Is Sims Already Gone?

King County Executive Ron Sims sits solitarily atop a Superior Court courtroom table, kicking his legs and tapping on his Blackberry on arguably the biggest day of the year for county government: the unveiling of the executive's annual budget proposal, which Sims has just presented. Meanwhile, a few floors up, four county council members, along with Sheriff Sue Rahr, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, and presiding Judge Bruce Hilyer—whose courtroom, incidentally, is where Sims is biding his time—are laying out their discontent with the county executive's cuts to public safety and criminal justice programs, as well as with the controversial ways that the budget proposes to fill the $93 million hole.

"Where are all your friends?" Sims, clearly annoyed about being upstaged, asks this reporter. He's also upset that council budget leadership—Bob Ferguson, Jane Hague, Larry Phillips, and Kathy Lambert—decided to pre-empt his address with a few comments of their own.

"The Speaker of the House would never do that to the President before the State of the Union [address]," he says. "Totally classless."

Sims, who's always favored the positive over the politic and greets virtually everyone he meets with a smile and a hug, chides the council for infusing the budget process—completed this week—with a lot of "hot rhetoric."

"People love to make a lot of noise. I've asked for a break from it, but I don't expect that we'll see it," he says, fuming. "It's only in politics where this talk works. People use hot rhetoric when they want to promote the self over the whole. It's about ambition."

Here, Sims is likely referring to Democratic county council member Larry Phillips, who may oppose Sims for re-election next year—a challenge made easier now that races for county offices will be nonpartisan, following passage of a charter amendment earlier this month. But Sims is no stranger to ambition: He's run for higher office twice and failed. And though he maintains he's never been interested in a cabinet post, he endorsed Hillary Clinton's presidential bid early (September 2007), becoming co-chair of her state campaign—and causing some to surmise that a Clinton White House could be his ticket out of the county.

Instead, Sims sits alone on this fall afternoon, waiting to defend his budget. The county's yawning deficit is just one example of what some say is mounting evidence that Sims, in his effort to gain national recognition, has lost a handle on the day-to-day operations of his job. There was the elections debacle of 2004, when hundreds of absentee ballots went uncounted while hundreds of provisional ballots were tallied without verifying voter eligibility; the deplorable jail conditions that resulted in a federal probe in 2007; the medical examiner's office employee arrested for stealing drugs from the dead earlier this year; a juvenile court building that's rotting; and animal shelter conditions so bad that the county wants to get out of the business entirely.

"Somewhere along the line, the county lost its focus, its mission of providing basic services like jail, Metro [buses], and elections," says Rollin Fatland, a former deputy county executive under Republican Tim Hill who also worked on Sims' 2004 gubernatorial bid and his 2005 re-election campaign. "It ran into trouble straying and getting into areas that may not be a county mandate. On a personal level, I have affection for Ron. He's a nice man, but somewhere along the line he got off track."

Some also contend that Sims has become distracted by big-picture pursuits at precisely the time when the county needs an attentive leader to roll up his sleeves and dig into the day to day.

Sims lost his first bid for elected office in 1981, when he challenged incumbent county council member Ruby Chow. Prior to this attempt, he'd worked as legislative director for State Sen. George Fleming, director of community accountability for Seattle's Human Services Department, and an investigator in both the state attorney general's office and the Seattle office of the Federal Trade Commission. He won Chow's seat when she retired in 1985, and was appointed county executive in 1996 after then-executive Gary Locke became governor. Sims was elected to the post a year later.

Since then, the gregarious Sims, a Spokane native and ordained Baptist minister, has developed the kind of political brand that is the envy of other elected officials. "Ron is just a physical and virtual hugger," says Seattle Foundation president Phyllis Campbell, who's known Sims since he was a child. "Wherever he is, he takes people into his circle. It's the minister in him."

Sims is a guy with big ideas. He was on board early to combat climate change by establishing clean fleet standards for government vehicles, and saw to it that the county operates hybrid buses, which make up about 18 percent of its fleet. He's also preserved more than 100,000 acres of forest land through the purchase of development rights, and led a tri-county effort to promote salmon recovery in the region's rivers and streams.

But Sims has never been a natural manager. Case in point: the county's quest to modernize and meld its outdated computer systems. In 2000, after three years, $39 million, and poor progress by project managers, Sims called off the effort to update and standardize the county's various payroll, accounting, and human-resources systems—something that's been desperately needed since the county merged with Metro in 1994.