Meet Olympia City Council candidate Bruce Wilkinson Jr.
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of interviews with candidates running for Olympia City Council. At the end of each interview, The Olympian asked every candidate two questions: what they pay for housing, and if they could correctly state the median home sale price in Olympia, which was $430,000 when this series began but has since climbed to $452,000.
Bruce Wilkinson Jr. is a bus driver for North Thurston Public Schools, a union member, and an arborist on the side.
He is running for Olympia City Council Position 2 against Yến Huỳnh and Robbi Kesler. He filed his candidate papers on the last day before the deadline. His entry into the race means there will be a primary for Position 2, which was vacated by Jessica Bateman at the end of 2020.
Wilkinson was born in Virginia, grew up in Kentucky, and moved to Washington in 2003 to do an AmeriCorps fellowship. He studied political economics at The Evergreen State College and has lived in Olympia since.
Over the course of about seven years, Wilkinson estimated that he’s put on more than 100 events in Olympia as a community organizer with groups like Media Island International.
In 2012, Wilkinson organized Power to the Public, a ballot initiative that would have allowed the Thurston County Public Utility District to create a public electricity provider, as 24 counties in Washington do, including Mason, Grays Harbor, Pacific, and Lewis. The initiative, which failed with 40% of the vote, was in response to Puget Sound Energy, the only utility company that serves Olympia, being bought by a foreign investment bank in 2009.
While he has never run for office before, Wilkinson managed the unsuccessful 2014 U.S. Senate campaign of Charlie Hardy, a former Roman Catholic priest who has been called “the Bernie Sanders of Wyoming.”
“For years and years I’m sort of a person who was on the ground showing up for various causes, helping to organize in the background, from labor protests at the Capitol to Occupy Olympia, and showing up for all sorts of things since then, fighting budget cuts on the state level.”
He will face Huỳnh, who was appointed to fill Bateman’s seat in January, and Kesler, who was a finalist for that appointment but lost to Huỳnh. He said he chose Position 2 because he supports Sarah Destasio for Position 6 and Clark Gilman for Position 4, and the other races had at least three candidates already.
“I’ve been telling people for years that we need to have more grassroots organizers run for office, and if you tell people that but you don’t do it yourself, then I think you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is to some degree,” Wilkinson said. “So that’s what I did.”
In an interview with The Olympian, Wilkinson positioned himself to the left of Huỳnh and Kesler, who he described as part of the “professional class.”
“I just have trouble with, because I know they probably think of themselves as progressives, and I think a lot of people probably do think of them as progressives … I’m kind of a blue-collar, working-class guy. And I feel like they’re part of the professional class, which is fine, but it’s a different perspective on things.”
Wilkinson said he is running to call attention to rapidly rising rents and the increasing commoditization of housing, which he blames on “out-of-town investors” speculating on property.
“We definitely need to build housing, you know — people are saying there’s a shortage and I think that’s true,” he said.
“But I also feel like if we keep building housing that keeps getting bought by outside investors and put into large property management funds, then these property management funds have such a large share of the market that they can arbitrarily set the rental prices higher. And there’s no amount of building houses, as long as that model is there to buy them up, that can get us out of the situation of higher rental prices.”
Wilkinson, who is a lifelong renter, called for more protection for renters, including banning application fees and limiting security deposits.
He proposed a tax on owners of vacant property and pledged to end tax breaks and “sweetheart deals” for developers. Asked if there were specific programs he would get rid of, he cited a 12-year property tax exemption for downtown properties that sounded like the Multifamily Tax Exemption, although he did not name it as such.
“They should be paying full price if they’re going to build in this town,” Wilkinson said. “If we do incentivize anybody, it should be young people who are trying to buy their first homes in this town.”
How much do you pay for housing?
His rent is $600 per month.
What’s the median home sale price in Olympia?
“I think 4 something, early $400,000s, $400,000-450,000?”
This story was originally published June 14, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Meet Olympia City Council candidate Bruce Wilkinson Jr.."
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