Phil Tavel, a lawyer and frequent right-wing radio guest who has lost every political contest he’s ever entered, is running against incumbent Seattle City Council Member Lisa Herbold as the business guy. “We need someone who’s been around and done a lot of things in the real world, especially owning a business,” Tavel said at a debate last Thursday, as if Herbold’s background as a legislative aide to former Council Member Nick Licata didn’t count as relevant experience.
Tavel holds this belief because he thinks owning a business translates to smart governance, a thesis our president challenges at least once every half hour. But even if he didn’t, even if we take Tavel’s argument on its own terms, Tavel’s business acumen doesn’t appear to be spotless.
During that debate last week, Herbold criticized Tavel for starting 12 businesses the state ended up dissolving for not filing an annual report to the Secretary of State. As the Seattle Times reported last week, Tavel at first denied those facts but then, after looking over the list she provided, said he had set up the businesses with a partner who basically ran the show.
In an email to supporters, as the Times notes, Herbold slammed Tavel for failing to pay state and federal taxes on one of those businesses, Business IQ LLC, which provided bookkeeping services. Business IQ also bounced a rent check for $3,100.
The next day Tavel swung back. The accountant for Business IQ went on record with WestSide Seattle to back up Tavel’s claims, saying the unpaid state and federal tax bills, which covered financial periods between 2010 and 2011, “occurred prior to Tavel’s involvement with this business.” However, records show that Tavel registered the company in 2009. He was there from the beginning.
In an email, Tavel says he was “never involved in any of the day to day operations” with the company.
Fair enough. Okay, so, why start that business—and all the others, for that matter—if he wasn’t going to be involved? “The idea was that if my friend got the other companies going that I would leave public defense and join him. That didn’t happen,” Tavel said.
It’s genuinely nice that Tavel used his law degree to help a parter register businesses with the state. But the dissolutions of those businesses shows that Tavel failed to oversee business conducted in his name, business he says he was interested in pursuing if some other guy did a good job starting it up. This disposition contrasts with the argument Tavel constantly makes about having the skills to bring sharper oversight of homeless service providers. If he didn’t keep tabs on a guy who was skipping tax bills (one of which he ultimately paid), I have little confidence he’ll be able to bring more scrutiny to these providers than Herbold or the other current council members, who, by the way, constantly demand that city officials and nonprofits provide data to support their claims.
Tavel’s response to questions about his unpaid traffic tickets also stand in contrast to his “tough love” approach to criminal justice. “My feeling is, you break the law, you get arrested for committing a crime, you are then charged with a crime you’ve committed. Because if you don’t arrest and you don’t charge, you’re sending a message that all of these things are just no longer crimes,” he told independent journalist Erica C. Barnett in a recent interview. And in that same conversation he walked back his initially enthusiastic support for Saul Spady’s “farm jail” idea, which is the notion that the city should ship off homeless people who commit lots of crimes to a work farm they couldn’t leave for months.
Court records dug up by consultant Heather Weiner show police ticketing Tavel for driving with expired tags four times between 2014 and 2017. In an email Tavel says he “forgot” to renew his tabs between 2015 and 2017 while he was caring for his wife, who “came down with an auto-immune disorder and ended up in intensive care.” He also let three unpaid tickets fall into collections during that time, he says, because “the priority was my wife’s medical bills.” He paid off the tickets last Friday.
That’s reason enough for me to excuse Tavel for not renewing his tabs on time—even the one he forgot to renew before he says his wife fell ill—and for not demonstrating fiscal responsibility when paying his tickets. But if I held Tavel’s views on “prolific offenders,” I couldn’t extend the same sympathy.
