West letter seeks $150,000 for recall fight

Spokane Mayor Jim West is telling his longtime supporters he needs $150,000 for his fight to remain in office.

West, through a committee he set up to fight the Dec. 6 recall, sent out a fund-raising letter late last month asking for donations ranging from $50 to $2,500 to pay for the coming campaign.

“In order to mount a campaign I must turn to my friends and supporters for help,” West says at one point in the four-page letter. “I must raise $150,000 in a very short period of time for mailings and TV ads.”

When validation of signatures made the recall election a certainty on Thursday, West said he was going to run a campaign based on what he’s done for the city since taking office in 2004, and what he plans to do in the rest of his term, plus the concept that “everybody’s entitled to privacy.”

But the fund-raising letter makes clear he intends to campaign on at least one other issue: coverage by The Spokesman-Review, which first reported allegations of West’s sexual misconduct and misuse of office in May, and the newspaper’s editor, Steven A. Smith. West accuses Smith of trying to “rob us of this progress we’re making in Spokane” so he can land a “big story.”

“He has launched a full-scale attack on the Spokane community and its trusted institutions … but to what purpose?” West asks in the letter. “Are Steven Smith and the Spokesman-Review the ultimate authority in Spokane or is it the people? The choice is ours.”

Smith said West was merely trying to shift responsibility for problems of his own making, and defended the newspaper’s coverage.

“Politicians in trouble will always blame the press, that’s Politics 101 and we understand that,” Smith said. “But Jim West’s problems are of his creation and his responsibility. The newspaper did what newspapers do; we reported the story for the readers we serve.”

In its latest report to the state Public Disclosure Commission, West’s campaign organization, Committee for Spokane’s Progress, lists contributions of $1,150 in cash and donated services, and debts of $85,000 for legal expenses of fighting the recall petition.

But West has a history of raising large sums of campaign money when he needs it. In 2002, West raised and spent more than $417,000 for his state Senate re-election fight against Democrat Laurie Dolan, an amount that still stands as a record for a legislative race. In 2003, he raised more than $217,000 for his successful mayoral campaign.

In an interview, West said he wrote the letter himself rather than relying on longtime political ally Stan Shore, a former GOP caucus staff member with a long track record of campaign mail solicitations.

“That’s me, sitting up late at night and scribbling down ideas,” West said. He said he showed it to his attorneys, who advised him to make changes but he told them, “you guys know law, I know elections.”

Asked whether part of his strategy will center on the newspaper, West replied he couldn’t predict how the campaign will “play out.”

In an e-mail, West’s lawyers Bill Etter and Carl Oreskovich said Friday “we anticipate the mayor and his supporters will run a positive and energetic campaign.”

The letter does not criticize supporters of the recall, who gathered more than 17,000 signatures in three weeks to get the proposal on a special election ballot. Instead, West blames that activity on the newspaper.

“It’s no surprise that this newspaper notoriety has resulted in a recall campaign,” West writes. “They say you shouldn’t fight someone that buys ink by the barrel but I have no choice. I need to tell my side of the story.”

The newspaper has included comments from West in every major story, starting with the first reports May 5. It has also published a rebuttal written by him on its Opinion Pages. Copies of all the stories, West’s guest column and court documents related to the recall challenges, plus transcripts of West’s online conversations with a person he thought was a high school student when discussing sex and offering a City Hall internship, can be found at the newspaper’s Web site, www.spokesmanreview.com.

Publisher Stacey Cowles said he wasn’t surprised West was taking a standard campaign tactic of blaming the newspaper and its editor.

“I like Jim West and have great respect for what he’s done for the city of Spokane and the state of Washington in his career,” Cowles said. “But blaming this on Steve Smith is pretty ridiculous.”

The newspaper is obliged to tell its readers what it knows, when it knows it, without favoritism, Cowles said. “And that’s what we’ve done,” he added. “We’re just the messenger. Now it’s up to the voters to decide.”

The fund-raising letter portrays Spokane as “a city on the move” and lists accolades Spokane has received in the last 18 months, including being named an All-America City, a Tree City USA two years running and one of the seven most “Intelligent Communities” in the world.

But City Councilwoman Cherie Rodgers, who has been among the most vocal on the council in calling for West’s resignation, said the last award is based at least in part on the downtown “Hot Zone” for wireless communication, work that started long before West took office.

The letter also contends the council voted “to endorse my proposal to put a new measure on the ballot in November” to raise taxes to maintain police and fire services. But Rodgers said the council took that vote on the recommendation of a citizens committee that West appointed, but which was supposed to be independent. West didn’t testify the night the council voted to put a levy proposal on the Nov. 8 ballot. “If it was a done deal, why did they appoint a committee?” she asked. “As it gets closer to the recall, he’s going to take credit for everything under the sun.”