booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

Chapter 10: Earning his “MBWA”
“Being Pierce County Executive was the best job I’ve ever had,” Booth says. Tacoma
was his home town, and Pierce County was Washington’s second-largest, with a population
of 500,000 in 1981. “It was the size where I could get to know everybody I worked for
and with.” It was there he says that he earned what he called his “MBWA” – the art of
Managing by Walking Around.
He took office on May 1, 1981,
after eight weeks of 16-hour days. Fueled
by fast food and surrounded by mounds of
file folders arrayed on the floor in orderly
chaos, he literally rolled up his sleeves to
immerse himself in the details of county
government. He studied the seven union
contracts up for renegotiation; took note of
the number of middle managers; made flow
charts of responsibilities; analyzed who was
driving a county car and how many there
were; calculated the cost of replacing a stop
sign and marveled, “Why does it take three
workers to do that job?” He discovered that
the county’s technology was state of the art
for the 1950s.
Those who hadn’t worked with him
before were immediately impressed by his
memory – “near-photographic” many said – and ability to focus on the most important
details. He’d billed himself as a “decisive administrator with extensive management and
leadership skills,” so the pressure was on. Yet he was more energized, more confident and
calm than he’d ever been.
For starters, he imposed a three-month hiring freeze because there was, as usual, a
curve ball: Not only was the county $4.7 million in debt, America was in its worst recession
since the Depression. The Fed’s tight money strategy to combat the runaway inflation of
the late 1970s had painful unintended consequences. The Northwest was particularly
hard hit, with timber and construction hammered. The jobless rate in Pierce County was
9.6 percent. In the next 18 months it would peak at 14.2. Sales tax revenues were down.
Cuts in state and federal assistance loomed. Pierce County’s new era of “home rule” was
impacted by a host of outside forces.
In Olympia, the new governor’s task was even more daunting. John Spellman had
Booth mulls a problem during his term as Pierce County
executive. Bruce Kellman ©The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA)
1984 Reprinted with permission.
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