When I moved back home to Seattle in 2001, there were more opportunities for first-hand acquaintanceship with Tom, and what a rich privilege that was. There was the man: wise, warm, funny, humble, and an acute observer of the politics and the engineering through which he had led the Metro program that brought us huge and enduring clean water benefits.
How can we today retrieve and hold on to that inspiration as we seem to slog tortuously to meet any of today’s quite fresh and equally daunting regional challenges? Fortunately for us, though Tom now is sadly gone, he left a living memoir in a talk to his retirement community preserved in an obscure but extraordinary 49-minute YouTube video of a brown bag meeting with King County Wastewater Treatment Division staff in 2013:
“They wanted to know about Seattle’s history. And they wanted to know about the clean-up of Lake Washington. They’d heard about it but they didn’t know what it meant. So on that basis I put together this presentation. This is a discussion of what happened in this area in the mid-nineteen fifties. To recognize and document the fact that environmental protection was important to us long before there was a Clean Water Act, long before NEPA or SEPA. There was an environmental ethic this community had, and still has.”
With voter approval secured in 1958, after tortured and hard-bargained fits and starts, for a regional agency to take on the pollution control challenge was secured, Metro went to work:
“The election was in September, ’58. The first meeting was held in October . . . They appointed the first executive director in March of ’59. . . . The engineering consortium . . . was retained in June of ’59. The comprehensive sewer plan was adopted in July of ’59 [laughter heard on the video from the 2013 King County staff audience] . . . And the preparation of the pre-design report and financing plan was authorized in July. So that was moving. And that was the speed at which we tried to finish the whole project, and we did largely.”
No obituary or eulogy could capture the live richness of Tom’s own telling of his and others’ stories. Great tasks were built on pillars he credits: citizen action, environmental ethic, regional cooperation, stellar professionalism, and mission commitment. By today’s standards, unimaginable results of really major projects through politics and engineering, from vision, to plan, to execution to delivery, to results.
But nostalgia for Those-Were-the-Days sells short the lesson to take from Tom’s masterful recounting – to say nothing of some wonderful barbed zingers in the video at still contemporary targets.
Here’s the real lesson. Today we need to hit delete on all the euphonious mission, vision and core values statements and the like that now smother our public agencies. As Tom says, Metro had it right 60 years ago and nothing would be more helpful today than to bring it back – short and sweet:
“Our goal was ‘Do better than promised.’ Our Executive Director made us believe in that and we did. We carried that slogan, mantra if you will, throughout the whole program.”