Seattle bagels get political
Seattle bagels get political
How did bagels end up at the center of a Seattle city council campaign?
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Billboards and mailers promoting a local bagel shop are par for the course when it comes to daily living in a city. However, some Seattle residents have grown increasingly confused by the mixed messaging they’ve been receiving from Eltana and its owner, Stephen Brown.
Chances are, at some point recently you’ve driven or walked past one of the four Eltana billboards around Seattle that include an innocuous phrase about bagels and appear, at first, to simply be marketing for the company. However, some of those billboards are pretty far away from their Capitol Hill and Wallingford locations, including one in West Seattle and one on Highway 99 en route to West Seattle, which just so happens to be in Seattle City Council District 1, a seat that Brown is currently running for in the upcoming election.
If you don’t get out much, you might have instead come across a YouTube video titled “Stephen Brown from Eltana Bagels.” The description of the video, which has over 97,000 views, reads “Stephen Brown fixed the bagel problem in Seattle, bringing people and communities together.” Even though the video seems like a promotion of Brown, it ends with a mention of Eltana and where you can find their bagels.
If the billboards and the video didn’t catch your eye, a mailer that some Seattlites received in early July might have instead. The flyer, which reads “Seattle Deserves Better…” before revealing “Bagels!” as the final part of the quote when opened, includes an offer for a free half-dozen bagels and schmear of your choice. The flyer also includes Brown as the originator of the quote and some fine print that the offer expires at the end of August.
All of that wouldn’t seem too out of the ordinary except for the fact that the flyer also includes a sheet dedicated to Brown’s candidacy in a primary election race that just so happens to end in August.
Erica C. Barnett at PubliCola started piecing together all of the details and wondered if Brown was violating Seattle election law. Since he’s participating in Seattle’s democracy voucher program, the billboards, video, and mailer could be seen as such if it was decided that Eltana was paying for what are essentially campaign ads.
She contacted Brown last week and the bagel shop owner categorically denied the possibility. He told PubliCola that the flyers were sent “to various addresses in the city that are close to retail grocery stores selling Eltana bagels… As part of its promotions, Eltana regularly gives bagels away in an effort to garner trial and acquire customers.”
Brown seemed to imply that this was all just a coincidental case of fortuitous timing.
“Eltana has never bought billboards in the past but the incredibly low price for billboards this summer ($1000 a month) made this promotional offer too attractive for Eltana to pass up,” Brown told Barnett. “We have used me, as the founder, in the past to promote Eltana[.] …. This effort is not a campaign expense—it is not electoral in nature.”
On Monday, however, Brown’s campaign treasurer reached out to Barnett and explained that they would be reimbursing Eltana “approximately $33,000” for the mailer, the billboards, and the YouTube video.
The change in heart seems to have come not just from PubliCola’s reporting but also following a July 13 letter from Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission director Wayne Barnett, asking Brown to provide more details about the Eltana ad campaign.
“As you know, all money spent to promote your candidacy must be timely reported, and is limited by your choice to participate in the Democracy Voucher Program,” he wrote. “Therefore, we must resolve this issue before the Voucher Program can release any more funds to your campaign.”
It’s a Shanda has no dog in this Seattle City Council District 1 fight. But I have to admit I found it fascinating that, at a time when the city is about to have one of the most critical city council votes in decades, we’re suddenly talking about bagels.
There really is something in the air right now and I’m not just talking about the smell of rising dough. The Seattle bagel scene has been evolving and changing in big ways recently. Mt. Bagel made its triumphant return. A slew of new bagel pop-ups and projects have put everyone on notice. And the fact that bagels have somehow inserted themselves into the upcoming election speaks to whatever is happening in the zeitgeist.
While I’ll leave it to others to decide how to feel about Brown and his campaign, I do want to make it clear that the claim in that YouTube video, which said “there used to be a bagel problem in Seattle” and Eltana was the ones to fix it, made me irrationally angry in a way I haven’t experienced since, well, the Seattle Times printed that Eltana was one of the best bagels in town.
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