Charley Royer, Seattle’s longest-serving mayor, has died at age 84. He was the city’s 48th chief executive.

Royer was ahead of his time in many ways. He established low-income housing to combat homelessness. Royer decided that the city would recognize domestic partnerships and provided city benefits to those families. He oversaw the development of the Washington State Convention Center.

Royer was born in Medford, OR in 1939. He joined the Army in 1961 and after leaving the Army studied Journalism at the University of Oregon. Royer worked for KING 5-TV.

KIRO Newsradio last spoke with the three-term former mayor in 2023, when he weighed in on the whereabouts of the “Seattle Spirit” in modern times.

“Our spirit is not pep rally spirit,” Royer said. “It’s almost a ‘golden rule’ kind of spirit, and it’s something that I think still exists. But when you start growing as fast as we have been growing, you get a lot of people who don’t know the handshake,” he continued, using the metaphor of fraternal organizations with arcane traditions. “They don’t know that they’re supposed to not be angry about gay people. They don’t know that Republicans sometimes, like Dan Evans and a bunch of Republicans we had in office, are for the environment, they’re for people paying their fair share of taxes.”

As Royer told it, it was almost like that 19th-century Seattle Spirit morphed and evolved into the 20th-century Seattle Process, which is the sometimes – OK, often – pejorative name for a style of big-tent public engagement in decision-making which can seemingly go on for years or even decades, which can often frustrate citizens watching from outside the big tent.

Royer said the modern version of the Seattle Spirit is also about getting over old rivalries like the one with Tacoma – which dated to the railroad age but which continued until recently.

“I couldn’t believe it when the Port of Tacoma decided that it would partner up with the Port of Seattle,” Royer said. “They were fierce competitors. Tacoma and Seattle have always competed for business, and it’s been unhelpful to everybody.

“Our cities in the region have not collaborated and so those grudges and competitions have blinded us to some opportunities,” Royer added.

When asked by KIRO Newsradio to give advice to incoming mayor Bruce Harrell, he said good working relationships with the city council and the media are key.

“Don’t criticize the council, even in private with your department, and don’t engage in bad mouthing the council with the citizens or with others who have some case against the council,” Royer said. “They know it when you’re doing that, it’s almost like an animal kind of sense that they sense that you have been talking about them, or they hear about it, and that will negate any entreaties you make with the council, or any approach you make for the council to try to work with them. So don’t engage in that, and certainly don’t engage in beating up the press.”

One big part of that skill and leadership emerging and taking action, said Charles Royer, is about the timing and about a critical mass of the public having the will and the stomach necessary to tackle the big issues.

Royer said honesty is critical to a functional political system. Even though Royer didn’t share the political views of Ronald Reagan, who was president during much of Royer’s tenure at Seattle City Hall, he did admire him.

“I thought he was a pretty good president. And he was an honest man, I think, and he was a caring person,” Royer said. “But he also told the truth. He may occasionally have, in some of his stories, bent the truth a little bit to his advantage – particularly if he was campaigning – but he didn’t outright lie.”

Royer is survived by his wife Lynn Claudon, two children; Suzanne Royer McCone and Jordan Royer, and 4 grandchildren and one great grandchild. The cause of his death is not known.

Contributing: KIRO 7

You can hear Feliks every Wednesday and Friday morning on Seattle’s Morning News, read more from him here, and subscribe to The Resident Historian Podcast here. If you have a story idea, please email Feliks here.

Bill Kaczaraba is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here. Follow Bill on X, formerly known as Twitter, here and email him here. 

RENTON, Wash. – Coming off the best statistical season of his NFL career, Tre Brown isn’t being cautious setting lofty expectations for himself as he enters the final year of his rookie contract with the Seattle Seahawks.

After playing a career-high in snaps while starting seven games for Seattle last season, Brown has been a fixture in the team’s first-team defense throughout the offseason program into training camp, seeing the bulk of the snaps at left cornerback opposite of Riq Woolen in nickel and dime sets. Believing his best football has yet to come, he’s eager to show what he can do in a new defensive scheme implemented by first-time head coach Mike Macdonald.

“I want to be the best on the field this year,” Brown proclaimed before Friday’s third training camp practice. “I got high standards, Pro Bowl, All-Pro, nothing less.”

When healthy, Brown has performed at a high level for the Seahawks, including recording 10 tackles and a pass breakup in five games after bursting into the starting lineup as a rookie. That season, he allowed just a 47.1 percent completion rate and 59.7 passer rating on 17 targets, looking the part of a potential long-term starter on the outside.

But the former fourth-round pick out of Oklahoma suffered a patellar tendon injury midway through his rookie season and a lengthy recovery limited Brown to only six games and 21 defensive snaps in 2022, putting his status in the secondary up in the air, especially after the team invested a top-five pick in Devon Witherspoon in the 2023 NFL Draft.

