Eric Anderson came to Tacoma after Brame mess, left after others

He came to town a bullish leader with bold ideas, lavished with superlatives such as “big time” and “world class” that helped him quickly earn a change agent’s reputation when Tacoma leaders were calling for a cleansing of City Hall.

He leaves unceremoniously six years later, having lost the trust of a refashioned council that grew to view him more as problem than a prophet along a new course charted for the City of Destiny.

A grand entrance. A whimpering exit. A career administrator out of a job.

Eric Anderson, 65, whose six-year run as Tacoma city manager ended Friday, carries a legacy of contradictions:

The outsider tapped to lead Tacoma out of an inside scandal. The manager who held so tightly to control he lost it.

Anderson steadied the city bureaucracy with one hand, and molded a staff to loyally do his bidding with the other.

He battled to retain big business with grand gestures but put off mid-range economic development projects, frustrating key business leaders.

He guided the city through a deep recession, trumpeting nip-and-tuck budgets to avert layoffs and service cuts. But he depleted tens of millions of dollars in reserve funds and relied on a balancing act of paper adjustments.

He announced a citywide wage freeze, then took a $35,000 pay raise before the freeze kicked in.

Under Anderson’s watch, Tacoma cleaned up tons of trash from its neighborhoods, shut down scores of blighted properties and cut some crime rates by double digits.

It built a state-of-the art waterfront laboratory, helped a ballyhooed car museum finally break ground, launched a downtown pay-for-parking system and revamped an aging baseball park.

It also lost Russell Investments, razed the Luzon building, paid big to build a gifted Chinese pavilion and botched an Amber Alert response for a little girl who was abducted and murdered.

Anderson, who declined interview requests for this story, cannot be fully credited or blamed for any of these events. But as Tacoma’s headstrong top official, he made sure to have his hand firmly in all.

‘READY, FIRE, AIM’

In 2005, with Tacoma still wounded from the David Brame scandal two years earlier, the council unanimously tapped Anderson as city manager following a nationwide search.

Longtime city bureaucrat Jim Walton, acting as interim manager, ceded to Anderson in July. But the outsider from Iowa effectively replaced Ray Corpuz, the downtown-centric deal-maker who had held the post for 13 years until 2003.

Anderson, then 59, with a decade of experience as Des Moines’ city manager, brought an impressive résumé that included managerial stints in Evanston, Ill.; Eau Claire, Wis.; and Munster, Ind.

“He’s big-time,” then-Councilman Tom Stenger said at the time.

Anderson’s reputation as a budget hawk helped push his résumé to the top of a stack 41 deep.

“One of the things Eric did as soon as he arrived is he brought the budget process under control,” recalled Julie Anderson, the councilwoman-turned-Pierce County auditor.

Within three weeks of his hiring, Anderson proposed doing away with the city’s share of property taxes in favor of monthly user fees for basic services.

“This idea was so radical at the time, it could get no traction,” former Mayor Bill Baarsma recalled. “But people were intrigued by it – and by him.”

Anderson quickly floated other bold ideas, including selling the aging municipal building and using proceeds to build a new city government campus.

“He was ready, fire, aim,” said Steve Marcotte, a longtime city finance director who retired under Anderson, then went to work for Fife.

“Almost always, nothing ever happened. But if Eric wanted something done and you told him it couldn’t get there, he’d go around you to find someone to say it could. Then they’d go through months of work to find out, ‘Hey, this really can’t happen.’ That was Eric.”

Soon after arrival, Anderson won the label of open-government advocate. He held weekly sessions with reporters and made public thousands of pages of previously withheld records about the Brame scandal.

A short time later, the city reached a settlement with the family of Crystal Judson, the wife of the Tacoma police chief, who fatally shot her and then killed himself.

Taking note of Tacoma’s improved public image, council members praised Anderson in a glowing 2006 performance review for obtaining a “high degree of credibility with the public and the media.”

Anderson, who with his wife, Linda, had settled in a home in North Slope, quickly set his focus on the city’s neighborhoods.

In 2006, he launched the Community Based Services pilot project in four neighborhoods. The idea was to break down walls between departments, creating multi-disciplinary teams to tackle crime and blight. Volunteers joined code enforcement officers, street cops, permit officials and other city workers to rid streets of junk cars, drug-houses, vandalism, graffiti and other nuisances.

The successful initiative quickly expanded and spawned the citywide Safe and Clean campaign, with a goal to cut crime citywide by 50 percent. The goal wasn’t met, but Anderson’s staff cited double-digit dips in violent crimes and property offenses.

