In January, the Bellingham Herald proclaimed Skip Richards, one of the three incorporators of CLUE, as its "Newsmaker of the Year." The laudatory biography that accompanied this award made no mention of the other two founders, Bill Geyer and Art Castle. In slightly more than half a year, Richards had been transformed from a minor partner in the incorporation of CLUE into a champion of free enterprise through property rights. One year later, the Everett Herald would write a similar personality profile on Darrel Harting, the executive director of SNOCO PRA.86
In late January of 1993, founding CLUE president and soon-to-be head of Coalition for Common Sense, Steve Brisbane obtained the services of the Pacific Legal Foundation to provide assistance in legal battles over the status of Whatcom County Referendum 92-3, the attempt to gut the Critical Areas Ordinance (CAO). After a series of hearings, newly elected judge Steven Mura ruled to drop a county-requested restraining order against the referendum, but also held that the county could continue to proceed with enforcing the CAO if it believed the referendum was invalid. Any land-use permit applicant who disagreed with county's position would then have to file suit against the county. The muddle left everyone dissatisfied. During the time that the CAO was in limbo, the county council made the permits "provisional."90,91,93
In King County, Jack Cairnes announced near the end of February that he was considering running against incumbent Tim Hill for King County executive. Cairnes, with his connections to the (King County) Property Rights Alliance and the Cedar County Committee secession organization, was the first of many candidates to launch a campaign from inside the Wise Use network of property rights groups in Puget Sound. Cairnes would eventually succeed in his quest for political office by being elected to the Washington Legislature in 1994.96
At the same time in Snohomish County, a lawsuit by the county attempted to circumvent the referendum that would gut a land-use ordinance mandated by the Growth Management Act. The thirty-two property rights activists named in the case would portray themselves as martyrs to a tyrannical government. The case would eventually fill twelve volumes of files at the Snohomish County Superior Court. The organization that backed the referendum was composed mostly of members of SNOCO PRA. Calling themselves "Citizens for Referendum 93-1", their executive director was Jim Klauser.
Later that month, the Citizens for Referendum 93-1 held a protest rally in Everett. According to the Everett Herald, there was a substantial overlap between the recall campaign against Peter Hurley, the secession organizations and SNOCO PRA: "Many are involved in all three." The Herald was actually being too kind. The tactic of creating numerous organizations out of the same general membership has repeatedly been used by extremists as a way of magnifying their numbers. David Helvarg, the author of The War Against the Greens, a history of Wise Use, jokes that Wise Users can say, "We have 450 members and 650 organizations."103
In the middle of May, SNOCO PRA held a meeting to outline what the Seattle Times called their "plan of attack" in "the legal battle with Snohomish County to overturn land-use policies." One of the attorneys representing the property rights activists was John Groen of the Pacific Legal Foundation.106 [See appendix IV.]
In June of 1993, two county separatist groups formed in Whatcom County, calling themselves Independence County in the east and Pioneer County in the northwest. As in King, Pierce and Snohomish Counties, a Wise Use property rights group, Whatcom Coalition for Land Use Education was the parent organization of the secession effort.
Also during the month of June, Bill Geyer, Art Castle, Bruce Ayers and others registered the Keystone Forum as a political action committee (PAC). Geyer and Castle were on the original board of directors of CLUE. Ayers was CLUE's secretary. This Keystone group had been meeting for about two years, holding luncheon meetings and discussing both policy and politics of local government. Keystone Forum PAC was heavily laced with members of the Whatcom Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Many of them were members of the Whatcom Republican Party who had lost power as a result of a 1992 faction fight with Christian Right activists over the abortion issue in the previous year.65,109 [See appendix V.]
In the September primaries, Wise Use did well at the polls in Whatcom and Snohomish Counties. In the Whatcom County Council races, challengers Ward Nelson, Marlene Dawson and Alvin Starkenburg went on to the general election. In the Bellingham city primaries, Bruce Ayers and the initiative to block city funding for an arts center were successful. In Snohomish, R.C. "Swede" Johnson bumped first-term incumbent Peter Hurley from the Democratic nomination.122,123,127
The November 1993 general elections clearly demonstrated that the Wise Use property rights movement had organized a large enough swing block to influence elections in a decisive way. With the exception of Orphalee Smith's narrow loss in the Bellingham City Council race, the entire slate of Keystone-endorsed candidates and issues won: Bruce Ayers and Bob Hall in the Bellingham City Council race; Ward Nelson, Alvin Starkenburg, Robert Imhof, and Marlene Dawson in the Council races; as well as the CLUE/Coalition for Common Sense Referendum 92-3 to gut the Critical Areas Ordinance.118,120
The only race that the Keystone/Clue coalition did not win was the Bellingham City Council At-Large position, which was retained by incumbent Louise Bjornson with a margin of only 304 votes. Bjornson's campaign had substantial backing from both Democratic Party members and organized labor. Her narrow victory over Orphalee Smith was seen as victory by Bjornson's supporters, but it highlighted the collapse of the support base for candidates opposed by the Wise Use political block. The other candidates in the city and county elections, John Blethen, Sandra Fancher-Garcia, Foster Rose, Sherilyn Wells, Marge Laidlaw, Lora Strobel and Dennis Vander Yacht were completely overwhelmed by the CLUE/Keystone stealth campaign.132,134 [See appendix VI.]
What was experienced by these candidates as being abandonment by Democrats and moderate independents was actually the failure of liberal political institutions -- the Whatcom County Democratic Party was particularly remiss in recognizing that it had an institutional, rather than individual, role -- to detect and respond to a concerted stealth attack. As Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab noted in The Politics of Unreason: Right-wing Extremism in America, 1790-1977: extremist movements frequently are associated with the disorganization of major political party coalitions. Wise Use in Whatcom County gained some assistance from the disorganization in both the Republican Party -- as a result of the split over Christian Right extremism -- and in the Democratic Party -- as the result of a failure to form effective coalitions and power blocks.
