Jim West dead at 55
Jim West, who was one of Spokane’s most successful politicians for a quarter-century until he was turned out of office by a career-ending scandal, is dead at 55.
West – a former city councilman, legislator and mayor – lost a three-year battle with cancer, which had spread from his colon to his liver and defied repeated chemotherapy and surgery. He died at University of Washington Medical Center early Saturday morning with his family and his pastor at his side.
“We knew Jim best as a son, brother, and uncle. … We have always been extremely proud of him,” the family said in a statement.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
West was remembered Saturday as an accomplished political tactician, a formidable foe, a mentor to a string of protégés and the central figure in Spokane’s most public personal tragedy.
“Spokane has lost one of its truly great champions,” said Spokane County Commissioner Todd Mielke, a former legislative aide to West. “Ninety-five percent of his life was devoted strictly to promoting Spokane and bettering the community.”
Born in Salem, Ore., West grew up in the Liberty Park area of Spokane and graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in 1969. He served as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne for three years, then returned to Spokane to pursue a law enforcement career.
After three years as a sheriff’s deputy, he entered his first political race, for that department’s top job, in 1978. He lost, but a year later he unseated an incumbent on the Spokane City Council and at 28 was the youngest councilman in city history.
Before that term was up, he won a state House of Representatives seat in 1982 and moved to the Senate in 1986, announcing he would run for the seat of one-time mentor Sam Guess before Guess had announced his retirement. In the Senate, West rose to become a powerful committee chairman, and finally majority leader when Republicans controlled the chamber in 2003.
Former state Sen. Lois Stratton, a Spokane Democrat, recalled that West sat behind her in his first year in the Legislature and eagerly railed against Democrats despite an unwritten rule at the time that freshmen were to be seen and not heard. When she pulled him aside for a caution about angering powerful people in the opposition, West said that was part of the fun of being in the minority party.
“Mostly, I remember his drive,” she said. “Jim saw no challenge that was too big. I don’t think Spokane realizes what they lost.”
State Sen. Margarita Prentice, D-Renton, called West “one of the brightest political minds” she had ever worked with. “Obviously, we had our political differences, but he could be a real friend.”
She said West’s support was key, for example, to getting through law and budget changes to improve farmworker housing.
In a statement issued Saturday, Gov. Chris Gregoire said, “Jim served the people of Washington and Spokane well during his 27-year career as a public official. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends.”
West spent a tremendous amount of time studying political leaders, from Lyndon Johnson to Rudy Giuliani, said Mielke, who first met West in 1982 as a legislative intern in a West-sponsored program and later went to work in his state Senate office. West urged a string of young aides to pursue their dreams, take chances, and “not look back with regret.” He was also a “gadget guy,” one of the first in the Legislature to have a computer, recalled Mielke.
“He was always thinking ahead, where might he go from here,” said former state Rep. Duane Sommers, who served with West for 12 years in the same Spokane legislative district. “He got (the Senate Republican caucus) to quit criticizing the opposition and say, ‘We’ve got a better idea.’”
West ate, slept and breathed politics. A legislative seat is a part-time job, and for many years West owned and operated a scuba diving shop and later was in real estate. A longtime Boy Scout leader, he ran the Scout summer camp for many years, in months that didn’t conflict with the spring legislative sessions or the fall campaigns and committee meetings. He didn’t win every race – he lost the GOP primary for lieutenant governor in 1996 – but always won his legislative seat.
“My private life? It’s public. I don’t have much of a private life,” he once told a reporter during a campaign interview. He proposed to Ginger Marshall, a health-care industry executive, from the Senate floor in 1990; five years later they would divorce, and West would point to the demands of the legislative life as a cause.
In more than two decades in the Legislature, he went from dogmatic conservative to thoughtful strategist. He backed proposals to improve the business climate, and generally opposed tax increases, although he supported a gas tax increase in 2002 and gave hotels and motels the ability to levy an extra room tax that can be used to promote local tourism. He wrote legislation that allowed Spokane to create the Public Facilities District, which operates the successful Arena. Motorcyclists must wear helmets in Washington because of a 1990 law he proposed. Abstinence is part of sex education in state schools because of another West bill.
As Senate Health Committee chairman, he helped create the state Department of Health. As the Senate Ways and Means chairman, he accomplished a rare feat of getting a budget done on time, without a tax increase, with a member of the opposing party as governor. State Sen. Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, who occupied some of the same positions as West when her party was in the majority and often sparred with him on issues, called him “a formidable political opponent.”
His “dream job,” West would later say, was Spokane mayor. He’d met Spokane Mayor Neal Fosseen as a youngster and been star-struck. He ran for the job in 2000 and lost in the primary.
In 2003, just months after being diagnosed with colon cancer and undergoing his first operation and chemotherapy, he ran for and won the top spot in City Hall, choosing to take the oath of office at Grant Elementary School – where he’d been a student decades earlier – in front of a standing-room-only crowd.
The cancer had spread to his liver, a condition that is often fatal within a year, but West said he felt strengthened by people who said they prayed for him and gained a new appreciation for the spiritual aspects of his life.
