Death by Parking
Former assistant city manager says
he was ordered not to inspect the garage
Former Cowles bookkeeper claims
he was told to falsify garage books
By Larry Shook
THE FINAL ACT OF JO ELLEN SAVAGE was to braid her life into an extraordinary tale of dynasty, fear, and the dark arts of modern propaganda.
Haunting images of her last moments survive. It’s just past noon, April 8, 2006—a brooding Saturday of gray skies and rainy streets. Security cameras in the downtown Spokane, Wash., River Park Square garage capture Savage’s Subaru Outback as it arrives. Floor-by-floor, Savage ascends the garage behind a Chevrolet Uplander. In jerky sequenced photographs, the cameras record the doomed procession. On the fifth floor, the Uplander turns and parks against the garage’s outer wall.
The Subaru follows. The next time you see it, it’s upside down on the garage ramp, four stories below. Jo Savage, the 62-year-old art director of the Washington State University alumni magazine, lies dying inside.
The scene is now film noir, dark and gritty. The action is silent. You can’t hear the screaming in the garage. You can’t hear the commotion on the street below, like the footfalls of the mayor of Spokane as he hurries toward the ruined car. Already, the county’s 911 line is buzzing with cell phone reports of Savage’s fall. You can’t hear them either.
These silent pictures are an apt metaphor for Jo Savage’s final moments. If a patron falls from the parking garage owned by Spokane’s most powerful family, and the family controls the city’s media, will the public ever know what really happened?
THE UPLANDER’S DRIVER, a young father, was unloading his two toddler sons when Savage started to park next to him. Savage saw what was happening and politely moved over a space to give the family plenty of room to unload. The boys’ mother was getting out of the passenger seat. She too was a witness.
In signed declarations, the witnesses describe Savage’s car inching slowly into the stall. Her car “bumped into the vertical portion of the retaining wall,” wrote the man. “I did not believe the Subaru had enough speed or momentum to cause significant damage either to itself or the retaining wall.”
Before the witnesses’ horrified eyes, however, the heavy wall’s curved shape acted like a giant spoon. With Savage screaming inside, the wall fell away. It levered the Subaru’s rear wheels into the air as though it were a toy. The father, mother and two small boys watched Savage tumble slowly over the edge. The father thought maybe he should leap for the car’s bumper to counterbalance the fulcrum, but it was too late. The car was already gone.
Nightmare
FORMER SPOKANE CITY COUNCILWOMAN Cherie Rodgers learned of Savage’s death on the television news that evening. She felt instantly sick to her stomach. For one thing, she feared for years that the garage was unsafe. She had evidence that the Cowles family, owners of the garage, so badly neglected the facility’s upkeep that it became structurally unsound. Making matters worse, the evidence also suggested to Rodgers that the city had looked the other way as the garage deteriorated. The city’s own reports proved that it knew of the garage’s disrepair. Rodgers never parked in it herself.
And then there was the dead woman. Rodgers believed she had met her. The picture of Savage that accompanied the TV story of her death wasn’t a very good likeness of the pretty, vivacious blonde Rodgers remembered, but there was a light in her eyes that was familiar. Besides, how many Jo Savages could there be?
“Oh, I’m a savage, too,” Rodgers had said when they spoke at a Spokane Community College function.
When Savage gave her a puzzled look, Rodgers explained that she grew up on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Hot Springs, Montana. The sports teams of Hot Springs High School were known as the Savages. Savage laughed at the reference to Rodgers’s Native American background.
ACCORDING TO THE RED NUMERALS on her nightstand’s digital clock, it was 2:39 on the Sunday morning after Savage died when Rodgers was awakened by a horrifying sensation of falling. She sat upright in bed, heart pounding, soaked in sweat. She couldn’t make sense of her terror. In 57 years of living she could have counted on one hand the number of nightmares she’d had.
And then it came back to her. In the dream, she saw the glow of a car’s dashboard. That’s when she realized that she dreamed she was riding with Savage. Suddenly the garage barrier falls away. A maw of air gapes before her. City hall, and the leafy greensward of Riverfront Park across the street, begin their sickening rotation. The car is upside down and falling. That’s when Rodgers woke up.
RODGERS SERVED on the Spokane City Council for nine years, from January 1997 through 2005. For much of that time she tried to expose the secret underpinnings of River Park Square, the controversial public/private partnership between the city and the Cowles family. She considered the project to be corrupt, involving securities fraud and a blatant abuse of public trust. She said so over and over, and she always cited the evidence supporting her conclusions. But her criticism never seemed to matter.
Redevelopment of the Cowles mall was controversial because it made lavish use of public money. The city was giving the family a low-interest loan of $22.65 million of its Housing and Urban Development (HUD) block grant money—a loan for which the Cowleses refused to meet federal collateral guidelines. Also, the city was buying from the Cowleses a parking garage at the grossly inflated price of $26 million—instead of the $9 million to $15 million at which the city valued the facility. The city went along with the Cowles demand to finance the transaction with tax-exempt bonds, despite warnings from the city’s bond counsel that the bonds didn’t qualify for tax exemption because there was too much private ownership in the project. And even after the city was slated to take over ostensible ownership of the garage, when the bonds were finally paid off, the city would never own the land beneath the garage. The city was required to lease it from the Cowles family, paying an average of almost a million dollars a year.
