The twin passions of Bruce Smith

YAKIMA, Wash. -- Bruce Smith is not going to apologize.

The editor and publisher of the Yakima Valley Business Times, the man who sparked an open-meetings-law controversy, the man who opponents contend controls elected officials from behind some curtain -- that man sleeps just fine at night.

"I'm a political junkie and a newspaper junkie," he says, sitting in a South Third Street office decorated with framed front pages. "I think I'm very good at both."

As a newspaperman, Smith, 50, runs the twice-monthly Business Times and the monthly Central Washington Senior Times. He says his business model for the Business Times -- free subscriptions to business owners -- has kept him out of "the death spiral that daily newspapers are in."

He's a trusted adviser to initiative guru Tim Eyman, a close friend of state Rep. Charles Ross, R-Naches, and a member of a 30-person group that sets the Eastern Washington agenda for the Washington Policy Center, a statewide conservative think-tank. He has served in public office and helped elect political candidates, including the previously unknown Rick Ensey to the Yakima City Council.

Critics say he's a kingmaker, a guy who can influence local policy like an elected official without worrying he'll be voted out. Former Yakima City Councilman Ron Bonlender contends Smith wields "insidious power" behind the scenes.

"State representatives come to see him," says Bonlender, a Democratic activist. "Charles Ross, whenever he's away from Olympia, meets with Bruce Smith. Ross doesn't dance to the marching orders of Bruce Smith, but he checks with him."

A Yakima native, Smith has dabbled in politics for decades. This year he's become a familiar subject of controversy.

Yakima firefighters union leader Randy Raschko blames him for the defeat of an EMS levy proposal in February.

In May, the release of Yakima City Council e-mails shed light on his role in a council vote on budget policy. And last week, Yakima Mayor Dave Edler accused him of orchestrating a letter-writing campaign against council candidate Ben Soria, whom Edler supports in the Aug. 18 primary.

Smith declined to comment specifically on Edler's allegation, but insists behind-the-scenes politicking is neither unusual nor nefarious.

"There is no wizard behind the curtain," Smith says of his political activism. "I'm one of dozens of people who are involved in those things."

*******

Newspaper publishers who take a strong interest in civic issues are not an anomaly, of course. Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen has lobbied Congress for repeal of the federal estate tax for years and, in 1995, personally promoted a tax measure to finance the new Mariners stadium in Seattle. (The Yakima Herald-Republic is owned by The Seattle Times.) Former Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham befriended President John F. Kennedy and held regular dinners for Washington power brokers.

The list goes on.

But Smith doesn't just champion causes; he has become a key player in local politics. He has been elected to the East Valley School Board and has served on a county task forces on jail issues and a Yakima city task force on transit. He most recently co-chaired a city task force on performance audits.

He's worked to elect numerous candidates whose views aligned with his. State Rep. Norm Johnson, R-Yakima, for instance, says Smith has given him campaign advice along with endorsements.

"He'd make a hell of a professional campaign manager in a bigger town," Johnson says.

Ensey, a political newcomer in 2007, credits Smith with teaching him about politics.

"I had no clue what I was doing. None," the councilman says of his successful run against Ron Bonlender.

A property manager in Yakima, Ensey ran a shrewd campaign contrasting his conservative Republican views with the incumbent's liberal Democratic views. That was atypical of a nonpartisan race, but it worked.

Smith guided him on strategy, introduced him to key people and helped with fundraising.

He and Ensey approached the county Republican Party for an endorsement.

"We discussed the fact that it would be unusual (for a nonpartisan race)," says Jim Keightley, who was then GOP chairman. "But it's not a bad thing. We want conservatives on the City Council as well as in partisan offices."

The strategy worked, and Ensey continued going to Smith for advice.

They've disagreed now and then, most notably last year when Ensey voted for the city to pay for Joe Morrier's parking ramp to be torn down at the former Yakima Mall.

"I don't think he's as influential as people think, really," Ensey says.

