Background:

Age, 63. Occupation. Mayor City of Auburn. Born in Boston, Mass. Family: Married, two daughters. One sister.

What is your educational background?

AA at Mesa Junior College and Degree at Institute of Financial Education.

Have you served in the military? If so, what branch, what rank, how long? Yes, U.S. Navy. Just under 4 years, served in Vietnam.

Tell us about yourself:

My father was in the Navy, and our family moved a lot, as I did when I was in the Navy myself and in the early years of my marriage to my wife, Kathy. I’ve seen a large part of this country and the world, and Kathy and I knew we wanted a hometown community that provided good schools and a safe place to raise our girls. We found it in Auburn, a place where our children could grow up with childhood friends, a variety of opportunities and lots of memories.

Over the last 20 years I became involved and invested in my home of Auburn. I love our town with all my heart. My development as a community activist came from my love and belief in our community. Citizens’ committees, vice president of the Auburn Food Bank, vice president of Miss Auburn, president of the Auburn Area Chamber of Commerce, president of the North Auburn Merchants, first president of my homeowners’ association, founder of the Auburn Chamber’s Youth Career Conference, and as a volunteer on many others. I have been involved as worker and leader to give back a small measure of what you have given so freely to me and my family.

I believe as a small, relatively poor, blue-collar city in two counties we must work in partnership as much as possible. As the saying goes, we are either at every table or we are on the menu, and we have been on the menu for too long.

As mayor I attend all six of our Auburn City Council committee meetings. I am involved in committees and boards in King and Pierce Counties, regional and state meetings, national groups, and most recently was one of the original members of the US Mayors’ Committee on the Infrastructure Stimulus Package, working directly with the candidates and then President Obama’s staff. Now I am a member of the U.S. Mayors Water Council, the National Transportation Committee, the AMTRAK Advisory Board and the International Trade Committee.

I am currently president of the 37 city Suburban Cities Organization representing 820,000 people in King County. I work with the nine Valley Cities organization, Pierce County Cities and Towns, am vice chair of King County’s Regional Policy Committee and sit on the King County Flood Control Board. I am past president and member of the South County Area Transportation Board and past president and a member of the five city Valley Communications for 911 services and others.

To serve this community requires cooperation, and I remain committed to Auburn and will make sure we are represented at and represented to all the governments around us.

Serving as mayor during this critical time, I am responsible for leading us through the many challenges so that we are positioned for the opportunities ahead. Fortunately, I work in partnership with an inspired Council that has also taken up this challenge with me. We will build on our strengths and continue to work together to finish what we have started, making Auburn, our hometown, a better place for us and our children for generations to come. I ask for your support in the election and in the work before us.

Assess your strengths and weaknesses:

Focused listener, patient in long term planning, work in partnerships and in a cooperative manner, willing to share any credit. I have the ability to decide once information has been received and accept responsibility. I am impatient with process for process sake. I am leading government but am distrustful of the power of government. I show patience in short term events.

Name some things people might not suspect about you:

For years I was a surfer, a single-handled sailor and a writer of poetry. My favorite reading materials include science fiction and historical novels.

Who have been the most influential people in your life?

My father, my great uncle Peter Conlin, Jim Weese, Fred Poe and Cyril Van Selus.

What is your leadership style, and there is anything that you feel you need to improve or change about it?

Decision maker, manager not boss. Wait for all input but then decide. Be willing to accept what doesn’t work, seek other paths. Patience, always patience.

Why do you want to be mayor?

I love this town. It gave me all the things I did not have as a child wandering the world in a military family, friends, home, and relationships. I saw a place of despair, we are making a place of hope and welcome.

Name three things you would like to accomplish as mayor?

1. Complete all road resurfacing, and as a part of that leave in place a long term method of funding for on-going street preservation.

2. Complete revitalization projects in downtown, north Auburn and on Auburn Way South to stabilize revenue and limit reliance on citizen property tax.

3. Complete quality of life projects, including safe neighborhoods by police and resident partnerships. More programs for all including our children, adults and seniors. Connect trail systems, add bike and pedestrian paths to connect our community.

What qualifies you to be mayor?

I have been a manager since the early ’70s. I am well versed and have taught the cash flow financial systems used in government finance. Auburn is a small city, and in order to care for our citizens we must continually form partnerships and work in a cooperative manner through the valley, region, and state and on a federal level. That period of time when Auburn could remain hidden has passed. We must work with others to help our citizens. I am hard at work on the enormous problems we are already involved with such as concerns over flooding this year with respect to Howard Hanson Dam, work on stimulus projects for our citizens and our city’s returning veterans. There is so much in progress right now that must be completed for our safety and our future.

Why do you think the citizens of Auburn should vote for you?

As mayor I have a proven record of working in cooperation and asking for citizen input. Together we are meeting in the neighborhoods to find solutions, and together we are changing our Auburn to make it a better place for those who will come after us. I bring experience and a cooperative leadership that is inclusive of all of our community and needs.

Have you held elective office before, and if so, recount at least three of your accomplishments?

Eight years as mayor, four as Auburn Council member.

