By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Reuven Carlyle is not your typical candidate for the state legislature. But not only because he is Jewish — although if he wins the 36th District seat being vacated by long-time representative Helen Sommers, he would be one of only three or four Jewish legislators in Olympia next year. At 43 (as of August 10) he would also be one of the youngest senators or representatives in state government, and the only one with children in the Seattle Public Schools.
“Most people do what my opponent’s doing, which is retire and then go down there. The problem with that is that it misses the rich diversity of experience of where people are in their lives,” said Carlyle. “That doesn’t mean they don’t have commitment…. It’s the difference between sympathy and empathy.”
Carlyle has four children, the youngest a 22-month-old girl. Born into the tumultuous ‘60s Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco, he lived in a series of temporary homes until he and his mother moved to Bellingham when he was 5.
“I grew up as the only child of a single mother,” he writes on his Web site, “I grew up on food stamps and free lunches at school. Those experiences form the DNA of who I’ve become as a progressive citizen activist, as a business entrepreneur, and as a husband and father.”
Growing up on and off public assistance, Carlyle began starting businesses by the time he was a teenager, his mother recalls on the Web site — the precursor to his work as an entrepreneur. At 13, she said, he showed his activist tendencies when he threatened the local newspaper with forming a paper boy union because of what he considered unfair policies against the kids. The paper fixed things quickly.
In Bellingham, Carlyle attended “a tiny little shul in which we had about one or two Bar Mitzvahs a year, if we were lucky.”
Carlyle remembers Rabbi Frederick Gartner as “an old German Jew who a lot of people were intimidated and afraid of, but who had a special warm place in his heart for me,” he said.
When Carlyle made the decision to become a Bar Mitzah late, “the rabbi really took me under his wing and said that the real experience of the Bar Mitzvah was a connection to God and to the Jewish people, and to ‘just do your best on the logistics,’” he said. “He really cared about me and my spiritual development and was just really influential.”
Judaism has remained an important area of his life. Most recently, his family has been attending Temple Beth Am in Northeast Seattle.
Starting in 1993, Carlyle worked in the cellular arena for McCaw Cellular and AT&T Wireless, then Xypoint Corp., the nation’s largest provider of wireless E91, the technology to identify the location of 911 calls from cell phones. But he also has a long record of public service. When he was 15, he became a Senate page, where he worked for Washington’s legendary senators Warren Magnuson and Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, and as an aide to the late Speaker of the House Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neil.
After his years in Washington, D.C. and receiving a B.A. in communications from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he came back to Olympia to work as a speech writer and deputy press secretary in the governor’s office before heading off to Harvard for his master’s in public administration.
While working in the wireless industry, he took six months off to work with the Casey Family Foundation, trying to develop a program that would bring 18-year-olds who were “aging out” of the foster-care system into a year-long community service project. Two years ago, he wrote a bill creating the Passport to College program to help every foster child in Washington go to college. A year later, Gov. Gregoire signed it into law. He names that as one of his proudest accomplishments
Education is one of Carlyle’s primary focuses as he campaigns, noting that
“ the paramount duty of the State of Washington is to fund education.” He calls the state’s ranking at fifth from the bottom in education funding “a moral outrage.”
Carlyle said that the key to ensuring that the state stays economically competitive, and for families to continue to thrive, is lifelong learning opportunities. Two issues he sees as intertwined are the environment and transportation.
“We need comprehensive seamless transportation infrastructure. We don’t have that,” Carlyle said.
He supports the Sound Transit proposal for building out light rail because he doesn’t want “to let the perfect get in the way of the good.” The laundry list of agencies, from the Dept. of Transportation and the Puget Sound Regional Council to the counties and cities “do not have a seamless integrated plan that they’re building toward.”
He said he feels an impassioned desire for his district, which encompasses Belltown, Queen Anne, Magnolia, Ballard, Phinney Ridge, Greenwood and Fremont, for “a real, powerful 21st-century” public transit system.
He also said that after waiting for 20 years for federal funding to clean up Puget Sound, it is time for the state to take on the job for itself.
Carlyle is locked in a fight with a fellow Democrat — long-time politico John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunities Council. Burbank brings 25 years of public policy experience in Seattle and Olympia and an MPA of his own. The two are raising and spending money at what could be a record pace if, as expected, both move ahead in Washington’s Top Two primary. Republican Leslie Bloss has also thrown her hat into the ring, but she has reportedly received little by way of donations or support.
At a 36th District Democratic meeting in July, members failed to reach the necessary two-thirds majority to endorse either candidate, first falling short of the votes needed for a dual endorsement, and then narrowly refusing to endorse Burbank alone.