How the Olympian helps shape the City Council: In its campaign against Meta Hogan, the Olympian pursues a lead that it invented

author : Rob Richards topic : Meta Hogan | Olympia City Council

by Rob Richards

If you have been paying attention to the recent local elections, you are most likely sore from banging your head against the wall. Our city council swung dramatically to the right (though I am sure they would call it the center), and we have a steep uphill battle ahead of us to protect our collective values.

Our choices this election were slim pickings to begin with, with Matthew Green and Meta Hogan being the only truly progressive choices on the ballot in the races for Olympia City Council.

Meta Hogan was defeated by Doug Mah. From the day she declared she was running, the Olympian, with the help of reporter Matt Batcheldor, took every opportunity they were given to paint her as only an “inexperienced homeless advocate,” neglecting to talk about substantive issues, and instead relying on a preconceived, biased narrative. They heavily supported Mah on their editorial page as well, using it as a forum to promote his campaign.

For some reason, however, Hogan losing the election was not enough. Days after the election, Matt Batcheldor wrote a front page article that accused Hogan of improperly spending campaign funds. This article contained lies of omission and overblown statements; in addition, parts of it were refuted by the very sources quoted in the article.

After the first article was printed, I decided to follow up on it and do some fact checking. What I found was evidence of one of two things, or perhaps a combination of both. Either Batcheldor is a lazy journalist and the Olympian news editors do not care, or the Olympian wanted to drag Hogan through the mud one more time. The election is over—why would they do that? The answer, I believe, is political. When Doug Mah takes the mayor’s chair, his current seat will be vacant and it will be up to the council to appoint the final member. Hogan has said that she will likely apply for that position. Therefore, by discrediting her reputation, the Olympian is doing its part to assure that there is not a single council member with truly progressive goals.

Sometime in the few days after the election, the Olympian reporter Matt Batcheldor claims to have received an anonymous tip that Hogan had violated Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) rules in her campaign spending. After receiving the tip, Batcheldor then called the PDC. Before we go any further, let’s look at the first sentence of Batcheldor’s article:

Olympia mayoral candidate Meta Hogan is under scrutiny from the state Public Disclosure Commission for spending campaign donors’ money on questionable items — including cigarettes for herself,

This sentence is the nut of the entire article, and Batcheldor attempts to convince us that this statement is true. It seems that Batcheldor was looking for a story to write, and instead of collecting facts and letting them write the story for him, he picked out the parts he wanted to use and wrote his article based on an untrue premise, that Meta Hogan ran a dishonest campaign.

The fact is that Meta Hogan was not under scrutiny at all. According to my conversation with PDC Communications Officer Lori Anderson, the PDC had received no complaints about Hogan and that a call by the Olympian’s Editorial Page Editor Mike Oakland was the first contact they had received. Oakland spoke to PDC assistant director Doug Ellis, who confirms the conversation and also stated that this was the first contact they had received regarding Hogan’s campaign spending. Mike Oakland’s involvement in this issue was left completely out of Batcheldor’s article, as was any mention of the anonymous tip he claims now to have received. It was highly irresponsible for Batcheldor to leave out the fact that the editorial page editor of the Olympian broke this to the PDC, while at the same time manipulating facts in order to lead people to believe that the PDC had been independently investigating Hogan.

During our phone conversation, Ellis explained that if questionable expenses are discovered in a campaign, the first step is a form letter to the candidate asking for a justification of the spending. Not, according to Ellis, what he would categorize as an investigation. When asked if Batcheldor’s lead sentence accurately reflected the actions of the PDC Ellis stated, “I suppose if they want to call it scrutiny they could, but really it’s no more than asking [the candidate] for an explanation.” Ellis went on to explain that if a candidate provides an explanation that passes muster with the PDC after that initial letter is mailed, then all is dropped. Ellis also clearly stated that there was “no formal investigation” into Hogan’s campaign spending at that time.