The disclosure of council e-mails leading up to an April 14 vote has critics convinced otherwise. The e-mails show how Smith, Ensey and Councilwoman Kathy Coffey worked outside the public eye to make sure they had four votes to change the way Yakima develops its budget.

In one, Ensey writes, "I want to make sure that we go in with an agreed-upon motion and an agreed-upon defense of the motion (I assume we will use the motion that Bruce ultimately came up with)."

Ensey says he wrote the motion, and that Smith ironed out the language.

"I thought this was important enough to get his opinion," the councilman says.

Smith's role in the council vote became a front-page headline in the Yakima Herald-Republic. Local television stations picked up on it, and Smith took to the airwaves to defend himself on KIT-AM radio. He contended the Herald-Republic zeroed in on him because his newspapers compete for ad revenue, an accusation Herald-Republic publisher Michael Shepard called "patently ridiculous."

"Bruce's is a niche publication that is pretty far down on the list of major competitors for us," Shepard says. "Our bigger competitors are radio and television."

To Smith, the dust-up over that council vote was no big deal, even if the city did have to pay $2,500 in attorney fees to settle a legal challenge. If council members inadvertently violated public meetings law, it was a technicality.

"You've got to understand. Everyone thought we were doing something good," he says.

Edler, who was on the losing side of the prearranged vote, objected to Smith's participation.

"I do have concern about his role and the influence he's having over the Yakima City Council at this point," Edler says. "Rick Ensey's made no secret of the fact that Bruce Smith is his adviser."

Peter Sussman, a member of the national Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee, says it's unusual for a journalist to play an active role influencing policy, and it can be problematic from an ethical standpoint.

"The ultimate problem is that the reader doesn't have the information necessary to evaluate the coverage," Sussman says.

If there's a connection between a journalist and the person he writes about, that should be disclosed, he says. "And that goes for commentary as well as straight news stories."

*******

Smith is one of three or four people Eyman talks to when planning initiatives. A graduate of West Valley High School, he's been seeking out Smith's opinion since 2005, when he read a pro-Eyman commentary in the Business Times.

It was Smith who persuaded him to try to get Initiative 1033 on the November ballot. If approved, it will limit revenue increases for state and local governments to the rate of inflation plus population growth -- unless voters approve an exception.

Eyman says he probably would have pursued a less ambitious initiative this year. "He had to talk me into it."

The initiative leader says he respects the publisher's candor, cerebral approach to policy and his ability to gauge the pulse of voters in Central and Eastern Washington. "With these big, monstrous decisions, you want to talk to someone you can really trust," Eyman says.

Ross talks with Smith regularly to run things by him. He says he knows Smith will have thoroughly considered an issue.

He also calls on Smith for help with speeches at local events around Yakima.

"I've asked for his help many times on speechwriting, or things that deal with writing," says Ross, now serving his second term in the state House of Representatives. "That's what his specialty is; he's a writer."

They are usually of like mind on issues, though Ross remembers once when they disagreed -- on 2007 legislation banning handheld cell-phone use while driving.

Smith, taking a libertarian view, opposed the bill, but Ross, a public-safety-minded politician, supported it.

Afterward, Smith made him realize aspects he hadn't considered, leaving Ross regretting that "yes" vote.

"The reason people go to Bruce Smith for advice is that he's usually got good advice to give," Ross says.

*******

Smith doesn't spend much time on introspection, doesn't discuss formative experiences. He gently brushes aside those questions. But he does credit his mother -- he never knew his father -- for teaching him the value of hard work. She raised six kids on a clerk-typist salary.

"I remember the day we got a phone," Smith says. "I can remember the day we got a TV. I remember the day we got a car. I was in eighth grade."

He has his own family now, living in Terrace Heights. He and his wife, Virginia, have raised four children, including two of hers from a previous marriage.

He traces his interest in politics and journalism to the early 1970s, when the first news stories about Watergate were coming from Washington, D.C., and he was in junior high.

Prior to college, he supported Democrats -- including former Gov. Dixy Lee Ray. But he found Jimmy Carter to be a disaster as president.

"And then there was Reagan," Smith says, reverence in his voice. He has Reagan stickers and campaign buttons covering much of his office.