Critics of the deal sputtered with outrage over the largesse of public funds. Both Time and Forbes magazines branded the Cowles mall an example of corporate welfare.
But that wasn’t all. Critics warned from the beginning that the deal just didn’t pencil out. It was doomed to fail, they said, because of its transparently false assumptions. One retail expert warned the city that the mall Betsy Cowles wanted to build in downtown Spokane could be built in the middle of the Sahara Desert and it would make just as much money there.
The critics turned out to be right. When the mall opened at the end of the summer of 1999, the customers that were needed to pay off the $26 million garage and the $22.65 million HUD loan stayed away in droves. The garage instantly headed for bankruptcy. Alleging securities fraud, four of the nation’s most prominent financial institutions filed suit against the city, the RPS developer and others in the spring of 2001.
Rodgers yearned to testify in the federal trial. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of thousands of pages of records that exposed the project’s details. She it was who provided two young jeans-clad IRS agents with much of the evidence the IRS used in their adverse ruling against the city-backed garage financing. Because so much public money went to a private developer, the IRS ruled the garage bonds were not properly tax-exempt.
She wanted everyone to know what she knew. She was going to need a wheelbarrow to haul her files to the witness stand.
But it never happened. The case settled, saddling Spokane’s taxpayers with a fiscal disaster from which Rodgers estimated it would take a generation to recover.
When she finally left office last December, Rodgers was surprised by the depth of exhaustion she felt. After all of the honors—the Eagle Feather Ceremony performed for her by fellow members of the Blackfeet Tribe, commendations from Spokane’s police and fire departments, the gold star flag from Spokane’s Veterans of Foreign Wars, the final touching city hall drumming ceremony performed by representatives of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe—Rodgers was overcome by a sense of… relief. That was the only word for it. She was shocked by how she felt when she cleaned out her cubicle at city hall. “It was like getting out of jail.”
Now Jo Savage’s death brought her a painful reminder of what all the struggle had been about. There was just no saving the public from the Cowles family’s appetite for public money, or from the city’s willingness to give it to them, or from the Cowleses’s ability to fog their and the city’s operations with their daily newspaper. But that potent combination had been a dominant feature of Spokane’s civic and political culture for a century. “Many a Spokane citizen still pines for a chance to read news that isn’t Cowles news,” Time magazine wrote in 1952. Suddenly, the Cowles family’s perennial influence over city hall, and the black cloud that always hangs over the credibility of Cowles media, had turned deadly. So now what?
Mystery Man
RODGERS DOESN'T REMEMBER exactly the first time it happened, but early in 2001 a stranger started showing up in city hall. He was a bearded, quiet man, but despite a shy manner he always greeted Rodgers with kind words.
“Keep up the good work on River Park Square,” he would say. Or sometimes: “When are you going to run for mayor?”
These encounters went on for years until their tenor changed abruptly one day in January 2005. This time the man was visibly agitated.
“They should all be indicted under RICO,” he blurted. [RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.]
The mystery man’s sudden change startled Rodgers.
“Who?” she asked.
“The city council. Cowles and her helpers,” said the man.
“Why do you say that?” asked Rodgers.
“I worked for the Cowleses for ten years,” he said. “I saw what they did. I was the River Park Square garage bookkeeper.”
“You’ve got to put some money
into this garage.”
AS SOON AS THE MAN was hired, Rodgers says he told her, Jim Cowles (uncle of River Park Square developer Betsy Cowles) called him into a meeting and told him that the garage was “simply a write-off. Nothing more.” Cowles told him the family intended to depreciate the garage’s value to zero. The family didn’t want to spend much money on maintenance of the facility, because its only value was as a tax write-off.
The bookkeeper was “appalled at the lack of maintenance at the garage,” Rodgers says he told her.
He described meeting a 30-year-old Betsy Cowles in 1992, shortly after the death of her father, William H. Cowles 3rd, publisher of The Spokesman-Review. Jim Cowles introduced Betsy at a meeting and told the bookkeeper, “This is who you’re going to answer to. You won’t be answering to me on the garage. You’ll be answering to her.”
Rodgers says the bookkeeper told her that Betsy Cowles seemed aloof and resentful, that she was a lawyer and didn’t want to be in the family business.
The man described life inside the Cowles empire as secretive, stressful and cold, according to Rodgers. He grew increasingly worried about the garage’s “ridiculous” disrepair. Garage personnel complained to him of leaking water and rusting rebar. He described a “big meeting” at which Jim Cowles was present where the bookkeeper begged the family to invest money in at least minimum maintenance.
“You’ve got to put some money into this garage,” he urged. “You’ve got to do something.”
The response at the meeting, Rodgers says he told her, was that the family intended to “depreciate the garage down to nothing,” at which point they would “unload” it on the city. He said there was general laughter about the unloading comment.
When the laughter subsided, the bookkeeper related, Jim Cowles repeated his earlier admonition: “The garage is a write-off. That’s all it is. And you’ve known that from the beginning.”
