Sunday, January 11, 2004, 12:00 a.m. Pacific
County Council newcomer likes a challenge
By Keith Ervin
Seattle Times staff reporter
As Bob Ferguson, the Metropolitan King County Council's newest member, prepares to get down to business this week, friends and relatives are still talking about the chess game that was a turning point in his life.
After putting off enrollment as a full-time college student to play high-level chess, the teenager found himself matched in a Berlin tournament with a Hungarian grandmaster whose games he had studied in chess magazines.
Ferguson fell behind Gyozo Forintos to the point where he couldn't win the game. But he held on, hour after hour, until 3 a.m., when the Hungarian accepted a draw.
"Since then, I've never been intimidated by any situation," Ferguson recalls. "Whether it was in the courtroom or a campaign, I've just always felt if I could handle this grandmaster, it's never going to be tougher than that."
Starting this week, as County Council members are assigned to committees, Ferguson will begin working with some of the state's political grandmasters. He was sworn in last week, along with another relative newcomer, Steve Hammond, R-Enumclaw, who won election to the seat he was appointed to last year.
Predicting what mark Ferguson might make has become problematic since he toppled the council's senior member, Cynthia Sullivan, in the Democratic primary nearly four months ago.
Ferguson had expected to spend his first weeks working toward his campaign promise to seek his colleagues' support for putting on the ballot a referendum to trim the council from 13 members to nine. But in a surprising turn of events, that goal was achieved before he took office.
After the state Supreme Court in September upheld a citizens' initiative proposing a charter amendment for a nine-member County Council, council members voted to put the issue on the November 2004 ballot.
Ferguson's other defining campaign issue was his criticism of Sound Transit's light-rail project, which was once $1 billion over budget and no longer included his North Seattle council district. He said the revised plan didn't make sense because it wouldn't reach either the University of Washington or Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Since the primary election, Sound Transit has secured $500 million in federal funds and has begun contracting for construction of the downtown-to-Tukwila line Ferguson objected to.
Eager to mend fences with light-rail boosters, Ferguson is praising Sound Transit's chief executive officer, Joni Earl, and emphasizing something that was frequently overlooked during the campaign: that he, too, is a rail supporter who voted for the original Sound Transit plan and for the Seattle monorail.
"There are people out there who just don't want light rail built, period," he says. "They want bad news for Sound Transit. I've never been in that camp. I've said: 'Build a line that makes sense.' I don't wish ill for Sound Transit in any way."
Because light rail is so important to his constituents, Ferguson says, "I'm going to do whatever I can to be a player on this issue."
Beat well-funded incumbent
A youthful-looking 38, Ferguson defeated a powerful and well-funded incumbent, in large part by hard work: walking the district every day for nine months and knocking on the door of every primary voter — many of them more than once.
"He's highly energetic. Anybody who would doorbell his district one-and-a-half times has got to be," said County Councilman Pete von Reichbauer, R-Federal Way.
Von Reichbauer said Ferguson brings to the council "a good, questioning brain and a willingness to challenge traditional concepts."
Ferguson is the sixth of seven children raised by a Boeing manager and a teacher on Queen Anne Hill. His sister, Annie, remembers their father, Murray Ferguson, lugging home armloads of library books.
"They would be on any topic you could think of — sailing, chess, flyfishing ... things he wanted to expose us to."
She recalls that once he brought home a book, "Home Freezing."
"My mother said, 'Murray, I don't even have a freezer.' "
After giving his children a chess set one Christmas, Murray took several of his sons to the Boeing chess club in a plant cafeteria on East Marginal Way. Bob, who would turn 10 the following month, became an avid chess player, matching his wits against some of Seattle's smartest engineers, including Kent Pullen, the late state senator and King County councilman.
By 13, Ferguson was reading the Russian-language chess journal "64." As an adult he has coached elementary-school chess teams, and he now coaches Lakeside School's state championship team.
A backpacker and mountain climber, he has bagged the highest peaks of 45 states and is gradually working on the last five, saving Alaska's treacherous Denali for last. Ferguson also is working on climbing the 100 highest peaks in Washington.
"He's very hard to say no to," says Aaron McGrath, a friend and frequent climbing companion. "He gets something in his head. He has that excitement that's contagious."
The president of his senior class at Blanchet High School and student president at UW, Ferguson joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and worked for a year with poor children in Portland. While a New York University law student, he spent a summer filing appeals for death-row inmates and assisting Yaqui Indians in Guadalupe, Ariz.
"He really has little tolerance for being idle," says Jeff Bjornstad, a longtime friend and chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Lake Stevens.
Bjornstad says Ferguson's approach is, "If there's a problem, what are the solutions? Let's get to them."
"He really does feel this Robert Kennedy passion for trying to fix problems on a social level that might not be the most glitzy thing," Bjornstad said.
Hard-pressed to find funds
With King County government facing an estimated $20 million financial shortfall in 2005, Ferguson and his colleagues on the County Council will be hard-pressed to find funds for social services as well as for elections, sheriff's deputies, jails, courts, prosecutors and public defenders.
And if voters approve the proposal to reduce the council from 13 to nine members next year, political tensions on the council will rise as some members run against each other to represent enlarged districts in 2005. Ferguson might face a fellow Democrat once again.
Ferguson still thinks cutting the size of the council is the right thing to do, as an important symbolic and practical step toward balancing the budget.
Although he's slain a few dragons in his time, he's also known failure. After his draw with chess master Forintos, Ferguson played a lower-ranked player — and lost. But as that player confided later, "My friend Forintos said, 'Do not underestimate that American boy.' "
Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com
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