Sandifur’s decision to fight the establishment was a major event in Spokane’s political history. The power of insiders was not so much in what they did as what they didn’t do. They didn’t argue. At least they didn’t argue in public.
By William Stimson
Spokane evolved a political system dependent upon unwavering cooperation at the top. To openly question a project was to put it at risk because voters, once alerted, were likely to demand it be decided by a vote, and then to vote it down. It was imperative, therefore, to nip in the bud any public questioning of vital projects.
The Spokesman-Review’s editorial policy reflected this strategy. On most matters of local government, Review editorials were inclined to take a patient and forgiving attitude. In the 1980s and 1990s, a period when all admitted Spokane’s economy was under-performing, the Review never found fault with the Chamber of Commerce or the Economic Development Council. During the whole discussion of the proposed Lincoln Street Bridge, a bridge without a need, a constituency, or (at one point) even a landing place on the north bank, the issue never raised an eyebrow on the Spokesman-Review’s editorial page.
But the Review’s patience gave out when someone criticized the projects of the local establishment. All such critics were “naysayers and opportunists” who were assumed to have selfish or vindictive motives. Critics who ran for local office were uniformly given to “suspicion and obstructionism.” To vote for such critics, the Review counseled its readers, was to “take a bath in bile and resentment.”
The Review explained it opposed the election of attorney Steve Eugster to the city council because he “throws rocks at Spokane’s City Hall, lobbing lawsuits and criticism at decisions by the public’s representatives on the City Council.” Only in Spokane would a candidate’s criticism of government be reported as scandalous behavior. Most of Eugster’s lawsuits were aimed at opening public records, the kind of lawsuits the Spokesman-Review should have been filing itself, and would have filed, had the issue been some safely remote state or federal issue, and not projects sponsored by Spokane’s establishment. Eugster’s sin wasn’t asking for open records, but raising questions at all. In Spokane’s delicate political system, a critic was a dangerous agent.
The Review and a large portion of Spokane’s electorate (about half of the voters, judging from the defining 1997 mayoral election) stood by the old politics, not out of blind loyalty, but because they had seen it accomplish good things. Under that system, Spokane had experienced two major periods of renewal downtown–Expo and River Park Square–and a third on the north bank around the Arena.
But the establishment’s political system was always difficult to maintain, and in the 1990s it finally became impossible. Local conditions were different. Business leaders who once had the local economy to hold them together were now more typically affiliated with headquarters and customers elsewhere in the country; they weren’t so worried about towing the line. Also, the city’s media diversified. Talk radio in effect gave outsiders their own editorial page.
Outsiders thought Spokane needed not consensus but debate. Eugster, who needled the city and developers of River Park Square with more than a dozen lawsuits through the 1990s, saw that as his mission. “I force debate,” he said.
Eugster seemed destined to see local politics differently than its traditional insiders. He began his career in the 1960s as a young attorney for the federal Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA) program, one of the federal programs created to challenge traditional community norms. Eugster thinks that Lyndon Johnson, except for his policy in Vietnam, was one of the greatest American presidents because of his willingness to change the American social fabric.
As if that weren’t enough to set Eugster on his collision course with conservative Spokane, in the 1970s he worked on the legislation creating Washington’s open government laws, rules set up to interfere with just the kind of insider politics that were at the core of traditional Spokane politics.
Eugster moved from Seattle to Spokane in 1977. Even after 20 years in Spokane, he still observes the local culture with the bemusement of a visitor. Spokanites strike him as essentially parochial and protected. “We have a lot of people in this community who have never left home. They have never competed outside of Spokane.” According to Eugster, Spokanites tend to have a “hold the fort” mentality. “There aren’t a lot of people who have a driving desire to see things get better.”
Spokane people seem to feel, Eugster said recently, that something bad will happen if they allow themselves to disagree. “There just isn’t a spirited, joyful public dialogue in the community. It’s as if a person steps out of line, they’ll be putting themselves in economic jeopardy.”
After he started criticizing local government, Eugster was amazed that people he had known for years would come up to him and say, almost as a warning, “People don’t like you very much in this community,” as if somehow personal feelings were supposed to guide his judgment in politics.
