Once again an insurgent mayor conquers city hall
It's happened twice before Mike McGinn's victory. Both Mayors Charles Royer and Wes Uhlman learned from early mistakes, regrouped, and mastered the challenging job.
By Sam R. Sperry
November 20, 2009.
Mike McGinn’s thin victory over Joe Mallahan puts the question on many lips: “What kind of mayor will he be?” Well we don’t know. And likely neither does our mayor-elect. We don’t know because the recent campaign brought out little from the candidates about what they would do, or how, once they figured out the who.
Part of that failure was the shallow coverage our several print and broadcast agencies purveyed to us: the convenient, familiar, but uninformative theme of the insider/businessman versus the outsider/neighborhood activist. Another reason we don’t know much about McGinn is because he does not tell us much. And it is difficult to assess him through close advisers because it is not clear he has any. One McGinn campaign worker, disclaiming any inside knowledge, suggested that our mayor-elect keeps his own counsel. Well, there’s a certain poker aspect to politics but the prospect of a Nixonian Mayor McGinn is unsettling.
So far, we're only getting bromides. McGinn told The Seattle Times: “We need people who understand how government really works. We need people who understand how Seattle works.” At least that’s a start. It’s better to know that you don’t know, than to believe you know when you don’t.
It may come as news to the “jobless school-kidz” who helped pedal McGinn’s campaign, but Seattle’s been here before. In 1977, Charles Royer led an insurgency campaign, mobilizing the out groups and making a virtue of his inexperience. But the history lesson I most want to recall was in 1969, when young state Sen. Wes Uhlman upset the Seattle establishment’s political cart by winning the mayoral election, a game-changing event. Uhlman, running as an identifiable Democrat, beat Republican Mort Frayn, a capable business leader (Frayn Printing), former state legislator, and the candidate hand-picked by the Chamber of Commerce and the Central Association, now the Downtown Seattle Association, the powerful downtown business owners' group.
Uhlman’s victory cemented into place the shift in political power from the downtown powers to a more broadly based constituency. That ended the top-down politics that had characterized Seattle affairs for decades.
Like McGinn, Uhlman come to office as an attorney (U.W. Law School), plenty smart, but with no significant executive experience. As McGinn said he would do in his statement to the Times, Uhlman sought out some seasoned administrators: Ed Devine, who had served former mayor Dorm Braman and was a protege of Pat Moynihan; and the estimable Dick Page, a protégé of then U.S. Sen. Henry Jackson who had come to Seattle to work with Jim Ellis on the hugely successful Forward Thrust capital-improvements program.
Also like McGinn, Uhlman took office with some major problems confronting the city: the aftermath of the police payoff scandal; a bitter fight over the I-90 crossing from Mercer Island to Seattle; the ugly employment scene caused largely by Boeing’s decision to cancel the once-promising Supersonic Transport project (a severe Boeing Bust was to come shortly after Uhlman's election).
Has McGinn’s election caused a similar shift in Seattle’s political power arrangement? That's not clear. McGinn’s 5,000-plus vote margin of victory gives him no mandate. Nor does the election of two new council members — centrist Sally Bagshaw and out-in-left-field Mike O’Brien, who will counter-balance each other — shed any light on the city’s political course. Still, McGinn beat the more readily identifiable centers of power: business groups, labor, and some of the Democratic constituencies.
In his first term, Mayor Uhlman experienced some turbulence: staff changes, blundering into support for the plan to tear down the Pike Place Market as part of an urban renewal project, a litany of communications gaffs that ended when his press secretary was arrested late one night by Seattle police for having taken the mayor’s sports car for a joy ride, without the mayor’s permission.
The second round of new staffers made a huge difference and launched the years that made Wes Uhlman one of the city’s very best mayors: Bob Gogerty, his new deputy mayor whose political savvy and people-friendly manner drew in more talent to Uhlman’s team; Ed Wood, a brilliant staff attorney whose sense of humor was contagious; and David Marriott, hired from KIRO TV News, whose smarts and integrity set a high water mark for mayoral communications. (Disclosure moment: I served under mayors Uhlman and Royer as director of the Seattle Energy Office, and later worked with Gogerty and Marriott at at their communications consulting firm.)
Once the votes came in on the campaign to save the Pike Place Market, Mayor Uhlman instantly understood the new lay of Seattle’s political land. He became the advocate for saving the Market and then went one step further by protecting Pioneer Square as a historic preservation district. He fought to get the surplused Fort Lawton and Sand Point Naval Air Station as as major city parks, Discovery and Magnuson Parks respectively. He battled to integrate the Fire Department and to bring women into the police force.
McGinn too will experience some turbulence as he learns the job of being Seattle’s mayor and first citizen.
