‘Strange but not illegal.’ Questions raised about lines between politics and governance at Seattle City Hall

Questions about who gets to work at Seattle City Hall came into focus recently when Seattle Times reporters Jim Brunner and David Kroman looked at why Mayor Bruce Harrell's campaign strategist ended up on the City Hall payroll. David Kroman told KUOW’s Kim Malcolm about what they found.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: Your piece with Jim Brunner clearly took a lot of reporting. To understand it, let's start with who is Christian Sinderman?

David Kroman: Christian is among the most powerful Democratic operatives in the state that you probably haven't heard of. He is a campaign manager first and foremost. He helps people get elected. His first big client was Maria Cantwell in helping her unseat Slade Gorton. But he has been behind the campaigns of Bob Ferguson, Mayor Bruce Harrell, a bunch of city council people, a lot of the Democratic caucus in the legislature. In short, he is a very well-known and well-respected campaign manager.

After Harrell became mayor, you found Sinderman stayed at Seattle City Hall and was paid $227,000 in taxpayer funds over about three years, but he was never technically a city employee. What was happening there?

It's a different arrangement than what is typical, and we focused on it for that reason, which is he stayed on after Harrell won, helping him transition, because he has a lot of connections in the community, and he was able to bring together a lot of people to help the transition. That is not atypical. What is atypical is that when Harrell took office, he continued to do work for that office on a sort of month-by-month contract that eventually turned into three years’ worth of contract.

We are not naive going about this. There is crossover between the political world and the policy world. Lots of people, after helping somebody get elected, then go on to work for them in their government offices. But what was different in this situation is Christian was neither a full-time city employee nor totally divested from his campaign work. And so, for us, that kind of raised the question of, is his role there one of governance, or is it one of politics? And if it's the latter, that raises some questions about how city funds are being used.

You talked to the director of the city's ethics commission. He told you he found the situation strange but not illegal. So, what were the conflicts?

His political firm was responsible for selling voters on passing transportation and housing levies after he had also worked on those within Harrell’s office. So that is kind of an interesting blurring of the lines between his political work and his policy work. He also, in his political work, has a lot of connections to labor. He's a very labor union friendly political consultant. And then we found that he also had a major role in helping Mayor Bruce Harrell negotiate a contract with the city labor unions. And so, there's another piece of, for some people involved in the negotiation, they had a question about his kind of allegiances, whether it's to the city or to the labor unions.

Another piece is that he is actively working on the campaigns of two people, Erika Evans and Dionne Foster, who are trying to unseat City Hall incumbents Sara Nelson and city attorney Ann Davison. For them, and particularly for Sara Nelson, it raises this question of whether or not they can have candid conversations with the mayor when she knows that his political consultant and, in turn, her opponent's political consultant, is in on those conversations. So, for her, that was also another conflict of interest.

What does Sinderman say about his role with the city and being so close to the mayor?

It's fairly simple, which is that he's a very well connected person who knows a lot of people, and that is a helpful thing in a mayoral administration, that his so-called rolodex is very extensive. And so, in a mayor's office, in which a lot of the work is about speaking to people and coming up with compromises and getting as many people in the room as you can, his argument is he is better equipped to do that than pretty much anybody.

He doesn't see the conflicts inherent here?

No, he sees a break. He says that he has policy interests. He was saying that a lot of the work that he was doing, he doesn't see an argument there that that was helping necessarily Harrell's reelection. He just saw it as interesting work that he felt like he was capable of doing.

And what has Mayor Harrell said about how this is playing out?

Similar to what Christian was saying, is that he has a good relationship with Christian Sinderman, that, again, if you were trying to bring as many voices into the room as possible to create good policy, you want somebody who has the kinds of connections that Christian does. And, say what you want about the arrangement, but Christian is an extremely well connected person who is able to dial people up right away and they will pick up his phone calls. And so, the argument is, this person is uniquely qualified to do this work in my office.

Now that you and Jim Brunner have stepped back from reporting on this particular story, what's your takeaway?

My takeaway is, as you mentioned, it's not illegal. It was not found to be illegal. He didn't try and hide this. They were filing all of their expenses above board. He was being transparent about it. But, you know, I've covered City Hall for about 10 years now, and a few mayoral administrations, and it is unique. This is a new thing. Usually, what happens is mayors either seek out political advice outside of their office, or they have somebody in house who is doing the kind of policy work.

To have somebody in house who serves both of those roles is a unique and different situation. And I'm not here to say whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a new thing, and I think it certainly is worthy of a conversation about where the lines are between politics and governance, and whether what is good for Harrell's re-election campaign is also what is good for governing the city. And I think people have different opinions on the answer to that question.

We know that people and voters have less and less trust in their politicians and elected officials these days. What would you say to people who might think, well, this is just business as normal?

I think there's probably a little bit of truth to that. I mean, I think part of the reason we wanted to do this story is every now and then I think it's good to do a kind of sausage making piece of journalism, which is that there is a really close tie between politics and governance in the city, and it is a lot of the same characters who cycle in and out through different administrations. I think that's something that maybe people don't understand, is that there are names you've never heard of who play fairly key roles in getting people elected and then helping them craft their agenda when they're in office.

So, to an extent that is true, that is how things work. But I also think there's another counter argument to say, well, it would be naive to think that political considerations don't play into policy agendas of elected officials. And you know, Christian was just serving that role of making sure that Harrell was doing what voters elected him to do.

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