Mccaslin’S Tough And Decisive
After writing about Spokane politics for nearly 30 years, I have to say that nothing affects our ups and downs more than the quality of local leadership. And nothing is more difficult than identifying the good ones ahead of time.
Leadership’s an art, an intangible, a blend of vision, competence, charisma and more. Many of the greatest leaders are as controversial as they are popular.
Soon, Spokane will elect a strong mayor. And that is only one of many leadership positions voters will fill this November.
How can we recognize good leadership candidates when we see them?
How do they do what they do, and survive?
To find out, I asked one. Her name is Kate McCaslin.
By any fair definition, this Spokane County commissioner is one of the most capable elected officials to serve our area in a long time. She listens to the people. She respects her staff. She’s tough, independent and decisive. She fights for the best long-term interest of the community. She deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the county’s strong financial condition: The county budget now has a $16 million reserve. This results from disciplined budget policies that the commissioners enacted, and stick to, largely at McCaslin’s behest.
Numbers alone can’t tell the story. After many years of giving developers whatever they wanted - a jeopardized aquifer, rural firestorms and clogged arterials were among the results - county commissioners have begun insisting that developments include adequate provision for services that will protect residents’ quality of life, long-term. This does not preclude development, and many developers remain strong McCaslin supporters. But it will make our rapidly urbanizing county a better place to live.
And again, for this change as well as the budgetary efficiency, McCaslin deserves much of the credit.
However, when McCaslin first appeared as a county commissioner candidate, all of this lay in the future. Four years ago I wrote a column dissenting from our editorial board’s decision to endorse her. My mistake was to focus on her campaign contributions, which came heavily from development interests. I figured she’d give away the store, even though she insisted she wouldn’t.
She was speaking the truth, while I was making the skeptic’s error, brushing aside a politician’s promises and assuming money spoke louder.
Sitting in her office last week, I asked McCaslin about the habits and skills that help her lead.
“You have to have a center,” she replied, “to keep yourself from getting off course, from being unduly influenced. Having that center means you look in the mirror every day and say, `It was a difficult decision but no matter how much I get beat up over it, it was a good thing.”’
For McCaslin, that central source of strength is her faith in God. It compels her, she said, to be truthful, to be fair, to aim for community service with a long-term vision. To say to colleagues, “I’m going to be frank with you and I’m not going to stab you in the back afterwards.”
And, she said, her faith helps her to resist the allure of power. “My life isn’t this job. … If I don’t get re-elected it’s not the end of my life. … If self-gratification is the job it becomes more important to be in the job than to make the right decision. … It would be so easy to lose your center because these jobs come with a whole lot of things. They call you `Commissioner,’ not `Kate.’ You get to liking that stuff.”
But nothing can shake a leader, even a tough one like McCaslin, as the personal attacks do. Civility, she says, seems to be a lost art these days. It is difficult, in the heat of a political debate, “to avoid being personal and to avoid taking it personally.”
McCaslin’s eyes glisten. Without a trace of self-consciousness she brushes away a tear. “I have lost some friends over this job,” she says. “That’s hard.” When she is making decisions that affect people she knows and the attacks become personal, “that’s where my faith comes in. If I didn’t have faith to get over it and forgive them I would be reduced to a very ugly person.”
These core values are only a beginning. Plenty of people have faith.
McCaslin also brings to the job an open-minded willingness to listen. Watch a commissioner’s meeting on television, she said, and it might seem boring - all those citizens and staff members making speeches. “But in my seat they aren’t boring, because you have to make that decision. It’s pretty good to hear all that input.”
The parties to a dispute “usually just hear their side,” says McCaslin. But commissioners “hear all the complaints,” such as the outcry over flooded basements in the Moran Prairie homes that were built on a wetland with county approval.
Finally, a good leader needs vision to see and deal with the big trends. McCaslin remembers, as a girl, riding a horse down Sullivan in the Spokane Valley. In the 1960s, Sullivan was a two-lane rural road. Today it’s an arterial, lined with businesses. “We used to be this sort of sleepy peaceful rural county and we’re transitioning to being a primarily urban county with all the good things and bad things associated with it. The challenge is - this is a test - to preserve the things we liked about that sleepy peaceful rural county and get the benefit of an urban county, as well.”
That means better job training, she said. It means a more adequate transportation system, including light rail. It means more efficient government. It means wise zoning policy.
And, it means that we are going to need great leaders to show us the way. “We’re going to be fine,” McCaslin insists. “We have good people in this county. We’re going to preserve the best and jettison the stuff we don’t like. We’ll get better paying jobs. But it is a test - of our strength, and our character.”