Bouncing back thanks to a normal offseason without rehab, Brown wound up beating out incumbent Mike Jackson for the starting left cornerback job last summer. Even with him taking on a diminished role for the Seahawks in the second half after struggling with defensive penalties, he set new career-highs with 34 tackles and two interceptions, returning one of those picks for a crucial defensive touchdown in a Week 2 win over the Lions, along with adding two forced fumbles and a sack.

Since the start of spring practices in May, Brown has looked quite comfortable in Macdonald’s defense, regularly getting his hands on the football for pass breakups in team and 7-on-7 sessions. In Friday’s third practice, he frequently jostled with DK Metcalf, winning several battles between the two in the red zone period, including deflecting a goal line fade. He’s also taken on a more vocal role in the secondary with communication being emphasized by Macdonald and the rest of the coaching staff.

“It’s been a lot to learn,” Brown explained. “But it’s really simple, a lot of things that you just see out there. Everything is really kind of like simplified in terms of the defense and it builds confidence in everybody as a whole because, even though he throws a lot at us, but when you can see how we can do it, it brings so much more to the defense.”

As far as fit is concerned, Brown’s strengths should mesh quite well with what Macdonald has asked his cornerbacks to do in the past as the Ravens defensive coordinator, including playing aggressive press coverage on the outside. Per Pro Football Focus, Brown ranked first among qualified cornerbacks with an 88.5 coverage grade in press coverage, intercepting two passes and forcing five incompletions on 22 targets.

In a very limited sample size, Brown has produced a sack on two blitzes, and given Macdonald’s penchant for sending defensive backs in blitz and sim pressure packages, he could have more opportunities to showcase that aspect of his game in 2024. Aside from leaving a few too many tackles on the field, which plagued Seattle’s entire defense the past two years, Brown has also been a serviceable run defender in his three NFL seasons with 64.0 or better grades the past two years via PFF.

With much still to prove and free agency looming next March, Brown isn’t thinking about his NFL future and he’s solely focused on controlling what he can control in the present with another opportunity to show what he can do in front of a new coaching staff.

“I say it all the time, I’m a really nice player,” Brown said confidently. “I’m a player who makes plays, especially in crunch time, you always see me show up. And you’re going to see more of that this year.”

Looking towards a crucial season, Brown will be counting on a clean bill of health, as durability has been the biggest factor that has held him back from fulfilling his potential to this point. His knee injury suffered in 2021 ultimately cost him a full season’s worth of games, setting back his development and preventing the organization from fully investing in him as a starting option. He will also have to beat out Jackson, who started 21 games over the past two seasons, for the second time in as many years.

Assuming he can avoid the injury bug that plagued him earlier in his career, the 26-year old Brown hopes to demonstrate better consistency as an all-around player and in turn, earn the trust from a new coaching staff that he didn’t from the previous regime. Coupled with a scheme that he believes will best accentuate his strengths and skill set, he’s hoping to finally enjoy the breakout season he has been on the cusp of since breaking into the league.

“I’m still coming back from not having played for so long, so now that the game is slowing down for me, you’re gonna see a lot more of the production you saw from me last year.”

Seattle Reign FC confirmed on Friday that defender Ryanne Brown tore her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and meniscus and has been placed on the Season-Ending Injury (SEI) list. Brown was injured toward the end of the first half of last Friday’s match against the Utah Royals, going down without contact as she chased a ball out of bounds.

Brown will undergo surgery to begin her recovery, which can vary depending on the severity of the injury but typically ranges from nine months to a year.

Brown, in her second full season with the Reign, started four games and played in 10 matches across all competitions this year. All her starts came in June and July as she worked her way into a starting role. Brown was part of a backline that corrected earlier defensive mistakes and gave up just three goals in the last four matches she started.

“We’re heartbroken for Ryanne,” said head coach Laura Harvey in a team release. “She has consistently been a player who works hard every day to help the team as much as possible. Her performances on the field this year have shown how much growth there has been in Ryanne’s game. We will be fully supporting her throughout this journey.”

After the Reign’s Summer Cup win against Utah, Harvey shared her frustration with the fact that the Reign had to play on Friday and couldn’t start training until Monday following a seven-day CBA-mandated break.

“The fact that we’ve been asked to play four days, five days after the mandatory break, I don’t think is the most player health and safety thing that we’ve ever asked the players to do. Tonight was always going to be tough. Playing on a Friday after a mandatory break outside of a FIFA break is close to absurd if you ask me, and unfortunately, we have a player that got injured because of it.”

Reign forward Bethany Balcer shared a similar sentiment on Twitter this week, commenting on the news that Sam Staab will miss the rest of the season with a torn Achilles tendon.