Analysis: Out With The Old

By Matthew Green

Think back to 2008-2009. Can you remember who was on the Olympia City Council then? If not, we’ll tell you: it was Mayor Doug Mah, Joe Hyer, Jeff Kingsbury, Joan Machlis, Karen Messmer, Craig Ottavelli, and Rhenda Strub. That group of councilmembers have now done something not achieved by any Olympia City Council before, going back to when Olympia established a seven-member council in 1982: they all left the council within two years.

Councilmembers are elected to four year terms, so three or four of them are up for re-election every two years. Barring mass resignation, the fastest a council could completely change is two consecutive elections. But the elections of 2009 and 2011 are the first time a council has actually accomplished this feat.

Typically, at each election, one or two councilmembers decide to retire instead of running again. That trend held in recent years, as Messmer retired in 2009 and Mah and Ottavelli followed in 2011. But usually, the other councilmembers run and win easily, creating continuity and experience on the council (or, if you prefer, fossilization).

The big difference between this council and the ones before it is that three members ran for re-election and lost. This is utterly unprecedented. From 1982 to 2007, only one sitting Olympia council member lost an election. But in 2009, voters tossed Kingsbury and Machlis, and in 2011, did the same to Strub.

(That earlier one: shortly after he was appointed, TJ Johnson lost to Mah in 2001; Johnson ran again and won two years later. In addition, a couple of council members retired from the council, waited a few years, then ran again and lost, including this author.)

The seventh councilmember, Joe Hyer, actually won re-election in 2009, but was forced to resign after being arrested for selling marijuana. (His arrest involved a sting operation by… wait for it… then-only-partially-not-fully-disgraced Kingsbury; if you don’t know that story, visit the OP&L website.)

The importance of all this is not merely the fact of change, but rather the reasons for it and the impact it will have on the city council and the city. This article will address the council that has gone away; a future article will discuss the new council that replaced it by stages in 2009 and 2011.

The biggest issue faced by the old council, and the most obvious reason why three of its members lost re-election, was the isthmus. In 2008, they approved a zoning change that included raising the height limits for buildings on the isthmus between Capitol Lake and Budd Inlet, to allow a high-rise condominium project proposed by a developer. The vote was Mah, Kingsbury, Machlis, Ottavelli, and Strub in favor, Hyer and Messmer against. This generated the biggest political backlash in council history (exceeding even the colossally failed conference center), as hundreds of people both voiced their opposition at public hearings and through letters and emails and also – importantly – got involved in subsequent city council campaigns.

The isthmus issue dominated the 2009 election. Kingsbury and Machlis lost to Stephen Buxbaum and Jeannine Roe respectively. In the campaign of Machlis versus Roe, the isthmus was almost the only issue, as neither candidate was well known for anything else. Meanwhile, Hyer won re-election against a challenger who supported the isthmus rezone. Messmer would likely have won re-election, but retired, so the campaign for the open seat became a battle of who could oppose the isthmus rezone most vigorously, a competition won by Karen Rogers.

Another issue for the old council was the relationship between the council and the public. The isthmus debate revealed a council acting defensive and dismissive against people who disagreed with it. Among other things, Kingsbury was revealed to have written insulting comments about citizens – during council meetings, on a city computer, while those citizens were testifying – which contributed to his election loss.

Two years later, Mah, Ottavelli, and Strub – all of whom supported the isthmus – came up for re-election. Mah and Ottavelli, perhaps sensing the political winds (and as rumor has it, interested in running for higher office and thus eager to sidestep an election setback), retired. Strub ran anyway, but she had also earned a reputation for conflict with citizens, much like Kingsbury, and lost to Nathaniel Jones.

With these elections, the isthmus rezone was reversed (though there is a lingering legal battle with the developer) and the council expressed a desire for a respectful relationship with the public. Yet, there were also much deeper changes in the council which may have greater long term impact on Olympia.

These changes can be described in terms of who gained or lost as the makeup of the council changed. With the disappearance of the 2008-2009 Olympia City Council, the following organzations or interests lost their strongest advocates and sympathizers at city hall.

