Politics

A Microsoftie Helps Moroccans Keep Their Government in Line

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:00:00 -0700

Othmane Rahmouni has always found satisfaction in volunteering, but a couple years ago the 30-year-old Seattle resident was looking for something that scaled. So on a trip to his native Morocco he asked around. What he heard was a desire for government to work better. Even basic contact information for agencies in the North African country can be difficult to find. Simple procedures, like renewing a driver’s license, can require multiple trips to various offices. And public officials themselves? Virtually inaccessible. “It’s little things,” Rahmouni says. “It’s going to a public institution and not having to pay a bribe to get your basic paperwork.”

In September 2012 the Microsoftie launched govpinion.com, a sort of Yelp for Moroccan public officials and institutions, in the hopes that reviews from citizens could inspire change. Rahmouni isn’t taking on the government, though; he’s more of a bridge builder. In fact, he hopes to invite pols to hold weekly “office hours” on the site to answer citizens’ questions. Govpinion has already been nominated for a web award in Morocco, but Rahmouni is more interested in other things—like redefining what it means to be a citizen of Morocco.

Published: May 2013

Legends of the Fallen

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 09:00:00 -0700

Image: Mike Kane

Death came to this place, and it left sated. Limbs lie in heaps, twisted and broken, grim reminders of what once thrived here. What little that’s still upright is withered and snapped in half and will surely fall before long; if life returns, it won’t be to these standing corpses. When the mist descends it resembles smoke, and it hangs heavy over the bloodless massacre.

Yet these casualties were just collateral damage, all that stood between a monster and its prize. And when the monster claimed that prize it left something behind, something that clung too tightly to the ground to ever be ripped away. It’s flat and smooth and round, as wide across as a man lying down. One day not long ago it held greatness aloft; today it marks the spot where a titan fell.

Richard Hughes was hunting along the Dosewallips River drainage in the Olympic National Forest when he discovered the stumps. It was early October 2007, deer season had just gotten under way, and the ground was slick with rain-soaked leaves. When Hughes wasn’t bobbing and weaving through the mature trees that dominate the landscape, treading lightly to keep from spooking his prey or snagging a boot on an exposed root, he clambered over the husks of fallen logs that had long since begun to crumble and sink into the dirt. And then, without warning, the forest just opened up.

In a crowd of giants, an absence of height is remarkable. You can walk for miles here on the eastern slope of the Olympic Mountains and not see the tops of the trees unless you look straight up; a sort of highway hypnosis sets in as you pass one living column draped in a blanket of moss after another, after another, after another. So when Hughes came upon the stumps, raw and exposed, their smooth, honey-colored surfaces practically gleaming amongst the underbrush, they were impossible to miss. And the forest floor was littered with the wooden stubble. By Hughes’s estimate, between eight and 10 truckloads’ worth of timber had been felled.

The national forest is protected land, but occasionally the United States Forest Service will allow logging companies to bid for the right to “thin” overgrown areas—usually for fire prevention purposes—and at first Hughes thought he was looking at the site of one of those so-called timber sales. He lives in the nearby town of Brinnon, making his living by buying and selling logs, so the possibility that he’d missed out on what looked to be a decent-size haul had him steamed.

But as Hughes poked around the scene he noticed evidence of a different scenario. First, there were no flags designating the area as a sanctioned cutting site. And some of the stumps were covered with moss—not moss that had grown there, but chunks of it that had been placed there, ever so carefully. Then there were the tire tracks. This particular part of the national forest borders private wooded land, and deep ruts in the mud cut a path toward that property. Based on their considerable width and depth, Hughes guessed they belonged to a skidder, a hulking logging tractor with an oversize claw used to clutch felled trees and drag them out of logging sites. These trees, he was sure, had been stolen. And they had been so close to the boundary line—in some cases just a few feet into federal land—that even with that heavy, loud machinery, the phantom tree fallers could have been in and out before anyone but Bambi noticed.

Hughes didn’t report what he’d found, though. If those trees had been cut down illegally—and it sure looked like they had been—he didn’t want to be the one to run to the feds and tattle. Of course, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t tell someone. Brinnon is a town of fewer than 800 people, and secrets like this don’t stay secret for long.

Had Hughes walked about a quarter mile directly south of those stumps in the national forest, he would have run into a Douglas fir that was exceptionally massive, even compared to the behemoths that surrounded it. So tall was the needled sentinel—by some estimates more than 130 feet—that you could pick it out in an aerial photograph of the forest. But it wasn’t just its size that made that tree unique. It was its knack for survival. “If you went out looking for a tree that would have been its contemporary,” says Dr. Jan Henderson, a retired U.S. Forest Service ecologist, “it would be hard to find one.”

Image: Mike Kane

The tree was born in fire. In the 1980s, Henderson and his research partner, Dr. Robin Lesher, spent a decade piecing together the fire history of northwest Washington and concluded that the forests burned at least five times, dating back to the early fourteenth century. The third of those wildfires swept across most of the eastern slope in 1668, leaving the land black and smoldering. In the ashes of that scorched earth, almost two centuries before white settlers would come to the area, the tree took root.

Douglas fir is a pioneering species. The conifer, which can live more than 800 years and grow upwards of 250 feet tall if undisturbed, thrives in open conditions and mineral-rich soil, both of which can be found in great abundance after a fire. As a result, it’s typically the first to colonize a recently burned forest. Of course, the one thing in short supply after a fire are trees to repopulate the land. So the seed that gave birth to this particular Douglas fir, no bigger than a grain of rice, would have had to travel miles—possibly dozens—on the wind to burrow down into the dirt north of the Dosewallips River.

The young sapling wouldn’t have long to settle in before it would face the first of four assaults on its life. As perpetually soggy as the peninsula is now, it’s hard to imagine it ever being dry enough to burn. But all it takes is 30 days without rain, a strong east wind, and a source of ignition (most likely a lightning strike) to reduce entire forests to barren fields of black, limbless snags. Just such a perfect storm struck 33 years after the Doug fir began its life, and with much of the land still recovering from the fire of 1668 and therefore virtual kindling, the peninsula—not to mention most of Western Washington—erupted in flames once again in 1701. Between two million and four million acres of land were consumed.

Wildfires of that size can rage as hot as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (just north of the melting point of gold), so a 30-year-old like our Douglas fir would have, without question, been incinerated had the fire come too close. But by some stroke of luck—maybe the wind shifted at just the right moment, maybe the tree was so isolated that it had no neighbors to pass the fire along—it was spared. Henderson sums it up succinctly: “It was probably just his day to win the lottery.”

Once the fire subsided, a riotous, almost violent, period of unfettered growth would have begun. Other species, like western hemlock, western red cedar, and maple, planted themselves alongside the Doug fir and elbowed each other for room. Green returned to the land, in the form of needles and leaves and vines. And for the better part of the next two centuries the resurrection continued. The Doug fir, in particular, shot to the heavens. But while it grew up, it also grew out, its limbs unfurling to give it a conical profile reminiscent of a Christmas tree. More important, though, it suited up in a thick, deeply rippled layer of bark that would come in handy later. Because while luck saved the tree in 1701, it would take genetics to do the job the next time.

The Logger’s Landing Restaurant and Lounge is a modest wood-paneled joint 15 minutes north of Brinnon, in Quilcene. If the name doesn’t hint strongly enough at who makes up the majority of its clientele, the sign out front—which incorporates illustrations of an old two-handled, crosscut saw and the face of a massive tree stump—should. Here, in January 2008, stories of Richard Hughes’s find in the national forest started to spread.

Those felled trees were newsworthy for more than just the fact that they’d been dragged from federal land. They were maple, a species that’s been the source of considerable controversy for more than two decades. The grain in an occasional maple—some buyers peg the number at roughly one in 25—will grow in a distinct pattern of tight ripples. Some call the look figured, others quilted. In either case, the wood is so rare and so striking that it’s in high demand among the makers of electric guitars and violins. And, not surprisingly, they pay a high price for it; a piece of this so-called tonewood that’s no bigger than two feet long, a foot and a half wide, and two inches thick can fetch upwards of $500.

Given the relatively small amount of work necessary to acquire it—an experienced logger can fall a tree, cut it up, and pack it out of the forest in less than an hour—tonewood has become a popular source of income for those feeding a drug habit. And whether they harvest trees from public or private land, they rarely do it legally. “It’s all tweakers, meth heads,” says one log buyer on the peninsula who fields calls at all hours of the night from desperate men trying to unload pickups full of the stuff. He’s so fed up with the direction that the industry has taken that he oftentimes considers getting out of the game. “The only reason I’m still doing it,” he says, “is that it’s the only way I can make a buck.”

