Lacey Councilman Michael Steadman: ‘I want to set the record straight’

Lacey City Councilman Michael Steadman reached out to The Olympian this week, in both an email and a follow-up conversation, wanting to set the record straight about an incident that happened last month during a council meeting.

At that meeting, Steadman decided to take a stand against a man in the room whom he accused of harassment and bullying.

“This whole meeting tonight there’s been a gentleman taking pictures of me, laughing, trying to provoke and taunt me,” he said that night. “For whatever reason, it’s not right. People like that need to be exposed.”

The man, Terry Ballard, said he was taking pictures of the entire council that night — not just Steadman — but he also said he takes issue with statements Steadman had made in the 2013 Thurston County voter guide about how long he had lived in Lacey and his “career of military service.”

This week, Steadman talked to The Olympian about his life. The 46-year-old was born, along with his twin brother, Matt, in the Bay Area of California in a town called Milpitas. They grew up and went to high school there, but always spent time in Washington state with family during the summer and on holidays, he said.

In the late 1980s, he and his brother moved to Lacey and lived in a house on College Street, one of several their father would buy and that the Steadman brothers would restore. Those homes were later sold and the money invested in commercial real estate that became the basis for the business that Michael Steadman is involved in today, he said.

Steadman attended Pierce College on a wrestling scholarship, but the school later dropped the program, he said. He also worked as an assistant wrestling coach at Timberline and North Thurston high schools in the late 1980s and 1991, Steadman said.

After that, he and his brother joined the Marines, and Michael served eight years, both active duty and reserves.

Steadman’s former platoon sergeant, Mike Foster, came to his defense in a letter to The Olympian, but he also acknowledged that “career” isn’t the best word for Steadman’s time in uniform.

Still, Foster added: “In no case should someone who decides to do what 99 percent of the rest of this nation won’t do, and then chooses the Marines out of all branches, have his commitment to his country marginalized.”

After his time in the Marines, Steadman returned to the Bay Area to work as a sheet metal worker — just as his father had done — then returned to Lacey with his family in 2005. They first lived in that house on College Street and then moved to Hawks Prairie.

Steadman still believes the real issue behind the harassment and bullying is not his background, but his support for Lacey’s plastic bag ban. The issue got heated after a group called the Effective Self-Governance Association of Thurston County offered to pay to put the issue before voters last year. They also thought they had won Steadman’s support for their anti-bag-ban stance on Facebook, but Steadman voted to uphold the ban.

Steadman doesn’t regret his vote too much, he said, because he was elected to represent everyone.

“I’m making the best decision I can for the most amount of people,” he said.

In an email to The Olympian, Steadman said Ballard and Justin Kover, the former chairman of the Effective Self-Governance group, have requested every city document with his name on it, totaling more than 15,000 emails and documents.

Kover confirmed Thursday night that he had a filed a public records request, wanting to learn more about Steadman’s work with the city, where he’s coming from policy-wise, and what he called Steadman’s “pattern of dishonesty.”

Steadman also accused the group of littering his entire neighborhood with plastic bags.

Kover disputed that, saying he didn’t know anything about littering a neighborhood.

“They just try to paint a picture of me being a bad person,” Steadman said in his email.

This story was originally published May 6, 2016 at 4:03 PM with the headline "Lacey Councilman Michael Steadman: ‘I want to set the record straight’."