Jarrett, a man who loves the details

State Sen. Fred Jarrett is a man of many words.

In the Legislature, the former Republican-turned-Democrat has a reputation for lengthy, highbrow commentary, which lawmakers ribbed him about on the Senate floor earlier this year.

"We think he's really smart, but we're not actually sure because we can't understand what he says half the time," joked Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, a Jarrett supporter.

State Rep. Judy Clibborn, D-Mercer Island, agrees that Jarrett sometimes provides too much information, but says "it only shows that he understands more about the subject than most of the people around him."

Which is partly why she's backing the retired Boeing manager in his bid to become the next King County executive. Clibborn says Jarrett, who's also from Mercer Island, knows how to break up the county's bureaucracy, and "how to put it back so that it would work."

At first impression, Jarrett, 59, comes across as more accountant than politician. He's not a back slapper. He wears round Harry Potter glasses and his sense of humor is so dry it can be hard to tell when he's joking.

He clearly loves details — and talking about them. Although his answers to questions may be long, they're not rambling. There's meat to what he says, and Clibborn contends that Jarrett is learning to be more succinct.

Jarrett scores high marks among Democrats for his work in the Legislature, but gets mixed reviews from Republicans who were angered when he abandoned the GOP to run for the Senate as a Democrat.

He's one of five candidates who've raised enough money to mount a credible campaign for King County executive. Those top candidates include state Rep. Ross Hunter, County Council members Larry Phillips and Dow Constantine, and former TV anchor Susan Hutchison.

Jarrett has collected about $99,000 for the campaign, so far. That puts him a distant fifth in the money race.

His highly detailed résumé runs six pages. He spent more than 30 years working for Boeing before retiring in June. He held a number of jobs there with increasing responsibility, starting out as a cost accountant and ending his career as a project manager for the commercial-airplane group.

He's been in local and state elective offices about as long, serving many years on the Mercer Island City Council, and as the town's mayor from 1984 to 1987.

He was elected as a Republican to the state House in 2000 and then switched parties to run for the state Senate as a Democrat in 2008. He serves on Senate committees overseeing transportation and education.

Political winds

Jarrett's defection from the GOP solidified the Democratic party's domination of Seattle and the Eastside.

At the time, the head of the House GOP caucus, Richard DeBolt, R-Chehalis, said "it is clear Fred put his finger up in the air and didn't like the way the political winds were blowing. He made a decision that he thinks is best for him politically."

DeBolt's opinion hasn't improved much since. "He seems like a fine candidate, but I haven't had the best experiences with him," DeBolt said Wednesday. "I have concerns that he doesn't know where he stands on issues."

Jarrett, long considered a moderate even when he was a Republican, has said he switched sides because he identified less and less with where the party was going.

Given that most of his career in the Legislature was spent in the minority party, Jarrett says you won't find many major bills where he was the lead sponsor.

However, he said he's particularly proud of a bill he sponsored, and that passed in 2008, that created a pilot program to develop six-year plans for the state's universities. The plans, among other things, are supposed to include bench marks and goals for degree production.

He also noted that he helped secure Republican votes several years ago to approve gas-tax increases that are paying for new highway construction today.

"A lot of the work I've done is behind the scenes," he said.

Rep. Hans Dunshee, D-Snohomish, chairman of the House Capital Budget Committee, agreed. "He's not a glory hound. He's sort of like the computer that sits below the desk and does all the work, but the monitor gets all the glory," Dunshee said.

Ever the project manager, Jarrett likes to talk about efficiency — taking existing programs and finding better ways to deliver those services.

Jarrett says he did it at Boeing, and when he served as Mercer Island mayor and as a City Council member. He says he can repeat that success at the county level.

Elliot Newman, a former Mercer Island mayor and council member, says Jarrett did make a difference there.

Jarrett worked with the city manager "to develop the concept ... of having metrics to demonstrate performance," Newman said.

City departments set up a series of goals such as how many times they'd cut the grass on certain fields or sweep the streets. "We carried it through the entire city. Eventually every department was set up," Newman said. "Fred was the innovator of that whole concept."

Jarrett said he'd take a similar approach as the county executive.

"What the county and the state do, is they set a budget that is an expenditure budget and each department has a number of dollars they have to spend. If at the end of the year they haven't spent that money, then the next year their base will be lower. So you've created the incentive to spend everything. I think that is one of the most idiotic management decisions you could make," Jarrett said.

"I don't care about your expenditure plan. I care about what you deliver," he said. "What I know, from my experience both in the private sector and in the public sector, is that when you measure people on what the output is, all of the sudden you change the entire dynamic inside of the organization."

Inviting comparison

Jarrett has released a plan for addressing the county's budget problems that calls for halting any new county programs, putting the county's passenger-only ferry system on hold, controlling employee health-care costs and reducing "bloated overhead."

One of his first targets would be to cut the size of the county executive's staff, he said, because "it sends the message that ... we're going to be a lean organization."

Jarrett got into the county-executive race before Hunter, his legislative colleague, announced plans to run. "I thought we had a conversation in which he said he was deferring to me," Jarrett said.

The fact that two people from the Legislature are vying for the same job inevitably leads to comparisons, made easier because the men have very different personalities.

Rep. Larry Springer, D-Kirkland, has endorsed both.

"Ross is more aggressive. He grabs a problem and shakes it to death until he figures it out. Fred is more analytical and slowly stirs it until you get an answer," he Springer.

Although many politicians have used the office as a steppingstone to run for governor or Congress, Jarrett said he has no intention of seeking another office later.

"If you came to me and said tomorrow you could be governor or county executive ... I'd probably choose county executive," he said.

The job, Jarrett said, is a chance to apply everything he's learned during the past 30 years at Boeing and state and local government. "What I'm interested in doing is showing what you can do."

Andrew Garber: 360-236-8266 or agarber@seattletimes.com