A Bureaucrat's Nightmare -- City Hall Is No Match For `The Zamboni Man'

Let's not mince words here. John Raymond Scannell is your basic pain in the neck.

Truth is, this minor celebrity, known by hockey fans as the raw-fishhead-eating driver of the Zamboni ice-grooming machine at Thunderbird hockey games, has dedicated his spare time to truth and justice - and raising a little havoc with the people who govern this city.

And he has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

Consider.

Since he got out of jail in 1970 for setting fire to the University of Washington's Thomson Hall in protest of the bombing of Cambodia, Scannell has become the self-appointed champion of disgruntled taxpayers, the homeless and a small-but-vocal band of disenfranchised city employees.

Over the past 20 years, he has filed dozens of personnel complaints and lawsuits against Seattle. One grievance, filed in 1975, eventually led to the city having to pay $5 million in back vacation pay to its temporary workers.

Last year he challenged the legality of a deal in which Seattle promised to give $45 million in admission taxes to Sonics owner Barry Ackerley in exchange for his keeping the basketball team here and building a new arena.

Scannell's lawsuit - charging the deal is an unconstitutional gift of public money - was initially scoffed at. Not anymore. The case is before the state Supreme Court, where city officials privately concede the Ackerley deal stands a good chance of being overturned.

In November, Scannell got himself elected to the three-member Civil Service Commission, where he has been causing all kinds of grief for your basic uptight, cautious, mid-level city bureaucrat.

And, most recently, he brought an ethics complaint against Seattle Center Director Virginia Anderson. The complaint very likely contributed to last week's defeat of a $94 million levy to redevelop the Center. It also may have derailed any chance Anderson had to run for the City Council this year.

"I don't know what makes a guy like that tick," says deputy city attorney Don Stout in grudging admiration. "Whatever it is, he's made life better for thousands of city workers. He's bright and he's one of the most dogged, determined people I've ever been involved with."

What makes Scannell tick has also been a question for hockey fans in the U.S. and Canada. He's notorious as the guy who, at the end of a televised Thunderbirds game, appeared to bite the head off a raw fish flung onto the ice by rowdy fans.

You hear John Scannell coming before you actually see him. His walk has the labored sound of a mailman after a long day, except it is accompanied by the jangling of heavy chains that keep his keys and biker's wallet from getting too far from his pockets.

Scannell pokes his head around the corner. It is topped by a soiled denim hat - the kind that used to show up on hillbillies in L'il Abner cartoons. It covers stringy, black hair that frames a pleasant face, most of which is covered by a beard containing remnants of what looks to be lunch.

Scannell, 43, wears virtually the same denim outfit all the time. It is a uniform that says to the city employees who voted him onto the Civil Service Commission: I'm not about to let myself be compromised.

So far he hasn't.

"He hasn't voted or expressed a single opinion in the city's favor," says one Seattle official familiar with his commission work.

"Facts don't get in the way of his personal agenda . . . If I didn't have to work with him, I'd think he was real fascinating."

Scannell, actually, isn't all that complicated. Like a lot of people his age, he was radicalized by the Vietnam War. And during an especially difficult period of his life - of which there have been many - he overreacted to President Nixon and set fire to a classroom in the UW's Far East department. It's a protest he now admits was a serious mistake.

What makes Scannell unique is he never quite got over being radicalized. When he is wronged, which he believes is often, he does more than get mad, he gets even.

As foreign as it now seems, Scannell once planned to go to work for The Boeing Co. A slump in the economy took care of that. Next came Nixon, who, after bombing Cambodia, cut money for the scholarship programs Scannell and other up-and-coming physicists relied on. Scannell looked around the UW campus, saw a lot of Ph.D. candidates driving cabs and working as janitors, and decided to skip graduate school and go straight to being a laborer.

Seattle Center obliged him with part-time work.

End of story as it pertains to career advancement. Scannell has worked in basically the same all-round handyman's job ever since. He also drives the Zamboni machine.

What has changed are the terms of his employment. In 1972 he was hired as an intermittent worker, a job classification the city uses for part-time workers who - until Scannell came along - weren't given benefits such as vacation and retirement.

Scannell's 19 years with the city have been one long struggle to change that.

Before he came along, it was the city's practice to lay off an intermittent employee when the total number of hours worked in a given year reached 1,040. Some workers toiled for decades under those terms, never accumulating vacation pay, medical leave or retirement benefits.

When Scannell was laid off, he filed a grievance. Then another, and another. He lost his argument at every level until, in 1989, the state Supreme Court ruled in his favor.

Eventually, the city's unions negotiated a settlement. Union officials now take credit for the $5 million agreement, but it was Scannell's tenacity that decided this case.

"Scannell won for the city's temporary employees vacation pay and a chance to buy into the pension plan," says a city official. "Those are benefits people all over the state didn't have and never thought they would get."

At the heart of Scannell's crusades is the belief the city is trying to weaken its unions by using temporary employees whenever possible, and by turning public facilities, like Seattle Center, over to private groups.

His fight with Virginia Anderson is based in large part on his objections to the Center's lease with the Pacific Northwest Ballet. He believes that agreement is part of a larger effort to put segments of the Center into private hands free to use non-union workers.

"What this all boils down to is the debate over union vs. non-unionized workers," says Scannell. "City employees have been steadily going downhill. A lot of things have been taken away from them while at the same time there's been a huge increase in the number of non-union, patronage, white-collar workers."

City officials suspect that what Scannell really wants is to protect the workers who support him, and through them run Seattle Center. Having already made them look weak, some union officials fear, he's going after their job.

Scannell seems incapable of doing either.

Much of his following consists of a fringe group of disgruntled workers who create an enormous amount of trouble for the city. What he does have are his intellect and tenacity. And when he has put them to good use, he has bested the city at nearly every turn, leaving frustrated bureaucrats to complain that his abilities are being wasted.

"There's a place for this guy," says one city official. "He should go to law school and then live on a reservation of impoverished Indians who need his legal counsel. He's Messianic and that would be a cause worthy for him."

But Scannell says that's not in the cards.

"I guess if I have an ambition," he says, "it is to be the world's greatest Zamboni driver."