SEATTLE CITY COUNCILMEMBER Tom Rasmussen isn’t usually one to use sports metaphors or sharp words. So it was doubly shocking when, at a council committee meeting in late September, he ripped into Mayor Mike McGinn for trying to redo a deal with the Museum of History and Industry that his own parks director had signed after years of negotiations. The city had agreed to give MOHAI several million dollars from the sale of the city parkland on which the museum sits. McGinn argued that circumstances had changed: MOHAI had scored a windfall by selling its old quarters to the state, and the city’s finances had cratered.
A deal’s a deal, Rasmussen declared: “Nobody is going to want to do business with the city if every time an administration changes its mind it’s back to square one.” Worse, he saw “a pattern occurring in this administration that I think is very divisive…pitting the haves against the have-nots”—the haves who cherish cultural institutions like MOHAI, and the have-nots who depend on the city for vital services, services that McGinn has repeatedly warned are at risk if the city throws its money around.
“This is Strike Two,” Rasmussen warned. “And this is a strategy that’s not going to work as far as I’m concerned, and I hope as far as the rest of the council is concerned!” A momentary silence fell, and then councilmember Bruce Harrell cheered: “Tom Rasmussen is in the house!”
The audience burst into applause.
Everyone knew what Strike One was: McGinn’s refusal to get with the program on another consensus item, the deep-bore tunnel to replace the perilous Alaskan Way Viaduct. Last year candidate McGinn urged doing away with the waterfront highway altogether. Then, just before the election, the council headed him off by approving the tunnel. He announced he wouldn’t try to block a done deal, which reassured enough voters to let him squeak through the election.
McGinn, who didn’t have time to be interviewed for this article, has nominally kept that promise. But he’s ardently opposed the legislature’s requirement that property owners benefiting from the tunnel be on the hook for the all-but-inevitable cost overruns—an extraordinary provision that may not prove enforceable anyway. “Maybe it’s genius,” says councilmember Sally Clark, “that the mayor has been able to find this very precarious ground he’s standing on: ‘I’m just watching out for the interests of the city, I won’t stand in the way of the tunnel.’ ”
This qualified semiopposition, together with McGinn’s bid to redo the MOHAI deal, is what makes critics inside and outside the council complain that he can’t be trusted, and that he’s an advocate who doesn’t know when to quit rather than a politician who gets results—“a true believer,” as Clark says. Colleagues from McGinn’s premayoral days, when he led the Cascade Sierra Club and his own nonprofit Great City, likewise describe him as “tenacious” and “persistent.” They say he’s also a savvy strategist, yet deceptively straightforward about his goals. “McGinn’s strength and weakness is his pure focus,” says one former colleague, Brady Montz, who chairs the Cascade Sierra Club’s Seattle chapter. “When he’s thinking about the tunnel, he’s thinking about the tunnel.” No ulterior motives.
“He can be stubborn, but he’s no diehard,” says environmental attorney Rod Brown, the president of the Washington Environmental Council. When it comes to setting legislative priorities, he says, “I have seen him compromise many times. But because he’s an optimist about social change, he’ll continue to fight longer than some of us would.”
Published: December 2010
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