The Education of Mayor McGinn

Hizzoner slides through the crowd, baseball cap in hand. There is no great to-do about his presence; Mike McGinns style doesnt demand it. Hes no glad-hander and the occasion is solemna Wedgwood neighborhood memorial walk for the family struck down on a March afternoon by a drunken driver.

Clad in brown cords and tucked-in blue shirt, a little of McGinns celebrated vanishing paunch has reappeared, but his pant legs are at proper length and Joni Balters clucking comparison in The Seattle Times to his appearance resembling an unmade bed less applies. The prickly activist who took office in 2009 looks healthy, put together and self assured in his role as mayor of Seattle.

Not surprisingly, he is still not as comfortable downtown these days as he is in the neighborhoodsand the discomfort is mutual. The relationship between McGinn and Seattle business has been like an on-and-off love affair in a romantic comedy.

Downtown, at first sight, never guessed itd take to the mayor with the anti-downtown campaign rhetoric designed to appeal to a bike-pedaling, urban environmentalist cohort, a constituency he cobbled together with a few service unions and the Sierra Club. He was elected, he brags, without Seattles usual institutional endorsers of big unions, business and people with significant names.

But since 2011, when the late politico Blair Butterworth pronounced McGinn a dead man walking, the mayor, in a tough reelection battle, is showing the business community a little leg. After some public eye batting and coffee dates, McGinn and city business leaders have been spotted holding hands. Some say theyve been seen getting out of the same bed. In any event, the eye rolling has abated somewhat when Hizzoners name comes up. Downtown and McGinn may never be BFFs, but theyre frenemies at least.

At first glance, McGinn has bragging rights. Seattles job growth is the fourth highest in the country, the crime rate is the lowest in 30 years and downtown occupancy rates are climbing. Seattle might or might not have a new NBA team. At the very least, the conversation about Seattles return to the NBA started on his watch. McGinn also can take credit for jumping ahead of his opponents to put fireworks back in the Fourth of July skies after facing their annual cancellation.

His was a rough start. Polling with only 51 percent plurality against another previously unknown candidate in Joe Mallahan, McGinns 2009 election was no mandate. He got the gritty of that after betting what little political capital he had by vociferously electioneering against the downtown waterfront tunnel as a replacement for the crumbling Alaskan Way Viaduct. The process getting to the City Councils tunnel decision had taken years and was broadly viewed as a done deal. Most were happy a decision had finally been made.

McGinns cantankerous jamming of a no-tunnel, back-to-the-drawing board referendum onto the ballot in 2011 bucked not only the City Council, downtown interests and the unions, but also the state, which owns the road. Combative by nature, McGinn publicly bad-mouthed former Governor Chris Gregoire (I dont believe we can trust the governor), the City Council, and the political establishments of both business and labor. He decried the tunnel plan as a backroom deal created by a cabal of state and local pols, contractors and labor. Weary voters slapped him down decisively. It was a political blow he now calls a policy difference of opinion, but seen as crippling to his effectiveness and a political death knell.

McGinn pulled back, licking his self-inflicted wounds. Local pundits, particularly those in The Seattle Times, smugly started sizing up his competition in a reelection campaign.

City administration has seemed chaotic from the outside; reporters heard from the inside that the mayor stubbornly eschews valuable advice that he himself solicits. He promised voters hed fire 200 of predecessor Greg Nickels senior advisersthe experienced hands of city government. He didnt because he couldnt. An early lesson was that he needs experienced technocrats to make the city go. Some of them will say (after a second glass of wine) that to the extent the city has ridden out the storm, it was despite the mayor.

Regionally, hes known as not playing well with others. County staffers privately say that McGinn limits collaboration or even cooperation if he must share the credit of their mutual efforts. His attempt to monkey wrench a hard-fought deal on a new Highway 520 bridge ticked off contractors, labor and Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer.

Downtown business folks say the grudge-bearing McGinns loss of the tunnel vote transmogrified into what could be called an appalling lack of leadership, at best, in the new waterfront development, or calculated foot-dragging at worst.

McGinn further crossed commercial interests by championing a paid employee medical leave plan, ignoring the concerns expressed plaintively by the small businesses he professes to champion. The plan is nearly prohibitively expensive for low-margin retailers like restaurants. He also vetoed an aggressive panhandling ordinance favored by downtown retailers that was spearheaded by City Council member Tim Burgess. Things didnt look good for a long-term relationship.

The joke in 2010 was that Mayor McSchwinns main accomplishments were potholesnot that they were less numerous but rather that hed striped them for bike lanes. The ubiquitous new bike lanes starved parking from some commercial blocks and were termed social engineering by the business owners affected. And many city residents say the decisions on where the bike lanes should go were made without consulting the very partners he now cant shut up about.

