In the view from the tower at Riverside and Monroe, Spokane did not have dissenters, it had “naysayers.” A 1999 Review editorial admonished: “Healthy cities don’t bicker, they build, everywhere, with a happy heart and an eye on the future.”
By William Stimson
If Spokane voters had some objection to the way the city was governed, the logical place to register those objections was in city council elections. As the Spokesman-Review editorialized in its 1999 defense of the city manager system, “Instead of tinkering with a perfectly respectable structure, elect good people to occupy it.”
That was simple, straightforward advice that never quite worked. The frustration that resulted explains Spokane’s mysterious “naysayer” tradition.
In their book, City Politics, political scientists Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson point out that the city manager system was designed by middle class reformers to accomplish a certain goal. “Middle-class and upper-class people . . . believed that the interest of the community ‘as a whole’ should be determined in disinterested ways and then be carried into effect expeditiously and efficiently by technicians.”
The system largely accomplished that purpose. With a government conducted day-by-day by a professional city manager, its biggest strength is the delivery of competent, reasonably efficient and honest services.
The disadvantage of the city manager system is that it is a poor recorder of discontent. It was purposefully designed to reject petitions for favors in a time when such requests largely amounted to attempts to pick the public’s pocket. The council-manager reform put distance between representative and citizen, and even more distance between the bureaucracy and citizen. What was deliberately made remote from crooked pols remained remote to citizens in general.
Banfield and Wilson published their classic study, City Politics, in 1963, just as Spokane was taking up the system. By then other cities had already given it decades-long trials. Based on those experiences, Banfield and Wilson predicted other problems: “The tendency of the new style is to produce cynicism and boredom.”
The boredom, said the authors, stems from the system’s sterile and narrow definition of local politics. “Politics was more exciting as a ‘game’ than it is as a ‘service’ to the community.”
The claim that the system tends to produce cynicism is particularly interesting, since all sides in Spokane’s political disputes agree that cynicism is at the core of its problems.
The system produces cynicism, Banfield and Wilson said, because it is based on the false idea that government can be conducted through “disinterested” votes on what is obviously right for the whole city. That made any attempt to influence the system, beyond testimony before the council, a breach of trust. Yet attempts to influence city policy were inevitable.
Ironically, the one stakeholder that absolutely could not afford to take a disinterested view of city government was the group that created the city manager system, the business community. The actions of city government had to be a factor in business’s daily calculations. For its prosperity business depends upon the city’s cooperation-in zoning, in business taxes, in fostering the economy.
Downtown business leaders therefore followed Spokane’s drab politics with an interest few others in the community could muster. They spread selected candidates’ praises through clubs, churches and social circles. This informal campaigning was all-the-more helpful to the chosen candidates, because voters in prosperous neighborhoods vote in greater numbers and are more likely to concentrate their votes on a single candidate. In the pivotal 1997 mayoral election, for example, a selected group of 25 South Hill precincts, where lots of professionals and downtown business owners reside, gave Jack Geraghty an almost two-to-one advantage over John Talbott (4,496-2,515). Talbott only won the election by 433 votes, because he got a majority of votes in two-thirds of Spokane’s other precincts.
Occasionally the special interests of business in local politics popped up in the news. In the 1989 mayoral election, the backers of candidate Sheri Barnard obtained a memo prepared by a professional political management organization for Washington Water Power Company. The confidential memo reported polls that showed Barnard was very popular and Rob Higgins, the candidate favored by business, was trailing in the race. It concluded: “Rob could still win, but business should not underestimate the enormity of the challenge. Clearly, a major media campaign is going to have to be funded the likes of which Spokane has never before seen for a Mayor’s race, and clearly the first priority. . . will have to be a classic negative attack on Sheri…. ”
No such campaign ever materialized, perhaps because the memo became public early in the campaign, or perhaps because business was not interested in the consultant’s ideas about negative campaigns. (Barnard was elected.) But the damage was done by the very existence of such a memo. What might be “just politics” in a system that considered partisanship a reasonable thing was, in Spokane’s supposedly high-minded, nonpartisan system, cheating. The implication was that one group, business, was out to capture city hall and use it for its own purposes. As Banfield and Wilson pointed out, disinterested nonpartisanship could not really live up to its pristine image and therefore was bound to create cynicism.
Another piece of governmental reform added to the impression that business owned city hall-namely, at-large elections, in which all voters elected all representatives. These tended to shift influence from neighborhoods to the Central Business District. Because council members were elected by the city as a whole, they tended to concentrate on matters that affected the city as a whole, and the most obvious such matter was the Central Business District.
