Helen Sommers: An Oral History

pg. 292 The Press
Sommers dutifully stuck in millions of new
dollars for a rash of anti-youth-violence programs
passed by the House. But she voiced her skepticism
for how bloated and poorly conceived the crimefighting
effort had become by quipping, “I don’t
dare read what the money is going for.”
“She’s the right person for this budget because
she’s given to making cuts and being hard-nosed,”
says House Judiciary Chairman Marlin Appelwick,
D-Seattle.
“But she’s in many ways a loner. I think what’s
handicapped her over time is she’s gone out of her
way to fight issues. . . . She hasn’t always done that
with an optimum of grace.”
From the moment Sommers arrived in Olympia
in 1972 - as the former president of the King County
chapter of the National Organization for Women, a
reform-minded economist and the first Democrat
elected from her Queen Anne district in 30 years -
she’s rarely shied from a fight. In her first term, she
took on the timber industry in a successful attempt
to revamp the archaic tax on forest holdings. Male
opponents smugly derided her as “the girl forest
ranger from Queen Anne Hill.”
Sommers has been a staunch ally of the Seattle
schools, community colleges and the University
of Washington. Many think her real influence,
though, has come as the watchdog over arcane,
multibillion-dollar areas of state spending, such
as pensions and capital budgets.
Her leadership in closing loopholes in the state
retirement system prompted traditional Democratic
allies like firefighters and state workers to
back her opponent, current GOP state Chairman
Ken Eikenberry, in 1976. She has worked with
Republicans to restrain teacher salaries and deny
professors collective-bargaining rights.
Her admirers, particularly women, complain
Sommer’s toughness and directness have been
unfairly used to portray her as cold.
“If you come in as a `bleeding heart’ simply
looking for money, off with your head,” says Rep.
Cathy Wolfe, D-Olympia. “But if you logically
show how it will help, she listens and has a lot of
compassion.”
Her welfare-reform proposal may offer a more
clear window on what makes Sommers tick.
She has grappled with the problem of teen
pregnancy for years. Poster-size charts in her office
cite the cost: $30 million for delivery and prenatal
care of teen mothers, $30,000 a month to care for
a crack baby.
Driven by such facts, she drafted a bill that
included ideas few Democrats have spoken aloud:
forcing teens receiving a welfare check to live at
home, reducing benefits for families on welfare
for more than four years and freezing benefits for
those who have more babies.
Some of her ideas, such as establishment of a
teen-designed media campaign to promote abstinence,
won wide support. But liberal Democrats
stripped most of the harsher provisions from the
welfare bill. Several complained the bill punished
women for getting pregnant.
But Sommers says her feminist ideals drove
the proposal: “The welfare system does no favor
for women. It traps them. Being dependent on the
government is no better than being dependent on
a bad marriage.”
Her own life has been marked by similar selfreliance.
Sommers was reared in a small, blue-collar
New Jersey town, the daughter of an alcoholic father.
Unable to afford college, she moved to Venezuela
to work as an oil-company clerk for 14 years. She
married and divorced there.
At age 36, Sommers made her way to the University
of Washington, where she got bachelor’s
and master’s degrees in economics. She eventually
landed a job with King County. She still works there
as a financing analyst.
In her last four elections, Queen Anne and
Magnolia residents have never given Sommers
less than 70 percent of the vote. But inside the
Legislature, Sommers suffered a string of defeats
for leadership posts.
The toughest came in the early 1980s, when
she lost fights for Budget Committee chair and the
majority-leader slot to Dan Grimm, a legislator
with barely half of her experience.