As Election Day bears down on Spokane like a runaway train, political attack ads are coming out in full force.
So are the lawyers and legal threats.
Last week, local businessman and deep-pocketed conservative donor Larry Stone threatened to sue local TV stations if they didn't stop airing an attack ad criticizing Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward's handling of the city's 350-bed homeless shelter — which is housed in an East Trent Avenue warehouse Stone owns and leases to the city.
"I just think it's really wrong that they're saying those things," Stone says.
Mark Lamb, Stone's attorney, sent cease-and-desist letters to KHQ, KREM, KXLY and Comcast claiming the video is false, defamatory and materially damaging to Stone's reputation. The letter demanded the companies pull the ad or face legal consequences.
KHQ station manager Jason Ramsey says his station plans to keep airing the ad, noting that "it is difficult to find anything that rises to the level of defamation outlined in the cease-and-desist letter."
Elaine Wong, a spokesperson for Effecttv, Comcast's ad sales division, says the company plans to keep airing the ad because it "complies with Effectv's ad content guidelines."
Last week, KXLY General Manager Teddie Gibbon told the Spokesman-Review that the station planned to pull the ad but declined to comment further. (KREM didn't respond to our emails.)
Woodward's re-election campaign is also calling foul. On Thursday, her campaign said it had filed a complaint with the state Public Disclosure Commission about the "wildly inaccurate" ad.
The ad was paid for by the Spokane-based Citizens For Liberty and Labor, a political action committee that has raised more than $350,000 this election season and is backing Woodward's opponent, Lisa Brown.
Jim Dawson, Eastern Washington director of Fuse, a progressive organization that partners with the left-leaning PAC, says that Stone is being a "rich bully" and that the legal threats are unfounded.
"That he is making these threats is kind of absurd, but it's also in line with the undue influence he has on local politics," Dawson says.
THE AD
The 30-second advertisement, which doesn't actually mention Stone by name, features Edie Rice-Sauer, the retired executive director of Transitions, a homeless services organization.
"I know every dollar counts," Rice-Sauer says, addressing the camera. "That's why I'm really disappointed in Mayor Nadine Woodward."
Cut to a photo of Woodward with an ominous color filter. Dramatic piano music swells. Headline from a July 2023 Range Media article flashes on screen.
"She enriched a political donor while bankrupting our shelter system. Leasing his warehouse, which didn't even have running water, for more than fair value and using our money to increase the value of his property."
Animated $100 bills rain down on exterior shot of the warehouse.
"We deserve better. Elect Lisa Brown."
'POLITICAL HACKS'
The Trent shelter has been a widely publicized flashpoint ever since Stone bought the warehouse and started leasing it to the city more than a year ago. Brown has called the shelter the "single biggest mistake" of the Woodward administration and a "humanitarian and financial disaster."
Critics have argued that Stone got a friendly deal and is overcharging the city's taxpayers for a warehouse with inadequate facilities. (He gave Woodward the maximum allowable $1,400 in 2019 and again this year, though the money was later returned out of concern that she couldn't take money from someone doing business with the city.)
"It was just all done behind the scenes," says Spokane City Council member Zack Zappone.
Stone's supporters say the price is fair, and that Stone was only trying to help the city, which was struggling to find a location for a permanent homeless shelter.
"Stone is trying to do something good for the community, and his reward is to have a bunch of political hacks attack him," says Lamb, the lawyer, adding that Stone is a private citizen who isn't running for office. (Lamb has represented other conservative causes and politicians before, notably Prop 1, the homeless camping ban Stone helped put on the November ballot; and former state Rep. Matt Shea during the House Republican caucus investigation into his alleged participation in domestic terrorism.)
Stone has dropped $290,000 on independent expenditures this election season. Much of it has gone toward the Good Governance Alliance, a conservative PAC that has far outspent progressive groups and launched a barrage of attack ads against this year's liberal candidates. None of those candidates has threatened to sue, but they have said the ads are divisive and misleading.
Stone says he doesn't keep track of the ads.
"I understand that negative advertising is horrific, and I hate it," Stone says. "But it's the way politics are done."
'I DIDN'T WANT TO OWN THE BUILDING'
During a series of interviews earlier this month, Stone insisted that his purchase of the Trent shelter was driven solely by a desire to help the city.
His involvement in the debacle began in winter 2022, when Stone says then-City Administrator Johnnie Perkins reached out to him to ask for help finding a building the city could use as a permanent homeless shelter.
"They knew I understood industrial," Stone says. "So I gave them two Realtors. And the Realtors — independent of me — found this building."
The warehouse was available for sublease, but Stone says the owner was wary of the city's plans to use it as a homeless shelter.