In March, the City Council announced formation of an Economic Development Commission composed of an impressive list of corporate CEOs, educators and non-elected public figures to advise on the development of plans, policies, regulations and strategies that have substantial impact on creating and maintaining an innovative economy that is resilient, sustainable and equitable.

Stepping in front of Council President Sally Clark, McGinn claimed the goals of the new commission were fruits finally borne of his 2010 Seattle Jobs Plan. At the outset, his jobs proposal had not been greeted with much enthusiasm by business, pundits or the community at large. Many of his 2010 proposals were already underway, including beautification of vacant lots, replacing fire stations, support of urban farming, and the leveraging of a $26 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to retrofit and weatherize homes and businesses for energy efficiency.

Trust in McGinn by the business sector was not enhanced by his grandstanding on popular issues like expanding the presence of food trucks. Downtown and neighborhood business grumbled about carnival-like atmospheres in the streets. Highly regulated, rent-paying restaurants considered the trucks unfair competition. But the food trucks are popular and the mayor stepped to the fore after the council made the tough decisions. Small-business folk groused about demagoguery. Nothing new in the inevitable tension between Seattles public and private sectors.

Though heartened by police handling of the May Day Happy Hour riots, security has been a concern for the Downtown Seattle Association, particularly in Belltown, along Third Avenue and in Pioneer Square. The city has not responded with the police presence that merchants still seek. Although crime is at a 30-year low, the numbers are probably more about demographics than innovative policing ideas from the mayors office. The U.S. Justice Departments investigation and subsequent monitoring of the SPD, and the police chiefs sudden April retirement, have signaled to nervous residents that the police department is rudderless and drifting. McGinns untoward media fisticuffs with City Attorney Pete Holmes last springanother example of crass public nastinessdidnt inspire their confidence.

His work on a few issues has caught the eyes of the business community. Though the work was done by San Francisco hedge-fund manager Chris Hansen, McGinn went to the political mat for the new $490 million stadium in SoDo, fighting and defeating arguments by the Port of Seattle and the waterfront unions with their old economy industrial interests. The idea is in limbo at this writing, the Seattle backroom dealers having apparently come up short in the eyes of the NBA.

McGinn speaks of playing to Seattles innovative and creative strengths and says the so-called old economies have to be especially creative in order to compete. His Seattle Jobs Plan puts forth his progressive, green notions by discouraging fossil fuel dependency, building transit, fiber-optic broadband, and infrastructure for walking and bikes.

His full-throated support for Vulcan Real Estates proposal to allow 24-story towers on three blocks in South Lake Union made the business community warm up noticeably to his nuzzling, and gives his incessant talk of partnerships another think. The proposal and McGinn were rebuffed by the council, but 16-story limits will probably fly.

Hell admit luck is a factor. Taking office at the nadir of a deep recession and being there for the inevitable recovery gives McGinn a default victory. FDR, Reagan and Clinton had that great fortune that cemented their reelections and legacies. Arguments that recoveries probably would have happened no matter who was in office never make much political hay. More providence: Seattle was less hard hit than most cities in the recession and McGinns snow days were gentler than the ones that did in Greg Nickels.

The mayors makeover has been internal as well as external. Hes come a long way turning to politician/insider from activist/outsider. His newly honed political skills blur the one-time certainty of his one-termitude. If the city ever gets the Sonics back to play in a new SoDo arena, Politician McGinn will take due credit, even if the backroom deals he made would have made Activist McGinn howl.

His accomplishments (or at least those he can claim credit for) have grown to quite a list. The mayor partnered with the Chamber of Commerce to double the size of the Families and Education Levy, and they got it passed. He spread $1.6 million around 17 neighborhood business districts, and backed a project to offer ultra-high-speed broadband connections in the city beginning with 12 Seattle neighborhoods. Hes launched an initiative to promote startups that has been embraced by many business leaders in the community. All of these green shoots can be spun as lovingly nurtured by Mayor McGinns increasingly steady hand. His combative, grudging and dubious management are papered over in this, his own vision of his rocky term.

And spinning he is. Hardly a day goes by without a happy news presser by the mayor. Sometimes he still remains awkwardly out of step with his own city administration. He announced, for example, that guns from the citys buyback program would be melted down to create peace bricks, only later to admit that the police department had already transformed the guns into rebar.

McGinn is a better mayor today than when he started his term. But has he done enough to deserve another term? His relationship with the business community remains tenuous; neither is anxious to be seen with the other. They might have to settle for being friends with benefits.