For years the tree had stood just out of reach, taunting Reid Johnston from the other side of a line he couldn’t see but had to have known was there.

Poaching got so bad back in the mid-2000s, particularly in Grays Harbor, Clallam, and Jefferson counties, that the Washington legislature added maple to a list of “specialized forest products” that require a permit to harvest anywhere in the state. Lieutenant Matt Stowers, a deputy in the Grays Harbor County Sheriff’s department who helped craft the amendment, can’t quantify how effective the new requirements have been in deterring maple theft. “A lot of thefts never get reported,” he says. “The victims say, ‘What am I going to do about it? They stole a tree. The cops have better things to do.’ ” But because both the seller and buyer have to keep a copy of the permit, at least now there’s a paper trail that can make it easier for authorities to know who’s selling what to whom.

Image: Courtesy U.S. Forest Service

Dead but Not Buried The remains of the Douglas fir still lie rotting in a Shelton log yard.

As far as the gossips at Logger’s Landing were concerned, only one man possessed the right combination of access, audacity, and desperation to have lifted the maple from the Olympic National Forest. Reid Johnston, in his late 30s at the time, grew up in the Brinnon area. He attended the University of Washington in the early ’90s to study forestry but dropped out a few credits short of graduation. And he was known around town for having dabbled in logging; in March 2007 he’d founded a company called Sound Maple. But in recent years he’d become better known for two other things: repeated run-ins with the law for suspected tree theft and a rumored meth habit.

By contrast, Johnston’s father, Stan, was well known within the community as the owner of a successful real estate business and a supporter of youth sports; for years he and his wife, Candy, sponsored local little league baseball teams. He also owned a lot of land, including 240 acres of wooded property that bordered the national forest. The very same wooded property, as a matter of fact, into which all of that maple appeared to have vanished.

Flames engulfed the eastern slope of the Olympics once again in 1870, and this time the Douglas fir was right in their path. In the preceding 200 years, it had reached skyward at a remarkable rate, growing almost to its full height of 130 feet. And the view from up there must have been a strange combination of breathtaking and horrifying as the inferno raced onward. But when the fire reached the Dosewallips River drainage and charred virtually everything else in the area, it did nothing more to the tree than scorch its trunk, if even that. The dense, corky bark it had spent decades building—an ingenious adaptation, given the species’ preference for fire-slicked areas—held off the flames.

Then, 100 years later, the tree stared down death again. By the 1970s, crews were legally falling trees in Brinnon, and to a larger extent Quilcene, by the hundreds every day. Back then the Johnston property was owned by Pope and Talbot, a major timber company based in Halsey, Oregon. Over six months late in that decade, it hired two logging outfits to clear the land. Fred Pleines owned one of them. Pleines was 23 at the time and, with two other men, he cut almost 18,000 trees from that parcel at a rate of 200 per day. What was there was of so-so quality—mostly hemlock, cedar, and Doug fir that had grown back from the last period of clear-cutting in the ’30s and ’40s—but they felled it all, trucking it out to Pope and Talbot’s sawmill in Port Gamble. “We was lean and mean back then,” says Pleines. “We didn’t have to go to the gym.”

Pleines’s crew cut right up to the federal boundary, within sight of the Douglas fir. Had they been allowed to take it, they would have, making it just one more log on a truck that would have been milled into boards, that would have been trimmed down further and hammered into the frame of an anonymous house in an anonymous neighborhood. But by virtue of the breeze that dropped the Douglas fir’s seed just so, it was spared.

That didn’t necessarily mean it had escaped a death by chain saw, though. The government claimed the land on which the Doug fir stood in 1897, and 10 years later the Olympic National Forest was established. But that didn’t stop crews from logging there. Well into the 1980s trees in the national forest were still a cash crop for the government, yet geographic chance favored our tree once again: It was too tough to reach from the federal side of the boundary line and there were too few other harvestable trees nearby to make logging the area worthwhile. Then in 1994 federal protections for old growth forests virtually outlawed logging on federal lands in the Olympic National Forest. And just like that the tree was safe. Its top broke, possibly in a windstorm, but ironically that made it even more valuable to the forest by creating crooks that could house families of marbled murrelets, seabirds that feast in the saltwater inlet just a couple miles away and that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service has classified as threatened. For the first time in its life, the Douglas fir found peace.

Loggers aren’t the only patronsof Logger’s Landing; law enforcement officers stationed at the U.S. Forest Service office just a block away frequent the place, too. And once word of the alleged maple theft got to them, by way of a loose-lipped log buyer who worked with Hughes, it wasn’t long before it made it east over the Cascades and to the desk of U.S. Forest Service special agent Anne Minden, in the mountain town of Winthrop.

Minden has investigated crimes in national forests throughout Washington and Oregon for more than 25 years, and nearly two-thirds of them involved tree theft. In January 2008, when she began looking into Reid Johnston, another case sat on her desk. So she knew poachers. And even though they had a reputation for being strung out, they took their work seriously. For starters, they waited until night to creep into the forest, with only the beams from their headlamps and flashlights to cut a path in the darkness. They worked in groups that included lookouts, they communicated via CB radios, and sometimes they even used motion-activated camera surveillance systems to detect approaching property owners or rangers. Not that they usually made enough noise to draw unwanted attention: To muffle the growl of their chain saws, they ran hoses from the exhaust port into a bucket of water. And the very smartest thieves were careful not to leave behind traces of their crimes. Sometimes they’d shear off trees right at ground level to leave as little stump as possible in the hopes that it would be harder to notice; other times, if it was feasible, they’d rip the stump right out of the ground.

If Johnston had tried to cover his tracks, he failed miserably. Not only did the skidder tracks lead back to his father’s property, but when Forest Service officers visited the site they spotted several trees along that same path that had been “checked.” (Rather than risk wasting time by falling a tree and cutting it into blocks only to find it has no figured sections, thieves will use an ax to slice pieces of bark off standing maples and look for the pattern underneath.) And mounting evidence away from the scene also seemed to implicate Johnston. Just weeks after the Forest Service learned of the missing maple, two employees drove by his house, which was no more than 10 minutes from the scene of the purported theft, and saw a backhoe tractor, logging truck, and skidder parked in a side yard.

The once proud sentinel of the forest took its first and last ride hidden in the back of a dump truck.

On four separate occasions after that, an employee observed Johnston’s truck parked in front of a maple mill north of town. And at least once in spring 2008, Minden and other officers covertly surveilled a vacant lot in town owned by Stan Johnston and watched as Reid brazenly cut up maple logs in broad daylight.

Damning though the evidence may have been, it was all circumstantial. Minden couldn’t definitively prove where Johnston got the maple she saw him cutting in that lot. And after checking with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office she learned that sometime prior to Hughes’s discovery, Johnston had obtained a permit to harvest maple. Minden continued to work the case, interviewing witnesses and poking around town, but otherwise she laid back in the weeds. Based on Johnston’s prior brushes with the law, it was only a matter of time before he would try to cut where he had no business cutting. Maybe she’d catch him in the act. Or at the very least she’d be able to gather enough hard evidence this time to convince the U.S. attorney to prosecute him.

And so, with an eye always on the forest, she waited.

The very thing that had seen the Douglas fir through one brush with death after another—namely its blend of good fortune and better genes—is the same thing that caught Reid Johnston’s attention. But where others saw beauty in its size and age and lush greenery, he saw a tower of a different kind of green. For years the tree had stood just out of reach, taunting him from the other side of a line he couldn’t see but had to have known was there. Now, days before Christmas 2009 and while the feds were still investigating his alleged maple theft, he decided it was finally time to take it down.

The singular nature of that Doug fir had one other unfortunate consequence. Although surrounded by other trees, it was unmistakable, incapable of disappearing into its surroundings. And it had no choice but to stand rooted to the same place it always had as a man slipped out of the treeline to the west, carrying little more than a chain saw.

The problem with trying to keep an eye on a piece of tree-covered land as large as the Olympic National Forest—which stretches out over 633,000 acres of the Olympic Peninsula—is that you can never see more than the tiniest fraction at any one moment. The U.S. Forest Service has four agents tasked with investigating all crimes in the state, as well as two others who help on an as-needed basis. And it typically employs three uniformed enforcement officers responsible for patrolling the Olympic National Forest.