For openers, he will learn that mayors and their families can be subject to threats from loonies, and that riding a bike to work is a frivolity no serious executive can manage. McGinn talks a lot about consulting people and working as a team. How he manages to do that will prove a massive new challenge. He'll also find that easily 50 percent of his time will be devoted to official ceremonial duties and appearances, plus a hurricane of invitations from community groups to attend their events, lunches and dinners that will cause fits for the scheduling and will rearrange his home life.
People in politics face innumerable challenges. The test is what they do to successfully manage them. It's a particularly tough test when the person is so new to politics, and is suddenly managing 11,000 employees, many of whom know a lot more about city hall than the new mayor does.
It’s one thing if Boeing is behind on the 787. McGinn can’t delay the delivery of such services as clean water, responses to fires, restoring electric power after a bad storm, or garbage collection. He’ll need to rely on others to get the job done right. Hard to say how McGinn will handle this. But the the Uhlman and Royer sagas suggest that it can be done.
Comments:
Posted Fri, Nov 20, 7:42 a.m. Inappropriate
Outstanding piece. I am all for unconventional. But McGinn's unconventional transition has one big thing missing: any accountability that comes with clear communication of organization.
The Mayor-elect says he'll run his transition just like his campaign. Let's hope that management method stops in January. This new Mayor will need to prove he gets the basics and earn a lot of credibility that's missing.
One way to do that is to focus on running the city well first, and saving the big idea policy stuff for later. McGinn will become Mayor, in part, because the city's transportation leadership was spending too much time out of town focused on policies rather than assuring that the basics were well managed.
Businesses will never forget the lost sales last Christmas when the city's transportation department inexplicably made a bad year worse by failing to clear major streets or otherwise deal smartly with the snow. Or that the Mayor's transportation director chose to leave town during the crisis.
Posted Fri, Nov 20, 10:06 a.m. Inappropriate
As to the matter of "no experience in managing an organization," that goes for Mayors Rice and Nickels as well as Uhlman and Royer. I believe that either Rice nor Nickels had managed anything larger than their own City Council offices.
That's four out of the last five Mayors lacked "management experience" and you can argue with their policies as Mayor's if you like, but none of them ran corrupt or sloppy ships (at least by the standards of a municipal government.)
In fact the only Mayor to have run an organization of any size was Paul Schell who had managed both the City's DCD (under Uhlman) and Cornerstone Development (which he created.)
I liked Schell and think he had a lot of bad luck as Mayor. A harsher judgment might conclude that management experience is actually counter-productive when it comes to running the City of Seattle.
Posted Fri, Nov 20, 10:11 a.m. Inappropriate
Btw, Mayor-elect McGinn has asked "3 questions" of the public about what he should be doing.
My own take is that "personnel policy," understood broadly, is the central issue for him in managing City Hall.
http://citycomfortsblog.typepad.com/cities/2009/11/personnel-policy-as-the-basis-of-organizational-competence.html
Posted Fri, Nov 20, 10:31 a.m. Inappropriate
Hey, Sam. Good piece. You bring back a lot of memories, most of them fond ones. Glad to see you are still around.
I'm optimistic about McGinn and his policies revolving around openness. I'm interested to see how he organizes his communications shop, whether he can make openness work.
Posted Fri, Nov 20, 12:13 p.m. Inappropriate
SDOT is utterly corrupt at the top, purposefully acting against the interests of Seattlers, for automobile-related business interests who derive income from automobile-dependency. Grace Crunican should be fired and given an unfavorable reference for her terrible record. She should NOT work in any department of transportation anywhere ever again. There are way too many Seattle progressive-types who've bought into Crunican's terribly engineered designs; the new Alaskan Way boulevard nightmare, Mercer West, a whole host of major road and highway projects studied to death, bicycle pathway battles, Seattle's putrid sidewalks, SDOT in bed with WSDOT for years both failing to produce a viable AWV replacement. The Deep-bore fiasco is a terrible tunnel option that most Seattlers still question.
Posted Fri, Nov 20, 4:34 p.m. Inappropriate
Spot on, Sam.
Posted Sat, Nov 21, 3:01 p.m. Inappropriate
The experience of Schell as manager will hopefully be looked at once again.
I've always wondered if the real battle wasn't between Reichert and Schell (w/Police Chief Stamper) and there various allies.
Posted Sun, Nov 22, 10:39 a.m. Inappropriate
Important perspective, Sam, from a thoughtful journalist who covered those ancient transitions. One important difference is that Uhlman, and to a lesser extent Royer, came into City Hall when Seattle was still a two-party town and the City Council included some moderate and even conservative voices like Bruce Chapman, John Miller and Tim Hill. With a virtual absence of partisan or ideological diversity, today's City Hall too easily stumbles into stupid ideas like the crusade against plastic bags. Given that ideological echo chamber, McGinn's challenge will be to cut spending and promote any ideas that happen to depart from urban liberal dogma. I don't envy him that task.