By Lornet Turnbull
Special To The Medium
As a 21-year-old student at Whitman College, Ian Warner learned about a political dynamic in the nearby town of Sunnyside that he couldn’t simply ignore.
Warner had read about the effects of at-large elections on minority candidates in city council races and recognized Sunnyside as a living example of that deficiency. While Latinos at the time represented more than 70 percent of the city’s 15,000 or so residents, there were none in elected office.
He focused his junior and senior year thesis on the results of his analysis, attracting some local media coverage and drawing the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice and ultimately election reforms.
It was that experience, a little over a decade ago, that led Warner to pursue a career in law, the recognition that a lot of the injustices faced by disadvantaged people and communities can be addressed by knowledge of the law.
“Seeing that change happen…made it clear to me that the law was going to be my career because it allowed me to make an impact on communities that I care about,” Warner said.
Warner, who was one of the Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 under 40 honorees for 2017, is legal counsel to Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, having previously served as legal counsel to Mayor Ed Murray. At 32, he is likely the youngest person and first African American to hold the position.
Durkan, who had previously served as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, likely had her choice of attorneys she could have selected for her office’s first legal counsel. But in an emailed statement she said Warner’s “knowledge and can-do attitude have earned continued respect across city departments as well as the legal community.
“His work and his ties to the community were essential in helping our police department reach full and effective compliance and will be a necessary component for continued reforms,” she said.
Warner had been an attorney at Dorsey & Whitney, when the firm was hired in 2012 by federal court-appointed monitor, Merrick Bobb, who is overseeing implementation of the 2012 consent decree between the city of Seattle and the Justice Department involving the Seattle Police Department.
In 2015, when M. Lorena González resigned as legal counsel to Mayor Murray to run for a seat on the City Council, Murray’s administration brought Warner on board to continue working on the court-ordered reforms on the city’s behalf.
The ensuing years have been baptism by fire. And in this fast-growing city, public policy around some pretty heady issues like homelessness and police reform that Warner is helping to shape could have implications throughout the city and local communities for years to come.
Warner helped to draft Seattle’s 2015 civil emergency proclamation in response to the city’s homelessness crisis and also helped write the policies around how and when the city can do cleanup of homeless camps. The city’s actions under these policies have drawn sharp criticism from within the homeless population as well as their advocates. “We all know we haven’t found the solution quite yet, but as a lawyer getting engaged in these kinds of difficult social issues is something I really enjoy,” he said.
Warner also helped write the police-accountability legislation and worked to get it through City Council. Last week U.S. District Judge James Robart announced the city was in “full and effective’’ compliance with the consent decree.
As chief labor negotiator for police unions within the city, Warner worked to help finalize an agreement with the Police Management Association, the union representing lieutenants and captains. It’s a key endorsement of the police-accountability ordinance and includes provisions that allow the city to move forward with the use of body cameras. The city must now restart stalled negotiations and seek a similar deal with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, whose 1,300 officers and sergeants have been without a contract since 2014.
But perhaps one of Warner’s most challenging assignments in the last year wasn’t anything the public could see. Rather it was helping to hold together the mayor’s office during a period of uncertainty in the months before Ed Murray resigned amidst sexual-abuse allegations.
“My role was to protect the mayor’s office, making sure Ed had good personal outside counsel and maintaining that wall between his personal issues and continuing the city’s work,” Warner said. “If you look at that time period, the wheels kept turning.”
Warner ended up serving two other mayors in that that interim – Councilmen Bruce Harrell and Tim Burgess. “It was a challenging time but definitely I learned some important lessons in terms of crisis management and communications…”
This wasn’t necessarily the path Warner had envisioned for himself.
He graduated from Woodinville High School and attended Whitman College where he said he wanted to play basketball and baseball.
“As it turns out, the small class sizes meant I had to perform academically, too,” he said. (He still shoots hoops, at least four nights a week, he joked, as a way to relieve stress.)
He majored in political science because of a deep interest in civil rights. And one class he took required him to read a book a week on current issues affecting Latinos. It was one of those books that led to the Sunnyside project.
The attention his work received led to involvement by the Justice Department. The disenfranchisement he uncovered in Sunnyside was a potential violation of the U.S. Voting Rights Act because it produced racially polarized voting patterns that, in effect, kept Latinos off the council.
The reforms that followed quite possibly led to election of the first Latino representative on the city council and the city changed its local election rules from all at-large to a partially districted system.
“It’s a bit humbling to know that you can make that kind of an impact,” Warner said.
But politics can be a tricky thing as Warner knows fully well and no one, he acknowledges can build a career as the mayor’s legal counsel.
He recognizes that in the world of politics, administrations change. Recently in Seattle that has been every four years — or less.
“The challenge for me will be finding something that has the public/private mix that will allow me to be engaged in the work of our city and communities and that’s sustainable,” says Warner. “A place where I feel like I’m engaged in work that will make a public impact, where I have the kind of passion I have about my current work.”
