A Stranger Q&A with King County Executive candidate Ross Hunter

Erica C. Barnett: Tell me a little bit about what distinguishes you
from the other four county executive candidates.

Ross Hunter: The big difference between all the candidates and me is
that I have substantial private-sector management experience. I had a
career at Microsoft where I was a general manager, and I had, at
various times, 100, 200—and sometimes five—people working
for me. That’s a different management experience than other [jobs]. You
get a sense of working with multiple layers. The King County Executive
job… a lot of it is about vision and building consensus, but a lot of
it is about managing the nuts and bolts of the county so that you’re
spending money effectively. Without having the ability to execute, you
lose a lot. That’s a concern I’ve had for a while with the current
council and executive—the focus hasn’t been there. Is that enough
to make me stand out from three other guys and Susan Hutchison? I don’t
know.

Why do you think private-sector experience is desirable in a county
executive?

Let’s look at the job. What you want in the King County Executive is
someone who can recognize the complexity of the county and understand
all the different moving parts. It’s a very big county, bigger than 14
states. And that’s made even more complicated by the fact that there
are 39 cities within the county that each have their own council, their
own mayor, their own unique form of government. The cities all have
different needs… If we’re going to have a million people move [to
King County], when they arrive, we want to make sure that we still have
a place where we all want to live. We’re going to have to make some
hard decisions. Right now, the county and the cities don’t cooperate
very well. The cities think the county wants to rip them off, and the
county thinks the cities don’t pay their own way.

Can you give a few examples?

The county is not taking new misdemeanors from the cities. The
cities look at that and say, we need new jail capacity. The cities now
want to band together to form their own little legal entity that looks
like a county, walks like a county, and quacks like a county to build a
jail. Well, it has to be cheaper for us to have one group build the
jail and have some economy of scale. Until we trust each other…
everyone does risk management and looks out for themselves.

How would you deal with the county’s ongoing budget crisis?

What I learned last [legislative] session was pretty interesting. I
worked hard to try and explain to people what problems the counties
were facing and why they needed more revenue. There are two stories
about revenue for the county. One is that they have a structural
revenue problem. They get 60 percent of their revenue from property
tax, and that only grows 1 percent a year, and inflation is just bigger
than that. Over time, they have to keep doing less and less as a
county. And if the county is doing things that you think are really
important to quality of life, like public health or putting miscreants
in jail, then that’s bad news.

And yet your legislation to give King County new revenue sources,
like a utility tax in the unincorporated areas, didn’t go anywhere.

Well, the other side is that people think King County has a spending
problem. I sat in a meeting with [House Speaker] Frank Chopp and one of
the [King County] council members, and we were trying to give them more
revenue sources, particularly the utility tax. And the Speaker
excoriated the council on their spending, particularly on their labor
costs. There’s no way we can be giving salary increases [in the
legislature] this year, but the county is choosing to do exactly
that… I was taken aback by that. It’s not something I’ve seen Frank
do that much.

So do you think King County has a spending problem, or is that just
the perception?

It’s bad PR. Perception is reality in politics. Until King County
changes the perception that they have a spending problem, they’re going
to have a revenue problem—so the two are linked. This one meeting
made me see that problem.

How do you go about solving the revenue side of the problem?

About a third of the county’s budget problem comes from areas inside
the county in the urban-growth boundary that are not in cities but that
ought to be. The cities are really best situated to deliver local
services. It’s a lot more convenient for a cop car to respond to Finn
Hill from Kirkland than from North Bend. [Senate Bill] 5321 extends a
tax credit to the cities to try to get them to annex these areas… We
shouldn’t allow a city to just annex a car dealer and not the
surrounding residential areas. We should force them to take the
residential area. That’s a strategic problem for next year. But we did
solve a couple of problems that block these annexations.

Such as?

There are five nontribal card rooms that are in annexation areas.
The state requires cities to either allow or not allow card rooms, but
you have to either allow zero or allow as many as show up. If Kirkland
ever decides to annex [Kingsgate, an adjacent unincorporated area],
that card room is really not interested in being put out of business.
What we did—and I’m not a big gambling fan—was we said, if
you annex an area that has a card room in it, it’s allowed to continue
to exist. There are five that may get to stay around if a city annexes
them. The one in Kingsgate generates a million dollars a year in tax
revenue. That reduces King County’s problem… If we can do structural
problem-solving like that, then we can move forward, then the King
County Council may be able to make a case, both to the legislature and
to the people, that there are services that should be preserved.

What’s it like running against Fred Jarrett, whom you’re friends
with and with whom you share so many political views?

Fred is my best friend in the legislature, so it’s really hard. I
like Fred a lot. There’s probably 90 percent overlap in terms of what
we believe in. I’m probably a little more impatient than he is. I think
in one article he said he’s more of a consensus builder. That’s
probably true. In many things, patience is a virtue. I think we have a
surfeit of that here, and impatience is a virtue in terms of trying to
pull these policy choices together. I’m a Quaker. Quaker meetings make
decisions by consensus, so almost everybody in the room has to agree.
Sometimes you just have to decide. You can’t get everybody to
agree.

We’re going to have some stylistic differences between us. I don’t
have a lot negative to say about the guy. I love working with him. I’ve
learned a lot from him. He’s a very good friend. Maybe one of us will
catch fire and one of us won’t.

What else distinguishes you from the other candidates in the
race—King County Council members Larry Phillips and Dow
Constantine, and former KIRO anchor Susan Hutchison?

What distinguishes me from Susan is I’m not a Republican. As far as
Larry and Dow… If you think the county is doing the right thing
today, if you’re happy with the council and how they spend their money,
[Constantine and Phillips are] likely to do the same thing. Together,
they’ve been on the council for over a quarter century. If they were
going to make a change, I think they would have done it by now… Other
people certainly feel that many of the county’s policies have been very
Seattle-centric. I’m going to be an executive for the whole county. How
do you deal with transportation when you have a bunch of people in Kent
who need to get to work in Redmond? The growth is outside Seattle… in
places like Renton, Kent, and Auburn, where we’re getting more
cosmopolitan areas and we need to rearrange our development
patterns.

What’s your opinion of 40-40-20 (the controversial formula that
gives 80 percent of new bus service to the suburbs and just 20 percent
to Seattle)?

Well, 40-40-20 is the compromise the council has come up with. When
you look at the distribution of the current service, it’s pretty
heavily weighted toward Seattle… I think you might be able to come up
with a smarter way of doing fairness rather than just saying this area,
that area, and the other area each get a certain level of service.
Maybe that means talking about what corridors are important to
people… Whatever you do won’t make people happy who live out in rural
King County who say, “I’m paying all this sales tax and I’m not getting
any service.” And it won’t make people happy who live in dense Seattle
who think they’re not getting enough service. In the [Seattle
Municipal] League review, they complained about the fact that it’s
expensive to provide service to the Eastside because the density isn’t
there. But… Link light rail will change the development pattern on
the Eastside, so you’ll get some of the density you have in Seattle
today. You’re going to have to run some transit for a while before that
happens.