Meet Olympia City Council candidate Spence Weigand
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 in rent or mortgage, and if they could correctly state the median home sale price in Olympia, which is $430,000.
After a career at Costco, Spence Weigand moved back to Olympia from the East Coast in 1996, and has worked as a broker at Virgil Adams real estate since.
Weigand is running for Olympia City Council Position 7. He will face incumbent Jim Cooper and Tyrone Dion Brown in the Aug. 3 primary.
Weigand, who referred to himself as a “lifelong Democrat, not a Bernie Democrat, more of a Biden or Klobuchar type of Democrat,” flagged lack of affordable housing, struggling downtown businesses, and homelessness as Olympia’s top three issues.
In an interview with The Olympian, Weigand stressed the need for urban density, loosening regulations to encourage more housing development, and making downtown a more attractive destination for suburb dwellers.
“My big deal is, again, get more people downtown to support our businesses,” he said. “My wife and I, we are frequenters of downtown, and we feel safe — and we’re not gun owners, but we still feel safe — but I talk to so many people who don’t. And somehow we have to make downtown Olympia a little bit more inviting so that the entire community feels comfortable being there. And it will pay off in the form of more functioning, healthy businesses, higher tax base, more money in the city coffers.”
On affordable housing, Weigand cited statistics showing that 31% of Thurston County households are cost-burdened, which means spending more than 30% of their income on housing, and Thurston County’s expected population growth, which is 60,000 households over the next 25 years, according to the Housing Needs Assessment report.
That so much of people’s income is tied up in housing costs drags down the economy more broadly, Weigand said.
“That’s less money that they have disposably to spend at businesses downtown. Or saving to become future homeowners,” he said.
Weigand praised the recent zoning reform ordinance that effectively ended single-family zoning in Olympia, but said more needs to be done if the county is going to keep up with explosive growth, adding that “Olympia has a reputation for being difficult to deal with.”
Not only should projects like West Bay Yards be built, Weigand said, but multiply that by 20 to get the amount of new housing needed. (Weigand disclosed that his real estate firm was involved in listing the Hardel property.)
“My vision for Olympia is that we need to build up, not out,” Weigand said. “There’s been a groundswell of people in Olympia over the years that have been anti-growth in general, or growth paying for itself as it goes. And the problem is, we are going to grow whether we like it or not. And I just think that development, which sometimes carries a nasty connotation, connoting it with greed, is simply an accommodation of growth.”
Weigand fired off a list of ideas for reviving downtown, including creating a no-car zone and building an outdoor amphitheater as a performance destination.
Weigand used the term “enabling” to describe the city’s approach to people experiencing homelessness, and believes that Olympia’s robust social services are drawing people from outside the area. (In the 2020 Point-in-Time Count, three-quarters of homeless respondents listed their last known address as Thurston County or a neighboring county, with 61% listing Thurston County itself. Another 11% listed other Washington counties. Just 14% said they were from out-of-state.)
“We have to realize that we are not going to be able to build and spend our way out of this particular issue,” Weigand said, “and we have to find a way to keep the homeless population from the huge increases we’ve seen over the last 10 years.”
Asked what he means by “enabling,” Weigand referenced the sanitation facilities and cleanup efforts at the Deschutes Parkway encampment. While those efforts are “okay for now,” they are not a long-term solution.
“That’s just satisfying people who are up in arms about the environment and how it looks, and how it makes them feel,” Weigand said. “Even those who were involved in coming up with that [scattered site] proposal have acknowledged that there’s no guarantee there’s going to be an overall reduction in the number of people living in encampments or in vehicles.”
But Weigand did not go as far as to call for pressuring people living in homeless encampments into court-mandated treatment.
“I’m not necessarily in favor of going in and sweeping up the camps, but I would like to see a higher law enforcement presence on those items that are a result of the large homeless population we have around the downtown core,” Weigand said. “And by that I mean businesses that struggle to compete, particularly in the COVID period, property damage, violent crime — there’s been a big uptick.”
Weigand proposed non-punitive solutions, too, including building a new mental health treatment facility such as the 85-bed Providence mental health hospital planned for Lacey, and using rent assistance to prevent homelessness in the first place.
“Someone who has lost a job, or is a victim of domestic violence, or has huge medical bills and gets forced out of their home — it seems to me that it would be a lot more cost effective and less expensive in the long run than trying to figure out what to do with people once they are homeless,” he said.
What do you believe are the root causes of homelessness?
“Lack of affordable housing, drug addiction and alcoholism, mental illness. ... I think what the city of Olympia needs to do is kind of take a triage approach to addressing homelessness. … Identify the people who are homeless, put a face and a name on them, identify them and triage the solutions. Because one solution is not going to fix the entire problem.”
How much do you pay in rent/mortgage?
“My monthly [mortgage] payment is $1,965. I also pay homeowner’s dues in the amount of $665.”
Do you know what is the median home sale price is in Olympia?
“Yeah, I just read Rolf’s article this week. It’s $430,000.”
This story was originally published May 26, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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