OLYMPIA – On April 17, five days before the end of the legislative session, six Snohomish County lawmakers held a lunch meeting in the Capitol office of Sen. Paull Shin.
They came seeking detente in their prolonged and fractious conversation on what kind of university they envisioned for Snohomish, Island and Skagit counties.
Reps. Hans Dunshee and Mike Sells put on the table a proposal describing a branch campus of the University of Washington with a curriculum heavy on science, math and engineering classes.
Shin and Sens. Jean Berkey and Steve Hobbs brought a proposal to study what would be best: starting a branch campus, founding an autonomous polytechnic university or converting Everett Community College to a four-year school.
Whatever negotiation the senators intended never occurred.
Instead, this day would be a moment of truth for all.
The three senators pushed the study as a step toward their goal of an independent four-year institution with the polytechnic academic focus. They counted Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen as one of their thick-as-blood allies.
This day she left them.
No more studies, she said. Haugen wanted action, and that meant a branch campus.
“Until then, I thought we were winning,” Berkey said.
Haugen and Berkey debated the point. Their voices rose, as did their emotions. Haugen pounded the table, and her tears flowed.
Haugen repeatedly insisted that what Dunshee and Sells brought was good and should not be ignored in pursuit of an absolute political victory.
“Do you know who wins? The kids,” she kept saying.
Haugen had crossed over. They knew it then. And if the deal for a branch campus hadn’t been sealed before, it was now.
“At that point, I think it was over,” Dunshee said.
* * *
In summer 2006, the six lawmakers in the meeting, plus civic and business leaders, served on an advisory panel reviewing results of a $500,000 study on higher education needs in the three counties.
This report examined the merits of a branch campus and an unaffiliated university and estimated the cost of starting each.
On Aug. 21, the panel’s last meeting, former Sen. Dave Schmidt, R-Mill Creek, made a motion to recommend the state pursue an independent college based on the study’s findings.
Dunshee, Sells, Everett Mayor Ray Stephanson, Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon, Haugen and the rest agreed.
Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe, D-Bothell, a panel member, dissented, making clear she didn’t want state dollars diverted from the UW branch in her hometown to a new venture.
Recollections differ on the seriousness accorded that vote. For some, it represented the community’s desire for a bold initiative. For others, that ballot served as no more than a what-the-heck-it-sounds-great vote.
The day after, Dunshee, D-Snohomish, launched his public campaign for raising the UW flag on an infant campus, explaining his vote with the others was a case of saying “yes” to ice cream with his cake.
He said the Legislature wouldn’t be willing to do more for the Snohomish-Island-Skagit region than it did for Tacoma and Bothell, or Vancouver and Tri-Cities – the hometowns of Washington State University’s branches.
His peeling-off drew the philosophical line in the sand.
* * *
In the ensuing months, the four senators dug in their heels as Dunshee gained allies.
Sells, D-Everett, came onboard first. He was enamored with the idea of an independent university. But he sensed that lawmakers like McAuliffe and higher education leaders such as UW President Mark Emmert would fight the effort. He ratcheted down his ambitions from the bold to the practical.
Stephanson joined up in the late fall after he tried without success to swing a deal directly with Emmert to bring the UW to the city.
Stephanson upped the ante by spending $60,000 to hire three lobbyists – two of them former state budget directors – with established ties to House and Senate members and Gov. Chris Gregoire.
Meanwhile, Berkey, D-Everett, Hobbs, D-Lake Stevens, and Shin, D-Edmonds, worked with Reardon on a game plan that amounted to cementing their position early to prevent slipping later when the slogging would get toughest.
Reardon spoke almost daily with Berkey and Hobbs, making moves like a chess game.
Haugen, D-Camano Island, stood alongside the senators on various initiatives. But she and Reardon didn’t talk strategy; they didn’t talk at all in this process.
However, Haugen routinely shared her views with the governor, telling her early and often not to let the session end without something tangible in hand.
* * *
Gregoire did not want to decide what type of university should be created or where it should be built. She did, however, want to advance the cause of higher education in the region.
She told that to Haugen on Nov. 29 and to Berkey the next day. She said it again when Shin, Sells, Stephanson and the city’s lobbyists visited Dec. 5, asking for $5 million for getting started on a UW branch campus.
The governor didn’t respond to the money request. But in each meeting, she stated that she wanted to move quickly and to see the community united when the key decision-making time arrived in April.
The chances of that already seemed slim.
Reardon had been invited to the Dec. 5 meeting. The night before, he phoned Sells to say he couldn’t make it.
* * *
On Dec. 19, Gregoire released her proposed capital budget, which contained $2 million for a study defining the setup, operation and location of a regional university.
The language was deliberately vague to give lawmakers a chance to rewrite it when the session began Jan. 8.
In the House, Dunshee, Sells, Stephanson and Emmert worked in person, by phone, and with faxes and e-mails on a budget proviso that put the future and fate of a college in the hands of the UW.
