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Welp, Stuckart's running for mayor again
Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart was thinking of running for mayor of Spokane. It was
December of 2014, and Stuckart's allies had commissioned a poll to encourage him to run for mayor. But ultimately, with his dad falling ill, he decided not to run. He's wrestled with that decision
ever since.
Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart was running for mayor of Spokane. It was
April of 2016, three years before the election, but according to Stuckart it was as, "a sure thing as you can get."
But unless something drastic happened, Stuckart said then, he was going to be running for mayor in 2019.
Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart had decided not to run for mayor of Spokane, after all. It was
December of 2016, and Stuckart not running for mayor was as a sure thing as you can get.
"I will definitively not be running for
mayor in 2019," Stuckart said.
The election of Donald Trump had sealed it. He would run for Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers' U.S. House of Representatives seat instead.
Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart had decided not to run for U.S. House of Representatives after all. It was
June of 2017, and with his family facing some serious health issues, he'd decided to drop out of the race and concentrate on helping them.
"The campaign was only going to get busier," Stuckart told the
Inlander. "The health issues in my families are only going to get more intense. I’m not able to fully focus right now. That’s only going to get worse."
Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart is running for mayor of Spokane.
"I am going to run for mayor," Stuckart says today, in the lobby of an under-construction building on the east side of Spokane. "There is nothing that is going to make me back out. I'm committed to the race."
He'd thought about running a lot during the past year, but decided he would about two months ago. He says he wanted to be open and honest about his intentions to run.
"I'm running for mayor as 'Ben.' The guy who averages a parking ticket a week. The guy with a coffee tab at Atticus and a beer tab at Community Pint," Stuckart says, a crowd of supporters behind him. "I know our city. I love our city. I know what we can do, together."
Stuckart has the unique position of having actually designed the local campaign finance laws that will govern his own race.
"I think the law I've passed is actually going to make it harder for me," Stuckart says. (We assessed the possible impact of a possible Stuckart mayoral run
here.)
Stuckart has a reputation as a key member of the city's liberal bloc, leading the council to introduce regulations about sick leave and passionately arguing for more protections for immigrants. He championed changing the name of Columbus Day to "Indigenous People's Day."
But in his campaign announcement, Stuckart stressed another part of his political identity harder
: As an
urbanist, the sort of leader enthusiastically supportive of dense, walkable developments. He looks at the city's extremely narrow vacancy rate, driving homelessness. He argues that more density is crucial to be able to fund more police officers and city services.
"I think urbanism is different from liberal and conservative. What urbanism is, is 'what do we want our cities to look like in the future. And are we willing to have mixed-income neighborhoods in the future, and live next to people who have different income levels?'" Stuckart says. "That's how you cure prejudice. Is 'we're all together in this,' right?
He says he sees a lot of classism in discussions around development.
"People say to me that they don't want apartments near them. What they're saying is, when we get down to it, 'We don't want poor people next to us,'" Stuckart says. "We need mixed-income neighborhoods. We all need to come together. We're stronger together. We're better together."
In the past, Stuckart has been a rare liberal to get an endorsement from the
Spokane Home Builders Association. He floated the possibility of asking voters for more taxes to support the development and other services. He endorsed the controversial Greenstone development on the South Hill. He says he'll be leading the charge to decrease barriers for dense residential development, even if it irritates neighborhoods.
“I saw an email, from somebody the other day in one of our neighborhoods, that said ‘We have steeped roofs, and this would allow flat roofs, and we are opposed to these infill changes because we don’t want flat roofs in our community’,” Stuckart says, doing an indignant neighbor voice. “I just was, like,
waaaaah?! We need density in our community!"