'WHY IS THIS NOT FRONT-PAGE NEWS?'

Interview with Armen Yousoufian

by Doug Collins

I met Armen Yousoufian by chance on the bus. I noticed a man reading the classic Seattle history book "On the Take" which outlines the endemic political and police corruption here in the 1960s and 70s. I told him, "That's a great book." He remarked to me, "This kind of thing is still happening here." We quickly traded phone numbers.

Yousoufian for years now has been persistently trying to squeeze information from the King County government, mainly on events surrounding the public financing of the Seahawks football stadium, which replaced the demolished Kingdome. Through public disclosure requests and lawsuits, he's uncovered thousands of pages of documents including receipts, bills, consulting studies, etc. In the process, he's logged the highest public disclosure award in national history: $432,000 in penalties paid by the King County government (all but $50,000 of which has gone to Yousoufian's lawyers).

Unfortunately, the spectacle of the monetary award is the only matter that most news media seem concerned about.

Other than good investigative reporting by Rick Anderson of the Seattle Weekly, mainstream news organizations have completely ignored the troubling facts that Yousoufian has uncovered, which include evidence of massively expensive corruption in the county government, involving rigged consultant studies leading to a public price tag of at least $400 million dollars for an extremely sweet stadium deal for local billionaire and Seahawks owner Paul Allen.

You can read about the ins and outs of the stadium deal at ArmenYousoufian.com, and in Rick Anderson's February 12, 2003 article in the Seattle Weekly (www.seattleweekly.com/news/0307/anderson2.php).

I thought it would be interesting to learn more about the person behind the lawsuit, thus the following interview.

Armen Yousoufian would be happy to know that you are as angry about the stadium deals as he is.

COLLINS: How do you feel about the outcome of your public disclosure lawsuit?

YOUSOUFIAN: I still don't have all the documents.... The judge ruled basically "You're getting as much as you're going to." She might as well have said, "You've been as much of a nuisance as you're going to be. Here's some money. Now go away." But even what I have found shows that studies were rigged, and that [current King County executive] Ron Sims was involved.

What basically happened with the Seahawks stadium?

I don't know what happened because I wasn't in the room. I wasn't in on the conversations or the tacit understandings that existed between Gary Locke [former King County executive then WA governor], Ron Sims, and Paul Allen....

When the first HOK [consulting firm] study arrived to Gary Locke, one of Locke's chief assistants recommended the HOK plan to renovate the Kingdome for about $106 million. Shortly thereafter , Paul Allen bought a $25 million option to buy the Seahawks. Something happened around that time that involved Gary Locke in a series of events that would culminate in demolishing the Kingdome and spending $400 million for a new stadium. Part of the series of events was rehiring HOK to do a second study, which came to a new conclusion that renovating the Kingdome would cost about $400 million, the same as building a new stadium.

I can understand why Paul Allen or the Mariners or Howard Schultz [owner of the Saeattle Supersonics basketball team] would want to get a stadium for free, or close to free. I don't understand why the political leaders give that to them and go to the trouble and extent of rigging studies to say that it makes economic sense-and not refer to other studies by unbiased authors that say that the stadiums don't make economic sense....

Gary Locke and Ron Sims are in the same category. I don't know their motivation, other than that they had some motivation to not let the team leave town, to do what politicians in other cities were doing....

I'm just one guy who has found this stuff. I don't have the time or resources of the Seattle Times. Why aren't they reporting on it?

What's your view of the media coverage you have been getting?

The stuff I’ve discovered is not in the major papers. Why are they not telling the story? Why are they doing investigative reports on fake Chinese vases, and not doing a story on how the public got ripped off for $400 million? I've gotten tired of sending emails to reporters.

I've told reporters at the Seattle Times that I have these documents and letters, and asked them to sit down and talk with me and go through this stuff, and I've gotten nowhere. Why is that? Why are you [the Washington Free Press] talking with me and they are not? Why is this not front-page news? Instead they do articles on a fraudulent jade merchant or on problems at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. I'm not saying they shouldn't report on these things. They should, but they should also report on the stadium deals....

You have to assume there are certain people they are not touching because they are important to Ron Sims.

The press is tacitly participating in the corruption... We need a press to keep a check on out-of-control government. I don’t see that happening here.

What's the basic problem with government?

Power should come from consent of the governed. There are things that we haven't consented to. We voted down the baseball stadium twice.... It sounds more and more like the conditions in 1776. It's very disheartening....

I don't know exactly what the motivations are to essentially give away so much public money or to guarantee debt and have the payments be serviced by taxes on ordinary citizens by goods and services that have no connection to baseball or football. We have a half percent extra tax on all restaurant bills now in King County. Ron Sims described this as a "user fee." How is it a "user fee" for the stadium when a family in Auburn [far from the stadium] goes to the Taco Bell in Auburn on a day when there isn't even a baseball game?