According to Hogan Campaign Treasurer Pat Tassoni, as soon as a question arose about Hogan’s spending, he and Hogan went to the PDC office, where they spoke with Lead Filer Assistance Specialist Sally Parker in order to clarify things. After hearing about some of the expenses in question, Parker advised that perhaps the cigarettes would not be considered acceptable after a review by the PDC. “At that point,” Hogan said later, “I asked what we could do about it.” Parker explained to her that the easiest thing to do would be to simply pay back her campaign for the expenses and update her PDC forms to reflect the changes.

Assistant Director Ellis confirmed, “That would probably solve any potential problems.”

Hogan has indeed paid back her campaign, and revised the forms in compliance with PDC rules, which should be available online at the PDC website before this article goes to press.

It seems that Hogan could have avoided all of this by simply not disclosing her smaller expenses. According to PDC rules, a candidate is not required to disclose any expenses under $50. All of the expenses in question were under that amount. Doug Mah had many expenses under $50 that he did not disclose, yet did not receive the same scrutiny from the Olympian that Hogan did. According to Hogan, she chose to report everything because she believes that “everyone that seeks public office should be accountable to the public to the highest degree possible.”

The decline of true progressivism in Olympia

There were two other important races on the ballot. In one, Matthew Green was defeated by Craig Ottavelli for a City Council position. The Olympian launched an anti-Matt Green campaign early on, at one point printing an unapologetic attack on Green in their endorsement of Ottavelli. Ottavelli is a supporter of the Pedestrian Interference Ordinance, and has made it clear in conversations that he is in favor of going much farther than that by passing even stricter laws that would further limit public access to public property. If we do nothing, the diversity that so many of us cherish will be wiped away in the name of short-term profits.

Rhenda Strub, who defeated Jean Marie Thomas, has stated that she will push for housing downtown that “most of us can’t afford.” Her views on the working class and poor of Olympia are neatly summed up by a quote that the Olympian printed and praised her for specifically, and that is: “We need retail customers, not social service customers.”

Ottavelli and Strub round out this new-look/new-direction council that believes in top-down leadership, that the will and desires of The People are superseded by their position on the council, and that bringing in revenue trumps all—even people’s rights.

We no longer have a progressive voice on our council, and we will suffer for it.

We must act now

All of this points to larger problems here in Olympia. We have one daily newspaper, and it frequently injects itself into local politics with an anti-progressive bias. Because there is no competition locally, they can get away with it. The closest newspaper that could afford to compete, the News Tribune out of Tacoma, is owned by the same corporation as the Olympian, and therefore will not enter this market. We have great local papers in the Sitting Duck and Works In Progress, but they come out bi-weekly or monthly and simply do not have the same resources as the Olympian.

This is symptomatic of the larger problem we are now faced with, which is a lack of cohesion among progressives in Olympia. If we solve this problem, we will no longer have to worry about struggling against a conservative-packed city council or have to worry about the Olympian spoiling the campaigns of our progressive candidates.

Too long we have rested on the fact that Olympia is a liberal town. We took this for granted and are now paying the price. Olympia is owned by the Democratic Party for sure, but many Democrats are heading to the right with Hillary Clinton. I believe the recent city council election is evidence of that shift. We have elected two new council members and promoted another to mayor that have no idea how to handle issues like poverty and homelessness in a sustainable way. They will continue to pass draconian laws while throwing lots of money at services that may mean well, but are inefficient, ineffective, and maintain homelessness as opposed to ending it. They will build the city hall on the port property because Doug Mah’s vision of synergy will bring the city lots of revenue in the short term. They will pay no attention to local environmental advocates who try to introduce new ideas or ways of thinking to the council.

True progressives in Olympia need to come together and develop plans for the future. We need to quickly develop a two-year plan to prepare for the next round of city council elections and focus our efforts on developing media strategies to combat The Olympian’s influence on local politics. We need to find candidates to run in the next election and we need to start grooming them now. It is never too early to start, and we might just need all of that time to gain enough steam to win back the council seats we need.

Sometimes, in a democracy, there reaches a point when things are bad, and nothing is going the way of The People, when we have to stop what we’re doing and realize that it’s our own fault, correct ourselves, and take back our place in the process. For Olympia, that time is now, and our window of opportunity is closing fast.