Rodgers says the bookkeeper told her the garage needed more than $200,000 in repairs at that point. Jim Cowles finally agreed to spend a fraction of that amount, said the bookkeeper, but Betsy Cowles angrily protested the expenditure of even that sum.
By now, he told Rodgers, “My conscience was killing me.” His anxiety soon worsened. He was ordered to falsify the garage’s books to make it look profitable, he told Rodgers. The garage never was profitable, he said. That allegation is a bombshell of another kind.
Was the Garage Profitable?
IN SEEKING THE LOAN of $22.65 million of the city’s HUD block grant money to help redevelop River Park Square, the Cowleses repeatedly asserted that the original garage had always been a moneymaker. “The garage has been operating profitably for some twenty-four years,” wrote a Cowles attorney in a letter to HUD signed by five city council members.
If the bookkeeper is right, that the garage’s profitability was fictitious, it raises questions about whether the massive HUD subsidy of the Cowles mall was fraudulently obtained.
Bob Glatzer says the mystery bookkeeper is right. Glatzer’s advertising agency, Delaney and Glatzer, marketed River Park Square between 1980 and 1990.
“I was privy to the garage’s figures every week,” says Glatzer. “The garage was a just a poor adjunct to the whole shopping mall. It was a service that the mall provided to shoppers who went downtown. I’m sure the garage was never regarded in the time that I was there as a profit center. It never was intended to make a profit.”
The extent of the garage’s bookkeeping, he says, was a mere tabulation of expenses. There was never even any calculation of anything left over that could have been regarded as a profit.
Moreover, says Glatzer, it would have been impossible for the garage to earn a profit because of the way it was operated. This was because Glatzer’s partner, River Park Square manager Mike Delaney, persuaded Jim Cowles to offer free parking at the garage as the only way of marketing both River Park Square and downtown as a whole. Downtown was declining, and only by attracting more shoppers could the trend be reversed. Delaney proposed free parking, and Jim Cowles agreed, says Glatzer.
“That was why we made it free parking after five p.m. weekdays and all day on Sunday. And that was very helpful. So in fact, when you look at what we did, you know that the garage could never have been intended as a profit center, because otherwise it would never have been allowed to allow free parking.
“Jim Cowles was the best client I ever had,” says Glatzer. “We were delighted and astonished, frankly. What businessman would willingly give up a sure source of income?”
Kevin Coleman, internal auditor of Cowles Publishing between 1985 and 1989, echoes Glatzer’s viewpoint. “I don’t remember the real estate companies—and the garage was part of the real estate companies—ever being significantly profitable.”
On the subject of maintenance, Coleman says, “I’m very comfortable in saying that while I was there no money was spent on any major repairs. I remember a focus on accelerating the depreciation on the real estate… and now [the family wanted] to recover the investment and grow the value of the property without spending any more. I do recall that Jim especially had, I think, some bigger plans for downtown. And their properties would be right in the middle of it… It was a public/private partnership kind of thing” that would propel downtown development to the next level after the 1974 World’s Fair.
Coleman says there’s no need to speculate whether or how much money the Cowleses spent on maintaining the garage. The family’s accounting records are meticulous, he says. There’ll be a record of every penny the family ever spent on garage maintenance.
In any case, the mysterious Cowles bookkeeper told Rodgers that the order to cook the books was the last straw. He decided to quit his job.
Hunting for a Ghost
RODGERS BEGAN RELAYING THIS ACCOUNT to me in February 2005. It piqued my interest for several reasons. First, in July 2001, a source contacted me and told me that the former bookkeeper of the River Park Square garage had quit his job after being told to keep two sets of books. The source, who claimed to know the mystery man, said the bookkeeper had recently moved his family to a new home in Spokane without telling former neighbors where he was moving. He kept an unlisted phone number, said the source. The fugitive ex-Cowles employee wanted to disappear, said the source, because he feared Cowles persecution.
It was the portrait of a frightened and angry man who was trying to create his own witness protection plan. I failed to discover his identity.
At that point I contacted Gary Ceriani of Denver, lead plaintiff attorney in the River Park Square securities fraud case.
Ceriani had made a standing offer to me. “If you ever have a source who won’t talk to you, give me his name and I’ll depose him if he’s relevant to my case.” (This was a variation on the tactic 60 Minutes used to get a Big Tobacco whistleblower on the record.)
I told Ceriani of my lead and why I considered it credible.
“Get me a name, and I’ll depose him,” said Ceriani. “I’ll guarantee you one thing. If the Cowleses have manipulated their books in any way, my forensic accountant will discover it.”
But the bookkeeper’s trail was cold. He struck me as a lost, hagridden soul. Rodgers by now knew his name but she wouldn’t give it to me. She said the man was “scared to death” that the Cowleses would find out where he was working and cost him his job.
“Do you know where he works?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Rodgers.
“But you won’t tell me?”
“No.”
Obviously, the man had not spoken to her in confidence or Rodgers would not have related his tale to me. I confirmed that the mystery number cruncher had not spoken to her “off the record.”
“No,” she said. “He wanted me to know his story. He bared his soul to me. He was genuinely distraught over the whole River Park Square situation. He is a person with a conscience, and it’s so rare that I run into that. I know what he’s saying is critical, but I want to protect him if I can.”
