City of Seattle
In January, Mayor Greg Nickels takes the oath of office a second time.
Details
City Hall Campaign Give and Take
See below.
Related Content
More About
Back in 1997, when he first ran for mayor, Greg Nickels drummed up a respectable $100,000 in campaign donations and got thumped in the primary. "I learned a lot in '97," Nickels said in 2001 as he launched a new Seattle mayoral run. Amassing what turns out to have been more than $600,000 in political contributions to pay for advertising, fund-raising, staffing, and more fund-raising, Nickels rode off to victory that year and helped usher in the city's first half-million-dollar mayoral race. Now figures are in from what turns out to have been his second successful half-million-dollar election, in 2005, crowning him as City Hall's first million-dollar fund-raiser.
No other candidate in the city's modern political history has collected the kind of financial backing Nickels did in 2001 and 2005, an aggregate $1,143,299, based on figures released March 8 by the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC). "Believe so," says SEEC's database expert, Bob DeWeese, of Nickels' money title. That doesn't include $80,000 Nickels quietly raised the past four years for the mayor's office fund, used to pay non-city-related expenses such as $2,000 for the mayor's recent Super Bowl trip or $650 for "beverages for legislators" in Olympia from Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis. Nickels just added $8,245 to his office account the other day, following a recent fund-raiser.
DeWeese and SEEC campaign auditor Polly Grow note that Nickels' next-closest challenger to the campaign fund-raiser crown, former City Attorney Mark Sidran, collected a single-campaign record $731,000 in 2001 while narrowly losing—by 3,158 votes—to Nickels. But Sidran's total fund-raising in three earlier city attorney races, somewhere around $150,000, leaves him short of a million overall.
City Council candidates, meanwhile, are also raising and spending more on their races. New figures show that Richard Conlin took in an apparent record $273,000 and Jan Drago attracted $258,000 in hotly contested re-election wins last year. Altogether in 2005, 21 candidates seeking six positions—four council spots, mayor, and city attorney—collected $2.4 million in donations. The real winner? City Attorney Tom Carr. Unopposed, he spent only $2,000 of his meager $5,600 to be re-elected.
Get used to increasing fund-raising and spending, some observers think. "It wasn't very long ago you could have a decent City Council race for $100,000," says Seattle political consultant Bob Stark, whose firm, Gogerty Stark Marriott, has both advised and donated to mayoral and council campaigns. "That cost has more than doubled in just a few years." He's not particularly surprised that Nickels raised another half-million in 2005 while steamrollering over a merry band of nobodies—his six primary and general election opponents collectively raised about $24,000. The bar had been slowly rising since 1993, when Norm Rice won re-election with $365,000, and then, in 1997, when Paul Schell beat an underfunded Charlie Chong with a then-record $394,000 campaign chest. "In citywide races today," says Stark, "they ask what should a candidate be spending time on: walking around a neighborhood and contacting, say, 15 voters, or calling people on the phone and raising money to pay for TV or mailings? They've obviously chosen the latter."
In 2001, Nickels, along with Sidran, took fund-raising to the next level. It had been conventional wisdom that Sidran had far outdistanced Nickels moneywise during that year of campaign-fund bacchanalia (a dozen candidates from the primary through the general election raised and mostly spent $1.7 million). But when all donations were tallied later in 2002, a recent review of records shows, Nickels in fact scored huge with donors, too, collecting a stunning $616,000—six times the amount he'd raised four years earlier. One key was spending a healthy 10 percent of his funds on raising more funds. Last year, he upped that to 25 percent, spending more than $130,000 to raise $537,000, even though he was effectively unopposed. His supporters responded accordingly, with 44 percent of them giving at or near the maximum $650 amount.
Geographically by neighborhoods, most money came from donors living or working in the downtown/Belltown area ($96,000); the largest group of contributors was out-of-towners ($151,000). Neighbors for Nickels, as the mayor dubs his campaign fund, is also the Developers, Attorneys, and Corporations for Nickels fund. Private corporations whose employees gave the most to Nickels' 2005 campaign were Washington Mutual Bank ($4,788), the Preston Gates Ellis law and lobbying firm ($3,315), and Paul Allen's Vulcan Northwest development company ($2,613). All do business with City Hall. Contributions reached $520,000 just days before the 2005 November election, and an additional $17,000 has since been reported in the account, some of it arriving after the election or deposited belatedly. The late arrivals include $650 donations from Alaska Airlines, Delta Airlines CEO Gerald Grinstein, and Bechtel Infrastructure of Maryland.
Preston Gates employees are Nickels' biggest single group funding source—$8,875 in the last two elections—and comprise the number two group giving money to all City Hall candidates from 1999 through 2005 ($48,000). SEEC figures don't parcel out top individual donors citywide, but two who regularly appear in the giving columns are well-connected Foster Pepper land-use attorney Judith Runstad and her husband, construction magnate H. Jon Runstad. Each has given nearly $15,000 to a wide variety of city candidates since 1999. Employees of their firms are among the top group givers to all City Hall races: $34,000 from Foster Pepper and $21,000 from Wright Runstad & Co.
If half-million-dollar mayoral campaigns have become the norm, the quarter-million-dollar level may be settling in at the City Council level. (See accompanying chart.) As in the mayoral contests, that's a lot of money to collect at a mere $650 a clip. (Two weeks ago, the city raised the maximum contribution limit to $700.) "If you look at these campaigns," says consultant Stark, "at least 80 percent to 90 percent is often spent on direct voter contact. That means, for the most part, mail, and repetition is really an important thing to some, so there's mail almost daily."
