So much for that theory. Della, a former United Way staffer and aide to ex-mayor Norm Rice who earned his political stripes organizing fellow cannery workers in Alaska nearly 30 years ago, caught a wave of voter frustration and rode it all the way to city hall. By blaming Wills for City Light rate increases, attacking her for her role in the controversial Rick's strip club rezone, and associating her with "frivolous" council actions like the proposed 2000 circus-animal ban, Della capitalized on his opponent's shortcomings and proved beyond a doubt that negative tactics do work in Seattle. "[Della's] campaign [strategy], from the beginning, was to get elected by any means necessary," says Wills' campaign consultant, John Wyble. "I have never seen a candidate more determined to get on the city council, and he was willing to cross some lines that I wouldn't cross to get there."
Michael Grossman, Della's political consultant and the principal architect of his cutthroat campaign, was unavailable for comment. During the campaign, however, Grossman told The Stranger that Della's campaign tactics were "very truthful and balanced," and characterized negative campaigns as a necessary evil. "Contrasts are what elections are all about," he said. Grossman should know: In local and legislative races up and down the West Coast, the Seattle consultant has made a name for himself by using hardball campaign strategies. Grossman's ads for former city attorney and mayoral candidate Mark Sidran, which ridiculed Sidran's opponents for their involvement in the Sound Transit debacle, are largely credited with pushing the controversial long-shot candidate through the primary. (Sidran almost won the race in November 2001, finally conceding after a nail-biting absentee ballot count pushed Greg Nickels over the top by just 2,700 votes.) Local consultant Christian Sinderman says that with Grossman's help, Della "proved the naysayers wrong. He's living proof of the power of negative campaigning."
Della discovered long ago that playing nice doesn't win elections. In 1996, he jumped into a 10-way free-for-all for an open city council seat; he came in fifth in the crowded race, which was ultimately won by Charlie Chong. Looking back on his experience as an also-ran, Della recounts two lessons: "One, never run in a crowded race like that; and two, don't run in a race that's only six weeks long and think you can get your message out in any effective way."
Della certainly found a way to be effective this time. "When the papers were calling this an unprofessional council, David took it one step further and said, 'These people suck and they're the reason your life is hell,'" Wyble says with some bitterness. Against the odds, it worked. Now, Della will have to go through an even tougher transformation: from trash-talking campaign firebrand to a consensus-builder on the council. Given Della's early missteps--refusing to chair the City Light committee despite campaigning on a City Light reform agenda, and backpedaling on some key campaign demands--it remains to be seen whether Della's tough words on the campaign trail were spoken out of principle, or political expedience.
Della, who was raised, along with eight siblings, in South Seattle, is no stranger to conflict. Like many Filipino Americans of his generation, Della spent several summers sliming fish in the Alaskan canneries to help pay for college and support his family. As a young organizer in the 1970s, Della fought what he calls "blatant discrimination" against poorly paid Asian workers like himself in the segregated Alaskan canneries. A lawsuit to which Della was a party, Atonio v. Wards Cove Packing Co. , went to the U.S. Supreme Court and led in part to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991. It is widely considered a landmark in affirmative-action law. Della went on to serve as head of the Washington Commission on Asian Pacific American Affairs, and chaired the Seattle Human Rights Commission from 1985 to 1989.
As an organizer, Della also fought to rid the cannery workers' union of loyalists to Ferdinand Marcos' regime, which was then leading a crackdown on the labor movement in the Philip-pines. In 1981, two union members, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, were gunned down for their anti-Marcos reform efforts by gangsters working on orders from the regime; Della, who was late for the meeting at which the two activists were shot, has called the event a "turning point" in his life.
Mike Withey, the attorney who won a $15 million judgment from the Marcos regime on behalf of the murdered workers' families, recalls that a couple of days after the shootings, the union held a meeting to decide who would take over Domingo's and Viernes' positions as dispatchers. The job was central to the reform movement, because dispatchers controlled job flow within the cannery. The dis- patcher position had obviously been targeted by the Marcos regime. "The first person to raise his hand was David Della," Withey says. "I'll never forget that meeting." Withey, who co-chaired Della's campaign, predicts Della's labor activism will make him a vocal advocate for low-income people. "If he could stand up to the [big fishing companies], he can stand up for people on fixed incomes," Withey says.
It's Della's progressive credentials that lead at least one of his new colleagues, lefty veteran Nick Licata, to believe he'll be "a consistent voice for folks who've been disenfranchised."
But despite his solid labor background, Della is no rubberstamp for the left's agenda. For one thing, he, much in contrast to Wills, has little patience for environmental causes. Della has criticized Wills for backing green initiatives at city expense, and has vowed to renegotiate costly long-term renewable energy contracts that Wills helped put in place.
His beliefs earned Della a cool reception at a candidate forum sponsored last year by the Transportation Choices Coalition, where he faced off against Wills on issues ranging from I-90 expansion to tolls on the viaduct. To say that Della's roads-friendly rap fell flat with the pro-transit crowd would be an understatement. At one point, Della launched into a tirade against the extension of the Burke-Gilman Trail through industrial Ballard, a statement that went over like a five-ton SUV among the stunned, bike-helmeted crowd. (Della, taking a page from the manufacturing lobby, said he opposed the route because it could increase businesses' insurance liability. Wills was one of the primary backers of the trail extension.)
