Chamber of Amnesia

Chamber of commerce bigwig George Griffin would have been surprised by what happened after he left the room.

Griffin spoke at a May 1 meeting of the city's Citizen Advisory Panel on Council Elections--a 17-member panel appointed by the city council to discuss the pros and cons of different election models, namely district elections vs. at-large elections. It's an issue the council has to watch because it may have to take a position on districts later this year, if the Districts Now campaign ever gets its act together and puts a districting initiative on the table. (Currently, Seattle elects nine at-large council members instead of neighborhood representatives.)

Griffin, chair of the Alki Foundation, the lobbying wing of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, was called in to give the business community's opinion on districting. Thumbs down!

Griffin cited work his ad-hoc chamber of commerce task force had done--looking at case studies like San Francisco, looking at the history of the council's makeup, and mining the research of University of Washington professor David Olson, an expert on the topic.

Griffin's central point was that districts would create destructive bickering during these hard economic times. "Let's not get into fighting against one another for resources," Griffin said. (Um, did Griffin follow last year's bickering budget process, starring the nine little mayors fighting over individual demands without any legitimate constituencies to back them up?)

After fielding a few questions (what did Griffin think of the fact that over the last 30 years, incumbents won a whopping 91 percent of the time?), Griffin left.

That's when things got interesting. UW professor David Olson--the guy Griffin kept citing as an "excellent, excellent resource on the issue"--gave his own presentation. To everyone's surprise, Olson argued for districts. The panel, confused at Olson's divergent take from Griffin's (again, anti-districts guy Griffin had just finished citing Olson), incredulously asked Olson if he had made a similar presentation to Griffin's chamber task force. Olson said he had--and that "it went over like a lead balloon."

Clearly, Griffin and his chamber colleagues, despite being awed by Olson's expertise, caught amnesia when it came to Olson's actual opinion on districts. Here's what Olson told the citizen panel: At-large city councils typically sacrifice neighborhood concerns for an agenda set by downtown business. (No wonder Griffin doesn't want neighborhood reps making claims on city resources!) To prevent an outbreak of crippling parochialism, though, Olson made the following recommendation: five district representatives and four at-large seats.

It's a compromise that could start to infuse the council with much-needed district representation. Let's hope the citizen panel doesn't catch a case of chamber amnesia when it reports back to the city council with its findings on July 7.

josh@thestranger.com