In other words, the chances that one of those officers would be in the forest just outside Brinnon on any given day aren’t so great. The chances that they’d be there just before Christmas 2009 are slim. And the chances that one of them would have chosen that week to patrol the Dosewallips River drainage, just 20 feet east of the Johnston property and a quarter mile south of the maple theft site found by Richard Hughes? Nonexistent.

So despite their best efforts to watch out for Reid Johnston, no one saw the man who came for the Douglas fir born in 1668. And it’s possible no one saw him because they weren’t looking for him. His name was Mike Love. He cut trees when he could find work and, like Johnston, he was rumored to be a junkie. Johnston had hired Love to fall the tree, promising to pay him for the job with the proceeds of the tree’s sale, which had the potential to be quite lucrative: Johnston already had a buyer lined up willing to fork out $15,000 for the massive specimen.

Thoughts of money—and what it could buy—had to wait, though, because Love needed to concentrate. Bringing down a tree of any size is perilous work, so perilous that responsible fallers, even the shady ones, work in pairs and carry a whistle so they can call for help if the job goes sideways. Trees don’t always fall where you want them to. And sometimes they can snap before the cutting’s done and come back and “knock the snot out of you,” says Pat Handley, a retired logger from the area. “You can’t just be out there la-di-da-ing.”

Love made the first cut, a horizontal one, on the side of the tree facing the direction he wanted it to fall, in this case west, toward the Johnston property. He sawed through about a third of the trunk, or more than 100 years’ worth of growth, before pulling the bar back out and making his second cut. He started this one below the first and cut up at an angle to take a sizable wedge out of the trunk, a technique that encourages the tree to tip in that direction. It’s known as an undercut. Then he moved around to the far side of the tree, lined up the saw with his first cut, and sank the bar in horizontally once again, chewing away at another 150 or so years. Had he sawed all the way through, the effect of the undercut would have been nullified and the tree could have fallen whichever way it wanted. But Love knew what he was doing. He left a few inches of live wood in the middle—called a hinge—to act as a fulcrum point, let the Doug fir’s weight do the work, and then watched it come down with a thunderous crash of splintering limbs.

On some logging jobs, the most experienced fallers will compete to see who has the best aim by trying to drop trees on watermelons placed on the ground as targets. Love wasn’t interested in proving his skill, though. Assuming he worked efficiently, the whole thing would have taken about half an hour.

The tree was then stripped of its branches and cut up into four 12-foot logs and one 10-foot log that were hauled out of the area with a rented excavator. And after a brief pit stop at Johnston’s house, those logs—the very best of a Douglas fir spawned by fire, spared by two more, and that had the good fortune to take root just this side of a timber killing field, only to be unceremoniously cut down before it had even reached middle age—were ferried south along Washington State Highway 101 to a log yard in Shelton, where they’d wait in the rain to be sold.

Timber that size would usually make such a trip on the flatbed trailer of a log truck, but not this load. The once proud sentinel of the forest that had stood for 340 years took its first and last ride hidden in the back of a dump truck, a rumbling hearse more suitable for gravel, construction-site detritus, or manure.

Even a clumsy thief can get away with pilfering and selling a few dozen maple trees. But it’s not so easy to fence logs the size of those cut from the Douglas fir without drawing the wrong kind of attention. Especially when the thief stores them in plain view and shops them to just about any buyer who will listen. One such buyer, Tom French, had heard about Johnston’s Doug fir—had even considered making an offer—but when he saw it in Shelton, he knew something was wrong. Johnston claimed to have taken the tree from his father’s property, but French knew all about Stan’s land. And he knew that, after the clear-cutting that went on in the ’70s, there was no way a tree this big would have been left to harvest.

French relayed his suspicions to a Forest Service employee in Quilcene in late January 2010, and the ground beneath Johnston’s feet began to shrink quickly. Not long after that, Special Agent Minden interviewed French, who’d since learned more about how the tree ended up in the log yard. It seems Mike Love had also heard French was dubious of the tree’s supposed origin and called the buyer to hash things out. Love was confused and spooked. Johnston had told him the land was resurveyed years prior, pushing the boundary line east—past the Douglas fir. Love insisted to French that he thought he’d cut the tree legally and repeated the same thing to Minden when she interviewed him on January 27. His story—or at least his belief that he hadn’t done anything wrong—seemed to check out. Minden found that a Forest Service boundary sign had been moved well east of its original location, making it appear that the tree was on private land.

Within two weeks Minden had a search warrant for Johnston’s house, where she found notebooks, receipts, and bank records that began to tell the story of how many logs he’d sold in the last few years. On November 9, 2011, Reid Johnston was indicted in U.S. District Court on two charges: theft of government property and damage to government property. All told, according to the U.S. attorney who tried the case, Johnston had stolen more than 100 trees from the national forest—the Douglas fir being by far the largest and oldest—worth a combined $216,000 on the timber market. In terms of sheer quantity, it was the biggest theft Minden has investigated in her 26-year career.

After mounting a vigorous defense based on his alleged belief that the boundary line had been moved—despite his inability to produce paperwork to support the claim—Johnston finally relented in September 2012 and pleaded guilty to one charge. He was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison and ordered to pay $84,000 in restitution. He filed an appeal but dropped it in April.

“It’s a rare thing and not replaceable,” says Jan Henderson of the Douglas fir. Along with Robin Lesher, he tried in summer 2011 to place an ecological value on the trees that were lost, taking into account the habitat they could provide for endangered species both while they were alive and after they died naturally—assuming they weren’t cut down. The number they settled on for the Douglas fir was $19,126, far more than any other single tree Johnston had felled and, sadly, far, far more than the tree is worth now.

The $15,000 that Johnston’s first buyer offered was for the tree in one piece. But after it was cut into sections—presumably to make it easier to haul out of the forest—the price dropped to $7,500. He never got a cent, though, because the government seized it before he could consummate a deal. Today it’s still sitting in that log yard in Shelton, exposed to the elements and rotting, its value in the timber market plunging more every day. The feds will sell it to you if you’re interested; just make them an offer.

Published: May 2013

A Health Care Surcharge on Seattle Menus?

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0800

Image: Dan Page

Come January 2014, businesses with 50 or more full-time employees must provide health benefits, per President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. While that’s still months away, it’s already driving serious debate among some of the biggest names in local dining. With profit margins hovering between 2 and 5 percent, they say a shift like this would flip even a successful joint’s balance sheet from black to red. “There’s no [restaurant] business out there that can just suck up the cost,” says prolific eatery opener Ethan Stowell. “The game is going to change, big time.”

Joshua Henderson, founder of the Skillet Diner empire, is leading that change. The bearded chef turned restaurateur estimates that insurance at just one of his locations will cost $8,000 to $12,000 a month, but rather than raise prices he’s considering tacking a surcharge onto all meals. The added charge—likely between 3 and 5 percent—would be noted conspicuously on menus and take effect when the law does next January 1. “We want to be very transparent,” Henderson says. “I don’t want to hide stuff like that in food prices.”

Despite only adding a handful of dollars to most tabs, this move will likely rile customers. Diners are prickly about any price increases, and chefs already struggle to educate the public on why a seemingly simple pork chop or plate of roasted beets costs what it does. That’s why Henderson started this conversation so early. The more time his customers have to get used to the idea, the less chance they’ll view it as the latest in the recent parade of dining trends (communal tables, not taking reservations) that benefit kitchen over customer.

Need more proof that restaurateurs are spooked by the possibility of alienating loyal customers? Consider Scott Staples. If the guy behind Restaurant Zoë, Quinn’s, and Uneeda Burger joins the surcharge movement (he’s not sure yet), he’ll go so far as to suggest that customers take the difference out of their tip, since those added dollars will still benefit the staff: “We’re just trying to find a way in a low-margin business to afford to take care of our employees.”

Of course not everyone is crazy about the surcharge idea—and not just because of the potential fallout. Renee Erickson recently started contributing to insurance plans for full-time employees at her two newer restaurants, the Walrus and the Carpenter and the Whale Wins, and has done so at Boat Street Cafe for four years. But she’d rather make her restaurant run more like a typical company, where the prices she charges actually cover the cost of doing business. “Boeing’s not going to add a $100,000 surcharge to every plane to cover their health care costs,” she says.

