Two members of The Stranger‘s intrepid news team had drinks
with city council candidate Bruce Harrell last week (the only topics
being discussed around council chambers during their long recess have
been protecting industrial lands and legalizing goats, and
frankly, that could drive anyone to drink), and during a two-hour-long,
far-ranging discussion, one story came up that I thought shouldn’t be
confined to the black box of an off-the-record discussion.
So I called Harrell, who gamely recapped the story. In short: A few
years back (in 2000), Harrell, who’s running against Venus
Velázquez for the seat being vacated by Peter Steinbrueck later
this year, represented an Eritrean immigrant named Selam Teklemariam in
a discrimination lawsuit against the city. Teklemariam sued the
city after she was twice passed over for higher-paying positions in
favor of Filipino-American candidates. (At the time, 61 percent of the
employees in the city’s accounting unit were of Asian or Filipino
origin, while only one was an African American.) The city settled the
suit after Harrell alleged that the city employee doing the hiring, a
Filipino American, had directed another city employee (also Filipino)
to alter the winning candidate’s results on an employment test.
The winning candidate’s résumé had apparently also been
altered, to imply that she had a CPA when she applied for the job,
months before she actually got her CPA. “It was clear that my
client was equally, if not better, qualified than the selected person,”
Harrell says.
Harrell’s case is interesting on its own; what’s even more
intriguing is what happened after the city settled. A few weeks
before the case was scheduled for trial, the internal investigator who
uncovered the altered test results and résumé was fired.
The city said it was because it had discovered he had a criminal
conviction; Harrell said it was because he was a whistleblower. The
city was represented in that case by outside counsel. The firm that
represented them? Savitt & Bruce LLP, the firm co-owned by
Velázquez’s husband, James Savitt. Savitt’s firm has
repeatedly served as private counsel on behalf of the city of
Seattle—a fact Harrell has implied may constitute a conflict
of interest. Velázquez calls that charge “an underhanded, sleazy
slap,” adding that “if I’m elected and there’s a conflict of interest,
we are law-abiding citizens and we will obey the law.” Interestingly,
Savitt’s office is just three floors down from Harrell, in the Puget
Sound Plaza building downtown. Harrell and Velázquez live right
down the street from one another, and their neighborhood, which is
plastered with dozens of signs for both candidates, shows
it.
Speaking of signs: It’s not unusual for campaign signs to go
missing during a hotly contested election, but it’s pretty unusual for
a candidate to get the police involved. But that’s exactly what
Harrell did, when he noticed that approximately 250 of his campaign
signs had been stolen. According to the police report, “The witness,” a
man whom Harrell later tracked down, “saw them take about 16 signs
before he quit following them.” Since June, Harrell has spent $7,000 on
$3 corrugated plastic signs. 