"That's when I said, 'I'll buy it,'" Stone says. "I didn't want to own the building. ... I only did it because it was clear to me that if I did not buy this, there would be no place for the homeless."
Stone negotiated with the owner to purchase the building for $3.5 million in March 2022.
"What I told the city is: 'If you want it, I'm going to hold on to it, but I won't hold it forever. I know you'll go through misery with the City Council because they'll make a big political game of it,'" Stone says. "I knew what I was getting into."
CONFIDENTIALITY OF REAL ESTATE
After a period of negotiation — and hesitation from the City Council — the city approved a contract to lease the building from Stone for $26,100 a month in June 2022. When a group of council members toured the building that spring, they saw a flier from the previous owner advertising the building as available for sublease at $21,000 a month.
In the cease-and-desist letters, Lamb said the ad's claim that Stone charged "more than fair value" and was "enriched" by the deal is false. He pointed to the prior owner's reluctance to lease to the city and said Stone spent $583,000 on improvements to make the building habitable for use as a shelter. (The improvements were required by the city's contract.)
Lamb also claimed that Stone got an offer from a private party that would have only required $50,000 in improvements. If Stone was actually out to make money, Lamb argued, he could have taken the other offer and been financially better off by at least $500,000.
In a statement, Woodward's campaign also said the video's claim that the shelter lacks running water is false because the shelter does, in fact, have flush toilets and plumbed sinks — in the parts of the building reserved only for staff members. The 300-plus homeless people who stay there each night use outdoor porta-potties, showers and hand washing stations.
Council members approved funding to install indoor bathrooms and showers in May, but the plans stalled amid concerns about investing taxpayer money to improve a building owned by Stone, not the city. The installation would cost $1.45 million — just slightly more than the $1.41 million raised by the Good Government Alliance to boost conservatives candidates this year.
When council members tried to exercise an option-to-buy clause in the contract, they said Stone asked for $8 million. Stone, citing the "confidentiality of real estate transactions," declined to comment on whether the figure is accurate, but says he was still willing to negotiate in good faith.
"To say that that's a bad place for those people who have no investment in society, who are, many of them, very destructive, and they're getting all these things for free that you and I worked for — to say that it's a bad place to live, I just think that's very hypocritical," Stone says.
Citing concern about the shelter's effectiveness and steep price tag, some council members want to end the lease early and wind down the shelter next year.
EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE
The attack ad relies heavily on reporting from Range Media, which started during the pandemic and has published a number of critical articles about the Trent shelter.
Luke Baumgarten, the founder and editor-in-chief of Range, is also the co-founder and creative director of Treatment, the advertising company that produced the attack ad. PDC records show that the Liberty and Labor PAC paid Treatment $12,500 for "development of video ads" earlier this month.
The Good Government Alliance described this as a conflict of interest last week. In a news statement, the conservative group referred to Range as a "radical advocacy organization disguised as a credible media outlet." (The alliance has spent at least $527,936 on attack ads this year, many of which wrongly suggest that progressive candidates are "radicals" who want to defund the police.)
Baumgarten rejects the assertion that Range is a partisan outlet. He also says that, the moment he started Range, he cut himself off from any campaign-related work at Treatment. The vast majority of Treatment's work isn't campaign related, Baumgarten says, adding that he has significantly limited his involvement in the company.
"Literally 100% of the day-to-day business decisions get made by the team," Baumgarten says. "I know nothing about what happened in the making of that ad."
The Good Government Alliance also called attention to Range's connection to the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund, which donates heavily to liberal causes and candidates in Spokane, and has given Range a $35,000 grant and a $67,000 loan.
Baumgarten says that Range maintains full editorial independence from all of its funders and that the publication hasn't received any additional grants from the progressive fund. Range's mission, Baumgarten says, is to highlight voices traditionally not included in media coverage.
"What we're trying to do is explicitly nonpartisan," Baumgarten says. "Because at some point there's going to be a Democratic mayor or something that's going to need to be held to account in exactly the same way that we've tried to hold Woodward to account."
Carl Segerstrom, the former Range reporter who wrote the Range articles featured in the ad, said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that, in his opinion, "the ad expands on the reporting in ways that are misleading and don't reflect my reporting (which I stand by) accurately."
Segerstrom, who left Range earlier this year to take a job at the Empire Health Foundation, added that he never wrote that Stone is getting rich off Trent — just that Stone was getting a lot of public money for a building he purchased in what the city's chief financial officer described as a "public-private partnership."
Despite repeated requests, Stone never agreed to an interview with Range, Segerstrom said. ♦