Because of several interviews I had done since first being told of this phantom Cowles bookkeeper, I thought I might now be able to learn the man’s name. I asked Rodgers if she felt she could confirm his identity if I was able to learn it independently. She agreed.
I called her back a few days later and gave her a name.
“That’s him,” said Rodgers.
I now had the man’s address, home phone (Rodgers did not have this information) and work phone.
I placed a series of phone calls to the man’s house and left messages on his answering machine. He didn’t return my calls.
Here was a dilemma. If what Rodgers said the bookkeeper told her was true, the public had a right to know. I had the councilwoman’s account on the record, and now I knew who the bookkeeper was. Still, I had an obligation to make every effort to seek the man’s comment.
Finally, I left a long message and explained my predicament. I said that I had located a Seattle employment attorney who had agreed to talk to him about representing him in the event he was wrongfully terminated after being quoted in my story. But he had to talk to me first. Then he had to talk to the lawyer if he was interested in her legal assistance. At the very least I needed to know whether he accepted as true the statements Rodgers had attributed to him.
At last, on May 20, 2005, he returned my call. He told me how frightened he was of losing his job if he spoke out about what he knew.
The phone connection had an odd, hollow quality.
“You’re not calling from work, I take it?”
“No,” he said.
“Nor home?”
“No,” he said. “Do you have to use my name?”
I told him that I did, because his identity was the whole point. His role as a Cowles bookkeeper explained how he could know what he claimed to know.
“You were actually ordered to falsify the garage’s books?” I asked. “Someone told you to commit accounting fraud?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Bob Robideaux,” he said.
Robideaux was the Cowleses’s manager of River Park Square.
“Why were you taking orders from Robideaux?” I asked.
“James P. Cowles told me to,” he answered.
I asked him if he obeyed Robideaux. He said he didn’t, that he complained to Cowles treasurer Mike Nielsen about what Robideaux had told him to do. He said that he informed Nielsen that he refused to cook the books, and he said Nielsen told him he didn’t have to.
I asked the bookkeeper where he thought the orders to falsify the garage’s books had originated. He said he assumed that everything came through Jim Cowles first, later Betsy.
Phone calls to Betsy Cowles, Jim Cowles, Mike Nielsen, and Bob Robideaux, seeking comment, were not returned.
Because of the nature of the former bookkeeper’s assertions, I told him I still wanted to conduct a detailed tape-recorded interview with him. He said he would think about it. Following up, I left several messages on his home phone. I never heard from him again.
On May 18, 2006, The Spokesman-Review published a picture of the bearded stranger who had introduced himself to Rodgers several years before. The caption gave his name: Rex Franklin. The picture, dated 1991, helped explain why he was so worried about the garage’s condition. It showed him trying to pull back into place a cracked barrier just like the one that failed when Savage died. The caption referred to him as the garage’s manager.
Until Jo Savage died, I had planned to deal with the matters of the garage’s maintenance and Franklin’s allegations in the book I was writing. They seemed to fit with other allegations I had been sitting on for a long time.
Following Savage’s accident, I again left messages on Franklin’s answering machine. I said I wanted to read to him the quotes I was about to use in this story. When he didn’t respond, I sent him a certified, receipt-requested mailing that included the above references to him. The receipt has not been returned and I have not heard from him.
By no means was Franklin the only one tormented by secrets about the garage’s condition. But Savage’s death makes these secrets much more timely.
Dubious Orders
THIS IS BECAUSE former top city officials contend that the River Park Square garage was not properly inspected during its expansion. I first heard that claim in 2001 from Dennis Beringer, the city’s former real estate manager. Beringer told me of tense meetings involving the city’s key department managers at which the decision not to inspect the garage—the “order” not to inspect it, as he put it—was hotly debated. Beringer told me that those meetings were supervised by former assistant city manager Nick Dragisich.
Beringer described the weekly meeting of department heads when Dragisich broke the news that the Cowles garage would not be inspected.
“Nick announced that… we weren’t going to inspect. You could have heard a pin drop in that room. I mean it was like we were just stunned.” He remembered the look on the face of Bob Eugene, director of construction services: “utter disbelief.”
When the department heads recovered their speech, says Beringer, the room started to buzz.
“There were issues about the normal inspections. You want to test the concrete, you want to make sure the rebar has been done right, you want to make sure electrical, plumbing, the fire systems… are to code; the proper heights are in there for the cars; safety features; on and on and on. And then Nick said, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re just not going to do this.’”
“We always do this,” Beringer remembers someone saying.
“Not this time, I guess,” said Dragisich, according to Beringer. Beringer remembers a cacophony of complaints from his fellow department heads.
“We’re setting the wrong precedent.”
“We’re doing something completely irregular.”
“We’re circumventing our own policies, procedures and protocols.”
Beringer says Dragisich responded vehemently to the protests by saying, “I understand that. And I agree with all of you. But we’ve been ordered to skip most of this.”
Beringer said, “I’m paraphrasing, but that was pretty much what he said. Now, if they were going to do some inspections, or partial inspections, I’m not really sure. But originally Nick said there would be no inspections.”
