Day of the Un-Mayor
McGinn gets flak for not resembling past mayors, but his vision for Seattle is firmly fixed on the future.
ON MARCH 24, nearly three months into Mike McGinn’s mayoral administration, his harshest critic, Seattle Times political columnist Joni Balter, delivered her bluntest critique so far: McGinn’s first quarter in office “stunk.” He was “perhaps the most immature politician I have ever encountered,” a “stumblebum” who didn’t “read the manual” or “play well with others,” a dismal dud after that statesman Greg Nickels. To right his foundering regime, McGinn should do what Nickels did: Can the big vision and fix some potholes. Otherwise he faced political oblivion as Seattle’s “un-mayor.”
The next day, McGinn showed he was neither cowed by Balter’s scorn nor persuaded by her prescription. At an executive meeting of the Puget Sound Regional Council—our local UN—he introduced himself as “the un-mayor.” Then he cast one of just two votes against Transportation 2040, a long-range, long-in-the-making regional plan. His reason: It included “billions and billions of dollars of unfunded projects that will contribute to sprawl [and] global warming, that don’t support good land use patterns, and that don’t provide affordable transit to those who need transit the most.”
McGinn’s vote seemed to confirm the rap that he stubbornly rejects compromises struck before he came into office. Cases in point: He’s challenged the state’s requirement that the city pay any (inevitable) cost overruns for the waterfront tunnel that would replace the viaduct—a project he opposed outright till the city council endorsed it. And he insists that a new 520 bridge be redesigned to accommodate light rail. “You only have one chance to get it right,” he says. Too late, say the state and the city council. Impossible. “What elected officials are supposed to do,” replies McGinn, is “figure out how to make things possible.”
That may sound like making the perfect the enemy of the good. But McGinn has a funny way of turning the perfect into the possible. In 2007, he and the Sierra Club opposed a megabillion-dollar roads-and-transit initiative backed by nearly every local elected official and environmental group. Organizing below the radar, they killed the plan. The next year they helped get a transit-only initiative passed. “McGinn was a huge reason why,” says Brady Montz, who chairs the Cascade Sierra Club’s Seattle group, who worked with him on that campaign and others. Rather than settling for an easy victory, he kept everyone’s eyes on the long-term goal of improving transit.
McGinn’s opponents misunderestimated him again during last year’s mayoral campaign. Again he ran below the radar, via online and old-fashioned social networking, enlisting young volunteers rather than the usual donors and endorsers; the Cascade Bicycle Club rather than the Alki Foundation; swooning Stranger writers rather than grumpy Times pundits.
They may be underestimating him yet again. They dismiss him as a one-issue ideologue: “I call him Mad Mike the Messiah,” says one City Hall insider. “All he cares about is global warming.” But McGinn waxes just as passionately about redressing inequities in city services to neighborhoods such as Bitter Lake and the Rainier Valley—and even more passionately about his Youth and Families Initiative.
McGinn has given his critics plenty of early fumbles to chew over. Facing a budget chasm, he promised to fire 200 high-level city employees, then backtracked when howls rose and morale plummeted. A close adviser resigned after getting caught claiming a nonexistent PhD. He transferred (or, as others saw it, demoted) a revered longtime budget director, who then quit to take the top county budget post. He announced without informing, let alone enlisting, council members, who were on a retreat, that he’d speed the $240 million replacement of the crumbling waterfront seawall.
“The longer he takes to get his act together, the stronger the council becomes,” notes ex–city council, now county council member Jan Drago, who fell far short in her own mayoral bid last year. “As long as [a veto-proof] seven of them stick together, they can run the city.” Detractors also carp at what Balter calls McGinn’s “idiosyncrasies”—his casual style (Ad-libbing his State of the City speech! Addressing Microsoft chairman Steve Ballmer as “Steve”!), rumpled look (lately somewhat tidied up), and zest for bicycling.
The McGinn bashers forget that Greg Nickels didn’t start out so smoothly or gently either. Nickels fired a revered neighborhoods director who was much more in the public eye than some backstage bean counter. He riled Northgate neighbors by pushing ahead a controversial development plan. And he restricted council members’ access to city staff, ordering that all inquiries go through his office. That angered them more than McGinn’s seawall surprise.
Published: May 2010
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