Quake Shakes New Life Into Seattle Mayor

There may be worse jobs than being the mayor of this city. It’s just hard to think of them at the moment. Only in Seattle, with its normally mellow streets, can a magnitude-6.8 earthquake look like a blessing in disguise.

Consider this: A World Trade Organization meeting in December 1999 that sets 50,000 demonstrators against riot police and the National Guard; WTO-II in December 2000, when new street clashes erupt; cancellation in 1999 of millennium festivities at the Space Needle when a suspected Algerian terrorist is arrested with the makings of a bomb; then, last week, three nights of uncontrolled street brawls during Mardi Gras celebrations that ended with one death and 70 injuries.

Mayor Paul Schell was just convening a news conference Wednesday to explain the Mardi Gras fiasco when the ground started shaking.

By the end of the day, Schell had earned the unique mayoral distinction of conducting two disaster tours of the same neighborhood--for two completely different calamities.

The first time, much of the city was gunning for his job. By the end of the second, he looked like a hero, holding a frightened city together.

“I could not believe that five minutes before, this guy was headed into what ultimately was going to be a death knell press conference, and all of a sudden there’s this earthquake. The first thing I thought was, how did he get all those explosives down there without anybody finding out about it?” political consultant Cathy Allen marveled.

For Schell, it wasn’t politics, it wasn’t fate, it was two sides of his city that he knows only too well. “It was the best of us and the worst of us--one day after another,” he said in an interview Friday.

Schell is an unlikely candidate for a big city mayor, a rumple-haired former lawyer and land developer who comes from a family of Lutheran pastors in Iowa. Still, he has taken some of the credit for booming tax revenues and--despite the dot-com meltdown that has eroded Seattle’s fabled new economy--a civic building boom that has seen the construction of two new stadiums and plans for a new city hall, library, parks and school improvements.

But in the high-stakes game of musical chairs that is Seattle politics, Schell until this week had been left without a seat.

When the WTO protests in 1999 caught the city unaware, forcing Schell to impose a curfew and call out the National Guard the next day, a citizens investigative committee placed the blame squarely on the mayor. “Contrary to the mayor’s . . . protestations of ignorance about the number of demonstrators and the tactics they would use, we found ample documentation that they were fully apprised of what to expect and inexplicably chose to ignore the warnings,” the panel said.

Schell also took criticism for hedging his support of a $3.6-billion light rail project while Seattle became the third most congested city in the nation.

When terrorist suspect Ahmed Ressam was arrested northwest of Seattle with a trunkload of bomb-making equipment in December 1999, Seattleites watched cities all over the world holding epic New Year’s Eve parties while their own celebration--on Schell’s orders--was called off. Scorn, by and large, was the response. And Schell’s defense, carried in a large Seattle Times headline--”I am not a wuss”--still has not been forgotten.

Planned Celebration Turned Into a Riot

By last August, many had had enough. “Schell has been a huge disappointment,” the Times said in a lengthy editorial enumerating the mayor’s perceived shortcomings.

But it wasn’t over yet. Indeed, the worst didn’t come until this week, when the first of three nights of Mardi Gras parties in the city’s historic Pioneer Square night club district turned violent as partyers took to the streets.

After the first two nights of violence, many expected that Schell would cancel the big Fat Tuesday celebration. Instead, the mayor, confident that warnings were in place, police were deployed and matters were in hand, went home and went to bed.

But then matters got out of control. As 350 police officers stood on the sidelines, 4,000 revelers found themselves in what evolved into a lawless zone, the scene of a roving series of savage beatings that were as random as they were brutal.

People pounded each other, broke bottles over each others’ heads, smashed windows, overturned cars, tried to set fires and savagely kicked people on the ground. Fearing that sending uniformed officers into the crowd could trigger a deadly stampede, police tried to help those they could but watched helplessly as others were victimized.

When 20-year-old Kristopher Kime saw a young woman fall to the pavement and start to get trampled, he ran to try to help her up. Someone smashed him over the head with a bottle, breaking his skull, and as he fell to the ground, others kicked him repeatedly in the head. He died later that night.

“You see the videos of the police just standing there while people are being pummeled and kicked, and it makes you angry,” said Kime’s stepmother, Kimberly Kime Parks.

“I’ll tell you what irritates me. I know the mayor and the police chief say, ‘We take full responsibility.’ OK, I’m going to send you the hospital bill. Let’s see how responsible you want to be,” she said. “I know one thing. I’m going to sleep better at night knowing Kristopher was trying to help someone. I don’t think they’re going to sleep at night, ‘cause they’re going to know they should have done something better.”

That was what Schell was getting ready to explain when the earthquake hit.

To be sure, the mayor has come down hard on the Fat Tuesday affair, announcing Thursday there would be no celebrations next year.

But blaming the police department, he said, is like blaming the teacher who tries to pull the bullies out of a schoolyard fight.

“We’ve got to stop blaming the police all the time--that in itself is an enabling conduct,” he said.

“I really am concerned about the senseless violence that’s alarming: people coming down with no other intent, not even to drink, because many of them were underage,” Schell said. “What we had was an invitation to a street brawl.”

Before the Mardi Gras events, Schell had begun to rehabilitate himself with much of the downtown business establishment. He was beginning to bask in some of the glow of the city’s prosperity. And his supporters point out that Schell ought not to be blamed for the WTO getting out of hand when he had simply been trying to make room for citizens to engage in lawful protest.

On Valentine’s Day, confounding expectations, Schell confirmed he would seek a second term in November.

Timing of Earthquake Called Providential

Now, the mayor’s aides are hoping the images of Schell touring the Magnolia Bridge, which was damaged extensively, will outlast the images of rioting and tear gas.

“When this earthquake happened, I asked one of [the mayor’s] political operatives, why do you think this happened five minutes before his [Mardi Gras] press conference?” Allen recalled. “He attributed it to the fact that the gods owed him one.”

Schell, for all his Lutheran connections, is more practical.

“You’re second-guessed no matter what you do, and you don’t do it for praise, you do it for the joy of public service,” Schell said. “I’m not worried about it. I’ve got a future and I’ve got a past. I do it because I love this city.”