David Curry - City Council Position 8 Candidate (19. June 2007, 03:46 by Derek Young) ~ It's Going To Be Close

This article was written by Todd Matthews and originally appeared in the Tacoma Daily Index on March 26, 2007. Reprinted here with permission.

Tacoma native David Curry can trace his career in public service back to Peru nearly a decade ago. It was there that Curry worked at Foundation For Grace, a faith-based organization that provided ethical leadership training for non-profit organizations.

“The concept was if we could help these non-profits, and if we could get the government to be less corrupt, then more money would go to the people,” Curry explains. “If we could help one orphanage or one soup kitchen be more effective, and in some way make the most of what they’ve got, then we’re literally helping them do more.”

The job sent Curry, who turns 39 years old this week, back and forth between Tacoma and South America for seven years.

Today, Curry has settled back in Tacoma, where he is most known for his work as chair of the Tacoma Public Utilities board, and executive director at Tacoma Rescue Mission. He’s also running for Tacoma City Council — specifically, an at-large seated to be vacated by Councilmember Bill Evans at the end of this year. Three others — Marty Campbell, Jonathan Phillips, and Marilyn Strickland — have filed with the state’s public disclosure commission, formally declaring their intentions to run for the position, too.

“It’s never boring,” says Curry of his work at the mission, where he’s currently working with staff on a capital campaign to build a new center for homeless families. “Wednesday mornings, for example, I teach classes in a rehab center. Then I might go meet with architects, then fundraisers. They’re different worlds. I like it.”

He lives in Tacoma’s North End with his wife, Kathleen, and sons Cole, 8, and Jack, 10. Curry and his twin brother, Dean (senior pastor at Life Center church), were born and raised in Tacoma. He graduated from Mt. Tahoma High School and Northwestern University, where he studied Youth Ministries, and spent two years as an ordained minister working with young people. “That experience led me into the social work area,” he says.

I caught up with Curry downtown last week to discuss his candidacy and views on the city.

TACOMA DAILY INDEX: Why run for City Council?

DAVID CURRY: Well, I’ve been actively involved in Tacoma through my work. I’m a Tacoma boy. I love Tacoma. I was born and raised here. I was born at the old St. Joe’s hospital. I guess it’s just a love for my community and wanting to contribute. Civic pride, I guess you could say.

INDEX: At this point, four people are vying for the seat. Was that a factor in terms of whether or not to run?

CURRY: No. I just think, ‘How can I contribute? What strengths do I bring?’ I’m not really running because I’m not a politician. I don’t have to run a campaign against anybody. I just need to talk about what I see as my interests in the city. I’ll just let the people decide. I look at it as I’m in the race. As a voter, I would get discouraged whenever there was one person in the race. In this city, it seems like we see a lot of that — ‘Well, he has the seat, so I guess nobody is going to challenge him’ — and so people acquiesce. I think it’s better for the voters, and in this case it kind of proves it. There are four good people. All of us have our own strengths. The voters are going to come out ahead.

INDEX: Tell me about your background with Tacoma Rescue Mission and Tacoma Public Utilities.

CURRY: They seem totally different in perspective. Let me start with the common thread, which is community service. I’ll start with Tacoma Rescue Mission. I served on the board at the mission for seven years. When [Councilmember] Mike Lonergan left two years ago, I applied for the job. It was a chance for me to stay home, not travel as much, and work in my field of expertise. The mission is what I do all the time. At the utility board, I have a history. My aunt worked there for years, and I was always interested in utilities, particularly in how infrastructure plays a part in civic development, how we invest those dollars from power and water, what it means to economic development, and what it means to the financial security of generations to come. I kind of see how that system plays into the bigger part of government, and I find it fascinating. I’ve been on the board four years, and I’m chairman this year. The position came open, and I applied for it. The board at the time was going through some challenges and it needed somebody who could bring different opinions together to try and form a consensus, which I think is a strength of mine. City Council picked me over, probably, people who were more qualified because I had that particular set of skills. I think that’s worked out well. Now we have a board that really functions well and has a lot of respect for each other.

INDEX: How do you think those two experiences — at Tacoma Rescue Mission and Tacoma Public Utilities — would inform your decisions if you were elected to City Council?

