Abunch of Seattle political people, and not just the Colacurcios and their friends, must have been made unhappy this morning by the Washington Supreme Court decision in Washington v. John Phillip Conte et al. It seems, after all, destined to return “strippergate” to the area’s political lexicon, long after it seemed to have faded away.
The legal issue involved may shale up a few political people, too. In Conte, the court is holding that the state Public Disclosure Commission’s actions against campaign law violations don’t overlap with, and don’t preclude, the possibility of a local or state prosecutor filing criminal charges covering the same territory: You’re not necessarily done with law enforcement when the PDC is done with you. It was on that basis, that PDC action precluded other legal action, that a trial court dismissed a clutch of charges of violations of the campaign finance law. The Washington Supreme Court said it was wrong to do that, and reinstated the charges.
As the court wrote, “the State’s ability to charge under two statutes is not a reason to hold that one of the statutes must prevail over the other.”
The decision includes a fine summation of this complicated case, which a couple of years back was all over the Seattle headlines but has died down since. A key part of it has to do (incredibly enough) with a parking lot, and the need to expand parking space, and the effort of the owners of the Rick’s strip club to get city approval for the expansion of parking onto nearby property they own, parking they installed without city approval. At the city planning department and commission level, they ran into turndowns – all of this went on over the course of more than a dozen years – and then in 2003 appealed to the city council. (As a side note, we’ve never grasped the argument at that core level of the case, of why such an expansion should be objectionable.) The city council turned out to be more amenable, approving the rezone on a 5-4 vote. The problem was that, as a Seattle Ethics & Elections Commission investigator reported:
In the fall of 2003 the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission . . . fined council members Jim Compton and Heidi Wills for violation of [Seattle Municipal Code (SMC)] 4.16.070(1)(a) when they voted on the rezone after undisclosed ex-parte contacts with representatives of Rick’s. Judy Nicastro was fined $200 for violating SMC 4.16.070(3)(a) because she accepted a lunch paid for by [attorney and former Governor] Albert D. Rosellini, . . . a close personal friend of the Colacurcio family . . . [d]uring [which he] lobbied Nicastro to grant the zoning change . . . . Wills was fined $1,500 for voting with impaired judgment, because she had toured the Rick’s rezone site with Albert Rosellini . . . after she had been notified the rezone issue was quasi-judicial.
News reports . . . mentioned that Compton, Nicastro, and Wills had received a total of about $36,000 from “people connected to Frank Colacurcio, Jr.” (Seattle Times July 19, 2003 article.) . . . These contributions were received by the candidates’ reelection committees before the rezone was approved. After these contributions came to light, each of the three candidates refunded all of the contributions.
And that was only the beginning; as the court decision describes, there was much more. Not a lot of Seattle political types are going to want to be reminded of all those good old days.
At least it may push the Alaskan Way off the front pages for a bit.
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