Innumerable neighborhood delegations discovered this bias when they approached city hall for help. Under the old ward system, a representative of one of these neighborhoods would not dare take them lightly. But in a system concentrated on the “city as a whole,” small complaints could be dismissed as piddling. Don Higgins, a veteran of 20 years working in the West Central Neighborhood, the poorest neighborhood in Spokane, recently offered an example.
In 1990, the West Central neighborhood mounted a huge volunteer effort to remove garbage from its alleys and streets. The citizen group then asked city manager Roger Crum to send in city garbage trucks to remove it. Higgins recalled that Crum, though perfectly polite, was clearly amazed that the group would even make such a request. The city had no budget to haul extra trash out of its neighborhoods, he asserted. (At that time, the city was proposing to invest in excess of $100 million in a solid waste incinerator.)
The solution to any such complaints against the responsiveness of city government-as the Review pointed out-was for voters to elect people who
would be more responsive. Voters tried. In 1975, in the wake of the establishment’s triumph, Expo ’74, three incumbents were thrown out of office and replaced by three critics of city government : Wayne Guthrie, a businessman who, in Paul Sandifur fashion, accused a “downtown bunch” of running the city; Marilyn Stanton, a Margaret Leonard-style neighborhood populist; and Jim Chase, an African American who ran a small business on the north side. They were followed over the next two decades by a steady succession of candidates who promised to buck the establishment.
Nothing changed. The new council members entered a government system that gave them very little room for maneuver. Nonpartisan office meant they had no party apparatus behind them; at-large elections left them with a weak or unidentifiable base of supporters; part-time government allowed little time to form and carry out plans. The city charter limited their influence with the bureaucracy; parsimonious voters provided minimal revenue; tradition left most initiatives in the hands of the business community.
City department heads were better equipped to fight any battle than were part-time council members.
Roger Anderson was a young attorney and former aide to Mayor David Rodgers when he was elected to the council in 1977. He was excited about the possibilities for Spokane in the wake of Expo. But once he took office, he found that his potential for initiative was severely limited. He couldn’t propose big ideas because the city had no budget to support them; he couldn’t propose small ideas without running afoul of the bureaucracy.
Early in his term Anderson took a liking to the recommendation of a citizen group that Spokane should provide bicycle lanes in some new streets. The city’s traffic engineer, whose budget would have to pay for these, “came unglued,” Anderson recalled in a recent interview. The engineer provided stacks of statistics showing that any such idea was impossible and probably a violation of the city charter. Anderson took away the lesson that any city department head was a lot better staffed and had a lot more time to fight such a battle than a part-time, and short-time, council member.
In 1980, at the beginning of Spokane’s serious economic problems, Anderson proposed that the city establish its own office to encourage economic development. When the Chamber of Commerce got word of this, its representatives stormed city hall and claimed that economic development was its province. With business’s lobbying strength, not to mention the city’s perennial fiscal weakness and dubious ability to support such an effort, the Chamber won easily.
Anderson learned, as did dozens of other council members, that Spokane’s city council had little power. Wise council members accepted their role as assistants to the real movers of the city-the businesses and the Chamber of Commerce-and did what they could to help things along. It was better than nothing, which is about what the city council was likely to accomplish without the help of outside initiative.
It took a pretty obstinate representative to continue complaining about business against these odds. A few people, like Margaret Leonard, Chris Anderson, Sheri Barnard and John Talbott, did so and came off looking like uncooperative cranks. The Spokesman-Review underlined this appearance with an editorial policy that labeled protest obstructionism. Spokane did not have dissenters, it had “naysayers.” A 1999 Review editorial admonished: “Healthy cities don’t bicker, they build, everywhere, with a happy heart and an eye on the future.”
Of course healthy cities bicker; that is why they need political systems. The real difference between Spokane and other cities was that Spokane had no mechanism to remedy this bickering before it became destructive of the city’s progress.
With no other place to register frustration, Spokane voters took to randomly vetoing projects put forward by the establishment. Since Expo Spokane voters turned down plans for a port district, joint sewering by the city and county, the arena (three times), funding a science center, consolidation of city and county government, the Lincoln Street Bridge project, to name a few. (Meanwhile, they were voting overwhelmingly in favor of schools, fire stations, libraries, and other causes that were not connected with the city establishment, suggesting their fiscal priorities were not mere stinginess.)
By the early 1990s Spokane politics was at a stalemate. Citizens could hobble the establishment but not influence it. The establishment could marginalize protest but not get around it.
At this point, a political faction began forming that had not been seen in Spokane in 80 years-organized opposition to the downtown establishment.