But the work didn’t make it into the House capital budget. That plan contained $1.5 million for the study and the governor’s language on how to carry it out.
Similarly, the Senate’s proposed budget, issued March 28, had the governor’s language. It also had something the House plan didn’t: $4 million. Half was for the analysis and half for land.
* * *
Time was running out. The session would end April 22, the two sides weren’t talking much and no compromise seemed possible.
Representatives, with Stephanson’s lobbyists in the wings, felt they had the winning language.
Senators, with Reardon in the shadows, remained entrenched in the belief they had momentum for an independent university. Haugen and Dunshee began talking.
Then Haugen spoke again with Gregoire. The governor’s message was “now is the time to strike.” Gregoire viewed the branch campus as the vehicle. Pursuing another study meant further delay, and if the economy slowed, that could leave the region waiting longer.
Gregoire’s words loosened Haugen’s grip on her demand for a stand-alone university.
“I felt it was time to fold the cards and play the new ones. They (Berkey, Hobbs and Shin) didn’t realize they could hold out and get nothing,” she said.
She didn’t tell her peers, who considered Haugen safely ensconced in their camp.
* * *
Dunshee and Sells wanted the staredown to end. They had corralled enough commitments in the Senate for a branch campus, but they wanted the local senators onboard.
To keep from losing the UW, they could steamroll the senators. But they didn’t want it to come to that.
So they turned to the governor.
On April 10, Dunshee, Sells and Everett lobbyist Len McComb went to Gregoire and asked for help.
That night, with the House language calling for a branch campus in hand, Gregoire spoke with Reardon to learn what it would take to bring him and the senators into the fold.
Reardon expressed his concern that the representatives were happy putting up a UW flag and calling it a branch campus. He wanted assurances the UW would offer engineering, science and other courses associated with the concept of a polytechnic university.
He asked for a future review to track the development of the program. He pushed the point made often by Shin for a neutral analysis of sites to give communities other than Everett a chance to make their case.
Gregoire and her staff incorporated some of the points into the language and then spent the next day seeking agreement from other parties.
Stephanson agreed. Emmert reportedly told her it was fine but these had to be the last revisions.
Gregoire sent the wording to Reardon, too. To her surprise, he made changes and faxed it back.
Gregoire was annoyed by what Reardon sent back April 11.
Most egregious was new wording to allow making the campus autonomous if the UW didn’t perform precisely as promised, a change she rejected.
* * *
On April 12, Gregoire met with Berkey, Shin and Hobbs in Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown’s office in the Capitol, a few steps from the Senate floor.
Gregoire shared with them the language agreed to by Emmert and Stephanson and asked for their support. Berkey, urged by Reardon to hold the line, led the senators in pressing Gregoire to back a four-year independent university.
When Berkey and Hobbs pointed out they had letters of support from the community, she waved them off, responding that she had heard from plenty of folks on the other side, too.
Gregoire laid out two options: If they backed the branch campus, she’d push it through. If they didn’t, the end result could be a study followed by another conversation in six months on how to proceed and no promise money would be there to go forward.
Signals were missed or words misunderstood in the half-hour session, because when it ended, the governor left frustrated with the senators for being obstinate and Berkey departed feeling good about their chances.
Her spirits brightened more when Gregoire’s higher education adviser, Debora Merle, delivered new potential language. It called for a study of the merits of a branch campus, an autonomous four-year university or the conversion of Everett Community College to a four-year school.
At that moment, Berkey felt like the senators were winning.
Berkey didn’t know then how close Haugen stood to backing the branch campus. Gregoire did.
The senators found out Tuesday, April 17, at the lunch meeting in Shin’s office.
* * *
Even after Haugen broke ranks, the trio of Berkey, Hobbs and Shin believed they could keep a branch campus out of the final version of the capital budget.
Two days passed and they met with Sen. Karen Fraser, D-Lacey, to push the language. She is the author of the Senate capital budget.
By then the deal was done. Haugen, Dunshee and Sells knew it.
No one told any of the three senators.
On Friday, April 20, Berkey returned from lunch to find a copy of the final language face down on her chair on the floor of the Senate. She described the moment as the low point for her in the whole process.
At 9 p.m., the capital budget was released. Hobbs and Shin then learned the result.
Gregoire called Stephanson and Reardon with the news.
“She said the language we’ve been working on to bring the University of Washington to Snohomish, Island or Skagit counties was included in the capital budget,” Stephanson recalled the next morning.
He praised the senators for their role in securing $4 million, the academic focus and a commitment to look at the operation five years after it starts.
But Berkey said it still felt like a loss. The dream of a four-year comprehensive university shared by the advisory panel last August had disappeared.
Sells pointed out that lawmakers could all claim a win.
“What people really care about,” he said, “is what we’ve done to create greater access to college for our young people.”
Reporter Jerry Cornfield: 360-352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
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