At first glance, Steve Corker would seem to contradict a theory that Spokane’s conflict is a matter of outsider-thinking versus insider-thinking. The tall, suave former partner in a successful public relations firm has for 25 years been the very picture of a Spokane insider, a pin-stripe personality who has served on a dozen public service boards.
But when Corker drifted into Spokane three decades ago, he was almost a hippie-longish hair, beads, sandals, the whole thing. Soon after arriving he called an insurance agent and asked him to come by the house so Corker could purchase a policy. The agent never showed up. When Corker called him back, the agent said he arrived at Corker’s house, saw hippie candles burning in the window, turned and left. “We don’t have any use for your type in Spokane,” he told Corker. Thirty years later Corker laughed. “That was my introduction to Spokane.”
But it wasn’t his last surprise at the city’s folkways. Five years later, in 1978, he made a quixotic run for the state senate against conservative Sam Guess. Corker recalls that he gave a speech in which he made some joke to the effect that if he could get a break from Bill Cowles’s newspapers he might just have a chance. After the speech one of Corker’s supporters grabbed him and said, “Do you realize what you’ve done! Bill Cowles was in that audience!” What Corker had done, apparently, was break a basic rule that one never criticized the Spokesman-Review in the publisher’s presence.
Nevertheless, over the next 20 years Corker found a place in Spokane. He became a prominent supporter and board member of public television and other boards, was well regarded as a spokesman for the arts, and was active in Democratic politics. Corker says it is not true Spokane is unwelcoming to outsiders. If you arrive in Spokane willing to work hard-or with a lot of money-you can find a place in the community’s political structure, and he was proof.
By 1995 Corker was a junior member of Spokane’s establishment. That year, he discovered that he did not agree with a plan to place a Science Center in Riverfront Park. He knew, he said, that the project was largely underwritten by the Cowles family and had the perfectly defensible aim of injecting some life into the park.
But he thought the pavilion was the wrong place for an exhibit that would draw students every day. It would mean that school buses would be churning through the park constantly. There were other, better uses of the prize pavilion space.
During the whole discussion of the proposed Lincoln Street Bridge, a bridge without a need, a constituency, or (at one point) even a landing place on the north bank, the issue never raised an eyebrow on the Spokesman-Review’s editorial page.
“I asked, ‘Did you ask the people?’ ” Although proponents apparently did not want the issue to show up on a ballot, Corker organized a signature campaign to force a vote. In the resulting election, voters, true to the Spokane tradition, said no to the Science Center.
The Spokane establishment was furious. They saw a project that was practically given to Spokane and would have helped bolster a badly fading downtown destroyed in one brief campaign.
After the Science Center vote, nine of Corker’s fourteen public relations clients quit, putting him out of business. At a downtown civic luncheon a man he had known for years said, “Don’t you know you’re not welcome here?” He was asked to step aside as the incoming chairman of the board of the local chapter of the American Heart Association, lest his name cost it money.
Corker himself doesn’t blame the Cowleses for this. He has worked with members of the family, and he doubts they would seek retribution. But he apparently crossed a line in killing something many in the downtown establishment wanted. “I was naive,” Corker said. “I didn’t see it coming.” Like his hippie candles, such behavior just didn’t fit it.
The really authentic 1960s radical of Spokane politics is Paul Sandifur. The president of one of Spokane’s major financial institutions, Metropolitan Mortgage and Securities Company, was, as a college student, a leader of Vietnam and civil rights protests. In graduate school at San Francisco State University he participated in demonstrations that shut the university down. He was expelled for organizing a faculty strike. “I would have been a psychologist today if it hadn’t have been for that,” he said recently with a laugh.
Sandifur had once sworn he would never work for his domineering father, who used a strap freely to compel obedience. Similarly, he believes decisions affecting the community should not be made in secret. As a one-time student of psychology, did Sandifur see any connection between his rebellion against his father and his rebellion against other authorities? Sandifur shrugged. “Maybe so. But I still believe it [abusive authority should be fought].” After getting thrown out of college, Sandifur went to the Midwest and made his living as a factory worker. He later moved to Hawaii and started a successful craft shop, then to the Tri-Cities, where he built up a prosperous real estate business.
