Mayoral hopefuls vulnerable

Spokane’s mayoral race started as a relatively civil affair with disagreements over management style, but it has evolved in recent weeks into a fight over decisions made or not made by Dennis Hession and Mary Verner.

With ballots already mailed out and just over two weeks before the election, each candidate is likely to continue talking at forums and in ads about what they see as the other’s vulnerabilities with voters.

Here are some things voters might hear or read about in candidate statements and ads between now and Nov. 6, and some details behind them:

Ambulance contract

An audit released last year showed that at least 881 city residents and an undisclosed number of insurance providers were overcharged more than $320,000 for ambulance usage from 2003 to 2006 by American Medical Response, the company that contracts with the city to provide the service.

The city’s contract with AMR would have allowed Hession to fine the company more than $4 million, but last year Hession chose a penalty of $80,000. The amount was criticized as lenient by the city’s firefighters union.

Verner brought up the issue at a debate last week, saying she expects the mayor to “not allow our consumers to be defrauded.”

Hession said he reacted justly: “It was not a deliberate attempt on their part to deceive anybody.”

At the debate Verner did not bring up AMR’s hire this summer of Hession’s son, Patrick, as a paramedic. Patrick Hession has qualifications for the job – he has a master’s degree in clinical anatomy from Creighton University in Nebraska – but Verner and Councilman Al French have said the hire deserves an examination by the city’s Ethics Committee. “I did not and do not see that as a conflict,” Hession said earlier this month. “I know that Patrick knows that he has to make his own way and that he wouldn’t ever use my position of the mayor to get a job.”

Firefighters pension

With little fanfare in September, the City Council accepted a recommendation from the Firefighter Pension Board and settled a longstanding dispute over whether the city should pay the Medicare Part B premiums for about 260 firefighters, some retired, some still working. Verner voted yes, first as the head of the pension board and later as a member of the council, which passed the resolution unanimously.

Afterwards, Hession criticized the vote for what he said is a price tag of $10 million and because Verner had received a $7,500 contribution from the Firefighters Union Local 29.

Verner and the union denied there was any quid pro quo between the contribution and the vote, adding the change had been under discussion by the pension board even before she announced her campaign. The change won’t cost taxpayers any extra money, she said: “We asked the council to front the money from the general fund to be reimbursed by the pension fund.”

If it was going to cost $10 million, she added, the council wouldn’t have passed it unanimously and the mayor would have vetoed it.

The change does put an extra burden on the fire pension fund, city officials and an audit say.

“This is clearly a decision by the City Council that will cost the taxpayers over $10 million,” said Hession, who couldn’t veto that particular council action.

Some basics about the pension process are necessary to understand this one. The city property tax includes a levy of 45 cents per $1,000 of value for the fire pension fund, which covers a range of costs for fire department retirees. Eventually the fire pension fund will have collected enough money from the levy to be self-sustaining and won’t need that property tax. Before the change approved by the council, that was estimated to be sometime in 2019; with the change, it won’t be self-sustaining until 2020.

The pension fund doesn’t pay the insurance premiums directly. Instead, the city uses money from the general fund to reimburse retirees for the premiums they pay, then reimburses the general fund by keeping a portion of that 45-cent levy that would otherwise go into the fire pension fund. It will have to transfer about $10 million extra from the pension fund to the general fund in 2019 and 2020 to cover premiums.

When the fire pension fund is self-sustaining, the city can either keep the levy and put it in the general fund or cancel it. So Verner is correct that there is no impact to the city’s general fund for paying those premiums and no “additional cost” because the levy stays the same. Hession is correct that property owners will pay into the pension fund longer before the levy can be cancelled or redirected to the general fund for other city services.

Consultants

The year started as a headache for Hession’s administration with the release of the Matrix report, a $260,000 efficiency study that his opponents like to say is written by a “California consulting firm.”

Hession didn’t solicit the report on his own; the City Council authorized it. And Hession is correct that city officials promised voters an outside review of municipal finances after a tax increase was approved in 2005.

“That was a commitment that we made,” Hession said. “That’s a matter of integrity to me.”

His administration says changes from the report will save the city thousands of dollars a year. But there’s no denying that the report was unpopular in many circles from the time of its release.

