PICKING ON THE ‘WRONG ARMENIAN’
Rick Anderson
Seattle Weekly
2009/01/picking_on_the_wrong_armenian.php
Jan 22 2009
WA
If you go back ten years, you see how little Armen Yousoufian was
asking for: Some papers. He wanted to make sure that King County
officials were being honest about their deal-making for a new "$300
million" Seattle football stadium (the true price tag was closer to
$1 billion with interest and other taxpayer costs). Yousoufian was a
hotel owner in the University District and worried about the impact of
a hotel-motel tax to fund the stadium for billionaire Paul Allen. He
made a public records request to see internal documents and splash
a bit of sunshine into the county’s back rooms.
The stadium, Qwest Field, has been operating for six years. Yousoufian,
now semi-retired, still does not have all the documents he requested,
nor does he have the full story of the county’s wheeling-dealing
with Allen. But, for his pissed-off persistence, he may soon have a
million dollars, he confirmed this week.
And here he’d been happy with less than a half-million.
Yousoufian got the run-around under county executives Gary Locke and,
later, Ron Sims, who stalled Yousoufian’s record requests for five
years, dating to 1997. He sued, and in 2001 a King County Superior
Court judge found the county’s actions "egregious," handing out
a $5-a-day penalty. The $114,000 barely covered his legal fees,
and didn’t send much of a message. So the sore winner appealed. A
higher court upped the daily penalty – a judge can impose from $5 to
$100 a day by law – and Yousoufian was eventually awarded more than
$432,000. Again, most went towards his legal fees. But he’d made his
point, and was willing to end the battle.
The county wasn’t. In 2007, it appealed. The state Supreme Court
last week made it clear just how bad that move was: The county, wrote
Justice Richard Sanders, snubbed Yousoufian, didn’t follow the law,
and effectively penalized him for asking for public documents, making
him refile his requests 11 times over two years. Time to pay up.
The case was sent back to a lower court to impose a penalty of perhaps
twice what Yousoufian has already been rewarded – closer to $100 for
each day of violation. As Yousoufian likes to say, "They picked on
the wrong Armenian."
The penalty, he said this week "could be even more than a million,
depending on how the court calculates it." He wishes it was
county officials paying it out of their pockets, he adds, rather
than taxpayers. "But I hope this will finally send a very strong
message. These aren’t their records. They are the public’s records."