Surcharge or not, the debate has started an important conversation. Plenty of local restaurateurs, even those not subject to the new law, think it’s time to pitch in for the men and women who work 12-hour kitchen shifts and endure aching backs, oven burns, and scant vacation time for their craft. And even better, offering benefits could insert stability in a famously transient industry and draw talented cooks to places with the best insurance packages. “You attract those kind of people who want to stick around,” Erickson says. It’s worth pointing out that there’s one notable chef in town who has been rocking the higher-prices-for-health care model for years. And it doesn’t seem to have hurt Tom Douglas’s business one bit.

Published: March 2013

How the SoDo Arena Could Decide the Mayor’s Race

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0800

Image: Shutterstock

Timing really is everything. This winter, mayor Mike McGinn’s hopes for reelection were all but dead. Then, within days of announcing his intention to run, San Francisco hedge-fund manager Chris Hansen cut a deal to bring the NBA’s Sacramento Kings to Seattle and fill the $490 million arena he hopes to build in SoDo. And just like that, McGinn was back in the hunt. Neither the arena nor the team’s move were a done deal in January, but the excitement (and ire) both have aroused is proof that basketball could play a major part in deciding who takes city hall.

The Hero McGinn—who has championed Hansen’s efforts from the beginning—demurred when asked about the Kings-to-Seattle chatter but added, “If it’s true, ain’t it cool?” It certainly would be for McGinn. A Sonics return would transform his image from the do-nothing mayor (belated seawall, thwarted bike lanes) to the mayor who restored Seattle’s civic pride.

The Iconoclast Alone on the other side of the debate sits former city council member Peter Steinbrueck, who has railed that the arena will harm industrial businesses and the Port of Seattle; that the cars it will bring to SoDo will hurt the environment; and that the City has failed to consider other sites, such as the Rainier Valley. As a candidate for mayor, Steinbrueck’s bomb-throwing style may alienate some, but he’ll likely peel off anti-arena voters, including those who want to stick it
to McGinn for what they perceive as a tax giveaway to a wealthy developer.

The Sore Winner Somewhere in the middle is city council member Tim Burgess, who jumped into the race in January. An early arena skeptic, he came around after negotiating numerous concessions: $40 million for transportation improvements, $7 million to explore new uses for KeyArena, and a personal guarantee from Hansen that he’ll pay for the arena’s annual debt payments if taxes from the facility fall short. But Burgess has already been upstaged by McGinn, who’ll win most of the credit if the deal goes through.

“Bring back our Sonics” is a powerful rallying cry. But if the deal goes south, or if new information makes it look less than solid, Steinbrueck will be the first to say, “I told you so.”

Published: March 2013

Meet the Candidates: Bruce Harrell

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0800

Image: Brandon Hill

For a candidate who—like all the other candidates—says his run against incumbent mayor Mike McGinn isn’t about policy disagreements, second-term Seattle City Council member Bruce Harrell, who announced his candidacy in mid-January, sure criticized McGinn a lot during an hour-long sit-down with the editors of PubliCola at Seattle Met at his Central District headquarters.

Harrell, the only minority among the major candidates (at press time it was not clear if former King County executive Ron Sims was in or out), is half African American and half Japanese American, and also talked a lot about race. But not in a Malcolm X way. A Garfield High School valedictorian and UW football star (the dude is big), Harrell has a fancy corporate law background, owns a ritzy condo in Bellevue, and accents his impeccable suits with schmancy cuff links. Indeed, he’s a formal guy for such an informal city: ESPN-style, he was wearing a matching purple tie and purple pocket square.

Elected to the council in 2007, Harrell started out as a low-profile legislator chairing the energy committee but emerged during the 2010 John T. Williams tragedy, connecting with the public, and particularly with angry minorities, who had reached their limit on Seattle police misconduct.

He’s not blustery, though. Harrell is a measured, thoughtful speaker who often finds his way to data points rather than emotion. Thinking back on his youth in the Central District and his family’s classic up-by-the-bootstraps story, Harrell said, “I don’t think this mayor has a clue about that. He would have a sense of urgency on looking at failing graduation rates of young African Americans...and the circle between poverty and people of color,” he concluded.

PubliCola: Mayor McGinn won four years ago by bringing together environmental advocates and neighborhood activists. Who do you consider your constituency?
Bruce Harrell: If you look at who votes and how they vote, I draw from a cross--section of all the bases. I was once a business lawyer, a telecommunications lawyer. People look at my background and know I can read a balance sheet and a profit-and-loss sheet. They look at the neighborhood work that I’ve done, so the neighborhood leaders like me. Labor groups support me—I’m a former Teamster; I’m pretty outspoken about working with labor. I have intentionally not been pigeonholed.

PubliCola: To what extent do you consid-er communities of color your constituents, given that you’re the only major candidate of color in the race so far?
Harrell: I’m a person of color, and so I’d have to be honest and say that people like seeing themselves in candidates, but I firmly believe that whites like good candidates irrespective of color, so I think my message resonates with all folks. Quite frankly, when you’re of mixed heritage, you don’t think in racial terms. I don’t look at an African American and think that because we both have pigment in our skin, we have something in common.

PubliCola: After several years of being a fairly low-profile member of the council, you’ve emerged in the last couple of years as a voice for police accountability, particularly with your call for body cameras on police officers. But so far, that initiative has only resulted in a trial of six cameras. What went wrong?
Harrell: First of all, I’ve been very loud for five years on the council. But the things I’ve been loud about—for example, having $1 million in the rainy day fund for City Light doesn’t make a lot of noise out there, because people aren’t following that issue. … Those are critical pieces of work. They were just not as newsworthy, for lack of a better word.

The reason we do not have body cameras on officers is because this mayor has not pushed it, and of course the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild and the rank and file do not like cameras, and I understand that…but the officers will love these cameras once they start to use them.

PubliCola: Your council colleague and opponent in this race Tim Burgess has said that, as part of his effort to improve police accountability, he would replace police chief John Diaz. Do you agree that ousting Diaz would help?
Harrell: I totally disagree. That is not the answer. You can terminate Chief Diaz and still not get the kind of change you want to see. There’s a huge disparity between the leaders and rank and file. The impulse to fire Diaz is just a knee-jerk reaction.

PubliCola: You were one of two votes on the council against increasing building heights near the Roosevelt light-rail station. Do you think the city is heading in the right direction on density?
Harrell: I don’t think there’s been an honest discussion about our density needs. We’re not growing nearly as rapidly as we thought we would. Our growth has been very flat. Our birth rates are flat. We keep using density as the catchphrase to say we have to build all this growth. … I love a walkable community, and I do support aggressive upzones around areas that are transit friendly, and South Lake Union is a great example where we have to achieve this.

In the Roosevelt situation, to me, a deal is sort of a deal. When you have neighborhood activists who put their heart and soul into neighborhood planning…for us to then, after the fact, change the zoning, I didn’t think that was appropriate. … Those are real human beings. They matter.

PubliCola: Tell us more about why you think McGinn has failed.
Harrell: The challenge with McGinn, I would suggest, is that in four years he has not initiated any creative legislation. I would actively ask people to find where his policy record is and where he’s been creative. An example would be our youth violence prevention initiative, which was started under former mayor Greg Nickels. McGinn’s response was to pour more money into it. … Preventing violence is just one small part of the equation. They could not be violent, but they could still be failing miserably in life.

PubliCola: What about McGinn’s plans to build a high-speed broadband system using the city’s miles of unused “dark fiber”? That seems creative.
Harrell: We’ve asked the executive for years to look at unused fiber and dark fiber and create some connectivity. It would be a complete misstatement to say that using dark fiber was the mayor’s idea.

PubliCola: Is race a factor in Seattle elections?
Harrell: Absolutely. But here’s the interesting thing about Seattle. I don’t believe we have a bunch of racists in the city thinking about, ‘How do we discriminate against this group?’ I think we’ve become so indifferent to race that we don’t see the disparate impact we have on different communities. …

In our streetlight work that we do, in looking at who complains about streetlights going out, poor people and communities of color do not complain about streetlights as much as more affluent people. … When we realize people are being impacted in a disparate way, we have to change our policies.

If you had a young black boy, or two black boys, in your house like I do [Harrell has two sons], and you see what’s happening to their friends, you will have a different sense of urgency
on those issues.

Under my leadership, we’ll do several things. The first thing is we will convert all or the vast majority of our community centers to empowerment centers, using that as an asset to teach anti-violence, self-esteem, and environmental sustainability. We’ll pipe in, through technology, different mentors that look like them. This is a program that is not heavy on capital investments. …

How you help a child is very simple: You have to have tutors and resources around them to help them understand the curriculum and good teachers that are culturally competent. You have to have role models around them so that they can see themselves doing better. …

I do not need to teach another African American boy to play basketball. What I do need is to have an African American teacher who can talk to that kid.

