After Two Decades, Helen Sommers Rises To Prominence, Scowl And All

OLYMPIA - "I have exactly the wrong personality for this job," Rep. Helen Sommers says. "I'm impatient. I'm blunt. I'm candid. I'm told I don't smile enough."

The trademark scowl that can leave an ill-prepared lobbyist, reporter or fellow state lawmaker squirming gives way to the faintest grin. Then a chuckle.

Last night, Sommers was in the spotlight as she completed negotiating her first state budget as chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee. No matter how the final numbers come out, her role represents a triumph of persistence.

It has taken the Seattle Democrat 22 years - two decades of being labeled brainy but abrasive, gutsy but tough to get along with - to achieve a position of power many think she deserved long ago.

By her own measure, Sommers, 61, has had "the rough edges beaten off me" in several failed attempts to win leadership posts. Colleagues say she spends more time cajoling and soliciting their ideas, less time skewering them with figures and policy arguments. And she laughs more.

If Sommers has mellowed a bit, Olympia has changed more dramatically.

Today nearly 40 percent of Washington's legislators are women. Few vestiges remain of the clubby atmosphere where lawmakers and lobbyists cemented ties nightly over after-hour drinks. And Sommers' tightfisted skepticism about spending state dollars, formed long before the term "New Democrats" was coined, is in vogue.

"It's Helen's time," says state Lands Commissioner Jennifer Belcher, a former Democratic House member. "She changed her style when she figured out it was being used against her. But the Legislature has also come to look a lot more like Helen these days."

Sommers isn't easy to pigeonhole. An ardent feminist, she championed a welfare-reform proposal this session that appalled some allies in the women's movement with its tough medicine for teen mothers and women who stay on the dole too long.

While most Democrats, led by Gov. Mike Lowry, were clamoring for tax cuts, Sommers rolled out a budget plan that panned the notion. Her initial spending proposal left out so many favored projects or budget-cutting ideas that 75 amendments to it were drafted in her own committee.

Sommers dutifully stuck in millions of new dollars for a rash of anti-youth-violence programs passed by the House. But she voiced her skepticism for how bloated and poorly conceived the crime-fighting effort had become by quipping, "I don't dare read what the money is going for."

"She's the right person for this budget because she's given to making cuts and being hard-nosed," says House Judiciary Chairman Marlin Appelwick, D-Seattle.

"But she's in many ways a loner. I think what's handicapped her over time is she's gone out of her way to fight issues. . . . She hasn't always done that with an optimum of grace."

From the moment Sommers arrived in Olympia in 1972 - as the former president of the King County chapter of the National Organization for Women, a reform-minded economist and the first Democrat elected from her Queen Anne district in 30 years - she's rarely shied from a fight. In her first term, she took on the timber industry in a successful attempt to revamp the archaic tax on forest holdings. Male opponents smugly derided her as "the girl forest ranger from Queen Anne Hill."

Sommers has been a staunch ally of the Seattle schools, community colleges and the University of Washington. Many think her real influence, though, has come as the watchdog over arcane, multibillion-dollar areas of state spending, such as pensions and capital budgets.

Her leadership in closing loopholes in the state retirement system prompted traditional Democratic allies like firefighters and state workers to back her opponent, current GOP state Chairman Ken Eikenberry, in 1976. She has worked with Republicans to restrain teacher salaries and deny professors collective-bargaining rights.

Her admirers, particularly women, complain Sommer's toughness and directness have been unfairly used to portray her as cold.

"If you come in as a `bleeding heart' simply looking for money, off with your head," says Rep. Cathy Wolfe, D-Olympia. "But if you logically show how it will help, she listens and has a lot of compassion."

Her welfare-reform proposal may offer a more clear window on what makes Sommers tick.

She has grappled with the problem of teen pregnancy for years. Poster-size charts in her office cite the cost: $30 million for delivery and prenatal care of teen mothers, $30,000 a month to care for a crack baby.

Driven by such facts, she drafted a bill that included ideas few Democrats have spoken aloud: forcing teens receiving a welfare check to live at home, reducing benefits for families on welfare for more than four years and freezing benefits for those who have more babies.

Some of her ideas, such as establishment of a teen-designed media campaign to promote abstinence, won wide support. But liberal Democrats stripped most of the harsher provisions from the welfare bill. Several complained the bill punished women for getting pregnant.

But Sommers says her feminist ideals drove the proposal: "The welfare system does no favor for women. It traps them. Being dependent on the government is no better than being dependent on a bad marriage."

Her own life has been marked by similar self-reliance. Sommers was reared in a small, blue-collar New Jersey town, the daughter of an alcoholic father. Unable to afford college, she moved to Venezuela to work as an oil-company clerk for 14 years. She married and divorced there.

At age 36, Sommers made her way to the University of Washington, where she got bachelor's and master's degrees in economics. She eventually landed a job with King County. She still works there as a financing analyst.

In her last four elections, Queen Anne and Magnolia residents have never given Sommers less than 70 percent of the vote. But inside the Legislature, Sommers suffered a string of defeats for leadership posts.

The toughest came in the early 1980s, when she lost fights for Budget Committee chair and the majority-leader slot to Dan Grimm, a legislator with barely half of her experience.

"A part of what made those losses so painful for Helen is that she felt she wasn't being taken seriously and treated equally by the men in charge," says a friend, political activist Krishna Fells.

Others think those defeats were less a matter of sexism than style in a place where personal relationships are often more valuable than policy proposals.

"Helen has never suffered fools gladly," Rep. Ruth Fisher says, "which can be a big disadvantage around here."

At a recent Appropriations Committee hearing, she granted one legislator time to testify about a bill. As he rambled on beyond the allotted time, Sommers' eyes twitched in irritation and she clutched her microphone. Finally cutting him off, Sommers apologized to committee members for wasting so much time.

Sommers says her stint as caucus chairwoman for the last two years, where she had to minister to the needs of members, taught her some lessons. She's better able to recognize when she's going to lose, as she did on tax cuts this year, and when to call off the fight.

"But I'm not in this position just to get along with people," she says. "I'm clearly an old-fashioned person. I'm inner-directed. I'm not all that influenced by what my peers think of me."