In 1980, with high interest rates pummeling the banking industry, financial institutions like Metropolitan Mortgage began collapsing. Sandifur agreed to return to assist the family business. While many other long-time Spokane financial concerns disappeared, Metropolitan survived and prospered, becoming a leading Spokane institution.
Sandifur was notified, as a major downtown property owner, that he was welcome to attend Spokane Unlimited meetings, the umbrella organization in which insiders plotted the future of downtown. At that Sandifur, the life-long anti-establishment type, joined the establishment.
“When I asked a question [at Spokane Unlimited meetings], it was like I swore in church.” –Paul Sandifur.
At first he participated with enthusiasm. He helped start and finance the cleanup and policing crews that patrol the downtown area. But then, he said, he began to realize that the meetings of downtown property owners were not meetings to make decisions but merely to hear decisions. The executive director of Spokane Unlimited would stand before property owners and explain “the plans.” Sandifur wondered who had made the plans. “When I asked a question, it was like I swore in church.”
When plans to involve the city in River Park Square began to be discussed at these meetings, Sandifur insisted on seeing the details of the financing. The executive director hired by the downtown property owners, Karen Valvano, said those numbers had to be kept confidential. When he persisted at one meeting, Sandifur said, “She told me to shut up.” Sandifur concluded that the fix was in, and there was no purpose in asking more questions.
“The thing that bothered me most was not that Spokane was controlled. It was that it wasn’t going anywhere. We [at Metropolitan Mortgage and Securities] did business all over the country, and this was the toughest place to make anything work. If these guys were making us rich, I still might not like it, but I wouldn’t fight it.”
His decision to fight the establishment was a major event in Spokane’s political history. The power of insiders was not so much in what they did as what they didn’t do. They didn’t argue. At least they didn’t argue in public. Secret deals were justified by the idea that the owners of property were talking about their own property. And city, county and state officials respected insider confidentiality on the grounds that they were, after all, supporting players in the building of Spokane.
Sandifur hired a political advisor, Erik Scaggs, and began plotting strategy. He donated money to Steve Eugster’s legal fund, aimed at opening up Spokane’s political process. He supported the Greater Spokane Area Symposium series, an effort by another dissident businessman, John Stone, to take the issue of Spokane’s economy out of the control of the Chamber of Commerce.
Sandifur and others trying to buck the system felt the Cowles ownership of the city’s only newspaper conferred a huge advantage. When he heard of a plan to start a regional magazine (Camas Magazine), Sandifur tried to broker financing on the grounds that a new medium would oppose the Cowleses. That effort did not work out because of the difference in aims, but Sandifur was nevertheless challenging the establishment in a very different media atmosphere.
Unlike discontents in previous generations, dissenters could elaborate their protests before a wide audience on a continuous basis. For one thing, the Spokesman-Review–in an experiment in encouraging public debate that received national praise in journalism circles–began publishing an entire page of letters to the editor every day. Ironically, this page became the most common place for writers to assert that dissent was forbidden in Spokane and that the Cowleses controlled the media.
Talk radio became a virtual opposition press in the 1990s, especially a daily radio show on KXLY hosted by Rick Miller. Bombastic and opinionated, Miller would accuse anyone who stood up for River Park Square of being a “Cowles flunky,” and dismiss them with, “You’re even dumber than I thought.” But the show also had plenty of time to discuss the detailed criticisms of dissenters like Steve Eugster, John Talbott and council member Cherie Rodgers.
In 1993 Spokane got its first alternative newspaper in a half century, the weekly Pacific Northwest Inlander, edited by Ted McGregor, Jr. The Inlander took the opposite approach of Rick Miller; instead of being inflammatory, it was studiously analytical and fair in its commentary. It ran a column of political analysis by a local political science professor, Robert Herold of Eastern Washington University.