I grew up three blocks from here. I can tell you what this city looked like back in the ’60s, and I could take you to places where people were killed over drug deals. But on the positive side, my black grandfather came here in 1944 with three sons, uneducated, and was able to build a home, buy an apartment building, and do quite well and send two kids through college and graduate school.

My Japanese grandfather came here from Japan in 1916. He could barely speak English and was able to buy commercial property here and build a thriving flower business right here at Ninth and Jackson. This was a time when racial bigotry was overt. What is different between then and now? You had leaders that were compassionate and gave hardworking folks opportunity.

Former mayor Wes Uhlman, when I was 12, put his arm around me and gave me hope that I would be able to be on the city council and perhaps run for mayor. You had compassionate leaders who know the art of listening. I have seen what this city can be if we listen. I don’t think this mayor has a clue about that.

PubliCola: You’ve called for a statewide ballot initiative that would give cities the right to adopt stricter gun regulations than the state. What are the prospects for that proposal?
Harrell: I think who will win the mayor’s race will be the person with the most creative ideas, and so I looked at our legislative agenda with regard to guns and public safety, and it’s been the same legislative agenda year after year after year: ban assault weapons, ban large magazines, close the gun show loophole. I’m suggesting a different strategy…of giving cities local flexibility in their gun safety laws. … We can’t just wait on Olympia to pass something. ... I don’t have all the faith in the world right now in Olympia, so I don’t like beating my head against a door to get things done.

Published: March 2013

Wait, How High Am I?

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:00:00 -0800

Image: Getty Images/Tooga

Keep it together.

Keepittogetherkeepittogetherkeepitogether. KEEP. IT. TO. GETH. ER.

Those are the only words that I remember running through my head the first time I got high. Which was at about 8:30 at night on December 10, 2012. Which, if you’ll recall, was four days after possession of up to one ounce of marijuana for recreational use became legal in Washington state for anyone 21 years or older. Oh, plenty of abstract ideas zipped around in the suddenly vast space that opened up between my ears after I took three hits off of a glass pipe: What would it be like to have feet where your hands should be? How long would it take to row a boat to the moon? If a sandwich could talk, would it be mean to eat it? But those three words I recall specifically because I could see them rolling through my brain on an endless loop as I paced my backyard barefoot for 10 minutes—I’m still not exactly sure why—wearing a hole into the grass until I was so overcome by the thought of my neighbors watching me through their windows as they called the closest psychiatric hospital that I ran back inside my house and hid in the basement.

I was hiding from narcs and straitjackets, but in a way I was desperately searching for a grip on reality, too. Because that’s what this little experiment was supposed to be about, back before it turned into the comically cliche, after-school-special version of Reefer Madness. A couple weeks earlier, during a story-pitch meeting, I’d floated the idea of finally trying pot and writing a user’s guide for first timers who I naively assumed had always wanted to get high but were just as scared of breaking the law as I was. (Or am.)

When Washington voters approved Initiative 502 by a 56-to-44 margin last November 6, they set in motion a process that will ultimately lead to the opening late this year or early next year of privately run stores dedicated to selling marijuana. And a study by the Washington State Office of Financial Management predicts that industry could bring in nearly $2 billion over the next five years. That’s a lot of built-up demand, so while it’s still technically illegal to buy, I told myself there had to be plenty of wannabe tokers out there anxiously Googling “how to find a dealer.”

Honestly, though, this was about more than just an altruistic act of service journalism. I’m 35 and have a three-year-old son. I stopped getting drunk about the time he was born and stopped drinking altogether not long after that. I go out to dinner maybe twice a year, and most nights I’m in bed before 9:30. It’s safe to say I was having a pre-midlife crisis, and, as embarrassing as this is to admit, smoking pot was my version of buying a Porsche. My wife, an unrepentant stoner in college, thought it was hilarious that her teetotaling husband was suddenly itching to get high, especially after the years of good-natured grief I’d given her for her bong-ripping past. But she gave me her blessing, so long as I smoked after the kid was asleep and promised not to “do anything stupid, like barge into his room and sing him a Dave Matthews song or something.”

Over Google chat I relayed my plan to my younger brother, who’d smoked occasionally in his 20s, and asked what to expect. He promised a mellow high. “Do it at night, chill for an hour or two, then go to bed,” he wrote. “You’ll sleep amazingly.”

ME: No hangover, right?

HIM: Not at all. Man, now I want to go buy an eighth.

That sounded awesome. But this? There was nothing mellow about it. Once I’d stopped pacing and ducked back into the house, I poured myself into a leather chair in my basement living room and tried to ride out my freak-out while watching SportsCenter. But two warring factions in my brain wouldn’t shut up long enough to let me enjoy highlights of what looked like football players trying to run through honey. There was the rational, Zenlike side, voiced by Jeff Bridges: Dude, relax. You’re just a little paranoid. Let go of whatever’s tethering you to Planet Stress and enjoy the high, man. And then there was the wildly irrational side, straight from a Gilbert Gottfried rant: STOP TALKING ABOUT PARANOIA, YOU SON OF A BITCH. YOU’RE MAKING ME PARANOID. WAIT, WHY IS THE TV STARING AT ME LIKE THAT?

The panic intensified for an hour—made worse by the fact that my field of vision narrowed so drastically that it felt like I was looking at the world through a toilet paper roll—until I finally stopped fighting with myself and passed out. And when I came to 12 hours later, every bit as nauseated and run down as I’d ever felt after getting blackout drunk on liquor, my “Smoking Marijuana for Dummies” idea had lost its appeal. Now I just wanted to figure out what I’d smoked.

Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone having an experience quite like that. Where did you get the stuff?” That’s Ed Stremlow, co-owner of Analytical 360, a laboratory that specializes in testing the potency and medicinal properties of marijuana currently grown for patients. I’d called him in early January hoping he could help me understand my high, and at first he wondered aloud if I’d just been unprepared for the effects. No doubt that was a contributing factor—I’d expected to feel loose and a little giddy, not see product logos in TV commercials change color and come to life—but more than that I was blindsided by the pot’s power.

My wife had saved me the embarrassment of clumsily asking coworkers for a hookup by getting me a sample from a friend whose wife has a medical authorization. And when she caught me peeking around corners in the basement, she called her friend to ask what he’d given me. As it turns out, he hadn’t checked with his wife before grabbing the first thing he could find in her stash, which, he’d since discovered, just happened to be an exceptionally high-grade medicinal strain. In other words, even if I’d been aware at the time of pot potency studies like the one conducted by the National Center for Natural Products Research, which showed that the average strength of marijuana doubled
between 1998 and 2008, I still knew nothing about the strain I got before I smoked it. As I recounted my experience to Stremlow, his soft baritone morphed from bemused to intrigued. I’d piqued his interest to the point that he asked to test a sample of my green tormentor just to satisfy his own curiosity.

We met the next night in Analytical’s modest space, and as lab techs in knit caps and North Face fleece jackets surveyed samples that had come in during the day (“Did you smell this Maui Wowie?” “Yeah, it’s really doughy”), Stremlow broke down the science of pot.

A given varietal strain of marijuana contains several compounds called cannabinoids. There are the well-known ones, like tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which produce the psychoactive effects typically associated with pot. But then there are others, like cannabidiol (CBD) or cannabichromene (CBC), which have been shown to alleviate everything from pain to nausea. (THC has medical benefits, too.) “And each strain has a different potential and potency for whatever cannabinoid it focuses on, whether it’s THC, CBD, or CBC,” Stremlow explained, pointing to a color-coded chart of CBDs and their medicinal uses, in a three-ring binder of information he takes on sales calls to local dispensaries.

Given the thousands of strains that exist today—thanks to decades of selective breeding—there are any number of cannabinoid permutations available. Which is a good thing for patients for whom traditional pharmaceuticals offer no relief or produce side effects worse than their symptoms. But despite the fact that marijuana for medical use has been legal in Washington state since 1998, for more than a decade qualified growers or providers weren’t required to test their product to determine what was actually in it. Which meant that patients had to choose their meds to treat specific symptoms based on recommendations or trial and error. And once they found something that worked, they had to hope its potency remained consistent from one batch to the next. Stremlow compared the unpredictability to the variations in a vintner’s wine production from year to year. “A guy might give you something with 18 percent THC this time, and his next crop might be 10 percent,” he said. “Some years you have good crops, and other years you have bad crops.”

