Alec Fisken, Renegade Port Commissioner. Gadfly. Maverick. Somehow this reputation seems at odds with the man's unassuming comportment before his election to public office. His grandfather ran a Seattle shipping company, Burchard and Fisken, "back when steamship lines were a big deal. I was also interested in the port when I was a banker," he points out. "I did a bunch of port financing projects, including Port of Seattle financing." In his younger days he drove a truck on the waterfront, and for 10 years was publisher of Marine Digest, an industry journal covering cargo, seaport and maritime industries on the Pacific Rim. He has worked as an investment banker, but is now a policy analyst for Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels.

Fisken, now 59, was inspired to run for the commission by the issue he considers second only to the environment in terms of its threat to an economically vibrant port: gentrification. Along with Seattle's primary waterfront, "I'm also a big fan of the maritime industrial businesses on the Ship Canal and in Interbay," he says, referring to the lowlands stretching north from Elliott Bay between Magnolia and Queen Anne Hill. "All those maritime businesses there have been protected by a special zoning district that prevents anyone from building condominiums. It's all that allows those essential little enterprises to still exist."

Several years ago, when the port attempted to rezone Interbay and turn its 57 acres there into a condominium and office development called North Bay, "I got so upset that I decided to run for the commission," Fisken says. His victory over Clare Nordquist came in time for the newcomer to vote against a pet project of the port's powerful executive director, Mic Dinsmore, which would have ended container shipping at Terminal 46 and leased these 88 acres of prime waterfront real estate to cutting- edge developer (and Dinsmore pal) Frank Stagen.

Stagen's South Waterfront vision imagined office space for 8,000 workers, housing for another 4,200, a cruise-ship terminal, pleasure boat moorage, shops, restaurants, a large public piazza and a new arena for the Seattle Sonics. In Stagen's postindustrial metropolis, of course, the terminal's three orange container cranes - the largest in the world - would be gone, along with at least some of its 1,336 jobs, $7.3 million in annual personal income, and an estimated $69.6 million in state and local tax revenue. Fisken, along with commissioners Pat Davis and Lawrence Malloy, voted no, and Dinsmore has never forgiven him. Yet Fisken continues to lambaste the port on its real estate ventures, while breaking with convention and demanding, sometimes successfully, that the commission vote in public, not in secret.