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Eyman's Finances are Old News
By Trevor Griffey
Feb 14, 2002 -- While Tim Eyman's highly public ethical collapse has been front page news for the past couple of weeks, those who have enabled his lies for so long have largely gotten off the hook. I'm not talking about his wife, or his former treasurer, or his campaign co-chairs who are perhaps sincere when they claim ignorance of Eyman's schemes to secretly enrich himself through campaign contributions to his initiatives. I'm talking about the media.To anyone familiar with Eyman and his initiatives, the shady finances behind his recent tax cutting initiatives were well known. No matter how big the headlines or how startled the media may act, it simply wasn't a secret that Eyman had created a private corporation, Permanent Offense Inc., to which he was directing funds from his official political action committee, Permanent Offense.
How do I know? I worked against Tim Eyman's transportation initiative, I-745, in the summer of 2000. As part of that work, I helped monitor the various records that the State's Public Disclosure Commission made available about the finances of Permanent Offense.
What I and all other Eyman-watchers knew then is what everyone knows now: Eyman had created a private corporation whose sole purpose seemed to be to hide his campaign's finances from public view.
Because Permanent Offense was the legal body putting forward Eyman's tax-cutting initiatives, it was subject to strict procedures about public disclosure of all its financial records. Permanent Offense Inc., as a for-profit corporation, didn't have to reveal anything to anyone. It was an arrangement that seemed to turn public disclosure laws on their head, bucking transparency and accountability by allowing Eyman to create a veritable black box for money he could amass and spend largely in secret.
This wasn't privy information. Anyone with a computer can log onto the State Public Disclosure Commission's Web site--www.pdc.wa.gov--and see that Permanent Offense Inc. and its relationship to Permanent Offense dates back years. So why didn't local journalists, who give Eyman more attention than any political figure other than Gary Locke and the president, break this story years ago?
After all, it wasn't Eyman's lies that first started the chain of events that got him in hot water with the state and his supporters. It was a story from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published as front page news only a few weeks ago. It was Eyman's guilt from having lied to the PI, combined with the threats of his former treasurer to go public when she read his lies, which ultimately lead to the disclosure that he hoped to get rich from his initiatives. Eyman chose to publicly self-destruct, but the story that prompted him to do so should have come out in 2000, not 2002.
It took almost two years and three full campaigns of Eyman initiatives for the Seattle media to finally raise the issue (apparently this was covered earlier in Spokane but ignored in bigger media markets). It took a crusade by Christian Sinderman, one of Eyman's arch rivals, of constantly barraging newspapers with information before they finally, belatedly, picked up the story. It took day after day of front page headlines for the state to finally investigate Eyman the way it should have before. Without Sinderman, one wonders if Eyman's shenanigans ever would have come to light at all.
Of course, the recent coverage was better late than never. But if it took such prodding and so much advocacy by a paid consultant to get a story covered, who knows how many other cases of fraud and corruption are out there, waiting to be reported on in a meaningful way? Who knows whether this will serve as a wake up call for the lazy journalists and government officials that were supposed to have kept Eyman honest all along?
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