City employee unions said ideas in the report were unrealistic, based on false assumptions, more about service cuts than efficiency or ideas they already had suggested. The study suggested cutting police officer numbers, an idea that was highlighted repeatedly by Hession’s mayoral opponents as a reason why the study was flawed.

Matrix isn’t the only consultant report Hession has been criticized for. He also used a Texas consultant to study animal control and hired a communications consulting group to craft a message about the Matrix report.

Verner’s supporters also point out that his campaign is using a controversial out-of-town consultant, Stan Shore, who operates Polis Political Services of Olympia. Hession’s campaign has paid the firm $20,000 for consulting so far.

Firing Kim Thorburn

As a member of the Spokane Regional Health District Board, Verner participated in the controversial firing of Spokane Health Director Kim Thorburn. She was dismissed in 2006, after more than a year of confrontations with some members of the board. She had expressed concerns about air quality and county officials being too “business-friendly.” County Commissioner Mark Richard said she had a pattern of being disrespectful, showing poor judgment and communicating through the newspaper rather than with the board.

The clash came to a head after her 2006 evaluation, in which employees gave her good marks but the board did not. Three months later the board, with Verner on it, voted unanimously to fire her; Thorburn supporters in the crowd shouted “Shame on you,” to the board.

Thorburn remains in Spokane as the medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Inland Northwest, has strong support among some members of the local Democratic Party and is running for county commissioner next year.

Verner continues to defend Thorburn’s firing as a decision that had to be made: “We had a complete breakdown between our health officer and the board,” she said. “I had worked hard to resolve that breakdown; it wasn’t getting any better.”

Hession has not said Thorburn should have kept her job but does say the board did “a poor job of communication” in the firing. “Certainly it’s within their purview to make that call,” he said last week. “But it is important that we have that transparency in that institution, just like it is in the city.”

Verner responded that the board wanted to say more but couldn’t: “We were under legal constraints with what we could and could not discuss with the press or the public regarding a personnel matter.”

Mudslinging

Spokane’s mayoral election got red hot at an unexpected place: the North Spokane Rotary Club.

At the service club’s Oct. 9 debate, Hession said Verner once approached him “on behalf of one of the gaming native tribes” about opening a casino downtown. Verner strongly denied the accusation, and Hession later said he couldn’t remember when or where Verner made the statement.

The lack of corroboration on the casino claim was reminiscent of a mayoral primary debate this summer when he said French would “terminate the chief operating officer and all department heads.” After that debate, Hession also said he couldn’t remember when or where he heard the statement – or even if he heard it from French himself.

Verner was furious after the Rotary debate, calling Hession’s accusation “racism.” She later retracted the racism charge but has continued to say Hession made it up.

Accusations of dirty campaigning intensified last week after Hession released an ad that tries to paint Verner as a flip-flopper.

“Mary Verner said she opposes a utility tax increase, but she voted for it,” the ad says. She opposed a condominium building along the Spokane River that she voted for.

Hession also voted to raise utility taxes in 2005, she countered. She made the statement about opposing a tax increase this year; she wasn’t saying she opposed the 2005 increase, but that it’s time to lower the tax.

She did vote for a settlement allowing the construction of the condominium tower in question, but only after the city’s attorneys said the city was at risk from a lawsuit if the council didn’t approve the deal.

At a debate last week, Hession said his campaign only has provided “factual information” about Verner for the voters to consider.

“Sometimes your opponent doesn’t like what you have to say about them, and sometimes they think that some of the things you say about them are unfair,” he said.

Making decisions

For weeks, Hession’s most frequent criticism of Verner is that she hasn’t made the kind of tough decisions he makes on a regular basis as the city’s mayor and doesn’t have a leadership style. Asked during a forum at the Gonzaga University Law School to give her one bit of advice should she win, he replied: “Be decisive about things. … Be prepared to step up and make the difficult decisions.”

Later, he told the audience of young lawyers and professionals he “very seriously questions the experience of my opponent and her non-specific way of telling you what she’s done.”

She counters that there’s a difference in style, not decisiveness. After that forum, however, she said she needs to do a better job of describing some of the complicated decisions she’s made involving the tribes she serves at the Upper Columbia United Tribes and the federal government.

She describes her style as more inclusive and collaborative and counters that some of Hession’s decisions, such as canceling garbage pickup in alleys in some north Spokane neighborhoods, were made without enough discussion with the people affected.