The response within CLUE to even slight and ineffective political opposition can be seen in the "Whatcom C.L.U.E. 1993 Highlights":
"In 1992 Dan Warner told us that if we didn't like the Council's agenda we should go out and elect a new Council. We did -- and we all owe a lot to the courage, conviction and skill of Marlene Dawson, Alvin Starkenburg and Ward Nelson for stepping forward, taking up the cause, and for conducting inspiring, well-fought and clean campaigns against the preservationists and their slander mongers like the People for (ir)Responsible Government."
In Snohomish, R.C. "Swede" Anderson, John Garner and Referendum 93-1 all were approved by the voters. The situation for the property rights activists was particularly complex. Snohomish County's council is a partisan body. The complexity of running a campaign that crossed over party lines somewhat diluted the effectiveness of the property rights voting block, since voting the property rights party line required voters to back both a Republican and a Democrat.133
As in Whatcom County -- and during the next year on a national level -- the Snohomish County Democrats also suffered from internal disorganization. In the case of Swede Anderson's campaign, there was no effective response to the appearance of what was essentially a third party attack in the primary campaign. Again, a lack of organization, institutional structure and clarity of purpose were revealed in the failure to address the challenge of stealth politics.
These failures at the local level were harbingers of a national weakness in the Democratic Party as a whole. Several years earlier, the Republicans had faced a similar challenge in Louisiana in the form of David Duke's gubernatorial campaign. In that instance, the Republican Party possessed sufficient organization and internal discipline to repudiate the challenge. As would be seen in the devastating mid-term elections of 1994, the Democratic Party could not muster the necessary institutional strength to meet the assault by the Wise Use and "gun-rights" forces. It is no coincidence that these issues were exactly the ones that Alan Gottlieb had aligned himself with ten years earlier.
Both the Whatcom and Snohomish elections were marred by possible election law and IRS violations. Swede Johnson's campaign reported contributions totaling $700.00 from two firms with the same address in Surrey, British Columbia. Accepting foreign contributions for elections is a violation of both state and federal election laws. Johnson's campaign also reported payments made on October 28, 1993 to SNOCO PRA, a 501(c)4 non-profit registered with the IRS, for "labels, mailing, labor." A 501(c)4 organization is granted exemption from federal income tax payments on the grounds that it is engaged in the "promotion of social welfare." This "does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns in behalf or in opposition to any candidate for public office," according to IRS Publication 557, Tax-Exempt Status for Your Organization.
In Whatcom County, Keystone Forum (PAC) accepted a $300.00 contribution from Pioneer County. This contribution followed very shortly after a letter was sent from the Public Disclosure Commission to Independence County informing them that they were considered to be engaged in grassroots lobbying and would be required to file financial disclosure statements should they exceed the spending limits for non-reporting organizations. Bruce Ayers' campaign sent a mailing to absentee voters that contained "misleading" information about taxes in Bellingham. A complaint to the Washington Public Disclosure Commission was dismissed administratively on the grounds that the staff were "unable to prove malice," but did find the claims "misleading." Councilman Ayers was also sternly cautioned by Ms. Melissa Warheit, director of the PDC, "...I would like to warn you that if you or any literature associated with you and your campaign should clearly violate the provisions of RCW 42.17.530, the commission will have no other choice than to enforce those provisions. In the future please make sure that statements you make and literature you publish are factual."
After the November 1993 election, the major issues for the property rights groups were continued obstruction of the Growth Management Act, sheparding the newly-passed referenda into administrative execution, and continuing the county secession drives. The election of their candidates in no way lessened their political ambitions. The next election would be in the Fall of 1994, the Congressional mid-term elections. The property rights groups had for the most part, completed their organizing and recruiting drive in Puget Sound. No significant new groups would form in the next year. It was a time of triumph and consolidation.
The county secession movement returned to public attention through an article in the November 15 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It had been slightly more than a year since a newspaper story linked secession groups in different counties. The P-I article only mentioned Freedom, Skykomish and Cedar as secession organizations. It would be two more months before Bob Partlow wrote the first story that linked efforts in Thurston, Pierce, King, Snohomish and Whatcom Counties. The press coverage of the secession groups was mostly favorable, with a focus on the personalities involved. Many of the stories noted the ties to the property rights groups in passing, but none examined the history or evolution of what the stories described as a "grass-roots movement." The general format was a short feature story that played up colorful personalities and statements. No analysis has yet been written that traces the roots of the secession movement to assistance from the development industry and Wise Use. As a stealth campaign, the "property rights movement" has been a success. Reporters have taken the Wise Use groups' statements and press releases at their face value. No facts were checked, no confirmation sought, no connections explored.68,136,143
A typical article was "Study: Independence County in ballpark financially" in the Bellingham Herald on October 26, 1993. The story uncritically repeats the claims that the proposed new county has the necessary tax base to make it financially feasible. No sources other than Bill Beck, who worked on researching the study for University of Washington Graduate School of Public Affairs professor Richard O. Zerbe. No mention of any independent opinion on the study. No mention of the other "feasibility" studies that Zerbe had done for Cedar and Freedom county separatist organizations. No mention of the dissenting opinions from a financial expert retained by the City of Everson. No mention that the study only addresses property tax revenue, which makes up only 31.9% of the 1993 revenues. No comparison between the conclusions of the study and the claims being made in other Independence County literature. Just the press release, rewritten as a news article and sprinkled with a few quotes from Beck.
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