That inconsistency started to change—though not without a few hiccups—in January 2011, when Jeanne Kohl-Welles, a Democratic state senator from Seattle, introduced Senate Bill 5073. Kohl-Welles hoped to clarify the state’s existing medical marijuana laws, which up until that point were vague and noncommittal in their support of the industry, by establishing protections for dispensaries. But she went further, proposing rules for inspecting the “condition, cannabinoid profile, THC concentration, or other qualitative measurement of cannabis intended for medical use.”

The bill made its way through the legislature and was even strengthened, requiring growers to submit samples of their product to independent, third-party “cannabis analysis laboratories,” which would examine the samples for potency and other yet-to-be-determined characteristics. But when it landed on then-governor Christine Gregoire’s desk that summer, she vetoed most of the bill—including the testing language—for fear that it would cause the state to run afoul of federal controlled-substance laws.

John Brown, a longtime friend of Stremlow’s, had followed Kohl-Welles’s bill closely, and even after it was gutted he saw an opportunity. The idea of marijuana testing wasn’t new; at the time, there were similar facilities operating in other medical marijuana–friendly states, like Steep Hill Lab in Oakland, California. A couple had even cropped up in Washington, but Brown and Stremlow—along with another buddy, Brenton Dawber—had friends in the biotech industry who they felt could bring an extra level of legitimacy to the business: Randy Oliver, a chemist who used to work for Seattle-based ZymoGenetics and is now employed by a pharmaceutical company in Montana; and his wife, Laura Taubner, who’s also a chemist and has been recognized by the National Institutes of Health for her work on mad cow disease. Not only that, while other facilities conducted tests using gas chromatography, which heats up samples and—according to the Analytical crew—produces skewed results, they planned to use the more reliable high-performance liquid chromatography, which can measure a strain’s pre-smoked strength. With their methods in place, the five partners opened Analytical 360 on January 1, 2012.

When you walk into your friendly neighborhood marijuana bodega you’ll be able to make a selection based on potency numbers printed right on the packaging.

The operation is located on the Fremont-Wallingford border on Stone Way—of course it is—and the first thing that hits you when you walk through the door is how tiny the space is. Actually, no, the first thing that hits you when you walk through the door is a wave of pungent, herby marijuana aroma. But aside from the smell, you’d never guess what they do here. The tidy and spare waiting area looks like a college student’s apartment, with a low-slung white couch and two inexpensive wood chairs situated around a coffee table that’s covered in copies of Northwest Leaf, a local medical marijuana magazine. January’s cover story: Will pot replace booze on happy hour menus?

Not until you walk behind a counter where techs check in samples and examine them under a high-powered digital microscope for insects, mold, and other nasties you wouldn’t want to smoke, do you find a door that leads to the cramped lab. In here, surrounded by racks of pinkie finger–size test tubes, pot from all over Puget Sound gets dried out, pulverized, and mixed with a solvent that pulls out the cannabinoids. That solution is injected into a device that looks a little like a stack of computer servers, which, 30 minutes later, produces a cannabinoid profile. (Fun fact: They’ve since developed their own testing methods, but Oliver, the chemist, started by adopting a process established by a crime lab in Belgium.) Analytical’s founders struggled to find business early on, but now they’re processing hundreds of samples per month, from dispensaries in King, Pierce, Thurston, and Whatcom counties.

Two hours after stepping through the front door, I handed Brown a Ziploc baggie the size of a credit card. In it was a tea-green nugget that weighed less than a gram, again from my wife’s friend’s wife. It wasn’t exactly the same stuff I smoked—I’d buried the leftovers in the bottom of my compost bin weeks ago while chanting something that may have been “Be gone, green demon,” my version of a horticulturist’s exorcism—but it was the best I could do. Obviously, as Brown and Stremlow explained, there was no guarantee that the test results would reflect the strength of the original sample, but I didn’t care. Even if it was 50 percent weaker, I was positive it would measure off their charts. “Come back in three days, and we’ll have something for you,” Stremlow said.

On the walk back to my car I stumbled and suddenly realized I felt a little lightheaded. Was I…high? They weren’t smoking anything in there, but with all the pot they had, maybe it was just in the air, and some random THC particles had seeped through my pores. Or maybe it just had something to do with the fact that I hadn’t eaten in 12 hours.

Although they couldn’t have predicted it a year ago, the group behind Analytical picked the perfect time to start testing marijuana. Because, thanks to I-502, business has the potential to really pick up. Substantially. Under new laws “every licensed marijuana producer and processor must submit representative samples of marijuana, usable marijuana, or marijuana-infused products produced or processed by the licensee to an independent, third-party testing laboratory…for inspection and testing to certify compliance with standards adopted by the state liquor control board.” Not only that, the control board will establish classes of marijuana based on THC and other cannabinoid levels. What that means is that as soon as this December you’ll be able to walk into your friendly neighborhood marijuana bodega and make a selection based on potency numbers printed right on the packaging.

Of course, how exactly that will work has to be yet to ironed out. When I called Brian Smith, the liquor control board’s communications director, in January he sounded…distracted. Ninety percent of the calls he’d fielded so far in the new year had to do with the implementation of I-502, and the department was days away from kicking off a series of public forums on the subject across the state. Testing was just one of the issues his office was considering. “We’re in uncharted waters,” he said. “Where in the world does a comprehensive system of growing and processing and retailing marijuana exist? There are pockets around the world, of course, like in Amsterdam, where it’s commonly available in certain ways. But nowhere do you have a system of farming it and processing it and retailing it.”

High on Stats Analytical’s clients get cards printed with their test results.

Take a second to consider that last point. When you buy a six-pack of beer, the alcohol content—or more accurately, the alcohol by volume—printed on the cans was calculated by the brewer. It wasn’t verified by anyone because no agency, state or federal, requires it, but even if there were a national testing lab that did that kind of work, it wouldn’t help in the case of pot because it’s still considered illegal at the federal level.

As a result, the responsibility for basic quality assurance falls to the State of Washington, and it will have to build the entire apparatus from the ground up. Nothing like it exists, and the only thing that comes close is a lab in Yakima run by the state department of agriculture for the purposes of testing the quality of hops for brewing. In fact, the job of regulating and selling pot will be so huge that the liquor control board sent out a request for proposals earlier this year for consultants with expertise in the previously underground industry. In case you’re wondering, experts in product quality standards and testing had to have a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, biology, or agriculture, or five years of testing experience.

One reason no laws exist for testing the alcohol content of beer may be the fact that we have decades (and decades, and decades…) of commonly held institutional knowledge about the relative effects of everything available at a liquor store. So with marijuana, for which information about chemical makeup and potency isn’t even remotely as widely disseminated, testing and labeling will no doubt provide a consumer safety function. “If I wanted to start drinking today, I don’t think I’d go straight to the 100-proof liquor because I know better,” Stremlow says. “But if I didn’t know there was a difference between beer and 100-proof liquor, it would be a harder decision to make and I might just buy the first thing I saw on the shelf.”

Ultimately people within the industry predict that testing will have the unintended consequence of opening the public’s eyes to the benefits of marijuana beyond the buzz—assuming it’s not focused exclusively on THC content, of course. James Andren runs Mountain Medicine Clinic, a collective garden in Puyallup, and he’s been testing with Analytical since last year. He laughed when I told him about my first brush with pot but got serious again when he considered how many other people may have similar freak-outs. “I have a feeling there will be several people on the recreational side that will experience green sickness”—or smoking themselves sick—“because they’re going to go into establishments looking for the highest THC,” he says. So it’ll be on the retailers themselves to educate their customers. “If the labeling includes a full cannabinoid profile, that’ll be very beneficial to the recreational users, as long as the information about what those cannabinoids do is available to them.”

In other words, if all goes according to plan, Washington won’t just be one of the first two states in the country where people can legally get high. It—and, more specifically Seattle—could be the center of an entirely new green industry. But rather than compostable clothes and high-efficiency lightbulbs, the products will be knowledge and common sense.

Three days after dropping off my sample at Analytical, I came back, just as instructed, fully prepared for Stremlow to tell me I’d been lucky to survive. The samples tested at Analytical average about 13 percent THC, but a quick peek at the lab’s site—it publishes all test results, again, to increase public awareness of what’s available on the market—reveals that you can occasionally find numbers as high as 20 percent. A sick part of me hoped mine would be even higher than that. It wasn’t a competition; more than anything I wanted to maintain what little self-respect I still had.

