A City of Consensus, Seattle Votes With Discontent

First there were the World Trade Organization protests. Then the ditching of the city’s millennium celebration under terrorist threat. Then the Mardi Gras riots, an earthquake, a drought, a controversial police shooting.

That took this city up through Tuesday, when Boeing Co. announced it was laying off as many as 30,000 aerospace workers--most of them in the Puget Sound area. It was election day, and Seattle voters gave Mayor Paul Schell the boot.

Schell, whose run of civic bad luck probably rivals that of any big city mayor, made his own sort of history in Seattle, becoming the first incumbent mayor to lose a primary election in this tolerant town since 1956.

It didn’t help that one of his chief rivals, City Atty. Mark Sidran, has been compared to New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and that Sidran was only too happy in recent days to adopt the popular image of a tough politician guiding a battered city.

“Even a nice town wants hard leadership during hard times,” said political consultant Cathy Allen. “When you take a look at the disaster this last week in a town that’s built on Boeing, the truth is, right now, even the softest of hearts is looking for a backbone.”

The fact that the planes that plunged into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 were manufactured at Boeing plants in Seattle’s suburbs has made the disaster something more personal here. “They were our planes . . . ,” said a headline in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The World Trade Center, it turns out, was designed by Seattle architects.

None of which has anything to do with the outcome of Tuesday’s mayoral primary. Except to explain the sense of heightened vulnerability in a city that is now about to lose up to one-third of its Boeing job base on top of the dot-com crash that has seen more than 13,000 Seattle-area jobs evaporate since the beginning of the year.

The Boeing announcement didn’t come until late in the day Tuesday, and by that time Schell’s fate probably already was sealed: a mere 21.75% of the vote. Sidran, with 32.53%, will face a Nov. 6 runoff with King County Council Member Greg Nickels, the top vote-getter at 34.2%. (Former Council Member Charlie Chong took 7.18%.)

Many absentee ballots remain to be counted, but Schell conceded Wednesday. “I’ve been so honored to serve this great city as mayor. Pam and I gave everything we had,” said Schell, referring to his wife. “We have no regrets, only positive memories of the people we met and what we’ve been able to accomplish together. . . . I wouldn’t trade the past four years for anything.”

Schell, 63, has been described as a Renaissance man, a former Wall Street lawyer, dean of architecture at the University of Washington, a hotel and retail developer, port commissioner and director of community development. His style was that of a visionary, championing a rebirth of the city’s cultural institutions and--somewhat naively, as it turned out--calling for a broad and open dialogue with protesters during the 1999 WTO talks, a policy that left the door open to massive street protests and an equally massive police crackdown.

When the Mardi Gras riots broke out in February, Schell had so much faith in the good behavior of his city and its police that he went home and went to bed. That night, one man was killed and 70 others were injured.

His was a perfect political style for a small-scale city that had grown up on polite debate, endless discussion and consensus. But the recent economic downturn, coupled with huge population growth and traffic congestion, has left many Seattlites unhappy with the politics of politeness.

“The city long admired as a place that can do no wrong suddenly can’t get things right,” the Seattle Times said when it endorsed Sidran, who it said “can be a strong mayor when the city needs one.” The P-I followed suit, saying Sidran “injects a bracing breath of fresh air into this city’s relentlessly politically correct dialogue.”

All three of the top candidates were Democrats; it would be hard to elect anything else in Seattle.

But Sidran brings a tough streak to the ticket. In 12 years as city attorney, he has championed “civility” laws that crack down on aggressive panhandlers, street drunks and unlicensed drivers--a policy that has attracted widespread criticism from the civil rights community and among advocates for the homeless. He has ridiculed the city establishment’s commitment to an expensive, loosely conceived light-rail project that is $1 billion over budget and without firm consensus on a route.

Supporters call Sidran a “big city mayor.” And in a town that alternately wants to think of itself as a big city and also quakes at the thought, Sidran has been called “Seattle’s Rudy Giuliani”--a moniker he has encouraged. It is one that played well this last week as the New York mayor visibly presided over a national tragedy that Seattle has felt with particular acuity.

Nickels has the endorsement of the traditional liberal hierarchy in Seattle--the local Democratic Party, former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice, much of the labor and environmental community--and he brings a more traditional, consensus-oriented political approach to the table.

He seemed to be taking a jab at Sidran’s confrontational style Tuesday night as he prepared for the runoff. “We need leadership that would unite us and get things done. We don’t need four years of quips and controversies,” he said.