West Olympia Business Association (WOBA): WOBA is a group of business and property owners in west Olympia, focused on large businesses and developments along Harrison Avenue. Their biggest past success was advocating for widening Harrison to five lanes from Cooper Point Road to Kaiser Road, in order to serve the big new housing and commercial developments there. They are now promoting the West Olympia Plaza, a large park slated for Harrison near the Safeway, which has generated some complaints because the city started the project and bought the property before going through the normal process involving the public and the city’s parks advisory board.

WOBA’s biggest advocate on the city council, by far, was Ottavelli. He pushed for inclusion of the West Olympia Plaza in the city’s parks plan. He also worked professionally for WOBA, and for a time served as the President of the West Olympia Community Visioning Group, an offshoot of WOBA that promoted the park. In fact, at its President, he signed some of the paperwork on behalf of that group for the sale of the park property from it to the city. Later, he declined to recuse himself from the city council vote on the same matter, saying he was no longer a member of the group, though he continued to advocate for it.

In 2011, that park deal was approved by the council on a 4-3 vote, with support from Ottavelli, Mah, Strub, and Rogers. With three of those councilmembers now leaving, especially Ottavelli, WOBA is losing its strongest voices on the council.

Olympia Downtown Association (ODA): The ODA is a group of downtown business and property owners. It is a private membership organization that advocates for its members’ downtown priorities. This is an important distinction from the Parking Benefit Improvement Area (PBIA), which is a city-sponsored group that collects fees from all downtown businesses and properties, and is governed by a board elected by all downtown business and property owners (with final oversight from the city council). The ODA proposed creation of the PBIA as a way to achieve its own goals, and to get money out of downtown business owners who weren’t its members, but some non-ODA members have since turned to the PBIA as an alternative to the ODA.

The ODA’s top priority has always been attracting more customers (not people, but customers) to downtown. It has long advocated for a parking garage and parking meters (to push employees out of downtown parking spaces and free them up for customers), and for a law enforcement approach to street people (to push those people away so customers won’t be bothered by them).

The old city council included three members who were both business owners and members of the ODA: Kingsbury, Hyer, and Machlis. In fact, Kingsbury and Hyer were past Presidents. That council approved a downtown parking strategy that expressed the fullest dreams of the ODA, including a parking garage. They later cancelled the garage once they learned the full cost, which even they couldn’t stomach, but they kept the new parking boxes along with their higher parking rates, originally established to raise money for the garage.

The ordinance prohibiting sitting on the sidewalk was passed prior to the 2008-2009 council, but most of its members either voted for it earlier or expressed support for it. This council did eliminate funding for the downtown police walking patrol. This might sound like less, not more, of a law enforcement emphasis, but it actually means that officers spend less time getting to know specific situations and individuals in downtown, and thus are more likely to respond to criminal complaints than to proactively address problems in other ways.

The new council includes no downtown business owners or ODA members. During their election campaigns, all of them talked about the importance and value of downtown Olympia, but with a different emphasis, including questioning the city’s parking strategy.

The development industry: The best way to understand who an elected official really serves is to look at the contributions to their political campaigns. In that regard, the old council served the property development industry, including builders and realtors.

A few examples: In 2009, Kingsbury raised an Olympia-record $48,000 for his re-election campaign; the largest contributions were $4,000 from the realtors association, $2,000 from the builders association, and thousands more from various property developers, including $1,500 from the developer trying to build on the isthmus. In 2007, the realtors association spent $19,000 (more than some entire council campaigns) in an independent effort to support Ottavelli. In 2001, Mah raised a then-record $38,000, much of it from the development industry, which helped him scare off strong opposition in future campaigns. James Morris, a major property developer as well as a board member of WOBA, has contributed over $4,500 combined to the campaigns of Mah, Kingsbury, Machlis, Ottavelli, and Strub, plus $500 to Hyer’s opponent (after Hyer voted against the isthmus), plus more to assorted councilmembers and candidates before 2009, but none to the new councilmembers.