When I walked in, Stremlow slid a sealed envelope labeled “Seattle Met” across the counter to me, and inside was a plastic card printed with a high-resolution photo of my sample, along with three numbers: THC, CBD, and water content. My jaw fell a little slack as my eyes focused on the only number I really cared about right then.

THC Total: 10.44 percent.

Was there a number missing? Was the decimal in the wrong place? How was this possible? Stremlow tried to soften the blow by pointing out that my pot’s activated totals—a measure of its cannabinoid potency presmoking—were considerably higher than average. But in reality, that just made me sleep longer and contributed a little to my hangover. Basically, I was a lightweight. “I think a lot of your experience had to do with the fact that it was your first time and you didn’t know what to expect.” He chuckled and added, “Hey, maybe pot’s just not for you.”

Maybe. Or maybe next time I’ll know that rather than asking for the vodka of pot—or even the light beer—I’ll go for a wine cooler.

Weed Won’t Show Up in Restaurants Anytime Soon

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 08:00:00 -0800

Now that weed's legal, the sticky stuff's bound to becomes the hip ingredient du jour at local restaurants, right? Not so much. I-502, which ended pot prohibition, bans the consumption of “marijuana-infused product in view of the general public.” But even if it were legal, local bakeries aren't keen on baking up pastries that’ll get you baked.

Neil Robertson, who owns Crumble and Flake Patisserie in Capitol Hill, isn’t hung up on legality. He’s just not high on the taste. “I’m in the deliciousness business,” he says, “so unless I could find a way to make the flavor work in pastry, it’s a nonstarter.”

That doesn’t mean Seattle pastry chefs won't show you how to give your own brownies a little kick, though. Brandi Henderson, of Ballard’s the Pantry at Delancey, jokes that she'd be willing to teach classes on pot gastronomy. “I honestly have no qualms about that,” she says. “And I bet it would draw an entertaining crowd.”

Published: February 2013

The Education of Ed Murray

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:00:00 -0800

Image: Robin Stein

Locally, the biggest winner in last year’s election wasn’t even on the ballot.

Democratic state senator Ed Murray, a boyish 57-year-old, was feted like a conquering hero on election night when he stopped by the impromptu street party that had broken out in Pike/Pine. Murray, who lives on the homier north end of the hip neighborhood, was returning from the Democrats’ official victory event at the downtown Westin around 11:30. So many people crowded around him, having their picture taken with him on their iPhones and hugging him, that, he says, he had “scratches all over my face” from people “rubbing me with their earrings.”

“People were kind of pushing me up to say something. And someone handed me a microphone,” Murray remembers. “And I got on top of a truck and said something like, ‘You guys made this happen.’ I’ll never experience that again in my political career.”

The Murray lovefest was the culmination of the state’s—and Murray’s—decades--long fight for gay marriage. Last February, Murray, who’s gay, sponsored marriage equality legislation that he nimbly maneuvered through the stodgy senate, picking up four Republican votes along the way. The liberal house easily passed the legislation a week later. But, as had been predicted all along, social conservatives backed by the DC-based anti–gay marriage group National Organization for Marriage, collected signatures to force a voter referendum. Come Election Day, however, gay marriage was approved 53 to 46 percent.

Just a week after Election Day, when members of the senate Democratic caucus got together to begin organizing for the upcoming session, they elected Murray as their new caucus leader. “It was pretty much a no-brainer,” says Lake Stevens senator Steve Hobbs, a conservative Democrat who supports Murray. “It was a unanimous vote. No other names came up.”

Murray’s name is also officially on the list of 2013 mayoral hopefuls. And his recent succession of political victories—especially if he translates his new Democratic leadership gig into more legislative wins that resonate in liberal Seattle—give him uncontested political momentum against incumbent mayor Mike McGinn.

Murray, arguably Election 2012’s biggest winner, is now set up to be a potentially bigger winner in 2013, when he may actually be on the ballot.

Murray, a ruddy-faced guy with gray hair and piercing blue eyes, is best known as a champion for gay rights; before passing the gay marriage bill, he ushered through a landmark antidiscrimination bill in 2006 and quickly followed it up with a series of domestic partnership bills in 2007, ’08, and ’09 that gave gay and lesbian couples all the rights of married couples.

Murray championed a strategy of incrementalism, convincing gay leaders in ’06, after the civil rights bill passed, to focus on domestic partnerships instead of gay marriage. “For a lot of people within our community, it was a very contentious process to decide to do domestic partnership,” Murray explains. “At one point, I was in a meeting in the governor’s office and I was the only person who said, ‘Don’t do marriage.’ All the other leaders were there, and I was not a popular guy at that point. I believed strongly that we had to walk our way toward this, both to make legislators comfortable and to make people in the public comfortable.”

Despite his advocacy for gay rights, Murray is more a stereotypical kitchen--table Democrat than a culture warrior; more Bruce Springsteen Democrat than Lady Gaga Democrat. He grew up on Alki and in Lacey in a working class family; his father worked in the steel yards and as a logger. “There were seven kids, and often my parents struggled,” Murray says. “Money was often an issue.”

His grandparents were first--generation Irish immigrants, and his Irish Catholic family was politicized by the Kennedy election in 1960. Murray was five when Kennedy was elected, but became forever after a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party; he felt that Kennedy’s election validated his family’s status. “The Democratic Party is about providing opportunities for families like mine,” he says. “The Democratic Party reflects my core religious belief of helping those on the margins of society, the homeless, the mentally ill. Those looking for a second chance.”

Murray came out when he graduated college in 1980, and his identity did play a role in his political evolution, but not in the way one might expect. Though he had participated in politics—student body president in high school; anti-apartheid leader in college, running a group called the Human Rights Forum at University of Portland—he didn’t think an out gay could make it in politics and he got a low--profile job as a paralegal. But when Seattle gay leader Cal Anderson ran for the state legislature in the ’80s, Murray was energized. Much as Kennedy had validated his family’s sense of who they were, Murray says, “When Cal Anderson ran, it was like, ‘Wow, someone like me can really do that.’ And he was sort of the bookend to John Kennedy breaking through the barrier.”

Murray ended up running Anderson’s winning campaign in 1988 and was drawn right back into politics. He got a job working for a young city council member, Martha Choe, where he was tasked with wonky policy work such as figuring out bus routes between Capitol Hill and Queen Anne, and facilitating street-calming and bike lane projects. “If I learned retail politics from Cal, I learned public policy and how to do budgets from Martha Choe.” When Anderson died from AIDS in 1995, the appointment shuffle to fill Anderson’s senate seat put Murray—by then he’d served as president of the statewide gay and lesbian advocacy group, the Privacy Fund—in the statehouse. He won reelection a year later.

First, he served as the house capital budget chair. Next, he served as house transportation chair, ushering through new auto emissions standards. More importantly, building an unprecedented business-labor-environmentalist alliance, he passed a pair of controversial, previously unimaginable gas tax increases in 2003 and 2005 (totaling 15 cents a gallon) to upgrade the state’s transportation infrastructure. Ultimately, the controversy of building stuff and repairing roads wore off. A right-wing radio attempt to repeal the gas tax increase in 2005 failed decisively at the polls.

Murray moved to the senate in 2007 and was appointed to the powerful ways and means committee, where his talent to craft compromises blossomed. Never mind gay marriage; slammed with the slow economic recovery and Republican power plays—including a floor coup—during last spring’s budget wrangling, Murray still managed to preserve core social services including the Disability Lifeline, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the State Food Assistance Program, and family planning services. “If the price of protecting our students, seniors, and vulnerable was a month of difficult negotiations,” Murray said, “it was well worth it.”

Murray is more a Bruce Springsteen Democrat than a Lady Gaga Democrat.

It’s ironic Murray has emerged as Seattle’s patient statesman in Olympia. For much of his career, he was infamous for being a hothead. Outgoing Democratic senate majority leader Lisa Brown remembers several occasions when Murray would just walk out of caucus meetings. And former house majority leader Lynn Kessler remembers Murray’s temper during a meeting with then– Eastside Republican senator Jim Horn after Horn staked out his conservative position. “Ed said, ‘That’s it, I’m leaving. If you’re going there, then I’m done.’ And I thought, Come on Ed, sit down.”

