Spokane looks like loser after allegations
Poor Spokane.
Here we finally elect a mayor who starts getting the streets fixed and will be seen eating lunch with me. Then – wham! – we catch him wooing a high school teenager on a gay Internet Web site by offering a City Hall internship.
This can’t be what the Chase Youth Commission has in mind.
Then there are the darker problems. West faces allegations of sexual abuse with children dating back to the 1970s.
I think all of us can agree with my sweet 82-year-old mother. After reading last week’s West Slide Story (as a clever colleague put it), she summed up the mayor’s predicament with a two-word gasp:
“Good LORD!!!”
And Mom voted for the guy.
The S.S. Jim West is going down. He knows it. He’s just rearranging the deck furniture right now.
Oh, I realize there are still dreamers out there who believe the Monroe Street Bridge makeover will finish on time and that Jim West can continue representing the Lilac City as an effective leader.
Keep clicking your ruby heels together.
But ask yourselves this: Can the state’s second-largest metropolis be taken seriously with a mayor who uses the cyber sobriquet, “RightBi-Guy?”
Please understand that I’m writing this on Saturday afternoon. At the pace this tale is galloping who knows what the situation will be by the time you read this.
For the record, I don’t give a hoot what a mayor’s sexuality is. Many of our previous mayors struck me as bloodless asexual pod people. I never said a word.
But whether or not you believe West’s denial on the child abuse claims, he undeniably violated the public’s trust.
It happened the second he started representing himself as the Spokane mayor to the Internet pen pal he thought was a barely legal boy toy. West dangled perks from his office. He sweetened the deal by offering an internship as an incentive.
I haven’t been on the singles circuit since Nixon’s last term, but it can’t be this hard to find a date.
Turns out, there was no Internet boy toy.
It was a ruse. West was actually chatting up a computer wizard hired by this newspaper. This was brilliant, creative work – the print journalism equivalent of a “60 Minutes” hidden camera sting.
The die-hards will say we set West up.
But nobody forced Mayor RightBi-Guy to take the bait. He has only himself to blame for being stuck like a dinosaur in a tar pit.
And now – for the moment, at least – West is vowing to keep his job while frantically jettisoning ballast the way a pilot tosses objects out of a plummeting hot air balloon.
He quit his executive board position on the Inland Northwest Council of the Boy Scouts.
He resigned his seat on the Morning Star Boys’ Ranch board of directors.
I wonder: If West isn’t a fit role model for the Boy Scouts and the Boys’ Ranch, should the mayor’s office standards be any less?
This isn’t easy for me because I thought highly of Mayor West. I still believe his job performance is the best Spokane has seen in the 21 years I’ve been jabbing at mayors in this column.
I told him as much over lunch not long ago. I predicted that if he continued to keep the city operating professionally and smoothly he would break the Curse of the One-Term Mayor. Spokane hasn’t had a mayor re-elected to a second term since David H. Rodgers left office in 1978.
Now I’m predicting that West may set a new record. For shortest tenure.
My thoughts keep going back to that chilled day in late-December 2003, when I watched West take his oath of office.
It had to be one of the happiest and proudest moments of his life.
A mayor can hold his swearing-in ceremony anywhere he or she chooses. West chose the auditorium of his humble childhood alma mater – Grant Elementary, a lower South Hill school with a high population of minority and low-income students.
There on the stage Jim West raised his hand. He stood as a symbol of hope to every Grant student.
It doesn’t matter where you come from. It doesn’t matter if your parents are poor.
You can grow up and become mayor some day.
Jim West is now a symbol for something else.
Poor Spokane.