Present at the meeting, according to Beringer, was virtually the full panoply of the city’s department managers, the line executives responsible for administering the city’s participation in River Park Square. Some of them already had concerns about the inspection irregularities, says Beringer. One of them told the group that the concrete was not being inspected as it should be. The structure’s reinforcing steel wasn’t being inspected either, said another.
“We inspect every other project,
not this one.”
—Former assistant city manager Nick Dragisich
THE NON-INSPECTION of the garage was discussed at several meetings, says Beringer. He remembers one meeting in particular when Bob Eugene said, “We’ll have to pay special attention to vehicle containment.” Beringer says Eugene cited a recent fatality in the Midwest where a car went through a barrier.
Eugene did not return a phone call seeking comment on this matter.
Beringer says he had several solo meetings with Dragisich in his office when he complained about the lack of inspection. “This is insane,” Beringer says he told him. According to Beringer, Dragisich said Eugene was also complaining privately to him.
“We’re being ordered,” Beringer says Dragisich told him repeatedly. “What can we do, rebel?”
The bottom line, insists Beringer, is that key city hall insiders knew that the city was looking the other way in the expansion of the River Park Square garage.
I interviewed Dragisich about the garage’s inspection on February 6, 2001. He confirmed what Beringer told me.
“We inspect every other project, not this one,” he said. “Was the proper material specified?” he asked. He didn’t answer the question.
When I interviewed Laurie DeVarney, the city’s former communication director, in the summer of 2005, she said Cowles control over city staff created unbearable anxiety among her coworkers. A veteran reporter and municipal communications director, DeVarney had been hired out of California specifically to facilitate the River Park Square public/private partnership. After several years she quit. The Cowles family’s control of city hall, she said, created an “evil” environment. At various times she thought some of her coworkers were on the verge of nervous breakdowns.
Last October, DeVarney was cleaning out old e-mails when she came across one from Nick Dragisich, with whom she stays in contact. DeVarney forwarded a portion of it to me, because it was relevant to my research.
Among other things, wrote Dragisich, “RPS was a big problem to [Beringer]. He told me a number of times about a memo he wrote to [then-city manager Bill] Pupo telling him the city was paying way too much [for the garage] and that the appraisal they had received was inflated. He claims he provided a very detailed analysis of the value. He says the memo has been lost and no one has any idea what happened to it. I tend to believe Dennis on this because he told me from my first day the City overpaid for the ramp [the expanded portion of the garage].”
What particularly leaped out at me, though, was this: “I also remember wanting to place a full-time construction inspector on the project since the city would ultimately be the owner and having the [city council’s] public works committee specifically forbidding me to do this. It seemed so strange to me that they did not want to protect their interest.”
DeVarney, too, had heard of Beringer’s memo and says that inside city hall there was widespread awareness of the stir it caused.
“They were all playing
the game together.”
—Former Mayor John Talbott
IN THE WAKE of Savage’s death, I wanted to talk to Dragisich again about the garage’s inspection. I left several messages on his work voicemail in Minnesota, where he’s a municipal consultant, and I sent him several e-mails. He never responded.
Both Beringer and DeVarney urged him to grant my new interview requests but to no avail.
Beringer, a Spokane Police Reserve Academy graduate and former Reserve officer, says he thinks Savage’s death raises serious questions of negligent homicide. Because of that, he doubts that Dragisich or any other city staffer with firsthand knowledge of the garage inspection debate will now talk to me.
“I think they’re all just waiting to be deposed,” he says. “And I think they’re all sweating bullets.”
According to Beringer, Dragisich is actually looking forward to being deposed. Beringer quoted from a recent e-mail he had from Dragisich.
“Nick said, ‘I would enjoy a free trip back to Spokane,’” Beringer told me. “We were talking about testifying and depositions and that kind of stuff.”
On June 7, 2006, Laurie DeVarney sent me an elliptical e-mail that suggested there was a public record somewhere documenting the recommendation to place a city-employed engineer at the garage expansion site. After I asked DeVarney for more information, she left this message on my answering machine:
“What I can tell you is that things have gotten a little bit challenging for various people to come forward and speak openly due to their professional commitments. I am merely the go-between, a messenger, to help you out. I don’t have any new information about this issue, other than the fact that it is in the public record that it was suggested, recommended, requested that a city contractor would employ an engineer to inspect the River Park Square garage. That concern came up, and I have to be very careful with how the source is presented and protected. You’re familiar with all of the sources. And I can just say that this source is reliable—extremely reliable—and is in a unique position, no longer able to speak on the record. Hope that helps you.
“But the source indicated to me that the concern came up when the contractor provided information to the city and to the developer that they were running out of money. And the concern on the engineering staff was with where corners might be cut. And those corners might be concrete, the amount of concrete, the quality of the concrete, stainless steel reinforcement, rebar, etc. So there was a method or a rationale behind that concern. It was not just another layer of bureaucracy. There were real, valid concerns. That’s what I know.”
DeVarney’s message seemed to confirm Beringer’s account of a heated debate among city officials about inspecting the Cowles garage. Did it also reinforce Beringer’s statement that former top city officials, especially Dragisich, were waiting to be subpoenaed in the matter of Savage’s death?
