PERSISTENCE COULD PAY RESIDENT $1 MILLION DIVIDEND
By Rick Anderson
Seattle Weekly
s/persistence-could-pay-resident-1-million-dividen d/
Jan 28 2009
WA
But a curious hotelier is still without the Qwest Field details he
asked for in 1997.
Published on January 27, 2009 at 7:55pmIf you go back 10 years,
you see how little Armen Yousoufian was asking for: some papers. He
wanted to make sure that King County officials were being honest about
their deal-making for a new "$300 million" Seattle football stadium
(the true price tag ended up closer to $1 billion with interest and
other taxpayer costs). Yousoufian, a hotel owner in the University
District, was worried about the impact of a hotel-motel tax to fund
the stadium for billionaire Paul Allen. So he made a public records
request to see internal documents and splash a bit of sunshine into
the county’s back rooms.
The stadium, Qwest Field, has been operating for six years. Yousoufian,
now semi-retired, still does not have all the documents he requested,
nor does he have the full story of the county’s dealings with
Allen. But for his pissed-off persistence, he may soon have a million
dollars, he confirmed this week.
And he’d have been happy with less than half a million.
Yousoufian got the runaround under county executives Gary Locke and,
later, Ron Sims, who stalled Yousoufian’s requests for five years,
dating to 1997. He sued, and in 2001 a King County Superior Court
judge found the county’s actions "egregious," handing out a $5-a-day
penalty. The $114,000 barely covered his legal fees, and didn’t
send much of a message. So the sore winner appealed. A higher court
upped the daily penalty–a judge can impose from $5 to $100 a day by
law–and Yousoufian was eventually awarded more than $432,000. Again,
most of this sum went toward his legal fees. But he’d made his point,
and was willing to end the battle.
However, the county wasn’t. In 2007, it appealed. And on January
15, the state Supreme Court made it clear just how bad that move
was. The county, wrote Justice Richard Sanders, snubbed Yousoufian,
didn’t follow the law, and effectively penalized him for asking for
public documents, making him refile his requests 11 times over two
years. The case was sent back to a lower court to impose a penalty
of perhaps twice what Yousoufian has already been rewarded–closer
to $100 for each day of violation. As Yousoufian likes to say,
"They picked on the wrong Armenian."
The penalty, he said this week, "could be even more than a million,
depending on how the court calculates it." He wishes it were
county officials paying it out of their pockets, he adds, rather
than taxpayers. "But I hope this will finally send a very strong
message. These aren’t their records. They are the public’s records."