booth gardner - Washington Secretary of State

to “work 110 percent to see that it works.” Taking a cut in pay, as well as a reduction in
power, rankled Stortini and Bujacich. “It was a double whammy for them,” Winsley says.
“All that salary cut did was cause animosity, but it wasn’t Booth’s fault. The people made
that decision when they approved the new home-rule charter.”
The council’s newcomers, including the often irascible Rasmussen, got along
fine. Ironically, it was Rasmussen, an unpredictable fiscal conservative, who pushed the
council to hire more staff. “We’ve got two hands tied behind our back,” Slim said, arguing
that they needed a budget director and a legal adviser to help interpret the new charter.
Stortini jabbed that
the new form of
government was not
supposed to cost
more. “Joe would
run to the press
and say, ‘Look what
the new council
members want to
spend money on
now,’ ” Winsley
recalls. Outraged at
the suggestion he
was a spendthrift,
Rasmussen would retaliate by reading aloud Stortini’s printed comments at the next
council meeting in a voice oozing sarcasm.
Vraves, a former mayor of Fife, was affable from the outset and usually voted
with the new council majority. “After a while, we all worked together and got along,”
says Winsley, who headed the new council’s Ways & Means Committee. Gardner strived
to stay above the fray, praising the council as a diverse “board of directors.” He said he
appreciated their varied talents. Bujacich, for instance, had “a good grasp” of the budget,
he said diplomatically, while Winsley and Rasmussen were also looking out for the county’s
interests in Olympia. “I love problems,” he said, “and I love to solve them.”
“Booth did a very good job” of managing a wholesale reorganization of county
government, Winsley says. What began as a bumpy courtship evolved into a virtual
honeymoon that lasted into fall. Members of a group called Friends of the Charter
appeared at a County Council meeting to urge the council not to become too enamored
of his charms. The group included several former freeholders as well as members of the
Municipal League and the League of Women Voters. “In the case of any love affair there’s
always a possibility of a certain amount of blindness on the part of both parties,” said
Dorothy Clark, one of the Friends. She admonished the council to remember that one of
Port official Lew Holcomb talks with Booth and County Council member Joe Stortini. Russ
Carmack ©The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) 1984 Reprinted with permission.
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