1. Top accomplishment — not mine, although I helped — would be the day the faith community gathered and told me the Auburn School district agreed to allow for and join the federally funded Summer Lunch Program for our children in need.

2. Establishment of the voted Save Our Streets Program to finally have a secure ongoing funding source to repair, resurface and maintain almost 100 miles of local streets.

3. Establishment of the first fire authority in the state. The accomplishment to me was to finally have the ability to have the number of firefighters, the training for them and the equipment for them to adequately serve our three cities. This also allowed for the hiring, training and equipping of the police service we needed.

4. Improvement of many of our parks and trails in our city with many new trails connections and completion of new parks.

What is your experience administrating budgets small and large?

I have administered budgets in banking since 1972 and worked in budgeting with companies with budgets from thousands to hundreds of millions, including the current general fund budget and the full budget of the City of Auburn.

Have you ever run a business?

Yes as a branch banker of an independent bank.

How would you maintain the same quality of life residents now enjoy without imposing additional tax burdens on them?

You can reduce costs, and you can raise income. That is basic finance. I have reduced costs per person throughout my administration and continually look to raise income through adding new businesses in areas we want business, making existing business more successful and working to bring the types of business that bring in sales tax and family-wage jobs.

What changes would you make to Auburn?

Bring up the sources of income to reduce reliance on property taxes. Bring up the current average income level of our citizens by providing new working opportunities and retraining facilities. Provide for a higher quality of life for our citizens. Work for stronger partnerships including Muckleshoot.

What would be your top priorities?

Attract the business we need where we want it to go to increase and stabilize income, lessening dependency on citizen property taxes. Attract through stimulus grants and other methods training and retraining facilities for green jobs and the new economy. Provide for ongoing financing for preservation of all of our streets. Provide for the safety of our neighborhoods with more police/neighborhood partnerships, more lighting, safe walking paths, trails, bike paths.

Name three of the principal issues confronting Auburn and how you plan to deal with them:

Income – We are still a relatively poor city. While we are very proud of our blue collar and farming roots, as I have shown my priorities include bringing that income level up not just to the city but to the citizens by the type of businesses we bring in and the jobs they will provide.

Safety – We are at another junction with the gangs of the metro areas beginning attempts to intrude into our community. It isn’t the first time, and we have been watching how other communities deal with the problem so that in partnership with the schools and the community we can stand together against this threat.

Infrastructure – Like almost every city in the United States, the infrastructure that was funded until the late 1960s by state and federal government is falling apart in our city. It’s not just the streets. We still have clay sanitary sewer pipes in parts of the city. The water system as well as storm and sanitary sewer have a complex and incredibly expensive system of pipes. The water system using the great aquifer below the city is no longer allowed to be used for the expansion we are now required to accept, forcing us to find new methods and sources of water.

With the exception of the project on Auburn Way South that was funded through the settlement with Muckleshoot and WSDOT over the White River Amphitheater, none of the traffic signals are connected together electronically. All this must have a stable financing system, and it cannot be borne on the backs of our citizens. We have got to have the partnerships with state and federal government to get those funds back to the cities.

How would you pay for street maintenance?

I have been working with the valley cities, the Puget Sound Regional Council and the ports of Seattle and Tacoma as well as Burlington Northern Railroad to find funds for the reconstruction and preservation of our big freight corridors. These require regional funding as they are a regional asset to the largest concentration of warehouse and distribution centers in the northwest. The data I have seen from our cities shows if we can get the money to repair and preserve those corridors, we can fund the rest through systems already in place. This is not a request for grants but ongoing preservation funds for our cities.

What do you think of plans now underway to redevelop the downtown?

We must find new, stable income to keep property tax rates down. Federal, state and county regulations state that we must accept new people in our city, and having transit associated residential developments is the most responsible alternative to ongoing sprawl and helps us avoid massive multi-family developments in our neighborhoods. This development also includes using environmentally sound practices and continues a practice I have encouraged to incorporate art into that which government builds.

What is your position on homelessness in the city?

We have been involved with the one night count and our non-profit organizations do wonderful work, but that simply will not help those in need. When the mayor of Enumclaw and I heard that more than 50 percent of the homeless in King County were veterans, we worked to restore the Veterans Levy, put in place after the Korea War, to help the vets. Those programs are now starting to provide housing, mental health and medical assistance to all of those vets in need and job training programs are coming on line, all out of the Vets Levy.

But there is more, displaced families, issues of abuse. For that we are working with the cities of Algona, Pacific, Enumclaw, Federal Way and other cities and their Councils are reviewing and passing an interlocal we call SEARCH, or South End Regional Collective Housing, to allow all of us the ability to put in a little money, apply for matching grants to build housing over a long term basis as projects in our cities came ready.

I have been working with our Human Services group to coordinate the available medical, dental and other services available to those in need, including basic ideas such as the number, type, dates of the mobile medical van, dental van, blood pressure, eye exam, hearing exam and others so that the schedule becomes known to all the agencies and therefore more of the ones in need.

Given King County’s plans to drastically cut funding for human and social services on the south end, how would you deal with the fallout?