CURRY: At the mission, the people we deal with are so poor. They’re hurting. Almost all of them are homeless. They have some major issue in their lives, usually more than one issue, that you can’t spend everyday in that environment and not be affected by the plight of people who have less, or who are working with some disadvantage. It puts you into a circle of social dynamics that maybe some other jobs don’t. We’re dealing with downtown transients, people with severe drug issues, methamphetamine issues, criminal issues — there are just a lot of issues we deal with. For example, most people think of the mission as one location where we serve male transients. But we have six locations around Tacoma. We have 80 employees. We do everything from emergency services to transitional housing. People come in and they’re homeless, poor, and hungry. We will feed them and give them emergency housing. Then we’ll say, ‘What can we do to help you get self-sufficient?’ Someone might say, ‘I dropped out of school.’ Well, we have a school. We can help that person get a [General Equivalency Degree]. If they have a rehab issue, we have a rehab program. We also have 84 units of transitional housing. We also manage one-third of the homeless program that the city manager started last year, the Housing First program. Being around all of that it either gives you, or reinforces, a belief that we have to be compassionate and mindful of people who are working from some disadvantage. From the utilities perspective, it was really my first interaction with government. Although it’s not part of general government, it operates in a lot of ways like a governance part of the city. I’ve learned a lot about how things get done there. I think I understand the important role that local government can make in encouraging economic development, to be proactive in planning for the future — different zoning, regulations, and these kinds of things, which seem like small things, but together they send signals to the markets, signals to real estate developers, signals to large corporations that say, ‘We value you. We want to help you keep your workers. We want to help you expand.’ So that is a little of what I have learned from the two.

INDEX: If you are elected, what are some of the issues you will pursue?

CURRY: Neighborhood safety is the big issue. I think you can look at that from the proactive nature, the proactive steps, City Council has taken in terms of funding and encouraging those kinds of things. I’m very much interested in taking a proactive approach — not waiting until things become a crisis point before we form task forces to do something. That seems to be kind of a habit around here. We wait until it becomes a newspaper article, and then we start forming task forces. I think it’s a city council’s job to represent the people and represent their concerns in such a way that we don’t have to be number two in the state in crime, and have it be the banner of the newspaper, and then say, ‘I guess we better get busy on this.’ I think we have a ways to go on that. I think budget discipline is an issue. You haven’t seen too much of this in the last biennium, but we always seem to be coming up with another way to not make a decision. Well, we found another $500,000, so we’ll push it off to the next biennium. At some point, somebody has just got to not be a politician on this thing. Let’s just try to make the hard decision now. We’re not going to try to task more pain onto some other council. I have to balance a budget. The mission has a $4 million budget, and we have to get that money 25 dollars at a time. We have to manage every single dollar.

INDEX: Perhaps these are some of the things you just mentioned, but on what issues has City Council failed or come up short?

CURRY: Well, I don’t really look at it as a judgement on any particular council. I look at it as an assessment of where we are now. If you look at some of the surveys that have come out about satisfaction levels, I think you could say, realistically, without any personal judgement on City Council, we still have a lot of work to do. We can’t just be working in sort of a tyranny of the urgent. There seems to be a regular pattern in these kinds of things where we’re not looking forward or anticipating some of the challenges in the future, and trying to make decisions now. It’s not really an indictment of any particular council. I think that’s part of the nature of how governments work. I actually think that if you look at our council, it’s filled with really good people who want to do the right thing. In a lot of ways, they are doing the right thing. I think this council has been better than most, I’ll tell you that.

INDEX: How?

CURRY: Collaboratively thinking of solutions. You can look at that group of people and you can see a whole bunch of folks trying to work out whatever their ideological differences are, and trying to work toward solutions.

INDEX: You are running for an at-large seat. What efforts have you made, either recently or over the years, to reach out to other parts of the city?

CURRY: I’ve lived in every part of Tacoma. I was born on the East Side. Grew up on the South Side. Moved back over near Lincoln High School. And then about eight-and-a-half years ago, I moved to the North End. And I lived on the West Side for awhile, when I first got married. I’ve lived in different neighborhoods. Fortunately, my work brings me in contact with all different kinds of neighborhoods. Of course, I spend a lot of time downtown here with my work, but the mission also has transitional housing in South Tacoma. I think that’s one of the reasons I was interested in this position. I don’t feel like I fit in one particular geographic niche.

The other candidates in this race include:

Marty Campbell
Jonathan Phillips
Marilyn Strickland