He had more surgery before he was inaugurated, and sometimes left his City Hall office early on Fridays for three-day weekends to deal with chemotherapy. Despite that, he was arguably at the peak of his political power after a year as mayor: He spearheaded a successful road bond approved by voters, received an appointment to a presidential commission on economic development, and even had some of his political foes saying he seemed to have the city moving again.
In pushing the road bond to a ballot victory, West proved his skills as a political tactician, succeeding where other city leaders had failed for several years by going to the public with a plan to rebuild the crumbling streets, listening to their suggestions and incorporating them into the final proposal.
Then a scandal rocked his personal and political world.
Through a long and detailed investigation, The Spokesman-Review revealed that West had used his city computer to meet young men on the Internet. He had offered some of them gifts or city jobs in exchange for sex. One person he met online – someone West thought was a local high school senior just turning 18 – was actually a forensic computer expert hired by the newspaper as a way to verify other reports of the mayor’s meetings with young men.
At the same time, the newspaper revealed that West had been described in a lawsuit against the county involving a former fellow sheriff’s deputy, David Hahn, with whom West had served as a Boy Scout leader. Hahn had committed suicide in 1981 in the face of allegations he had sexually abused boys. One of those boys, now an adult, was suing the county and said he’d been abused by West, also.
West admitted to bad judgment in his private life for contacting young men on the Internet but said he’d only had consensual sex with adults. The admission of homosexual activity shocked some of his longtime conservative Republican supporters and prompted some longtime gay-rights activists to accuse him of hypocrisy for opposing such proposals as benefits for the domestic partners of city employees.
“I see it as a tragedy,” said Brown. “Becoming the mayor of Spokane was a lifelong dream, and right as he was on the verge of that dream, everything unraveled, both personally and politically.”
He strenuously denied he had abused his office and the sexual abuse allegations from the 1970s and 1980s. He lashed out at the newspaper for invading his privacy through what he called a “brutal outing,” and threatened a lawsuit, although one was never filed. On Saturday, the newspaper declined comment about the investigation and subsequent political ramifications.
“Our job today is to report the news. Anything else would be inappropriate and unfair to Jim West’s family and friends. To them we extend our sympathies,” said Editor Steven A. Smith.
West took a leave of absence after the investigation broke, but when he came back refused to resign, despite the urging of the City Council, business groups that supported his election and his own local political party.
City Councilwoman Cherie Rodgers, who supported the recall and led the unsuccessful effort to get West to resign, called him “a complicated man who led a double life.”
“His behavior and his actions changed the lives of many people forever. In the end, the people held him accountable,” Rodgers said.
State Sen. Bob McCaslin, a Spokane Valley Republican who served for years alongside West, said he talked to West and urged him to cut a deal with the city to finish out part of his term and get his retirement benefits.
“He said, ‘I won’t do it, Bob,’ and he didn’t,” McCaslin said. “It’s regrettable that he got in the mess with the computers and the city … But as a Christian, you leave it up to God to judge.”
The man who was arguably one of the top political strategists in Spokane met his match in a political novice, Shannon Sullivan, a determined single mother who led an often disjointed populist uprising through a lengthy court fight, a signature-gathering process and a recall campaign. In December 2005, voters did turn West out of office.
“It was never personal,” Sullivan said Saturday. “I pray he went with peace in his heart.”
Sullivan recalled talking to West after a special federal prosecutor announced last February there was insufficient proof to charge the former mayor under the narrow federal corruption law. West told her he “had the utmost respect for me and respected my tenacity. He was very kind.”
At his last political press conference at City Hall, he thanked city workers, told them to hold their heads up, be proud of the job they did and always to be eager to go to work on Monday.
“This has probably been the best two years of my life. I have no regrets as far as being mayor,” he said. “I’m not angry at all. I’m at absolute peace.”
He took a job selling advertising with a local magazine. He talked with KGA radio station about a weekly one-hour show that was tentatively scheduled to start in August, and feature him doing interviews with his contacts from decades in public life.
“We met a couple of times,” said Dan Mitchinson, the station’s program director. “He was tired of all the screaming and negativity. He wanted something that would be more of a community forum that would get things done for the city.”
Even after his ouster, rumors would circulate every few months about a possible West comeback. He’d run for his old Senate seat, up for election this fall, some said. He’d run again for mayor in 2007.
He denied both, repeatedly. Contacted last month about the mayoral rumor which had resurfaced, West laughed.
“I have no plans at all, right now,” he said, knowing that the rules of engagement called for the reporter’s next question to be whether he would absolutely rule it out.
“Next year is next year. I would never close a window of opportunity. I would never say ‘never’ to anything,” offering the perfect political answer when the question came. He was feeling fine, he added.
West was typically upbeat about his prognosis, even when he started another round of chemotherapy last July in the midst of the recall.
Karen Stratton, the daughter of his former legislative mentor who worked at the time as his adviser, said that the last time she saw West he told her that he had lived 36 months longer than he thought he would after being diagnosed with cancer in 2003.