They will cut funding, although with two county Councilmembers running it will likely start to lose further funding toward the end of the year at the coldest, most difficult time. We will work in partnership with other south King, north Pierce cities to pool resources and find as much as we can to help. City government alone cannot provide all that is needed, but together, the city, the faith community and all of our citizens that have shown they do care we will work together to help all we can. We will continue to work with the non-profits for the One-Stop Shop, the multi-service center so that all of Auburn’s non-profits have a presence in one place.

Do you believe the City is responsive to its citizens, and if not, how would you improve things?

We are trying. We’ve got Channel 21, the work in the Auburn Reporter both in print and on-line, my update, the direct mailers, the meetings in the neighborhoods that replaced our unsuccessful efforts to have Council meetings in the community. We’ve got web pages and we twitter. We send out alerts and with all of that we still need to find more ways to communicate.

Given that King County will no longer accept misdemeanor inmates from the cities after 2012, what do you think of the city’s partnership with other cities to build a new one?

It’s the best of a whole series of tough choices. After Executive Sims came into office and notified the cities that they would be required to vacate their misdemeanant inmates from the King County Justice Center by 2010 we all worked to find other arrangements. Cities like Auburn looked for a decade at building their own jail, but the costs for Auburn alone were more than $30 million for a jail judged inadequate as soon as it finished construction. The cities that became known as the JAG, including Auburn, contracted with Yakima County and our prisoners were transported, sometimes daily, back and forth across the mountains for hearings and meetings. But that contract is coming up too, and Yakima wanted to wait to see if they could get more favorable changes at additional cost to the cities.

In the meantime King County extended the date first to 2012 and then 2015 but gave the cities a new list of charges tat would double and triple some of those costs.

While all that was going on, the matter of the Bellevue jail site had not been resolved. The same bond that paid for the Kent Justice Center paid for property for a jail and to construct the other needed Eastside facility in Bellevue. It was never built. The cities included in that bonding effort, the JAG, moved to get that property sold which finally closed a few months ago and those funds are being distributed to the cities with the caveat that they be used only to build new jail facilities.

There has been a coalition of cities working with Seattle hoping to build a joint facility, some are meeting with King County but the costs to operate are driving most away. The remaining group is called SCORE and it is made up of the cities of Federal Way, Auburn, Renton, Tukwila, Burien, Des Moines and SeaTac. In partnership they are building a 680-bed facility at a cost judged to be just under $100 million dollars at a rate to the owner cities approximately what they each pay today. In addition, it allows for bed space to be rented to other cities which would then drive down costs for the owner cities. Would it be better to use county facilities? Yes, but we have not been able to get a reasonable price for service or ongoing use, and each agreement we have received from the county includes a stipulation that the cities could be asked to vacate again based on the needs of the county.

Do you think the community center and activities center proposed for the Les Gove Campus represent a wise investment?

Was it a wise investment to build a 1,000-seat Performing Arts Center in a town of 21,000? Was it a good idea to bond for a huge King County Library in a community of 28,000 or a brand-new modern senior center in the tens of millions? I believe in times of plenty governments should cut costs and save funds and expend them, judicially as the good stewards of the people’s money. In the leaner times when people need jobs. I do believe in the Council’s vision of a community center to bring us all together in this expanding cultural mix we call home.

Closing statement:

These are difficult times. I am as concerned as I was back in January about Howard Hanson Dam. I believe the dam is secure. I believe that the “temporary” grout curtain being installed now will work as did the partial one done back in 2001. I also believe the Colonel’s statement that he will not raise the level of the pool behind the dam above 1,155 foot elevation. Now his staff do state that he has the sole authority. They state that if they feel the storm is of a short duration, if it has a quick peak then he can order the level to go higher. There is a possibility of an El Niño forming, that might take the pressure off. But I have listened to him and his staff state repeatedly that Howard Hanson Dam was built to ease the flooding of the lower valley including Kent, Renton and Tukwila and in every single meeting the state that Auburn will be the first to bear the burden of the flooding and that he can accept minor flooding in this area.

We must be prepared and we must be in communication with our residents and school district, neighboring cities, county, state and federal representatives to have a coordinated plan that includes and protects the people and businesses of Auburn.

This is my third recession I have gone through, and I know that the worst of the recession in terms of its effect on the people is yet to come. Business may begin to improve, goods and services may begin to flow again, but the cumulative effect of ongoing unemployment has yet to make its way through the economy. In addition, if the situation in California continues to worsen its effect on the national economy through its connectivity with the nation can begin a second phase of the recession all on its own. We must work together in more partnerships and within cites find new ways to provide services with increased efficiency and less cost. We must look at combining services not just within a county but across county lines, across agency lines and even lines of government. It is so important to me to bring different parties together to make sure that the people of Auburn, for once, do not get lost and neglected as has happened before.

With all of that the stimulus money will continue to be available, and for the first time since the 1060s government, citizens and business, even the faith community have joined together, and there is the possibility that we will bring new jobs, new industries and new opportunities to our people. The partnerships we have formed are important to our future, and I want the opportunity for Auburn to have all its people deserve.