One example illustrates the difference the new media climate made to Spokane’s political dynamic. In one of his columns, Herold criticized the establishment’s arguments that there needed to be a new bridge over the Spokane River at Lincoln Street. The project had been in the city’s plans since the 1960s Ebasco Plan. A citizens panel was formed in the early ’90s to review the matter, and concluded that, yes, Spokane needed the Lincoln Street Bridge. Traffic engineers-the experts-confirmed the bridge was necessary to keep Spokane’s traffic moving.
To Rick Hastings, a young architect and a newcomer to Spokane, it seemed lamentable that another bridge had to be built over the beautiful river. But from what he read and heard, it was a necessary evil. No one seemed to question it.
Then Hastings read Herold’s dissenting view in the Inlander, and that confirmed his own doubts about the project. Hastings took the time to look into the justifications for the bridge and found them highly questionable. He started a campaign to reopen the question.
Hastings was surprised at the number of people who came forward-people who, like himself, had assumed it was a done deal because of the tomb-like silence surrounding the issue. (The widespread skepticism about the project would be confirmed in the 1999 local elections, when 75 percent of Spokane voters approved an initiative which required the city council to get a public vote before it built any new bridge over the river.)
Among those who joined Hastings’ campaign were two attorneys, Doug and Laurel Siddoway, who challenged the bridge before the state’s Shoreline Protection Board, starting a process that would eventually see the bridge project shelved.
Doug Siddoway, a bond attorney who had worked in Salt Lake City and New York City before choosing Spokane to rear his children, made a familiar comment after his brief foray into Spokane politics. Spokane’s political system was “anemic,” he said, in such poor health that an ordinary public debate was somehow perceived as a catastrophic threat. When he mentioned to some people he was against the bridge, immediately he was pigeonholed as “a Birkenstock-wearing, Cowles-hating, Luddite.”
Two premises of Spokane’s insider politics, then-a solid public front of downtown property owners, and a sedate media discussion-were upset in the 1990s. A third was soon to be added. As noted before (see Part 8: Naysayers and Government Structure), dissenters were a fixture of the city council of the last quarter of a century. What was new, however, was for dissenting council members to enjoy the backing of a virtual political party.
As Sandifur and political advisor Erik Scaggs looked around for allies, they soon came across John Talbott, another of Spokane’s freelance political critics.
The theory that the dissidents of the 1990s shared a 1960s reformist attitude breaks down with Talbott, an ex-Air Force colonel. What Talbott did have in common with Sandifur was a certain financial and emotional independence of Spokane’s establishment. After growing up on Spokane’s north side, Talbott joined the Air Force as a teenager, rising to the rank of full colonel.
Talbott returned to Spokane after retirement, determined, he said, to start a second career of service to youth. He had himself grown up fatherless and adopted, and feeling he owed a debt to a few key male mentors who kept him on the right track. He studied community development with the intention of working with kids. “I came here to volunteer. I had no intention of getting involved in politics.”
He joined a number of neighborhood action boards. But, perhaps because much of his Air Force experience involved organizational trouble-shooting, he asked a lot of questions. He just didn’t agree, Talbott said, with how Spokane did things in its grassroots public policy. He let the others know he thought these efforts were off-track. “I was persistent, and it was wearing on their nerves.” So he quit the voluntary organizations and took his questions directly to the city council. He joined a small group of critics of city government who attended meetings regularly to register dissent.
At the urging of Sandifur and others, Talbott ran for mayor against Jack Geraghty in 1997. With the help of a $30,000 donation from David Sabey, the Seattle-based owner of NorthTown Mall, Talbott won-by 433 votes out of 57,337 cast.
Suddenly, the established leadership of Spokane was surrounded by critics. It was as if the Pan Tans of 1909 had returned for revenge. (See Part 3: The Election That Changed Spokane’s History). The first William Cowles had accused the Pan Tans of meeting in secret to determine the course of the city. His campaign in the Spokesman-Review against this insider party, the Pan Tans, ultimately scattered the neighborhood politicians and their business supporters. Now, nine decades later, a group of neighborhood pols and uncooperative businesses had reversed the tables, charging the Cowleses with planning the city’s course behind closed doors.
And this was taking place at a very awkward moment. The established leadership of Spokane was just then trying to midwife the community’s most ambitious project since Expo.
