An epilogue to last week’s Mobius malfunction at the Park Board again shows how the Cowles family uses its newspaper to decide whose voice gets center stage in Spokane, and who has to yell from the cheap seats.
As noted in our feature section, Tuesday was a sour day for the board of Mobius Spokane, the non-profit organization that plans to open a $29.5 million science center in 2011. Mobius’s preference is to locate on city park property along the river, a few blocks from the Spokane Arena, under terms that are extremely generous–a fifty year ground lease, locked in at $1 per year. But after winning near-unanimous support from the Park Board last August, some major cracks in the project opened Tuesday as several formerly supportive board members publicly rejected a new version of the lease offered by Mobius. It was an eye-opening story, one that the news part of the Spokesman-Review newspaper actually covered very capably in Wednesday’s regional news section.
Today the other shoe dropped. In the paper’s premium weekly opinion spot–the Sunday Guest Column–Mobius Spokane President Neil Worrall got roughly 800 words to defend the project against the new public critics on the Park Board. To those who follow Spokane
politics, and the city’s political history, it came as no surprise that Mr. Worrall got such immediate access to the newspaper’s bully, Sunday opinion page pulpit.
In most of the rest of the world, if you want to publish a guest column in a major newspaper like the S-R, particularly on a Sunday, and especially the Sunday that’s just four days away, good luck. You’d likely be dismissed as a nut for even asking.
But that’s the beauty of living in Spokane when you’ve got several hundreds words of opinion to dispense on a subject of immediate interest to the Cowles family. It’s as easy as ordering a quarter pounder at the McDonald’s drive-thru, and they may even roller skate out to your car to help you edit it.
The context is this. The science center in the park idea is a pet project of the Cowles family and a constellation of local business luminaries who share their vision. Not sharing the vision may be pardonable, but speaking out against it can be ruinous. This is what Steve Corker learned 14 years ago when his once-prospering advertising business was broken by a boycott after he led the opposition to the first effort to build a science center in Riverfront Park. Corker has at least recovered politically, and was elected to the city council in 1999 and again in 2007.
In this case, the problem is the opinion page where Mobius’s president is getting valet service and Jonathan (Jock) Swanstrom, Jr., is being told to take a hike.
Given this history, and the not yet forgotten River Park Square disaster (during which the city’s dissident mayor, John Talbott, was slammed by the paper as a “civic terrorist” for opposing a federally-backed loan to the family’s real estate arm) it’s perhaps understandable that the Park Board shifted the venue of last Tuesday’s meeting to what was literally a back office conference table on East Trent. By then it was clear that tensions between the Park Board and the Mobius board were going to come out.
And they did. And it wasn’t pretty. And, judging from what Park Board members were willing to say publicly, I doubt that Mr. Worrall’s efforts to downplay the proposed changes to the lease are going to play well with most members of the Park Board. But we’ll see.
What’s more interesting to me, today, is the fresh reminder of how the Cowles family, for over a century, has used its newspaper and other media to win its political and civic arguments with citizens and elected leaders. When it comes to reporting on issues involving the family’s interests, the newspaper’s conduct continues to defy the basic ethics of American journalism not just to report news without fear or favor, but to ensure that differing points of view on important public issues get a decent hearing. It’s not a legal issue. The First Amendment gives Stacey Cowles the right to be as one-sided as he likes with his paper. It’s just that most journalists, and most citizens, recognize that when you’re the only daily newspaper in town, that you have an added burden to be fair.
In this case, the problem is the opinion page where Mobius (on whose board the publisher’s wife sits) is getting valet service and Jonathan (Jock) Swanstrom, Jr., is being told to take a hike.
Swanstrom is former business vice president, holds a degree in Economics from Whithworth, and has opposed a science center in Riverfront Park for a long time. As you can see by the attached document he sent out earlier today to those of us on his email list, he has had trouble getting his views on the Mobius Spokane draft lease published as letters to the editor at the Spokesman-Review. So lately, he’s taken to just emailing them around to government officials and interested citizens.
His bad luck at the newspaper on this issue could be censorship. Swanstrom’s letters note the involvement of the Cowleses (in addition to Anne Cowles’s ongoing membership on the board, Jim Cowles’s wife, Wanda, recently left the board) and refer to the proposal as a “heist” of public property.
It could be that his letters (though much shorter than Mr. Worrall’s guest column) violate the 200 word limit the paper puts on letters to the editor.
To give the paper another benefit of any doubts, it could also be that the timing of his letters conflicts with the rule the paper has of limiting individual writers to publication no more than once a month. (Swanstrom says the paper won’t tell him why his letters about the Mobius lease don’t appear.)
But here’s the thing. There’s no question that Swanstrom’s criticisms of the project would strike the average Spokane citizen as reasonable. His main argument is that, notwithstanding the up front costs of building the center, his research shows that science centers operate in the red and have to rely on public subsidies to survive. He estimates, based on his review of other U.S. science centers, that the Mobius center will run a deficit of between $1.5 million and $2 million a year. Where will that money come from? The city seeking wage concessions from workers to balance its budget? The state struggling with its biggest budget crisis ever? The federal government fighting two wars and running what is, by far, a record deficit?
Among other things, Swanstrom used his email today to highlight that part of Worrall’s column that reads: “The lease allows Mobius to sublease property to other tenants, with city approval. Because nonprofit science centers don’t cover costs through admissions alone, this revenue would help support operating costs.”
Swanstrom red-lined the second sentence.
But let’s not look past the first sentence because, even here, things are not quite as simple as Worrall’s column suggests in terms of the city having approval over subleasing to other tenants. Section 23.2 of the proposed lease states that: “Tenant [Mobius] shall have the unrestricted right to sublease, sublet, rent, or license any part of the Premises or the Center for any time or times during the Initial [50-year] and Optional Terms (if any).” Moreover, on the three lots where subleasing is allowed, section 23.3 is ambiguous, at best, on whether the Park Board/city can veto specific subleases. In addition, the word “approval” is actually modified by the word “reasonable,” suggesting that if Mobius thinks the Park Board is being unreasonable in denying subleasing, it could legally contest the Park Board’s decision.
Now, for the second sentence, the one Swanstrom red-lined: “Because nonprofit science centers don’t cover costs through admissions alone, this revenue [from subleasing] would help support operating costs.”
So, here, Mobius and Worrall are conceding Swanstrom’s main point. And it runs smack into another problem. There’s something of a bait and switch going on here if you are among those who voted for Proposition 2 in 1999, thinking that you were authorizing the city to purchase the north bank property to add to Riverfront Park, which the property abuts. Currently, it’s unlawful under the City Charter to allow commercial development inside the park, which is what the subleasing arrangement contemplates.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that you were fairly misled. Say you only read the newspaper articles on the proposal instead of whatever fine print is being relied upon to make subleasing on the science center lots legal. Well, it still begs an issue that even Mobius supporters on the Park Board say they’re very concerned about. Will the commercial subleasing be aesthetically and otherwise compatible with the park, let alone the science center?
Even if you think Jock Swanstrom is being a cad for dragging the Cowleses into this, or that he’s anti-science or anti-children, these are all reasonable questions that ought to be debated. But you wouldn’t know it by reading the newspaper.
Instead, what Worrall’s prime space Spokesman-Review guest column represents today is just an old Cowles family power play. It has all the grace and enlightened thinking of a nose-bloodying rugby scrum where they just try to bowl over critics and impose their will on the community. Because they know better. And they always have.
Right?
–Tim Connor
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