Verner says tribal work readied her to lead city

Candidate Mary Verner arrived out of breath at her new offices in the Saranac Building recently, having skipped the elevator and run up four flights of stairs.

The climb was partly to get some exercise that’s in short supply during a mayoral campaign featuring almost daily debates, and partly a statement of being energy conscious. Running late after spending an hour on a radio talk show, she needed to join a videotaping of a discussion of community health and wellness that was in progress down the hall at Community Minded Enterprises.

She put in a plug during the taping for cleaning up the Spokane River and having more bike paths and pedestrian-friendly streets, then left the studio to learn that a camera crew from KHQ-TV wanted “three minutes of her time” out on the sidewalk to talk about the mayoral campaign.

Returning from the sidewalk, she had calls to make, payment vouchers to study and checks to sign for the Upper Columbia United Tribes, where she serves as the executive director. There was a meeting with tribal leaders on the north bank of the Spokane River in about an hour to discuss plans for a Living History Center, a possible joint effort between the city of Spokane, where she is a city councilwoman running for mayor, and Inland Northwest tribes.

But what she really wanted to do was show off the “green” qualities of the refurbished Saranac, especially its rooftop garden with native plants and passive irrigation, designed to keep the building cool in the summer and insulate it in the winter. With its view of downtown Spokane, it’s also a good place to come and think, she said.

The 51-year-old single mother with a 26-year-old daughter, a 10-year-old son and a master’s in environmental management from Yale University is green. “I don’t think I was ever radical green,” she added. “I am radical anti-nuke, because of the waste. But I never chained myself to anything.”

She believes what’s good for the environment is good for business, and vice versa, and said Spokane is behind the curve on environmentally compatible building codes. Although the Spokane Homebuilders Association does support “green building,” it – and much of the rest of the development community – is financially backing incumbent Dennis Hession.

Here by happenstance

If Mary Verner is elected mayor of Spokane next month, it might all be traced back to the slimmest of chances some 15 years ago and some 2,000 miles away.

She was a graduate student waiting to use the telephone in Yale University’s School of Forestry lounge when she spotted a small ad on the bulletin board. The Spokane Tribe was looking for someone to direct its environmental management programs, and she decided to apply.

She’d never been to Spokane, let alone Wellpinit, where the tribal offices are located. She’d been a college student in Alabama, North Carolina and Connecticut, studied pollution from the nuclear weapons plant in Savannah River, S.C., waited tables and sold municipal bonds in Florida and taught school in the Virgin Islands. She left the islands in 1989 after Hurricane Hugo hit St. Thomas, tearing off her roof and soaking everything inside. Among the few papers left were applications to grad school; she filled them out wet, by candlelight.

“I thought someone might be trying to tell me something.”

Although she is part Native American – one-sixteenth Muskogee, on her father’s side – she’d never spent time on a reservation.

“I really didn’t know what to expect,” she said.

Wellpinit was described as “on a bluff above a beautiful river.” She pictured a pastoral village by the Columbia and discovered Wellpinit was actually in the foothills, several miles away.

But the river, the job and the area were more, not less, than she expected. She stayed and eventually moved to Spokane, got a law degree at Gonzaga University, and became executive director for Upper Columbia United Tribes, an organization that represents the Spokanes and four other tribes on cultural and environmental issues.

She also got married, and divorced, for a second time. She said she repeated the mistake of trying to live up to the ideal she was brought up with in the South: a good wife stays home and raises children while her husband works to earn money.

“That just wasn’t me,” she said. She raised both children as a single mother, but called them “a balancing force in my life.”

Working for five different tribal councils, she said she must balance their sometimes competing interests and internal politics. But she finds tribal politics more honest than Spokane city politics.

“The tribes say ‘We put it out there and tell it like it is,’ and so it’s easier for me to determine a tribal representative’s position and why they are taking that position,” she said. “In city politics, I’m sometimes challenged to follow the trail, to figure out what a person’s position is, much less why they are taking that position. Sometimes I just abandon the why question to figure out the what.”

Building support

Verner came relatively late to the mayor’s race, after Hession and fellow Councilmember Al French were in full campaign mode. Critics have said it’s an example of how a style that Verner describes as deliberative and collaborative is really a sign of indecision. She said it was a result of two factors.

One was a conclusion last summer that Hession “wasn’t settling in and doing a good job,” she said. The other was a need to be sure of public support.

Shannon Sullivan, a friend who met Verner during her quest to put a recall of Mayor Jim West on the ballot, recalls swimming with her at the YMCA earlier this year, lamenting her feeling that Hession wasn’t listening to the public and suggesting Verner run. She replied she’d need to figure out how much support she could expect.

When others suggested the same thing, Verner set a goal of 100 people encouraging her to run. When she passed that, she began talking to her employers with the tribal councils, because unlike the nominally part-time council job, the mayor’s job is full time and does not allow outside employment.

“I think she had the fire. She wanted to make sure that people thought she could do the job,” Sullivan said.

When she made her decision, there was one person Verner needed to tell before making a public announcement: Hession.

She had been appointed to his seat, with his support, after Hession was elected council president in 2003. She won the seat outright in the 2005 election, with his help. They weren’t close personal friends, she said, but had a good working relationship.

On a Friday afternoon, she said she “took a deep breath” and went into his office: “I knew that (betrayal) would be something that would cross his mind and it crossed my mind,” she said. “Something I had to weigh … is this a betrayal of Dennis or would I be betraying my community if I don’t run?”

Hession said he was disappointed in Verner’s decision. He and his family had worked for her election and helped organize her earlier campaign.

“I solicited money from my supporters to help her,” he said in an interview. “I felt now to run against me was troubling.”

Since that time, their relationship has been strained. Hession said he tries to maintain a professional relationship with Verner as a councilmember but the personal feelings are still strong. Verner said they went from having a cordial, professional relationship to Hession being “openly hostile.”

In recent debates, Hession has pointedly questioned her management and leadership skills.

“I seriously question the skills of my opponent, her nonspecific way of telling you what she’s done or brings to this job,” he told a roomful of young professionals at one forum last week.

Reflecting on that comment the following day, Verner said she’d try to be more specific in explaining things she’s done for the tribes, like negotiating with three separate federal agencies for a fair share of the money the Bonneville Power Administration must spend on fish and wildlife restoration after a secret deal in Washington, D.C., tried to limit those payments.

Handling environmental and cultural issues for five different tribes that involve millions of dollars requires the kind of collaborative approach Spokane could use, she said. It also involves hiring and firing, budgeting and setting agendas

“I was wondering what kinds of tough decisions he feels he has had as mayor of Spokane and what decisions he feels it would be hard for me to make,” she said. “As a City Council person, I have to vote every Monday night.”