Such investments often pay off. For example, the isthmus proposal was so quickly embraced by the old council (before the public even knew to react) both because the city had encouraged downtown housing for many years and because that council in particular was sympathetic to a suggestion coming from a developer. Some years ago, when an earlier council was pondering why there was a disconnect between the goals of the city’s Comprehensive Plan and the development actually happening, Mah proposed a committee of stakeholders to examine the issue – but all the stakeholders would be members of the development industry (that earlier council expanded the membership). In 2011, when the council considered approval of a permit for Trillium, the largest housing development in the history of Olympia, the vote split along the same lines as developer campaign contributions.

Olympia is a liberal and Democratic town, having voted 75% for Barack Obama. But within the term liberal, some people are more progressive and some people are more moderate. And within the Democratic Party, there are more liberal Democrats and there are more conservative Democrats. (City councils are officially non-partisan, but no open Republican has won in at least twenty years. Often, both candidates in the same race compete for the endorsement from the local Democrats.)

The 2008-2009 Olympia City Council was mostly conservative Democrats. It was more conservative than the council that came before it and the council that will follow it. (Though, if you go back even further, there were some equally conservative councils; if anything, that used to be the norm.)

Their conservatism was not always obvious when these councilmembers were first elected, but it came out when they got together. In particular, Mah, Kingsbury, Ottavelli, and Strub caused many early supporters to change their mind, even as they picked up new supporters elsewhere.

This is most easily demonstrated by comparing the campaigns of Kingsbury and Strub in their initial election against their re-election. In both cases, some financial contributors to their first election defected to their opponent in the second. Also, both received a sole endorsement from the Democrats in their first election, but merely shared a dual endorsement with their opponent in their second.

The voters also changed their minds. Obviously, both Kingsbury and Strub lost votes from one election to the next (22% and 10% respectively), but it was a bit more complicated than that. Both of them actually picked up additional votes in the most conservative Republican neighborhoods in the city (mostly far southeast Olympia), while they lost a ton of votes in the most liberal neighborhoods (mostly near downtown).

Consider the voting results in Precinct 44, near the westside Olympia Food Coop. Obama won 92%, his best result in Olympia. Kingsbury won 80% in his first race, but only 23% in his second race. Strub won 56% in her first race, and 36% in her second race.

In every incarnation of the Olympia City Council, there is a core group of three or four members that tends to dominate the tone and the agenda. There are no formal caucuses or alliances on the council, and there may be additions or defections depending on the issue, but that core group can still get most anything it wants.

In 2008-2009, the core group was Mah, Kingsbury, Ottavelli, and Strub. They were pro-development and pro business, and they set the agenda and almost always voted for what any of them proposed. Among the other councilmembers, Machlis, who was appointed in 2008 by that core group, was generally supportive of their issues and never developed a political personality outside of them before she was voted out. Hyer supported them on many issues, especially involving ODA priorities, but broke with them on others, notably the isthmus. Messmer was the furthest outside the core group, promoting smart growth and bicycle/pedestrian issues that did not interest the other council members.

That core group lost their votingmajority after Kingsbury (and Machlis) lost in 2009, and the rest lost or retired in 2011. The voters saw their agenda and rejected it, over the course of two elections like Olympia had never seen before.

In 2010-2011, the new core group was made up of the four newly elected council

members, but they often seemed to have little in common besides opposition to the isthmus, so the votes on specific issues as well as the overall direction of the council have been uncertain.

In 2012, a new Olympia City Council will take office which appears to have a unity of purpose very different than the old one. First up, they need to appoint a new member (to replace Buxbaum, who is leaving his current seat to take the Mayor’s seat – the Mayor is mostly just another council member with a few extra duties), and then formally set their agenda at a council retreat early in the year. OP&L will cover those developments in a future issue.

Disclosure: Matthew Green has a long history with the Olympia City Council. He was elected in 2001, and served alongside Doug Mah and Joe Hyer through 2005. He lost an election to Craig Ottavelli in 2007. He worked on numerous city council campaigns before and after that, including for Stephen Buxbaum and Karen Rogers in 2009 and Stephen Buxbaum and Nathaniel Jones in 2011.