But Murray’s recent victories—on the budget, for example—defy his former rep, and have featured a more mature politician. “I watched Ed grow into his leadership role,” Kessler says, “and he really came into it when he was made chair of the ways and means committee. Did he have the patience to work with all these various people that can drive you crazy? I just watched how he realized, ‘Okay we gotta go there.’ ”

Murray’s new penchant for negotiating and bringing opponents along has become his strongest suit. “It’s not a sin to cross the aisle and negotiate and come to some compromise so that you get a better deal. And Ed matured into that place,” Kessler says, juxtaposing Murray with a lot of other progressives who “hard-edged their positions…and Ed didn’t.”

Kessler points to Murray’s gay marriage victory. “In order to get that passed he had to bring on some more moderates and some Republicans, and, I will tell you, even though opponents were just always saying wretched things on the floor, he just responded with the most calm. He knew that when you really want to get something that people don’t want to do, you have to do it in a way that brings them along slowly.”

Murray will certainly need patience in his new job as caucus leader of a shaky majority. Indeed, with a likely 26-23 majority, the posse of conservative Democrats in the senate known as the Roadkill Caucus who side with the GOP on fiscal issues, Murray may face big ob- stacles. “Depending on 25 votes to pass anything will be very difficult,” he says.

The other factions are already staking their positions. “I did tell him, ‘I’m going to support you as leader, and I’m not looking forward to the times that we’re going to disagree and we’re going to fight,’” says Hobbs, a leader in Roadkill, which is likely to push for more cuts to social spending and workers’ comp. “I’m pretty sure there’s going to be some tension.”

“I work well with them,” Murray says about his conservative foes in his own party, “but there’s been some policy disagreements. I could be the shortest-lived majority leader in state history,” he jokes.

In addition to reintroducing the anti–death penalty bill he regularly introduces and reintroducing a local DREAM Act bill that would allow children of undocumented immigrants access to financial aid for higher ed, for example—Murray is now squarely focused on education. Asked what, besides funding K–12 education, was on the legislative agenda this year, he simply added higher education to the list. And Murray cleverly connects his education advocacy to the Seattle agenda, citing the high number of kids who aren’t graduating from high school in his district. Asked about the mayor’s race, Murray also turns to education. At his December 5 mayoral announcement, he listed local schools (which aren’t under the city’s official purview) among his top-three priorities (the other two were public safety and infrastructure). “I see real opportunities for this city to partner with its school district,” he said.

Ultimately, though, his mayoral pitch rests on his legislative record. “I just think this is a great city with great opportunities to really do great things. I think my legislative career shows I specialize in bringing people together to get wins, and I think the city needs that. That excites me.”

Published: January 2013

Same-Sex Marriage Opponent Lashes Out at Starbucks

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:00:00 -0800

Image: Stuart Isett/Polaris/Newscom

“[Starbucks’] international outreach is where we can have the most effect…. In Qatar, in the Middle East, we’ve begun working to make sure that there’s some price to be paid for this. These are not countries that look kindly on same-sex marriage."

—National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown, during a conference call with reporters in November 2012, on what his group plans to do to make Starbucks accountable for its support of same-sex marriage legislation in Washington state and elsewhere

Published: January 2013

White Center’s Annexation Fight

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 10:33:00 -0700

Most days the sweet smell of pork ribs drifts from the kitchen at Uncle Mike’s Super-licious BBQ and into the dining room. The hickory smoke gets in your head, man, and it messes with your senses. You almost forget that you’re here; not just here in this homey, wood-paneled joint, but here, like, in the present. The voices coming from the TVs on the wall—ESPN talking heads previewing this week’s NFL games—get garbled up and stop making sense. Your mouth starts to hurt, it’s watering so hard. And your lizard brain takes over and hisses, Ribs. Now. In other words, the smell is freaking intoxicating.

Other days the cozy restaurant in the heart of downtown White Center is still overcome by a mind-altering smoke, but it’s coming from the NW Cannabis Market, the farmers market–style medical marijuana dispensary next door. Clouds of the stuff will seep down through the ceiling tiles in Uncle Mike’s and fill the place. “I got customers coming in saying, ‘Wooo, it’s strong in here,’” says owner Michael Gordon. “Some of them want to eat here, but they end up taking their food to go. I still get the sale, but it doesn’t help when somebody walks by and sees that I got an empty restaurant.”

Gordon doesn’t have a beef with medical marijuana; there’s another dispensary across the street that’s never caused him any problems. It’s the smoking that goes on indoors; last he checked, that wasn’t legal. It’s the noise from raffle nights that the market holds; while we’re on the subject, do pharmacies hold raffles for vicodin? It’s the pot deals he says he regularly witnesses in broad daylight outside, between patients leaving the market and others—presumably not patients—sitting in parked cars. That stuff is hurting the family-friendly atmosphere he’s aiming for, and it’s the kind of activity that he thinks a restaurant owner in a city with more governmental oversight wouldn’t have to deal with.

Roman Turchiniak, who owns Stan’s Adult Superstore, another downtown business, says revenue is down 30 to 40 percent since the market opened a year ago, mainly because its patients monopolize the parking spots in front of his store. Turchiniak’s seen a lot of sketchy activity in White Center over the last three decades, but this is the worst. And he was there last year, when the feds seized more than 50 pounds of meth and nearly 70 guns from other businesses that have since been shut down. “It’s a nightmare,” he says.

The nightmare he’s referring to, specifically, is the NW Cannabis Market. (For the record, its owner, Michael Keysor, says he has a security team that’s been doing its best to sweep the street of any secondary-market dealers. And the “medicine room,” where patients smoke, has a top-of-the-line carbon filter to reduce the smell.) But Turchiniak might as well be talking about the sense of helplessness that he, Gordon, and other neighborhood residents say they’ve felt for years now.

White Center is part of the 3.2-square-mile sliver of unincorporated land between Seattle and Burien—known to land-use wonks as North Highline Area Y—and consequently has no central government. Its designated liaison to King County, the North Highline Unincorporated Area Council (NHUAC), was defunded last year. Its lone zoning code enforcement officer is responsible for several other neighborhoods and muni-cipalities. Its police services, which come from the cash-strapped King County Sheriff’s Office, have been routinely reduced. In 2010 the county cut from its budget the salary for a deputy who patrolled White Center’s downtown; last year, after crime increased and citizens signed a petition, it reinstated the position using special funding. But that’s set to run out at the end of 2012.

Those concerned residents do have reason to hope. On November 6, the 17,000 or so people who live in North Highline Area Y will vote on whether to be annexed by the City of Burien. “There’s been no investment in our community for many, many, many years,” says Barbara Dobkin, the president of NHUAC, which has continued to operate without financial support from the county. If the annexation is approved, “we will have a city that has an incentive to see that our community does well.”

Slam dunk, right? Don’t say that to Mark Ufkes, a developer, the president of the White Center Chamber of Commerce, and an outspoken opponent of annexation. “I like being unincorporated. Are you kidding me?” he shouts into the phone. “If I go to Burien, I’m going to have to get a permit to trim my tree.” If you ask him about the upcoming vote, he’ll rattle off one figure after another to support his belief that being absorbed by Burien will kill both communities.

Taxes for North Highline residents will go up over $400 per year, Ufkes says. (Burien city manager Mike Martin says the number is closer to $140.) The neighborhood has $77 million in deferred maintenance needs that Burien can’t afford to address, he says. (Dobkin, of NHUAC, says that number represents a wish list of infrastructure improvements to the area similar to what any municipality has. But if the area remains unincorporated, the county has said that it will stop maintaining its roads, even allowing them to revert to gravel if they degrade too much.) All of that, Ufkes says, and the level of police service will go down. (Again, Martin refutes this and claims police service will be at least as good as it is now.)

Ufkes laughs a lot when he talks about annexation and the people who support it. It’s a sneering, sarcastic chuckle, and it gets even more sarcastic at any mention of NHUAC. He used to be a member and thinks it’s toothless: “I got seven of my neighbors, I promised them an ice cream cone, and they elected me to it.” But really, he just doesn’t like the people, several of whom now say he only opposes annexation to Burien because he’d rather that White Center became a part of Seattle, where zoning laws would allow him to develop high-density, low-income housing. That claim? “It’s pathetic,” he says.

That’s the irony of the annexation vote: An attempt to bring together two communities has bitterly divided one of them. And all the while, people like Uncle Mike Gordon are left to twist in the wind, hoping for some kind of order to be restored in White Center, a sense that someone—more police; maybe another code enforcement officer; anyone, really—is minding the store. Because if it doesn’t come, he’ll have to consider closing the restaurant and going somewhere else. “I would go somewhere where there’s going to be some regulations around,” Gordon says.

It’d be a shame. Because those ribs smell good.