The eighth in a series of Q&As with the candidates for city council.  (Previously on PubliQ&A: Position 6 candidate Martin Kaplan , Position 4 candidates David Bloom and Sally Bagshaw , Position 2 incumbent Richard Conlin and challenger David Ginsberg , and Position 8 candidates David Miller and Jordan Royer .)

Mike O'Brien, former chairman of the Cascade Chapter of the Sierra Club, is a hippie with an MBA: After getting a degree in economics at Duke and his masters in finance from the University of Washington, he spent a decade as chief financial officer at the Stokes Lawrence law firm. In the crowded field for Position 8, he stands out for his environmental background, for his opposition to the waterfront tunnel (a position he shares with fellow ex-Sierra Club chair Mike McGinn, who's running for mayor), and his fundraising prowess: So far, only he and his competitor Jordan Royer have broken $50,000.

We sat down at Peet's Coffee in Fremont.

PubliCola: I really admire your work on environmental issues like light rail, but I do have some concern that you're going to be a single-issue city council member. What experience do you have working on other, non-environmental issues?

Mike O'Brien: When I see an environmental problem, I usually figure out that there is an economic problem behind it. When I started at Stokes Lawrence, there were 16 partners. They got "free parking" as part of their compensation. So I said, let's put a price on this. You can get free parking, or you can get $3,000 a year instead. And after I did that, it went from 16 people parking in the parking lot to three. It was just [saying], you know what? Parking costs money. When you look at it as an environmental problem and tell people to do the right thing for the planet, you only get so far. But when you make it an economic issue, people go along.

I want to design this city in such a way that when people live here all they have to say is, "I live in Seattle," and you know they're doing the right thing by the environment and living lightly on the earth.

PubliCola : What can you do as a city council member to accomplish that?

O'Brien : We know cities are the answer to our environmental problems. They're also the answer to our social problems. The types of things the city council can do are things like long-term investment in good education, good transportation, strong communities, a progressive tax structure.

[The Seattle Department of Transportation]'s mission should be to move people and freight. When I see 70 people on a bus and that bus is sitting at a light for two light cycles, I want to be able to call SDOT and say, "This is screwed up, fix it."

PubliCola: There's been a lot of talk lately about mismanagement at SDOT. [Mayoral candidate] Joe Mallahan has said [SDOT director] Grace Crunican has to go. What do you think of the job she's been doing?

O'Brien: I worked on the viaduct oversight task force with Grace and I thought she was smart, I think she has her values in the right place... I'm torn because I like her. But clearly, part of that job is managing employees, and clearly, there are some major problems with management at the department. Whether it's [Mayor Greg] Nickels' fault or Grace's fault, I don't know, but there are clearly some problems there. As much as I like Grace as a person, if her management is piss-poor, she has to go.

As a finance guy, it blows me away that they don't know which projects are over budget. You set up systems so you know which jobs are making money and which aren't. If you're not doing the day-to-day management then you're not doing your job.

PubliCola: A lot of candidates talk about improving transit service, but that isn't the city's job. Is there anything you can do as a council member to impact Metro's performance?

O'Brien: I would say, Here are ten [transportation] corridors and they carry this number of people. In three years, I want to be averaging 50 percent more people moving in those corridors. And we'll measure our progress and put right up at the top of the web site.

Right now, it takes half an hour to get from the University District to Ballard. If all of a sudden you can get there in 20 minutes, you've increased the number of trips in an hour from three to two without buying a single bus, without hiring a single driver. Reworking the streets can have a significant impact on how Metro operates.

[Additionally,] we have to look at a transportation benefits district , and we have to go it alone. Voters in Seattle have shown again and again their willingness to pay taxes for transit investments. ...

One of the frustrating things to me is how creative people get when they want to build a tunnel. [Meanwhile] how long have [neighborhoods] been saying, "We just want sidewalks"? But you don't have a big business gorilla jumping up and down and yelling for sidewalks.

PubliCola: Your goals all seem related to transportation and land use, but first-time council members typically end up in less glamorous committees like energy and health. Do you have an interest in committees other than land use and transportation?

O'Brien: I think there's room to do great stuff on all of the committees. I would love to be on the energy committee and help figure out how we can make this city more energy efficient. The capital costs of a building are about two percent. The rest is operating costs. Yet we make short sighted "cost-saving" decisions that end up costing us a huge amount of money in the long run. That's where the city can step in and say, this is broken.

PubliCola: City Light pats itself on the back all the time for being carbon-neutral.

O'Brien: That's bull. Every kilowatt hour of power we don't use, we can sell to someone else, and that displaces coal. The city could use ten percent fewer kilowatt hours and sell that on the grid and reduce carbon [in the atmosphere].

PubliCola: You've disagreed with Mayor Nickels over a lot of different issues over the years, including the tunnel and the 2007 roads and transit ballot measure. If he wins reelection, how well do you think you'll work with him?

O'Brien: I think I will work just fine with the mayor. The Sierra Club gave him the highest award we give to politicians. Then we hammered him on the tunnel. We criticized him on roads and transit, and we're also working to get [mayors] to sign on to his climate initiative. [Mayors who sign on to Nickels' climate initiative agree to work to reduce their cities' greenhouse gas emissions to the levels mandated in the 2005 Kyoto Protocol].

PubliCola : The climate initiative seems like a perfect example of the city patting itself on the back without really accomplishing much. The agreement is nonbinding, and most of the cities haven't made much progress toward the Kyoto goals. Is having the mayor of a city like Jackson, Mississippi saying he'll try to reduce carbon emissions really meaningful?

O'Brien : One of the models of an organization like the Sierra Club is to set an ambitious goal. If a city says you have to measure it, then it becomes more likely you'll do it... One [of the things you accomplish] is, you get a mayor in Jackson, Mississippi saying, "We've got to reduce climate change." If, two years later, you get a report saying this mayor has not lived up to those expectations, the mayor looks pretty bad. Setting expectations allows us to do that.

PubliCola : Which members of the current council do you most admire?

O'Brien: Richard Conlin is someone whose values I share. His ability to get things done... [Trails off]. Four or five years ago there was this thing called the Bike Collaborative that he started. We biked around northwest Seattle and looked at different intersections and [recorded] the places where bike paths were needed ... Matt Stevenson and I went out two or three times and we figured out what we needed and we detailed a plan and we presented it to the [city council's] transportation committee. And then it was like two years later and I ran into Matt and he was like, "What ever happened to all that work we did?" I said, "I don't know."

And then the Sierra Club said we're not getting behind [the 2006 transportation levy] Bridging the Gap without a significant investment in bikes. And Jan [Drago, now head of the transportation committee] grabbed all the work we did on the bike collaborative and said let's tweak this. And that turned into the Bike Master Plan. So Conlin was the guy with the vision and Drago was the one who came along and sealed the deal.