Helen Sommers: An Oral History

The Press
has been a key player on many more. “The state is
complicated and varied enough that you can work
in many different areas,” she says, “and entering
a new area is almost like going for a new degree.”
In her freshman term, Sommers took on the
powerful timber industry in a tax reform battleand
prevailed. (“I just didn’t know any better,” she
says.) More recently, she has focused on welfare
reform and teen pregnancy prevention. Through
the years, she also has spent endless hours working
to improve access to higher education and
has led numerous initiatives that have benefited
the UW.
“She single-handedly got us going on asking for
the Evening Degree Program,” says Sherry Burkey,
UW associate vice president for university relations
and director of government relations. “She has
continually reminded us of our responsibility as
a regional, public university. I can’t think of one
person who has been more supportive or effective
than Helen.”
Evidently others agree. In a 1994 Seattle
Times rating of all legislators, Sommers ranked
highest. Sommers appreciated the recognition
but mostly shrugs off both compliments and
criticisms. “I’ve made just about everybody mad
in my tenure in the legislature,” she says. “You
have to be able to take heat and not be too upset
about it. I don’t have a need to be loved. Being
respected; that’s different.”
After Two Decades, Helen Sommers
Rises To Prominence, Scowl and All
Jim Simon
Thursday, March 10, 1994
OLYMPIA - “I have exactly the wrong personality
for this job,” Rep . Helen Sommers says. “I’m
impatient. I’m blunt. I’m candid. I’m told I don’t
smile enough.”
pg. 291
The trademark scowl that can leave an ill-prepared
lobbyist, reporter or fellow state lawmaker squirming
gives way to the faintest grin. Then a chuckle.
Last night, Sommers was in the spotlight as she
completed negotiating her first state budget as chairwoman
of the House Appropriations Committee.
No matter how the final numbers come out, her role
represents a triumph of persistence.
It has taken the Seattle Democrat 22 years - two
decades of being labeled brainy but abrasive, gutsy
but tough to get along with - to achieve a position
of power many think she deserved long ago.
By her own measure, Sommers, 61, has had
“the rough edges beaten off me” in several failed
attempts to win leadership posts. Colleagues say
she spends more time cajoling and soliciting their
ideas, less time skewering them with figures and
policy arguments. And she laughs more.
If Sommers has mellowed a bit, Olympia has
changed more dramatically.
Today nearly 40 percent of Washington’s legislators
are women. Few vestiges remain of the
clubby atmosphere where lawmakers and lobbyists
cemented ties nightly over after-hour drinks. And
Sommers’ tightfisted skepticism about spending
state dollars, formed long before the term “New
Democrats” was coined, is in vogue.
“It’s Helen’s time,” says state Lands Commissioner
Jennifer Belcher, a former Democratic
House member. “She changed her style when she
figured out it was being used against her. But the
Legislature has also come to look a lot more like
Helen these days.”
Sommers isn’t easy to pigeonhole. An ardent
feminist, she championed a welfare-reform proposal
this session that appalled some allies in the women’s
movement with its tough medicine for teen mothers
and women who stay on the dole too long.
While most Democrats, led by Gov. Mike Lowry,
were clamoring for tax cuts, Sommers rolled out
a budget plan that panned the notion. Her initial
spending proposal left out so many favored projects
or budget-cutting ideas that 75 amendments to it were
drafted in her own committee.