October 17, 2004 in City

Spot in Congress appeals to rivals

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Most people wouldn’t expect a millionaire dairy owner to drive up in his Chevy Suburban and ask a group of Teamsters striking his plant where and how he could deliver the milk himself.

Even more surprising was that the Teamsters told Don Barbieri where he should go – without using the word “hell.”

The incident during the 1995-96 strike at Spokane’s Broadview Dairy, recounted by a former union representative, offers a glimpse of two sides of Barbieri’s character, a successful businessman and committed social activist.

“Broadview had to change its structure or go out of business,” said Larry Kenck, a former Teamster negotiator and strike captain. “Barbieri did not set out to break the union. I don’t think it was ever his intention.”

This year, the 58-year-old Democrat is running for the 5th Congressional District seat on two records – that of the former CEO of the company he grew from five to 5,000 employees and that of the activist who saved the homes of 185 elderly, poor and disabled tenants. In campaign speeches from Walla Walla to Newport, Barbieri has campaigned as a “radical centrist,” promising to work for a balanced budget and health care reform.

“The things he says about bipartisanship are true,” said Barbieri’s longtime friend Greg Smith, the city of Spokane’s hearings examiner. “He doesn’t owe the Democratic Party because he wasn’t hand-picked by them to run. He’s a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal when it comes to helping out.”

A new approach

Barbieri was born on Nov. 18, 1945, to Kathryn and Lou Barbieri, who was the son of Italian immigrants. In 1937, Lou Barbieri founded what is now WestCoast Hospitality Corp., a company Don Barbieri ran for 32 of its 64 years.

But Barbieri’s commitment to community was born at Santa Clara University, where he co-founded the Santa Clara Christian Action Program, which paired up Latino grade school students with university student mentors. By the time Barbieri graduated in 1968, he said, 60 percent of the Santa Clara student body participated in the program.

That year, Barbieri volunteered to help Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign in the San Francisco Bay Area and took to heart Kennedy’s message, “commit yourself to something.”

During graduate school in urban planning at the University of Washington, Barbieri researched case studies in the Affordable Housing Act of 1968. When he joined his father’s property management company, Goodale & Barbieri, he was eager to take the company in a new direction by developing federally financed affordable housing for the poor.

“The last thing he wanted to worry about was leaking faucets and toilets,” said the Rev. Frank Bach, director of Catholic Charities from 1964 to 1978. Bach had worked with Barbieri’s father, Lou, a devout Catholic who had been a member of the charity’s board of directors.

With Barbieri’s help, Catholic Charities developed low-income housing in Spokane, Pullman, Clarkston and Colville and turned the day-to-day management of many of the new facilities over to Goodale & Barbieri, said Bach, who became a close friend of Barbieri’s and preached at his father’s funeral in 1997.

“Don was a pioneer in developing this kind of housing, and we became well known for it,” Bach said. “Certainly for low-income elderly it has been very good.”

One such project was the Park Tower, the city’s biggest low-income apartment building at 217 W. Spokane Falls Blvd. Built in 1974 with the help of a federal Housing and Urban Development loan and a partnership formed by Lou Barbieri, the 24-story building provided subsidized housing to 185 low-income elderly residents.

In the late 1990s, after the federal loan had run out, investors were ready to sell the property to a developer who could have converted it to luxury apartments.

Instead, Don Barbieri and his wife at the time, Heather, created a nonprofit charitable foundation to purchase the building and keep it a haven for low-income residents with the help of city, state and federal funds, as well as $500,000 of their own money.

The company grows

In the mid-1970s, Barbieri moved the company his father founded into hotel development and set a course of rapid expansion. In partnership with Burlington Northern, he developed Cavanaugh’s River Inn, named for an old ferry crossing at the Spokane River site operated by “Big Jim” Cavanaugh. Barbieri has long since bought out BN’s interest in the hotel.

Goodale & Barbieri then opened Cavanaugh’s Hotels in Kennewick, Moscow and Kalispell. When the company went public in 1998, it took the name Cavanaugh’s Hospitality Corp., before changing it to WestCoast Hospitality Corp.

In 2001, the company acquired the Red Lion brand name. In 2003, The Spokesman-Review reported that lodging represented about 90 percent of WestCoast’s business, with entertainment ticket sales and real estate management accounting for the rest. Last year WestCoast owned, managed or franchised 75 hotels with 5,000 employees in 16 Western states.

Goodale & Barbieri still exists as the company’s property development, management and affordable housing division.

Barbieri resigned as CEO of WestCoast Hospitality last year, but remains chairman of its board.

“My father gave me the leeway to do what I do best, develop a vision for the company,” said Barbieri, who perceives the role of a congressman as much like that of a CEO, looking ahead five years down the road.

While Barbieri the businessman was expanding his company, Barbieri the social activist was busy as well.

He sat on economic commissions for three governors, Republican and Democrats.

Scott Morris, president of Avista Utilities and senior vice president of Avista Corp., was on Gov. Gary Locke’s Economic Development Commission with Barbieri. He also worked with him when Barbieri was president of the Spokane Regional Chamber of Commerce from 2001 to 2002.

