Stadium Plan Not Scoring Well With Businesses
Most folks, when looking for a spot to build a new public building, uproot as few businesses and jobs as possible.
But when you’re building a new baseball stadium the locals already said they don’t want, why stop there? King County voters gave a new stadium for the Mariners thumbs down when it was on the ballot last year. But the Legislature approved spending $320 million to build it anyway.
Now public officials looking for a place to put the park are on a collision course with 21 Seattle businesses.
The officials’ first choice is a spot south of the Kingdome that would force relocation of 663 jobs with a total payroll of $15 million and $100 million in combined sales.
One of the city’s most venerable businesses would be sent packing.
C.C. Filson Co. has been a premier outfitter since the Klondike gold rush. This year, it celebrates its 100th anniversary of doing business in Seattle.
The wood-floored shop with towering wood-sashed windows speaks of earlier days before malls and Muzak.
The store is a mecca for hardy souls seeking no-nonsense clothes. Its so-called tin cloth coats, soaked in paraffin wax, have been a standard for outdoor work since miners started taking them to Alaska during the gold rush.
Its trademark heavy-duty wool and cotton duck clothing is made upstairs, right over the store, mostly by 130 highly-skilled, first generation Asian immigrants. They are paid between $10 and $18 an hour, get full benefits, and work full time.
It is, in other words, exactly the kind of business most cities would be loathe to disrupt. “We’re not going to go quietly, I can tell you that,” said Stan Kohls, president of the company.
A final decision on the stadium location will be made in September.
One thing’s for sure, Kohls says: the stadium, due to open in 1999, will be delayed by lawsuits if the preferred site is chosen.
“We have to protect our jobs.”
Nothing to fight about
If their proposed platform is any clue, state Democrats appear to have decided no news is good news.
This year’s platform, to be hammered out in Seattle today fills only one page, covers only eight points, and does so in the blandest generalities.
It would be almost impossible to fight over the platform because it doesn’t say much. And what it does say, such as families need good jobs, is hard to argue with.
This is not an accident.
Like the GOP, Democrats have embarrassed themselves in the past with detailed platforms and highly combustible planks, including a doozy that called for sex education in preschool.
In 1994, the GOP roared out of its state convention in Bellingham on a tide of consensus issues that carried the party all the way to unprecedented victory at the polls.
Looks like the Democrats are hoping lightning will strike twice, but to the left this time.
Nothing wrong here
Deborah Senn, the state insurance commissioner, has a big smile on her face this week. A federal judge just cleared her of allegations of illegal campaigning.
Nickie Moran, a former employee of Senn’s, filed a suit last fall that accused Senn of forcing her to campaign for Senn on taxpayers’ time.
The suit was found to be without merit.
Senn complained that public life has a new, meaner tone to it. “People tell me to have a tough skin, but this is different.
“There have been so many personal attacks. It makes good people not want to be in public life.”
If the past is any indication, Senn will face an ugly re-election campaign. But anybody who turns up at work on dress-down days in a studded black leather jacket and boots - as Senn did one day last winter - probably can handle it.
, DataTimes MEMO: West Side Stories appears every other week.