“Eric Anderson was a breath of fresh air for Tacoma’s communities,” said Edwina Magrum, an East Side activist who worked with Anderson in an effort to restore junk-ridden First Creek into a historic salmon stream.

“His policies increased safety and reduced blight, things that need to happen before you can even start talking about economic development.”

BUSINESS AND BUDGETS

In 2008, with two of Tacoma’s largest private employers considering moves, Anderson’s staff and other boosters cobbled together tens of millions of dollars in enticements to try to keep them from fleeing.

In the end, Russell Investments left, DaVita stayed, and Anderson drew praise.

“Eric made it very clear to us the city was going to do everything in its power to encourage us to stay,” said Jim Hilger, DaVita’s Tacoma vice president and controller. “We appreciated that. It made our decision easier.”

But afterward, some downtown movers and shakers grumbled that Anderson was dragging his feet on pledges. Progress on streetscape improvements and a new light rail stop was too slow, they griped. Some, used to Corpuz’s alacrity, complained about Anderson’s lack of it.

“When it came to some big deals that we worked on, Eric was superb, and the city delivered under his leadership,” said Bruce Kendall, president and chief executive of the Economic Development Board of Tacoma-Pierce County. “On some infrastructure issues, things took a little bit longer than a lot of people expected.”

Anderson dismissed his critics as rash.

“These things take time, and people are impatient,” he said at one meeting.

By then, a repeated criticism showed up in his annual reviews. Plans to draw new business and foster growth of existing ones needed to improve, went the council’s refrain.

While some downtown complained, others hailed Anderson for his methodical approach. To shatter years of opposition to paid street parking, he built support slowly through dozens of public meetings.

“Instead of trying to impose the power of the city onto the community, I think he took a very unique position: Let’s see what the community really wants,” said Steph Farber, owner of LeRoy Jewelers.

“Paid parking was a really hard thing to institute,” Farber added. “But I know as a downtown retailer, what I thought would be the worst idea in the world has proved to be very valuable for my business.”

As the council changed into one mostly of new politicians, complaints hardened that the career administrator kept them in the dark on key issues. Meantime, what once was considered Anderson’s strength – budgeting – began to draw doubts.

While other local governments announced service cuts and layoffs, Tacoma mostly avoided them by depleting $40 million of reserves and eliminating vacated positions.

With the reserves mostly gone, Anderson gave the council a choice: They could support a new budget based on his preferred action of refinancing debt and selling bonds to pay for capital needs. Or, they could lay off employees. When city utilities officials complained that his budget had inflated projected tax revenue by about $7 million, the council asked Anderson to make trims based on real dollars. He came back mostly with adjusted forecasts.

“This council member is concerned about whether we’re being real about our budget,” said Jake Fey, before voting against Anderson’s final general fund plan.

SURPRISES AND MISCUES

The last months of Anderson’s tenure were marked by surprises and miscues.

In February, to help cover mounting costs to erect a Chinese pavilion gifted to Tacoma, Anderson hastily placed a request before council to divert $250,000 from a long-planned highway project. It caught some off guard.

Two months later, council members learned from a news story that Tacoma police officials had omitted details in public statements about why it took 12 hours to issue an Amber Alert after Zina Linnik was kidnapped in 2007. An officer who’d been asked to activate the alert instead had gone back to sleep, The News Tribune reported.

Following the report, Anderson met privately with the council, convincing it that no further action was needed on the case. He changed course when a reporter asked for pay records from the night of the incident. They showed the sleeping officer had been on standby duty.

Anderson reprimanded the chief, called for an investigation of the officer and supported Mayor Marilyn Strickland’s call for an outside review of the Zina case. He also claimed both he and the council learned together about the details of the sleeping officer’s delay during a closed-door meeting in 2009.

But nearly all members who attended the meeting told a reporter they didn’t recall ever getting that information.

More surprises came in June when the council was asked to approve an $821,000 increase to the Cheney Stadium project’s construction contract. Anderson had known about the overrun for at least a month but hadn’t informed the council.

Before the council fired him Tuesday, Councilwoman Lauren Walker, who voted to renew his contract, said Anderson had become a scapegoat.

Most of the council simply said Anderson had served the community well, but that new direction was needed to shape the Tacoma of tomorrow.

Over his final two months, Anderson, the open government champion, halted his weekly press meetings. Instead, he issued comments to the media through the city’s spokesman or in written statements.

In his final one, after the council’s vote Tuesday, Anderson called his service to Tacoma “a privilege.”

“I am comfortable that I leave the city in a good financial position,” he said, “and I look forward to my future endeavors.”

Lewis Kamb: 253-597-8542
lewis.kamb@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/politics