Above: Clark Gilman, left, greets Doug DeForest after Gilman was chosen Monday night by the Olympia City Council to be appointed to the council. He replaces Cheryl Selby, who won the mayor's seat in November. Gilman will be sworn in at Tuesday night's council meeting and serve out the remainder of Selby's term.
By Janine Gates
Westside Olympia resident Clark Gilman was chosen
Monday night out of eight candidates who applied for appointment to the Olympia
City Council, Position #4.
The position became vacant when Councilmember Cheryl
Selby won her election and was sworn in as mayor.
Gilman will serve for approximately 23 months, until the November 2017 general election results are certified and will be sworn in at Tuesday night’s Olympia City Council meeting.
Gilman is a grantwriting and organizational
development consultant for a local company, and a
special education paraeducator for North Thurston High School in Lacey.
Prior
to that, he worked as a manager for the Harvesting Clean Energy program for Climate
Solutions and co-founded a residential carpenters union local in 1996.
“I am a person who can work hard as part of a group
and live with the decisions of the group. A career as an elected local leader
and a regional staff person for the Carpenters Union offered me a great deal of
practical experience in this area….As a regional leader of the Union, I would
often represent the organizations’ position on contentious issues to diverse
interest groups and use my position to work towards resolution of those
difficult issues,” Gilman said in his application to the city.
Above: Eight candidates applied for the appointment to the Olympia city council. Left to right: Dr. Karen Johnson, Paul Masiello, Allen Miller, Marco Rosaire Rossi, Max Brown, Clark Gilman, Chase Gallagher, and Peter Tassoni. The interviews were open to the public, and taped for replay on Thurston Community Television (TCTV).
Councilmembers took turns asking questions of the group of eight,
in two groups of four. Candidates had two minutes to answer
each question. After the interviews, councilmembers voted for three candidate
choices. Although the council unanimously chose Gilman as a choice in its first
round, they chose to do a second round, asking the top four vote getters an
additional four questions.
In the first round, Gilman received six votes,
Johnson received four votes, and Brown
and Gallagher each received three votes. In the end, allowed one vote, five
councilmembers voted for Gilman. Councilmember Jeannine Roe chose Max
Brown.
Jimmy Haun, political director of the Pacific
Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters which covers six western states, came
down from Seattle to attend the interviews and lend moral support to Gilman. He expressed full confidence
in Gilman’s abilities to be a councilmember for the city.
“Clark has been an advocate for carpenters working
in the residential construction market for many years. In most cases,
carpenters who are not represented by a union are not aware of their rights and
are victims of payroll fraud. Many of these workers are Latino and are not
familiar with how overtime works or how much they should be getting paid on
prevailing wage projects. Some are misclassified as "independent contractors"
by their employers who avoid paying Labor and Industries premiums and payroll taxes. Clark
worked to help educate these workers so they were able to collect the wages
that they were duly owed. He also help found a residential carpenters local,
and a vast majority of their members are Latino,” said Haun.
For the City of Olympia, Gilman is chair of the
Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee, which he said allowed him to have a
closer look at the work of the council.
“As chair of the BPAC my focus has been on taking
care of the committee members and the process. I have worked hard to make sure
that every voice is heard and that our decisions reach consensus as often as
possible. With support from Council we have moved forward with modestly funded
innovative initiatives that kept the bicycling and walking agenda in action
through the leanest of city budgets,” Gilman said in his application.
During the interview, Gilman said he feels blessed to have developed broad constituencies and relationships
with shop owners downtown, neighbors on the westside, colleagues he works with,
and people he has represented as a union representative.
“…I take very seriously the trustee role of
overseeing a municipal corporation. I
see that as a responsibility and as a call to look at the best interests of the
community, putting aside some of those particular issues and constituencies dear
and closest to my heart….
“I generally feel really good and excited about where
Olympia is at right now today…I am very proud of the work that the city staff’s
been doing…so I don’t have any hesitation in putting my energy toward the
agenda the council has right now and trying to push implementation of the good work
of the staff,” said Gilman.
Gilman did gently suggest that the council has gradually shifted its attention over the years from overseeing the big policy picture to spending too much time on details about programs that the city implements such as the comprehensive plan and downtown strategies.
When asked by Councilmember Jim Cooper, in a
hypothetical scenario, how he would pick one parks related project, have five
million dollars to spend, and build community consensus around it, Gilman said
that if the purchase of the LBA Woods was already accomplished, he would be
responsive to and satisfy the community need for a dog park.
Gilman said he lives near Sunrise Park and was part
of a group that had concerns about the dog park in that area. The park inadvertently
became a regional magnet for pent-up city-wide off-leash dog park needs and was
disruptive to nearby neighbors.
As a result of those concerns, he said he spent
about a year working with a parks and recreation subcommittee to try and find
another location, and spent days riding around with city staff to
look for appropriate land with buffers that would not adversely impact neighbors.
“I think it would be such a different ride if I had
that check in my hand,” Gilman said, eliciting laughter from councilmembers and
the audience.
Without the benefit of running a recent campaign and
hearing first hand from voters what is on their minds, Gilman was asked by Councilmember Bateman what he thought were the top three issues most important to the
community members. He responded: the use of the Parks and Pathways fund and lack of
land acquisition; safety, particularly since the officer involved shooting of two
African American men in May; and the condition of downtown sidewalks.
When asked by Councilmember Jeannine Roe who he
would choose to be the next councilmember if the councilmembers didn’t choose
him, Gilman said Dr. Karen Johnson, saying that she was eloquent, gracious, and
would be an asset in the process of group dynamics. In answer to the same question, three other candidates also mentioned Johnson,
who received the most votes of confidence by interviewees.
Mayor Cheryl Selby and councilmembers thanked all
the candidates for their knowledge, ideas, and passion, and welcomed them all to
stay involved in city issues. The meeting was Cheryl Selby’s first as mayor, and Jessica Bateman’s first as a councilmember.
Above: Jimmy Haun, political director for the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters, greets Dr. Karen Johnson, during a break Monday night of the interviews for Olympia city council. Johnson received four votes of confidence from other applicants when asked who they would chose for the seat, other than themselves.
