Van Luven Tackles Hawk Stadium Crowd

SUCCESSFUL IN A SIMILAR EFFORT with the Mariners, the hard-working legislator hasn't yet found the right football play.

OLYMPIA - Steve Van Luven, this is your moment.

The long, tortured march to Olympia by billionaire Paul Allen's Football Northwest has come to an end, at your committee. The overflow crowd is here and you are chairman of Trade and Economic Development, the House committee assigned to respond to Allen's request for funding of a new $402 million stadium for the Seahawks.

Like a political magnifying glass, this issue has enlarged your image in the Capitol: the point man in the House who will help turn task-force reports and Gov. Gary Locke's recommendation into law. To fans in Seahawk blue, you can be a savior.

"I'm biased in favor of the team," you tell the crowd.

But despite your effort to rally support to a plan, the best you can pass out of committee is a "title-only" bill, with no provision for funding. Then the team's bill gets sacked 18-3 in the Senate Ways and Means Committee.

Anyone in Olympia can see that the Seahawks are in trouble. Legislators don't sense an overwhelming public demand to help the team. Lobbyists stand ready to fight taxes for the stadium. Republicans feel burned by Democrats for having helped finance a Mariner stadium in 1995. Professional football doesn't arouse the passion that baseball does. Unpopular California developer Ken Behring still owns the Hawks.

Which means the job of raising public money for the Seahawks is all the more difficult. No legislator is working harder to find an acceptable deal than Steve Van Luven, the Bellevue Republican whose mediocre reputation was dramatically improved by his role as a writer of legislation financing the Mariner stadium.

But now, on his second stadium, Van Luven is struggling. And after months of working closely with Allen's team of lobbyists, he's beginning to sound annoyed with Football Northwest. "I could solve this thing in two weeks if they'd work with me on the plan I've presented," he says.

Republicans insist there are far more powerful and influential people in Olympia, starting with Locke, whose support for football must be vigorous to pass a funding package. But Van Luven personifies the ability of one legislator to push an issue, and also the limits of what any one person, even a committee chairman, can get done. Hard work and results are two different things.

Van Luven loved every minute of the baseball effort, but this time he's feeling alone, another indication of trouble for the Seahawks. Stadiums are a path politicians prefer to travel in herds.

"Football hasn't been a group effort," he says with some exaggeration. "I've worked on it myself."

Nothing that stands out

At 49, Van Luven has the looks a political cartoonist would despise. There's little distinctive about his appearance. He's not very tall, or short. He doesn't dress well, or badly. His hair, often a defining feature for politicians, could have been cut at a barber college. His face looks like one of a hundred found in a yearbook.

At work in the Legislature, a distinction emerges. An intense personality who seems busy even when there's no need to, he bursts in and out of rooms, talks rapidly, cracks sarcastic jokes and seems to love the limelight. He seems to flip from extremes, from the wiseacre to the diplomat, from the glory hog to the modest worker bee.

Perhaps as a result, Van Luven has been a mixed presence in the Seahawk-stadium debate. As a committee chairman, he's important to the process. But he's not speaker or majority leader, the people who bring real muscle to an issue. When the top dogs in Olympia gather to talk football, such as when Allen met with the governor, Van Luven doesn't get an invitation.

Even with his own ideas, Van Luven has had little success. Critics say he sometimes throws out one thought after another before finding support, feeding a perception that he is not a shrewd player.

"I'm a creative thinker," says Van Luven. "I'm a legislator. I don't have to have anybody's approval to come out with an idea."

Before the stadium issue came to Olympia, for example, Luven said he had the perfect funding solution. He refused to reveal it until the timing was just right, saying the idea was so good somebody would try to steal it for their own pet program.

"When I come out with it, everybody's going to say, `Gee, why didn't I think of that?' " he said.

