Sims leaving legal bill for public-records fight

OLYMPIA – The man President Barack Obama selected to be his top deputy at the Department of Housing and Urban Development is leaving his last public job with a huge legal bill for violating Washington’s open government laws, in a case tied to Seattle’s taxpayer-financed NFL stadium and its biggest booster, billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Obama has pledged a new era of government transparency. But his nominee for the No. 2 job at HUD, Ron Sims, ultimately was responsible as the elected chief executive of Washington state’s largest county for a saga of delays and denials that judges have deemed an inexcusable breach of open government laws.

The tug-of-war in Seattle centered on government documents relating to a proposed stadium for the Seattle Seahawks – the building now known as Qwest Field. A judge later ruled the paperwork should have taken only days to deliver. Instead, many documents were trapped for years in bureaucratic bungling.

The ensuing legal battle – still in the courts 12 years later – could leave county taxpayers on the hook for about $1 million in legal bills. The dispute has spanned Sims’ tenure as King County executive, and may even outlast him in Seattle. Nominated in February, he now awaits confirmation by the Senate.

Open government activists, who were cheered by Obama’s swift action to loosen secrecy policies at the federal level, are wondering how to reconcile that transparency pledge with Sims’ record on the Seahawks stadium documents.

“Let’s hope President Obama is not relying on Ron Sims to carry out the president’s transparency agenda,” said attorney Greg Overstreet of Allied Law Group, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief for the news media in the case.

Sims said through a spokeswoman the public-records case is an aberration that doesn’t reflect his long record of public service. As county executive, Sims manages a staff of 13,000 and an annual budget of about $4.9 billion, dealing regularly with complex transit and land-use issues, among other thorny problems.

“It’s surprising to me that anyone would think this case is representative of his three terms in office as executive,” spokeswoman Carolyn Duncan said. “He’s accomplished remarkable things for the environment, for public health, social and health services and housing.”

The case began in 1997, when businessman Armen Yousoufian asked the county for studies of proposed food taxes and professional sports stadiums. Voters were just weeks away from narrowly approving a tax package that pumped some $300 million into a stadium for the Seahawks, which recently had been purchased by Allen.

Yousoufian didn’t get the records he sought for about four years, and only then after filing a lawsuit. A judge found the county had been negligent, misleading and inexcusably disorganized, but she also found no evidence of bad faith or ill intent.

Yousoufian said Sims was giving voters an inaccurate picture of the economics of a new stadium.

In the end, Yousoufian obtained about a dozen studies and reports that examined the economics of stadiums and sports teams. He says they reveal mixed conclusions about the necessity for a new NFL stadium and may have affected the very narrow outcome of the tax election.

Today, a second phase of the court case is still winding down, as Yousoufian seeks higher penalties for the county’s poor performance.