Spin control: Fire station photo op offers plenty of hot air

Ya gotta know it’s campaign season when a press conference on a new fire station sets off charges and countercharges on who’s playing politics.

Councilmen Brad Stark and Al French had such an event on Wednesday, on High Drive, which provides good photo ops of Latah Valley below, to suggest that the city spend about $2 million to build a station down there, where the response times are unconscionably long for fire rigs from the downtown station.

Mayor Dennis Hession responded with a rather forceful press release, calling the event “the most blatant display of political maneuvering I have ever seen,” and noting that the area in question doesn’t yet meet Fire Department standards for population or the number of calls to build a new station.

Hession and French are running for mayor and Stark is up for re-election, so just about anything they do short of ordering a latte can be seen by someone as political.

The superlative on blatant political maneuvering might seem a bit much, considering that a press conference, after all, is no more than a yellow on the campaign threat-level scale.

Perhaps that ranking can be chalked up to the fact that it’s fairly early in the season and that Hession and French waged a rather genteel campaign in 2003 that was overshadowed by a knockdown mayoral race between Jim West and Tom Grant. But if this is the worst maneuver Spokane voters see before the campaign season staggers across the finish line in November, they’ll be patting themselves on the back for having the best-behaved candidates this side of Lake Wobegon.

Hession’s prepared response sent to the media by city spokeswoman Marlene Feist was also e-mailed to more than 100 “movers and shakers” – political leaders, congressional staffers, university and business honchos, even some military commanders – at the mayor’s behest by Susan Ashe, the city’s director of legislative and public affairs.

Stark questioned the tactic of sending out the mayor’s press release to folks who might be considered politically well-connected, without wanting to seem like he was casting aspersions.

“I think it’s a gray area, but I’m not going to pass judgment,” he said. “I don’t want to focus on anything but the merits of the policy issue.”

That policy issue being – in case anyone has lost it – whether there needs to be a new fire station in Latah Valley. The city will be holding a hearing on that this month.

Ashe said there wasn’t anything particularly political, or even special, about forwarding a press release to other people in the community.

“It’s fairly routine. We regularly communicate with a broader circle of the community” than the news media, she said. Sometimes that means sending out a press release to that list of community leaders; other times it means sending out a separate message from the mayor.

“I’ve done it as long as I’ve been here, which is nearly five years,” she said. “I presume it was done before that.”

Exactly the point, Stark countered. Ashe sent out similar messages for former Mayors John Powers and Jim West. It didn’t work for them, he said, because people see through this type of tactic.

In fact, people who are watching can probably see through all manner of tactics and decide for themselves who’s playing politics. When this multiple choice question comes up, it’s a smart bet the answer will be:

D) All of the above.

Going over like a lead …

Photo-op planners would do well to forget balloon drops at future political events. Gov. Chris Gregoire’s visit to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture on Tuesday definitely could have done without one.

The governor had a date with some school kids to view the replica of Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex, the museum’s new exhibit. Kids love dinosaurs, the governor loves emphasizing education for kids, dinosaurs can be educational. … It’s a win-win-win situation, as politicians love to say.

So, after exhorting the kids to study more math and science so they, too, could get a job with dinosaurs, the governor and three school kids were invited to pull on a rope that would rip open a net full of balloons hanging from the ceiling.

They pulled. The net didn’t rip. Instead, the rope dropped to the ground, leaving the guv and the kids looking at each other with a shared “what the ..?” look. Someone thought quickly enough to get a long metal pole with a hook, and handed it to the governor so she could yank open the net, allowing at least some of the balloons to float down on the waiting children.

There were giggles. There was laughter. There were squeals of delight. Then a balloon popped, and there was bedlam as some of the kids began stomping on balloons to make more pops, causing other kids to shriek or cower or cringe.

Also cringing were the governor’s security detail, which may have been thinking something like “We’re in big trouble if one of these loud pops is coming from something other than a balloon.”

The balloon drop did generate a good photo in Wednesday’s paper. But let’s face it; they already had kids, the governor and a giant dinosaur skeleton for visuals. Who needs balloons?