Muni News
VOLUME 90, ISSUE 1  - JANUARY 2000

OLD PROBLEMS, NEW TOOLS
Reprinted excerpt from 75 Years of Citizenship: THE MUNICIPAL LEAGUE of Seattle and King County: A History by Walt Crowley (1985)

In the Twenties, the League campaigned doggedly to institute a city manager form of municipal government, reluctantly abandoning the cause in 1926 after losing the second vote on the issue by a mere 111 ballots out of 90,000. Its efforts to promote land-use planning and zoning met with more success when the City Planning Commission was established in 1924. During this decade. The League’s interests touched on themes that would recur later in its history, including a proposal for a privately financed pontoon bridge across Lake Washington, creation of a tri-county Sewage Commission to combat the increasing pollution of Lake Washington and Puget Sound, and advocacy of a special property tax to subsidize the city’s trolley system.

Despite the hiring of an energetic and ambitious young attorney named Warren G. Magnuson as its secretary in 1930, the fortunes of the Municipal League, like those of the rest of the country, plummeted as the Great Depression took hold. Membership declined from over a thousand to barely 300, compelling the League to take two major steps: it hired its first fulltime executive secretary, Glen Eastburn, and it finally voted to admit women as members. The latter proposal had been “on the table” since 1913, but League elders repeatedly dodged the issue through many of the same sort of parliamentary maneuvers they deplored in government. On March 6, 1937, a full 17 years after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, the board of the Municipal League voted 18 to 7 to install its first female members.

Despite its depleted numbers and the distraction of Depression at home and war clouds abroad, the League kept busy during the Thirties. It advocated the permanent registration of voters to replace the extant system under which citizens registered anew for each election, and it continued its campaign for city-county government consolidation, improved public budgeting, and long range capital planning. In 1934, the League even dallied with promotion of a political slate, endorsing “The Order of Cincinnatus” candidates who swept out the incumbent Seattle City Council in that year’s elections.

By 1940, League membership had begun to rebound, reaching 682, under the guidance of then secretary Murray Morgan, now a respected historian. Morgan was succeeded by Ewen Dingwall, who would later make his own mark as director of the 1962 Century 21 World’s Fair. Despite the demands of World War II, the League remained active

successfully arguing in 1943 for a Freeholders election to draft a new City Charter for Seattle and in 1945 for new

state law mandating centralized county purchasing. Following the end of the war, the League won passage of the new City Charter in 1946, which remains the city’s basic organic law, and the adoption in 1948 of state law permitting “home rule” county charters.

The Fifties brought new growth and influence for the Municipal League. Its rolls swelled to 5,206 members in 1952 (before a dues increase trimmed them back to almost 4,000 by the end of the decade) and the League undertook what would become its greatest achievement, the creation of the Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle, or as it is better known, “Metro.”

The seed was planted in a speech by a young attorney named James R. Ellis, who called in 1953 for a “Metropolitan government” for greater Seattle. The proposal was formally embraced by the League in its 1955 report, “Metropolitan Seattle - The Shape We’re In,” authored in large part by Ellis. At the time scientists were predicting that Lake Washington had only a few years “to live” before it choked on algae fed by the raw sewage pumped into it by neighboring cities. With its report and these warnings, the League won passage in 1957 of a state law to permit creation of a county-wide “municipality” for water quality, waste management, transit, and parks supervision. The issue was taken to the voters in March 1958 but failed to pass. A revised proposal was put on the fall ballot, and met with voter approval, launching the initial $135 million program “to clean up Lake Washington.”

If Metro was the League’s biggest undertaking during the Fifties. It was hardly its only. The League campaigned hard but unsuccessfully for a new Country Charter in 1952, championed creation of the City Transit Commission, led the fight to expand the Port Commission from three to five elected members, secured the election of municipal and traffic judges, prodded the Seattle School District into reforming its civics and social studies curriculum, arranged for the first evaluation of municipal finances and operations by an independent private accounting firm, drafted Seattle’s first noise control ordinance, and promoted the installation of sprinklers in the city’s older, wood-framed schools.

The League maintained this extraordinary level of activity into the Sixties. Again, it was James Ellis who laid down the League’s most important challenge when, in 1966, he delivered a speech entitled “The City-A Cause Waiting for Rebellion.” He challenged the community to take control of its own accelerating growth through a comprehensive program of capital improvements, including rapid transit and new parks, roads, and civic facilities. The proposal was soon augmented with additional ideas, such as that for a “county domed stadium,” and became known as “Forward Thrust.” $334 million of Forward Thrust bonds were passed by the voters, in 1968 for virtually all of its projects, with the notable exception of rapid rail transit.

The year 1968 also brought success for one of the League’s longest fought battles, the campaign to create a new charter for King County. The decade ended in a flurry of activity in behalf of a County Ombudsman’s Office, a County hearing examiner system, a household tax to help subsidize Seattle Transit (remember 1928?), and as a token of the “good old days,” a grand jury investigation into vice, graft, and payoffs in the Seattle Police Department.

Transportation problems headed the Municipal League’s agenda for most of the Seventies, beginning with its research into proposals for the I-90 bridge and the proposed Bay Freeway between I-5 and Seattle Center. The League scored a major victory in 1972 when the voters delegated management of a county-wide transit system to Metro. Perhaps its best remembered accomplishment of the decade, however, was the revelation of massive irregularities in the design and budgeting of the proposed high-level West Seattle Bridge. The League’s findings spurred a grand jury investigation that culminated in the conviction of the city engineer and two powerful State Legislators for corruption.

On other fronts, the League joined with many civic organizations to promote initiative 276, which created the Public Disclosure Commission, open meeting laws, and the reporting of campaign contributions when it passed in 1972. Also in 1972, the League challenged a city proposal for $40 million in bonds to repair bridges, and when voters rejected the bonds, it helped the city to find $8 million in unspent funds to do the job with. It also investigated irregularities in Seattle’s attempts to acquire a computerized financial system, which led to sweeping reforms in city purchasing proposals.

In 1973 the League advocated election of Freeholders to draft a new City Charter, but the panel split over whether to create City Council districts (an issue which divided the League in 1911), and the proposed Charter failed. The League rebounded in 1977, helping to win passage of four out of five proposed amendments to update the 1946 Charter it had originally helped to write. As the decade closed, the League lent its support to the Seattle School District’s desegregation plan and it promoted revision of Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan, a process that it is still continuing almost ten years later.

This article was written in 1985 and since that time the Municipal League has continued to work for good government.

With your help the work will continue.