A good example [of the problem with government] is our local elections.... It always seems to be: "Our public education system isn't very good. We need to spend more money on it." There's never anything about how much more money, how much we are spending now, how much we are being taxed now, and how much of that is actually getting into the classroom. There is no critical self-examination at all in the rhetoric in these election campaigns. There's no ranking things, sitting down, and putting them in priorities. At one moment they'll say, "people are losing their homes because they can't afford the taxes," then five minutes later they'll say, "we need to raise more revenue."

Maggie Fimia [former King County Council member] said to me once, "All that most politicians are thinking about is the next election." It's true, they are not thinking long term about the greater public good or responsible leadership.

Chris Van Dyk [a well-known critic of stadium financing and activist with Citizens for Better Things ] told me that a tremendous amount of the population enjoys professional sports and they don't want to see it go away. If it goes away they will blame whoever was in charge. A Gary Locke or Ron Sims is afraid that their popularity and their re-election prospects will be dimmed more if the team goes away than it will be if they publicly finance it.

How has Paul Allen done since the public stadium financing?

I know the evidence in the record is he bought the team for about $200 million. By the time the stadium was built it was reportedly worth about $600 million [it was early this year reported by Forbes magazine to be worth $823 million].

Paul Allen in just a couple years profited in the value of the team by just as much as the cost of the stadium. And that doesn't even count operating profits. How can there not be money in professional sports if the value of a team can go up so much in a couple of years? Why can't they afford $400 million themselves for the price of the stadium?

It's a place of business. If you are a manufacturer you need a plant. You either own it or rent it yourself. I assume Paul Allen's motivation was that he would like to get what other teams get in other cities, that is a building to do your business in for free.

The rent the Seahawks pay of about $800,000 a year is in essence free for a $400 million facility. That's only two-tenths of one percent of the value of the facility. There is even a cancellation right. Paul Allen has the right to terminate the lease and pay ten years rent, $8 million. That's nothing when you're talking about $400 million in profit.

What are some ways that government officials avoid complying with public disclosure requests?

They'll say the documents don't exist. They're saying that with the [more recent public disclosure requests on the] NASCAR study. One official said, "We only had one copy and we gave it to this other entity. We don't have a copy anymore. It's not in our possession." It turned out he had a copy sitting in his bookcase and he had forgotten about it.

In the case of King County they said they didn't have the documents, and then when they finally produced them, they said [as a defense], "We're incompetent. We had the documents, and the explanation for why we told you we didn't have them... is that we are incompetent. We didn't do it on purpose, as evidenced by the fact that as soon as we discovered we did have hem, we produced them."

I believe personally they will lie and then pretend they are incompetent. They have no shame. they are not embarrassed to pretend they are more stupid than you could possibly expect.... Or they'll say, "This will take research. We need six months to find this. We only have one person working on this."

They'll do anything and everything to force you to sue them, then if you do, there have been a few instances where you [the requester] hire a lawyer and file the lawsuit and you get the stuff right away. The stuff you weren't getting for six months you suddenly get. Then they say, "We don't have to pay your legal fees because we were just about ready to produce the documents anyway. It's just coincidence that we produced them two days after you filed the lawsuit." So then you have to fight for the legal fees, and often the judges won't give you the legal fees. The agencies know that it takes a very unusual requester-and they are rare-to go after them with a lawsuit. And even if they do, what happens? the Stadium is still there, and Ron Sims gets re-elected.

Some people are mad at me. They say “What did you accomplish”?

What similar types of corruption do you see happening now?

[Related to another public disclosure request] I found an internal document at the Department of Health that three inspections a year at espresso stands and bakeries are not necessary for public health. The report said only once a year was necessary. But they were doing three a year. Why? So they could preserve 30 or 40 inspector positions at maybe $80,000 a year. It's corrupt and self serving. When I moved here we didn't have this extent of self-serving bureaucracy....

Also, there's an area of Redmond, a huge development there, and it turned out the traffic studies were cooked to allow a developer to build homes without proper access roads. Somehow the county had allowed the developer to use a private traffic consultant rather than do it through the county.

The [consultant's] computer traffic model was fed data which included another road at the back side of the development. The computer model said there would be no problem with traffic. Well, there is not another road, and there were no plans to build another road. Now there's a tremendous amount of traffic on the existing roads, and people have become upset. It appears to be blatant corruption. This is another one that the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer haven't covered much. Why aren't they covering cooked studies?

On the other hand, the basketball stadium financing ideas are meeting a lot of public opposition now. Citizens for More Important Things has been revived. That's a hopeful sign. This kind of corruption seems to happening everywhere, but maybe it's coming to an end with this basketball thing.

You've lived more than half your life in Seattle now. How do you feel about this place?

Pretty disheartened. Now I'm looking to get back into the business world. But probably not in Seattle.