“Don was a person who worked very hard on regional collaboration,” said Morris.

The dairy deal

When Barbieri was serving on Democratic Gov. Booth Gardner’s Economic Development Board in the late 1980s, Gardner asked him to look at the struggling Foremost Dairy in Spokane.

A recent National Republican Congressional Committee ad criticizing Barbieri is largely the result of actions the businessman took in the 1990s as a result of Gardner’s request.

“He told me, ‘Don, you’ve been harping on keeping these blue-collar jobs. Can you do something to save these jobs?’ ” Barbieri recalled.

He ended up buying the historic dairy at Cataldo and Washington in 1991 after the former owner defaulted on loans and the business went into receivership.

As part of the restructuring of the renamed Broadview Dairy, Barbieri said, the company asked the Teamsters union in 1995 to accept a $2.50-an-hour pay cut in exchange for a profit-sharing plan when the contract came up for renegotiation.

Teamster Jim Cottier criticized Barbieri in a recent letter to the editor in The Spokesman-Review. He said he left the dairy after Barbieri “broke the union,” and he agrees with the Republican campaign ad that says Barbieri “put profits over jobs.”

“If you have a place that’s being mismanaged, you get rid of management, not labor,” he said in an interview.

Kenck, a former Teamster representative, has a different view. He recalled Barbieri’s manager, Art Coffey, opened the company’s books to the Teamsters. They showed the dairy had lost $250,000 the year before.

“They were tough times,” Kenck said, but what the company was asking the workers to accept would have had a damaging effect on other union contracts across the state.

“The negotiations came apart, and the membership voted to strike,” Kenck said, but he believes to this day that the dairy had to restructure or fold. “It should have been out of business 12 years earlier,” he said.

After the union was decertified, the dairy accepted everyone who wanted to go back after the strike, Barbieri and Kenck said.

The next year, Broadview Dairy’s management group, Inland Northwest Dairies, announced it would consolidate its milk processing and delivery operations with Darigold Inc.’s Francis Avenue operation. Both dairies were operating at 50 percent capacity. The consolidation cost 20 of about 85 Darigold workers their jobs, but saved the dairy for local producers to bring their milk. At the time, Denny Young, secretary-treasurer of the Teamsters local that represented the plant, told The Spokesman-Review that those who were not hired got good severance packages.

In 1997, the resulting Francis Avenue operation employed 150 people. In 2001, employees bought Inland Northwest Dairies and now share its profits.

Barbieri no longer earns a profit from the dairy operation, but he sits on the board of Inland Northwest, which manages it.

Like many Democratic candidates, Barbieri has the political support of several unions in his run for Congress.

“Any candidate that backs union issues we support,” said Bob Barker, a United Food and Commercial Workers Union representative. He said the UFCW has no contracts with Barbieri businesses.

“He backs us in the fight to maintain overtime pay and repealing what Bush has done,” Barker said, referring to the president’s overhaul of overtime rules.

‘Blue dog’ Democrat

Barbieri is divorced and has two sons, David, 33, and Stephen, 31. He includes as his mentors his father and the longtime president of Sacred Heart Medical Center, Sister Peter Claver, who asked Barbieri to sit on the hospital’s board of directors.

He served on the board from 1983 to 1992 and was its chairman for three years.

He also was director and president of Physician Hospital Community Organization, which offers affordable insurance to health care providers, from 1992 to 2001. He was on the board of directors of Spokane Mental Health from 1979 to 1983.

Barbieri said any consideration of health care reform must look at the problem as a whole – the uninsured, medical malpractice liability, Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements and the cost of pharmaceuticals. Eight out of 10 uninsured people are from tax-paying, working families, he said, and half of the 45 million uninsured in this country could get access to health care through pooling and offering tax credits to small businesses that provide insurance to their workers.

On economic issues, Barbieri identifies himself with the conservative “blue dog” Democrats in Congress who favor a balanced budget. He would make middle-class tax cuts permanent and supports ending the estate tax for farms and small businesses, but he would eliminate breaks for the top 2 percent of taxpayers.

On social issues, Barbieri has said the United States should be a world leader in stem-cell research, which could hold cures for such diseases as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

“It’s not right for us to stop science and prevent grandparents from meeting their grandchildren,” he said.

He supports marriage being defined as between a man and a woman by states and churches, but not by constitutional amendment. He believes in “a woman’s independent right to choose” abortion and rejects the government’s right to interfere in reproductive health.

When asked recently by The Spokesman-Review’s editorial board whether he could admit to any errors in judgment, Barbieri cited his involvement in the Spokane Transit Authority’s plan to build a transit center in downtown Spokane. The plan fell through – and Barbieri says he lost money on the deal, despite ads that have claimed he made a profit.

“It diverted our attention from other community projects,” he told the editorial board, “but we were able to rebound and develop the Crescent Block.”

Goodale & Barbieri invested $15 million in transforming the abandoned Frederick & Nelson department store into a commercial center.

“Don just couldn’t stand the thought of another big empty building in downtown Spokane,” Smith said of his friend.

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