No matter, I still needed help before requesting the public records DeVarney referred to. I feared a formal request for an incriminating document might trigger its destruction. Former RPS special counsel O. Yale Lewis told me he was convinced the city had either hidden or destroyed important RPS records. Dennis Beringer says he wrote a memo objecting to the appraisal of the Cowles garage (the same memo referred to by Dragisich and DeVarney above). But if his memo existed it had disappeared without a trace, despite what the city said was an exhaustive effort to find it. And more than a year after a federal court ordered the city to release a key memorandum justifying the city’s settlement in the RPS fraud case, the city is still refusing to honor my public records request for the document.
I asked DeVarney if she had any other suggestions for tracking down the documents.
“All I can add is that the source was an eyewitness to the fact,” she said.
That meant that the source had personal knowledge that a formal city recommendation to put a full-time inspector on the Cowles garage had been entered into the minutes of an official public meeting.
“The source was a former upper management employee of the city,” she added. “He put it on the record that the city needed to have its own inspector on the garage. The source will truthfully answer a subpoena. You know him. You’ve talked to him.”
“He,” said DeVarney. “Him.”
It had to be Dragisich, I thought.*
That would be consistent with an account from former city councilman Steve Corker. Corker told me that in early 2000, Dragisich was being seriously considered to replace Bill Pupo as city manager. During an informal interview, Corker says, Dragisich voiced his frustration with Pupo’s lack of leadership.
“In the course of that conversation, he had mentioned, in the case of River Park Square, that [Pupo] had ordered building inspectors off the site. He did not want them to slow down the construction.” According to Corker, Dragisich told him that the lack of inspection “concerned him greatly,” because it was a clear legal violation.
Pupo today is town manager of Chino Valley, Arizona. He did not return a phone call requesting comment.
Former mayor John Talbott told me that he had heard rumors the garage was not inspected, but he had no direct knowledge. Nevertheless, Talbott says he believed the rumors, because they were so numerous and because the whole project was rife with secrecy and irregularity.
Why, then, as mayor, didn’t he order an investigation? I asked him.
Because the city council had put Bill Pupo in charge of River Park Square, he answered. As a weak mayor, Talbott told me, he had only one vote on the council and was powerless to overturn the majority’s wishes. Besides, the city manager was the city’s chief executive officer, he explained. Every city employee, from the city attorney down, worked for the city manager. And City Manager Bill Pupo, Talbott told me, was working for Betsy Cowles.
“The Cowles were in charge of city government,” said Talbott. “No question about it. That authority was exercised directly through meetings with the Cowles in their [newspaper] building, directly through pressure from the Chamber of Commerce, which the Cowles were very strongly in position with. You didn’t have a chance. Who were you going to turn to? You couldn’t turn to the citizens, because the citizens were being fed a line of public relations from The Spokesman-Review on how great everything was going…”
Talbott said, “What an eye-opener for me, to get into office and find out that there is a very strong group of people in the downtown area, leaders of our community, that just didn’t want the truth to come out on this River Park Square, because they were benefiting financially….”
I asked Talbott if he thought there was any relationship between the way River Park Square evolved and Jo Savage’s death. He responded bluntly.
“You’ve got a whole bunch of people out there that are responsible for this tragedy. And they were all playing the game together.”
The City’s Fingerprints
BY THE END OF HER FIRST YEAR in office, 1997, Rodgers had concluded that River Park Square was a corrupt project. It looked to her as though city officials were working with the Cowles family to build a money laundry where tens of millions of public dollars would be siphoned into the glitzy Cowles-owned mall.
Rodgers found studies that revealed serious financial flaws in the public/private partnership, but public versions of the reports had been scrubbed of the most damaging information:
First, she discovered a supposedly independent Coopers and Lybrand feasibility analysis that was purged of important facts before being made public. Next, she uncovered a federally mandated credit analysis that had met the same fate. Finally, she found a study suggesting that parking revenue projections for the new garage were suspect at best, bogus at worst. As a public official with access to original records, Rodgers concluded that the Cowles mall was a financial house of cards.
It wasn’t until 1999, however, that Rodgers started worrying that the physical parking structure itself might be a deathtrap. The garage was being expanded from 750 to 1,304 spaces. Cement workers confided in Rodgers that the new work was of inferior quality. At that point she knew nothing of the existing safety issues with the older portions of the garage.
Her safety fears were kindled when she found an unfamiliar document on her desk.
Rodgers confronted assistant city manager Dave Mandyke, who was nearby. “What’s this?” she asked. “Did you put this here?”
Mandyke “just gave me an odd smile and walked off,” says Rodgers.
The little-known report had been delivered to the city by Walker Parking Consultants, a national firm, in June 1996. It was called a “Final Report on the Financial Feasibility Analysis & Condition Assessment” of the River Park Square garage. Rodgers found it disturbing.
Walker concluded that the original structure, 22 years old at the time, had reached the state where “a number of factors are combining to cause the floor slabs to be extremely vulnerable to corrosion-related deterioration.” The report found the garage needed “comprehensive repairs and waterproofing” and recommended $1.4 million in maintenance “as soon as possible.”