On Feb. 6, Locke endorsed the basics of a plan by a citizens task force that called for a mix of rental-car fees, stadium-admission taxes, lottery games and a tax on sports memorabilia. Almost immediately, Van Luven criticized the plan and promoted his own, whose chief feature involved retailers holding sales-tax money in trust accounts and using accumulated interest for the stadium.

Van Luven's announcement took some focus off Locke's plan, which had reflected weeks of effort by Football Northwest. But Bud Coffey, Allen's chief lobbyist, chose not to criticize the chairman.

"It's Steve's way of expressing himself, getting attention," Coffey said recently. "Steve's a great guy, fun to be around. It was a situation where he thought he had a good idea, better than anyone else."

The next day, Van Luven did an abrupt about-face - promising to lobby against his own idea. Van Luven explained afterward that Locke had asked him to back off the interest-income idea.

Later, when Locke's plan failed to win much support, Van Luven said he would try to persuade his committee to approve four amendments to the governor's plan, including the income-interest idea. Instead, the title-only bill passed.

"I think he's going from day to day. His idea is a total sinker," says Rep. Tim Sheldon, D-Hoodsport, who sits on Van Luven's committee and opposes stadium funding. No retailer would want to maintain the extra paperwork, he says.

Today, Van Luven is third in seniority among House Republicans.

He came to Olympia in 1983 as an appointee, was defeated in 1986, and returned in 1988 by beating his former mentor, Rep. Paul Sanders. He ran unopposed last fall and, because of term limits, cannot run again for a House position. He's coy about future plans.

Outside of politics, Van Luven runs a one-man company called Exchange Enterprises, which audits leases for large companies, looking for overcharges by landlords. Since his divorce in 1995, Van Luven has lived in a rental apartment. During the session, he stays at his parents' home in Olympia.

Since joining the House, much of Van Luven's career has been one of obscurity, characterized by a modest legislative image based on his calls to protect referees at games and limit the use of acronyms by state agencies. (Van Luven prefers to point to his work helping establish branch campuses and promoting the convention and tourism industry and international trade.)

A Seattle Times rating of lawmakers in 1994 put him near the bottom. "Quirky. Not a lawmaker others feel they have to deal with," was the overall evaluation.

When Republicans gained a majority in 1994, House leadership gave Van Luven a chairmanship, but of a second-tier committee that handles tourism, ports and other issues. When the Mariners in 1995 threatened to leave town unless they got a new stadium, the hot issue went to Van Luven's Trade and Economic Development, the traditional sports committee.

Suddenly, Van Luven had a big job that captured statewide attention. Nine years of obscurity dissolved like butter in the TV lights.

"What happened to me in baseball would have happened to anybody if given the same opportunity," says Van Luven. "There's nothing special about me. This issue came along and I jumped on it. Actually, it jumped on me."

"He's a problem solver," says Rick Wickman, a Mariner lobbyist. "He's very unpretentious. He doesn't come on like he knows more than other people, or it's his way or the highway."

Rep. Velma Veloria, D-Seattle, the ranking Democrat on the trade committee, praises Van Luven for being fair and attentive. "He has a personal relationship with each one of us," she said.

He's never met Paul Allen

Ironically, Van Luven has no personal relationship with Paul Allen, whom he's never met. Last week, Van Luven said it would be nice if Allen showed up to personally lobby for the cause. "There's a lot of people who feel they're putting their careers on the line for a guy we don't even know exists," he said.

But that sentiment abruptly changed Monday, when Allen said he wouldn't exercise his option to buy the team unless the Legislature acted by April 3. Legislators perceived that as a threat. House members vented their anger at Van Luven, who felt the ground slipping away.

"It upset me. Ultimatums aren't popular. We work for the people," Van Luven said. "Now we don't want him down here. We think he'll do more harm than good."

It's a unique situation in which the principal beneficiary of a bill is told to stay away by his principal advocate. But the Seahawk stadium has entered a weird legislative warp, a moment where things have gotten quiet, perhaps ominously for football.

"It's up to us to put something together," says Van Luven, hoping the moment, for both him and the stadium, has not passed.