He went to Gonzaga University thinking he'd be a lawyer. That changed when he joined the staff of the school paper.

Smith was top editor at that paper three terms running before leaving for an internship with a Catholic newspaper in California. Smith never went back to get that law degree, and a newspaperman was born.

He returned home to Yakima and, with a couple of partners, launched the Business Report. In 1983, they began publishing the Central Washington Senior Times.

They expanded the business publication to the Tri-Cities, but the expansion backfired, Smith says. He and his partners got in over their heads with expenses.

The corporation filed for bankruptcy in 1991, and a year later, Smith and his wife filed, too. It took him years to crawl out from under the debt, Smith says.

He held on to the Senior Times and in January 1996 launched the Yakima Valley Business Times.

The opinion pages of the business newspaper afford Smith a level of influence that belies the paper's small circulation, about 7,200 subscriptions, mostly of the free-to-businesses variety.

When the Yakima City Council put a tax measure on the ballot for 12 new firefighters, a dispatcher and paramedic training, Smith not only editorialized against it, he joined the anti-levy campaign committee.

With Smith doing the committee's strategizing, he changed the focus of the question facing voters. Levy supporters framed the question as, Do you want more firefighters and do you want some of them to provide emergency medical services? Smith reframed it to, Do you want a "double tax" for a program that will hurt private ambulance companies?

It was the kind of rhetorical tactic that a smart political communicator prides himself on.

"You get down to what resonates and what's winnable," Smith says.

He's been known to work 80-hour weeks, although that can be hard to quantify. The lines get blurry between Smith the publisher, Smith the political mover and Smith outside the office. His interests outside publishing and politics are, well, publishing and politics.

His social circle includes many of the people he deals with professionally.

A poker fan -- he attended the World Series of Poker this year in Las Vegas -- Smith organizes a $20 buy-in game every two weeks that often includes elected officials. Ross, Ensey and Yakima County commissioners Rand Elliott and Mike Leita have been among the players.

The games, held at a private office, allow Smith and his friends to get together and relax, away from the forced propriety of life in the public eye. The card games feature "a lot of junior high humor," Smith says, and the guests know they can trust each other's discretion.

"It's a group of people who trust each other," he says. "We can tell jokes and have a good time and not have to read about it in the Herald."

*******

Smith's core constituency, the business people of Yakima County, generally believe he does well by them, says Brad Christianson, the owner of Roy's Ace Hardware and past chairman of the Greater Yakima Chamber of Commerce.

Though Christianson doesn't always agree with Smith, he thinks he's well-informed and appreciates Smith's lobbying efforts on behalf of business.

He's also a fan of the Business Times news coverage.

"He profiles a lot of businesses ... " Christianson says. "He does a lot better job than the Herald does on business."

Jim Russi, who owns Piety Flats winery outside Wapato, agrees.

"I give it high marks," he says.

At the same time, Russi questions whether Smith's politics sometimes get in the way of his news judgment. Russi, a vocal opponent of the Yakima County's controversial Douglas Auto Wrecking relocation project, believes Smith's relationship with Leita kept him from being critical of the project.

"He covers business, which I'm very interested in," Russi says. "I just wish Bruce Smith would stay out of politics."

Smith disputed the notion that he went easy on the commissioners over the wrecking yard relocation. He's written columns that put him at odds with Leita on several issues -- from the proposed Black Rock reservoir to the proposed city of Yakima aquatic center.

"Mike and I disagree on a lot of things," Smith says.

The wrecking yard move just wasn't one of them.

In January 2005, Leita asked Smith to join the jail task force because of columns he wrote criticizing mistakes the county made in building its new jail. Why not let the astute critic help clean up the mess, the thinking went.

"I respect Bruce Smith's opinions when I seek them and when he offers them," Leita says. "Having said that, he's not the Wizard of Oz. He's a committed citizen wanting better government, and he's fully engaged in that process. This community would be better off if there were more Bruce Smiths."

* Pat Muir can be reached at 509-577-7693 or pmuir@yakimaherald.com.

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