(Contradicting former Cowles internal auditor Kevin Coleman, the Walker report cited “a major repair project” in about 1986 at a cost of $300,000 to $400,000.)
Rodgers had never heard of this study before. The city paid for it, so why hadn’t the mayor and city council brought it up during the debate over whether to invest public funds in the Cowles garage?
The facility opened in 1999 amid PR-driven fanfare, and cars started trickling into the expanded parking garage. Proponents of the project said River Park Square would be an economic boon that would save downtown.
“You’ll pay a horrible price later.”
BECAUSE THE GARAGE was connected by sky bridge to city hall, Rodgers occasionally walked through it. She always hurried, so as to get out of it quickly.
But one day in March 2003, Rodgers stopped dead as soon as she entered the garage. Two men, dressed in work clothes, were poking the concrete walls, pointing to the ceiling and shaking their heads. Their frowns seemed ominous to Rodgers.
She approached and asked if they were doing maintenance. They both laughed and said no.
“Cherie, you don’t know me,” said one of the men, “but my name is Don Woods. We work for the Parkade [a competing downtown parking garage]. I’m the operations manager. This is my assistant.”
Woods explained to Rodgers that he was just keeping an eye on the River Park Square garage, because it worried him.
“Boy, I tell you, it’s not in very good shape at all,” said Woods.
Rodgers mentioned that developer Betsy Cowles claimed to have spent $2 million renovating the garage as part of the $26 million the city had paid her for it.
“You’re kidding,” said Woods.
“No,” said Rodgers.
“Oh, they didn’t begin to do anything near that,” insisted Woods.
Woods explained that the Parkade had just spent $250,000 on maintenance. Rodgers took that as an indication that he understood how garages held up in Spokane’s four-season climate and that he could tell if they were being properly cared for.
“Bill and Jim Cowles broke the rules,” he told her. He said the brothers didn’t take the parking garage business seriously, the way the Parkade did. He pointed out to her the efflorescence in the concrete, white discoloration caused by leaking water, and noted the obvious signs of rusting rebar.
“The garage is in terrible condition. You’ll pay a horrible price later,” he said.
The competition: the privately financed Parkade garage two blocks down Main Street from River Park Square has never had a car fall through, according to Don Woods.
Rodgers suggested Woods speak out about what he was seeing. He told her that his boss, John Hieber, forbade him to.
The conversation lasted maybe ten minutes. Nevertheless, Rodgers recalled it clearly five months later, in August 2003 when, because of the River Park Square securities fraud litigation, the city commissioned still another report on the garage’s condition.
Performed by the Bellevue, Wash., firm of N.G. Jacobson and Associates, it sounded a grave warning. “These findings are serious and indicate an imperative for actions to repair, restore and protect it as a safe … facility.”
The 2003 study found that the original garage “was not built to a first class condition. Nor was the majority of restoration and repairs recommended [by] Walker Parking Consultants 1996 Condition Assessment provided at that time. It is also apparent from my site visits to the garage that the parking garage has not been operated and maintained in a first class order, condition and repair.”
The report’s author, Gregory Jacobson, predicted that if major maintenance wasn’t begun soon, the useful life of the garage would be dramatically shortened. The city asked Jacobson if he thought the garage could remain operable without significant repair and restoration until its bonds were paid off in 2019. These were the bonds, sold with the security of city funds, that brought the Cowleses a payment of $26 million.
No, said Jacobson. The garage wouldn’t make it.
“It is our opinion from our review of this structure,” he wrote, “that the damage threshold will very likely be reached by [2019,] leaving the complete replacement of the parking deck slabs as the only viable alternative for this facility to be safe to park in.”
Grim photographs (see #9, #11 and #12) showed moisture and freezing damage surrounding barriers like the one that later failed and took Jo Savage’s life.
Rodgers was shaken by the report and said so in an interview she gave to KREM TV. But neither the city nor the Cowles family seemed to care that the garage might be metamorphosing into a public hazard.
I MET WITH JOHN HIEBER in the Bennett Block, across the street from Hieber’s Parkade garage. I was struck by the Parkade’s design. In contrast to the precariously curved walls of the Cowles garage, the Parkade is surrounded by massive vertical concrete beams, five feet apart, too narrow for a car to squeeze between. Inside the beams is a foot-wide steel girder and two steel cables. To crash through the Parkade, a vehicle would have to pull down the entire building.
When I asked Hieber, a quietly articulate man, if he would give Woods permission to talk to me, he said Woods had been retired for ten years.
“He still does some work for me,” said Hieber, “but I can’t tell him what to do.”
I asked Hieber if he had told Woods not to discuss his concerns about the condition of the River Park Square garage.
“I don’t remember doing that, but I wouldn’t contest what he says,” answered Hieber.
I related Rodgers’s account of her meeting with Woods.
“We have a different maintenance philosophy than River Park Square,” said Hieber. “We do annual maintenance, the Cowleses did it every two or three years.”
I asked how he knew about Cowles maintenance practices. From “general conversation,” he answered. “I don’t agree that the Cowleses didn’t spend any money on maintenance,” said Hieber.
Hieber lauded the Cowleses’s $100 million investment in River Park Square to revitalize downtown. “I have an investment downtown, and I certainly appreciate what they’ve done.”
