Critics Strike Out As M’S Owners Make Their Pitch

Major League Baseball met big-time politics in Seattle this week, and naturally the subject was money.

The Mariners want a new stadium, and they want King County residents to vote to raise their sales tax, already the highest in the state, to help pay for it.

Enter Bob Gogerty, one of the most influential political consultants in the state, and adviser for the stadium campaign.

Gogerty convinced the normally reclusive owners of the Mariners to hold a town hall meeting for taxpayers this week, billed as a chance to ask tough questions about the stadium proposal.

Less than a minute into the meeting, it became clear just how tough the questions would be: the crowd of about 500 people greeted the owners with a standing ovation.

Rather than a question and answer session, the meeting turned into dueling testimonials to the wonders of baseball.

No dummies, the Mariners’ owners were quick to publicly tie baseball to the tracks.

Wayne Perry, vice chairman of AT&T Wireless Services, told voters the Sept. 19 election is “a lightswitch vote.”

“Say no to this, and say goodbye to major league baseball in the Pacific Northwest forever.”

Unless voters pony up $240 million, the team will be sold, and the new owners will doubtless take it somewhere else. No one else would put up with the Kingdome, Perry said.

“You’ve already got all the dumb people in Seattle right here,” he said, gesturing at fellow team owners.

Just a few faint mews of protest were voiced, most notably by a citizens group called The Committee for More Important Things. But nobody seemed to take much notice.

Pushing the tax increase is a walk in the park for Gogerty compared to the work he has cut out for him if he finds himself selling his former client, Gov. Mike Lowry, to the electorate in 1996.

Gogerty was a top consultant to Lowry’s 1992 campaign.

The embattled governor has been sending strong signals of running for re-election lately, including setting a date for his annual shrimp feed fund-raiser in September.

Whether shrimp feed better describes the food served or the size of the crowd Lowry attracts remains to be seen.

Speaking of Lowry, the governor took another hit from former press aide Susanne Albright this week, who went national with her complaints about alleged undesired sexual advances from the governor.

Albright penned a scathing column, published in the Washington Post, that compared Lowry to U.S. Sen. Bob Packwood, and told the country she knows just how Packwood’s “victims” feel.

“Was I hired simply because the governor liked to touch and look at me?” Albright wrote, and described Lowry’s “touches, grabs, caresses and pats.”

“If someone had blown the whistle on Lowry before me … then maybe his rank behavior would have stopped. Perhaps that would also be true for Bob Packwood.”

Jordan Dey, spokesman for Lowry, said the governor has no comment on the column, which was published in papers across the state.

Alan and Bonny Riggs of Kingston say their bureaucratic nightmare shows why voters should back Referendum 48, which supports the state’s new property rights law.

The Riggses held a news conference in Olympia this week, organized by the state Farm Bureau, to say their efforts to build a house on five rural acres turned into a nightmare when an eagle nest turned up nearby.

State regulators criticized the Riggses for cutting more trees than their logging permit allowed, and took issue with how the property was replanted.

Then the Riggses went on radio, trashing biologists enforcing the law. The biologists have in turn sued for defamation of character. No winners in this one so far.

, DataTimes MEMO: West Side Stories runs every other week.