Exit Mayor, Musing

Greg Nickels’s finest moment on the political stage came when he stepped off it.

By Eric Scigliano

Indeed, Tim Ceis’s prominent role was the administration’s defining, and in many views fatal, feature. No Seattle official below the mayor has loomed so large since, at the very least, the early 1980s, when Charley Royer’s brother Bob served as deputy mayor. Comparisons between Nickels/Ceis and Bush/Cheney have long rumbled through city corridors, but Ceis is hardly secretive and stealthy like Cheney. He’s been everywhere—articulating policy, cutting deals, cajoling and threatening, browbeating wayward managers. “Ceis had a lot to do with setting the tone of the administration,” says Diers. “Tim runs the city while Greg’s off schmoozing with the other mayors,” says another prominent ex–city official.

A week after the election, Steinbrueck put it more harshly: “Ceis was and is notorious as the son of a bitch little asshole skunk who’s the face of local government.” That characterization isn’t entirely fair; for starters, Ceis is tall and he can be affable. But it suggests the degree of antipathy and fear he could inspire. Nickels brought Ceis over from King County—where he was a top aide to two county executivesv—to shake up city government and shake it out of the exacting, consensus-seeking process known as the Seattle Way.

Ceis has made no bones about being willing to break some eggs to get the job done. City Hall insiders called him “the Shark”; he embraced the term and promulgated “Rules of the Shark” that are worthy of Machiavelli and very much not of the Seattle Way. (For example, “Conflict is okay. Manage it, don’t avoid it.”) He flashed the shark’s teeth almost immediately. In the interregnum between the 2002 election and inauguration, city councilmembers voted to cut a few positions on the mayor’s staff that Nickels’s predecessor had lately added. “You will pay for this,” Steinbrueck recalls Ceis warning the council. “You won’t know when, but you’ll know when it happens.” Soon after, he announced a change in the way information flowed. Department heads and other staffers would no longer answer questions from councilmembers. Requests would instead go through the mayor’s office.

Outside City Hall, Ceis’s style inevitably became conflated with Nickels’s image; it was Nickels who got characterized by opponents and press as “a Chicago-style bully.” That may be only fair; Nickels is Ceis’s boss. But Steinbrueck disputes the “bully” label: “I think he’s more of a coward, because he put Ceis up front.”

Nickels for his part expresses no qualms about the course he took. In his concession speech he echoed a theme he’d sounded, prophetically, when he laid out his campaign agenda in July: From the start “I determined that I would rather be an effective mayor and get things done than be a popular politician who left nothing more significant than footprints in the sand. I said that I would make right decisions for the future of the city rather than ones that would preserve my personal popularity. Based on Tuesday’s primary election results, I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.”

“I’ve worked for the kind of leaders who spend their political capital to get things done, and for the kind who try to save it,” Ceis said afterward, referring to the two King County executives he served, Ron Sims and the famously cautious Gary Locke. “And political capital doesn’t last. If you don’t spend it, you lose it anyway.”