“How do you know they invested $100 million in River Park Square?” I asked.
“It’s all been in the newspaper,” answered Hieber.
“Who publishes the newspaper?” I asked.
A smile crossed Hieber’s face. “I know,” he said. Then: “Don knew that I had a good relationship with the Cowleses. I have a great deal of respect for them. I’m not looking for a confrontation with them.”
After talking to Hieber, I reached Don Woods. I read to him Rodgers’s account of meeting him. Woods took offense that Rodgers had told me of their encounter.
“I mean, I didn’t speak with her to have it go any further,” he said. “In fact, I don’t even remember talking to her more than a couple of minutes. I don’t even remember anything about it, really… I know I talked to her one time for a few minutes, but I don’t recall any of the gist of it.”
Woods bristled at his purported statement: “Boy, I tell you, it’s not in very good shape at all.” He responded by saying, “I had no way of knowing that that’s in bad shape. I’ve done no study there.”
Where Rodgers attributes to Woods the statement that the Cowleses spent nowhere near the amount of money on maintenance claimed by Betsy Cowles, Woods said: “I deny that. I had no way of knowing anything like that. I absolutely deny that.”
Woods’s response to the following excerpt was more muted:
“Bill and Jim Cowles broke the rules. The brothers didn’t take the parking garage business seriously, the way the Parkade did.” He pointed out to her the efflorescence of the concrete, white discoloration caused by leaking water, and noted the obvious signs of rusting rebar. “The garage is in terrible condition. You’ll pay a horrible price later.”
“Well,” responded Woods, “I may have said that about the rebar, because that’s completely true. But I have no way of saying the garage is in horrible condition. I have not inspected that garage totally and made a study… I can’t say that at all. That’s not right. I did see signs of leakage and probably rusting rebar, that’s true.”
Woods emphatically denied that Hieber had silenced him about River Park Square. “John Hieber has never forbid me [sic] to say anything to anybody.”
When I sought Rodgers’s comment on Woods’s denials, she said: “I stand by my statements. When I met Don Woods in the garage, I had never even heard of John Hieber.”
Woods says he spent more than 50 years in the parking business and managed the Parkade for 29 years. All garages deteriorate and need constant attention, Woods explained. He said that under Hieber’s ownership the Parkade was “religiously” maintained. Asked for his impression of the condition of the Cowles garage, Woods refused to comment.
“The only thing I will tell you, though, is when I walked through there and looked at those outer interiors that broke off? When that was first built, I looked at it and I didn’t think it was very good. I didn’t think they looked safe. But, again, I have no way of knowing. I know I didn’t like it.”
—END— (July 14, 2006)
*A week after publication of this story, responding to a public records request, the city provided me with a document corroborating the non-inspection charge. “The consensus of the Public Works Committee was to not do any inspection of this facility [the Cowles garage],” read the minutes of the Nov. 23, 1998 meeting of the Public Works Committee (last page).
Curiously, the minutes also record that former mayor John Talbott opposed having the city provide “construction inspection of the downtown parking garage.”
In a July 24, 2006 interview, Talbott explained, “In no way, or at any time, did I mean to imply that we should forego any inspections essential to the acceptance of the building as meeting city code.” Talbott said there were numerous cases of the developer attempting to pass costs associated with the mall’s redevelopment onto the city that the developer should have paid. He says he thought this was one more such instance. (To see the document, click here.)
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An old Harvard economics thesis foreshadowed the River Park Square controversy
REFERENCES AND LINKS
Declarations of Witnesses, April 21, 2006
These are the two declarations of the husband and wife who were eyewitnesses to the accident of Jo Savage on April 8. To protect their privacy, the witnesses’ names have been redacted.
The Walker Report, June 1996
Prior to the public/private partnership between the City of Spokane and the Cowleses, this report was commissioned by the city to evaluate the general condition of the parking garage. The national firm of Walker Parking Consultants recommended a number of repairs.
Jacobson Report, Aug. 1, 2003
Commissioned by the City of Spokane, this report by the engineering consulting firm of N.G. Jacobson and Associates describes the extensive disrepair of the River Park Square garage, noting that most repairs suggested in the Walker study of 1996 had not been done. For the attached photos, click here.
Letter to HUD, Aug. 21, 1998
To counteract then-Mayor John Talbott’s skepticism of the proposed $22.65 million HUD loan to the Cowles family, five city council members sent this letter to HUD. Contradicting former Cowles personnel who were familiar with garage operations, the letter claims, “The garage has been operating profitably for some twenty-four years.” Later, during the discovery phase of the River Park Square securities fraud case, the letter was found on the computer of a Cowles attorney, suggesting Cowles authorship.
CAMAS MAGAZINE
Independent reporting on the River Park Square controversy. Note article:
“The Casino Was Rigged”
IRS report blames the city and Cowles companies for RPS garage bond sale duplicity.
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Jo Ellen Savage
Sept. 1, 1943 - April 8, 2006
A spandrel, similar to the one that failed, causing Jo Savage’s death.
Just a few feet from the accident site, a gap shows the lack of reinforcement or connection between spandrel sections.
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