Speaking For Business

Washington businesses hoping to set the agenda in Olympia are trying to speak with a unified voice—with mixed results.

By Bill Virgin | May 2010 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Credit: Photographs by Hayley Young

The many voices of business (back row, left to right): Dann
Mead Smith, president, Washington Policy Center; Don Brunell, president,
Association of Washington Business; Tom McCabe, executive vice president,
Building Industry Association of Washington; Steve Leahy, former president,
Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce; (seated) Pat Connor, Washington director,
National Federation of Independent Business.

Jacobsen’s Law—coined by and named for the longtime
Democratic state senator Ken Jacobsen, from Seattle—puts forth a theory about
legislative life in Olympia: “If your bill is in trouble for no discernible
reason, big timber is against it. If your bill dies for no discernible reason,
Boeing is against it.”

But Jacobsen’s Law reflects a bygone era when the business
community was largely big forest-products concerns, the aerospace giant and
everybody else, and when the acronym for the Association of Washington
Business, the equivalent of a state chamber of commerce, was translated by some
as “Alcoa, Weyerhaeuser and Boeing.”

Today, as Jacobsen acknowledges, big timber is a shadow of
its former self. And while Boeing still matters a great deal to Washington,
it’s not clear how much Washington will matter to Boeing in the long run.

“Business has never been a monolith,” says Steve Leahy, who
worked for the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce for more than 30 years, most
recently as its president. “It’s certainly less so today then ever before.”

Today, the business community is really a gaggle of
communities, a cacophony of voices and an alphabet soup of organizational
acronyms—AWB and BIAW and NFIB and WTIA—the industry-specific trade
organizations, the regional and local chambers, the business-oriented policy
groups and think tanks, all clamoring to be heard by legislators, agency
directors, regulators and elected officials.

“It’s more fragmented than it ever has been before,” Leahy
says.

And it’s about to get more so. A group of business leaders
and investors, seeking representation of what they call a more politically
moderate viewpoint, is organizing the Washington Business Alliance.

David Giuliani is one of the co-founders of the Washington
Business Alliance, which wants to take a more centrist approach in its dealings
with the state legislature.

One of the business leaders involved in that effort is David
Giuliani, the co-founder of Optiva Corp. (inventor of the Sonicare toothbrush),
and more recently, the founder of a company marketing a skin-care brush, the
Clarisonic.

“There are existing business organizations, but a lot of
them are politically polarized or have narrow interests or [are] limited in
scope,” Giuliani says. “Business guys tend to be politically moderate. We tend
to see