It didn't help that Della warmed up his audience by proposing that the city spend a quarter of its transportation dollars on roads, a suggestion Wills defused by stating sunnily that she would not support a single new road inside city limits. In fact, many city hall insiders have long regarded Wills as the city council's staunchest environmental advocate; city council member Jim Compton says Wills was "consistent on her environmental values. Nobody can fault her for her dedication to the environment."
Besides being cool to environmental interests, Della fails another liberal litmus test: Despite his labor background, he's staunchly pro-business, a position that earned him accolades among industrial and manufacturing interests, a group that has long felt disenfranchised at city hall. "My general impression is that he's someone we can work with," says Dave Gering, executive director of Seattle's Manufacturing and Industrial Council. "In our world, if we can find somebody who's willing to listen, that's a real plus."
By all indications, Gering has found his man. Like former city council member Margaret Pageler, whom Gering also found "receptive," Della supports city assistance for both manufacturing and biotech development and has called for streamlining the permitting process and simplifying land-use regulations. "Everyone I've talked to, from small businesses in neighborhoods to manufacturing firms in Salmon Bay and the Duwamish, says the city is a barrier," Della says. Asked how he would remove roadblocks to business, Della says the city should "facilitate businesses of all sizes and persuasions to develop and grow in Seattle by helping them get started and providing technical assistance."
That's encouraging news to Gering, who sees in Wills' defeat the welcome political demise of a council member who "was just not interested" in working with industry. "The [Burke-Gilman] bike path, as small as it is in the eyes of the rest of the world, was a litmus test for us," Gering says. "Heidi was simply not interested in hearing our concerns. My impression was that David would have been more open, had he been in her shoes."
While Della has staked out very clear positions on both business and labor issues, he remains almost purposefully vague on other questions, forcing people to draw their own conclusions about his political inclinations. Asked to describe a single piece of legislation he plans to propose during his first year in office, Della explains ramblingly that he and his staff "haven't fleshed [any proposals] out yet. We're going to sit down over the next few weeks and try to flesh out what that looks like. I know there's a lot of issues in front of the council that we're trying to deal with, but in terms of my agenda we're still trying to flesh that out."
One point Della did flesh out on the campaign trail was the need to restore fiscal integrity and accountability to City Light, which Wills oversaw as energy committee chair; as part of his campaign platform, Della devised an ever-expanding plan (nine points, at last count) to turn around the troubled utility. So when Della told council president Jan Drago (first reported in The Stranger December 18) that he would not chair the energy committee--perhaps the best opportunity he would have to affect his campaign's biggest single issue--it took many observers by surprise.
"Given that he had an opportunity to chair [the committee], I assumed he was going to," Licata says. But, he adds, "We shouldn't jump to conclusions. We just had three incumbents defeated," including one, Wills, whose leadership of the energy committee was a centerpiece of Della's negative campaign. "Can you blame him for not wanting to put himself in the spotlight?" Wills' consultant, John Wyble, agrees. "It's not a win to be on that committee," Wyble says. "But it also says that he knows as well as we do that Heidi didn't steer that ship."
Politically savvy though Della may be, it seems a little disingenuous for the new council member to turn down the chairmanship after basing his entire campaign on the premise that his opponent was "asleep at the wheel as chair of the energy committee." (Newcomer Jean Godden has tentatively accepted the politically risky assignment. Della will still likely serve as a member of the committee.) Perhaps bringing "fiscal sanity" back to City Light, as Della promised on the campaign trail, doesn't require him to take the reins of the committee that oversees the utility. Then again, in a Stranger endorsement interview last summer, Della spoke animatedly about what he would do "if I'm made chair" of the committee, and laid the details of his nine-point plan to address City Light's financial problems.
Is he risk-averse? Della bristles at the very suggestion. "Anybody who's ever known me knows I've never chickened out of anything," he says. "But I'm not going to go in there gangbusters, because one person on the council can't do everything. People will see when I get [on the energy committee] that I'm going to go in there and do the things that need to be done with City Light." Compton, who says he's "not surprised" Della turned down the chairmanship, believes Della is "cautious and doesn't leap into issues and make snap judgments." As long as Della is a member of the City Light committee, Compton adds, he'll have an opportunity to put his proposals into action.
On close inspection, however, Della's nine-point plan looks less visionary than reactive. Several of Della's proposals, such as limiting the utility's exposure to the volatile "spot" energy market, have already been implemented; others, such as setting financial benchmarks for City Light management, are duties that actually fall to city staff, not council members; and others, such as renegotiating long-term energy contracts, can't be done without the approval of contractors, who have little incentive to revisit favorable contracts.
Della also seems to have dropped another major City Light-related issue, this one concerning the hiring of a new superintendent for the utility. During the campaign, Della said he wanted the mayor to present the city council with several nominees. Despite council pressure, Nickels submitted just one: Jorge Carrasco, the former head of a private water company in New Jersey. Della, who made the choice of a superintendent a cornerstone of his campaign, has since backpedaled on that demand, saying that although the council "has not been involved" in the nomination process, "we now have an opportunity to see what we can do with Mr. Carrasco. That's the name we have in front of us."
For someone who talked so much about the importance of choosing the best possible superintendent, it's disappointing that Della didn't take the one position on the council that would have given him a real role in the selection process. What committee did he choose? Parks, a position he says will enable him to "encourage small businesses in our neighborhoods." Maybe so--or maybe David Della just isn't comfortable on the hot seat.
