During a recent debate with Jim Cooper, John Hutchings told a tale about why he isn’t necessarily in love with the idea of county government becoming more representative.

But, he get’s most of it really really wrong. A little disclosure, I am a member of Better Thurston, which advocates for Home Rule and a charter form of government. So is Jim Cooper.

1. Hutchings says we would need to amend the comprehensive plan if we decided to have home rule.

Just quickly, the comprehensive plan is a document required by the Growth Management Act, basically where certain buildings will be built and where people will eventually live.

A charter is how county government is organized.

They have nothing to do with each other.

2. He says we’d have an unelected super bureaucrat vetoing decisions by elected officials. Hutchings:

The charter would also have a component of an executive manager for the county. And no matter what the people want and what the commissioners vote on, the executive manager, who is not an elected position would have veto power. And, I don’t think I like that because that takes what the peoples’ wishes are away from the people. 

Oh man, where to start.

First, in the charter process it is up to an elected group (a disappearing committee) to write a county charter, essentially a county constitution of how political power is divided up through the county. How many seats on the county commissioner? Is the clerk elected? That kind of thing. So, that anything at all (like a veto wielding bureaucrat) would be required is false.

If you look at charter counties throughout Washington, you see a significant diversity of how they manage their own affairs. Whatcom has a non-partisan county commission with seven members and an elected executive. Both San Juan and Clallam stuck at three commissioners.  King County has a nine-member non-partisan council.

That said, Hutchings says that an executive manager could veto decisions by an elected body. So, more than a few of these charter counties did decided to go with a council or commission appointed administrator. This is, in fact, very similar to the forms of governments of Lacey, Tumwater and Olympia. The elected officials approve a budget and policy and the manager executes it.

While this gives the administrator day-to-day control of the county government, they can not veto a damn thing. In American government terms, a veto is literally turning back a decision by the elected board and saying “nope, we’re not going to do this.”

Veto power does not exist with any single unelected administrator with any local  anywhere in Washington State.  Seriously.

Also, while the Washington State constitution envisioned noncharter commissioners as a cross between executive and legislative actors, Thurston County has in fact had one of these unelected administrators for decades. So, if elected, Hutchings would step into a power structure very much like the one he fumbled through describing.

3. I understand that the county charter process is complicated. So it makes sense that people oftentimes don’t get the nuances. But, there’s a reason why it’s complicated. Its serious business changing our form of government.  And, people running for office should be serious enough to understand it.

This late in the game, you’d hope that a county commission candidate would have ironed out any confusion they had with the process.

But, you know. I don’t think Hutchings thinks he’s wrong. I think he’s pretty confident about his understanding of how the charter process would work.

Listen to the confident way he explains his understanding of the relationship between a county manager and elected officials. He’s trying to walk the listener through a complicated arrangement that he is just not getting himself. These aren’t shades of gray either here, or things that honest people can disagree about. This is literally a question of elements of government existing or not.

By this point in time, Hutchings or any candidate for county commission, should have their facts straight. Especially about such a hot topic (of which, there are many).

I am certainly not in favor of taking through regulatory action. So, if we need to take, we need to compensate.

On the other hand:

You want to be able to do what you want with your land. But at the same time, landowners should not be able to destroy things for the people around them. It shouldn’t be a free ticket to do whatever you want.

The point of view that Edwards articulates here is an aggressive and far-right approach to land use management that would not only throw growth management into chaos, but was soundly rejected by Thurston County voters ten years ago.

What he’s talking about is called “regulatory takings,” which is a strictly legal term that has been hijacked by the right. They’ve started using the term to describe any sort of local land use rule that prevents a landowner from realizing an economic gain from their land.

County is stopping you from building 100 homes on your 10 acres? That’s a taking.

City stops you from opening a convenience store? That’s a taking.

Basically, and restriction that keeps the landowner from making any money from their property would be described as a taking.

You can see how cities and governments would just give up on trying to preserve natural resources and the livability of our communities than try to enforce now expensive rules against landowners.

Back in 2006 a coalition of right-leaning organizations came to Washington with Initiative 933. This initiative would have forced local governments to pay landowners anytime a local zoning or land use law conflicted with their interests. If the government couldn’t pay, the landowner was free to do what they wanted.

What happened that year was that  64 percent of Thurston County voters rejected the initiative that was based on Gary Edward’s bad idea of land use management. That was higher than the 58 percent who voted it down statewide.

Even in Oregon (where the idea to give developers a free ride started with a similar initiative a few years earlier) the idea was turned back in 2007. The people there saw how bad the idea really was, allowing development where it wasn’t appropriate and where the natural resources simply couldn’t support it.

So, what Edwards is describing is really an extreme, and already rejected, idea for how Thurston County should protect communities and natural resources. Giving landowners free reign by holding the county hostage anytime they disagree is a terrible idea.

After his last run for sheriff 14 years ago, Gary Edwards faced a couple of lawsuits from his former opponents. Both now former sheriff deputies, they claimed that Edwards used the power of his office to discredit them during the campaign.

Edwards ended up beating both of them, in the primary and then eventually in the general election. But one of those lawsuits was settled for half a million dollars, and in the other, a jury sided against Edwards.

The lawsuits include an assortment of allegations, including harassment and retaliation against Ed Thompson and Glen Quantz. In the case filed by Quantz (in which the jury decided against Edwards), the former deputy claimed that Edwards delayed an internal investigation to make sure it was still open until after the election. The internal investigation ended up clearing Quantz.

I pulled together most of the news coverage of Edwards’ time as sheriff in this file.

A judge eventually threw out the jury decision against Edwards in the Quantz case. He didn’t decide the allegations weren’t true, he only said that as a sheriff, Edwards had the “qualified immunity” to do as he wished.

These incidents and costly lawsuits are only the most interesting aspects of Edwards’ service as sheriff. Another is a episode where he joined a fast speed pursuit into Pierce County on Interstate 5. Without telling anyone else involved in the pursuit, Edwards performed a “rolling slow down” during which the suspect (who escaped) his his unmarked car.

What gives me the creeps is that the lawsuits, the questionable tactics, all happened relatively recently. Up until now, I don’t think anyone has brought up these issues.  Edwards has brought up issues of county commission actions that predate the current commission and obviously don’t involve his opponent or anyone else running for county commission. But, his time as sheriff shows at the very least a management style and decision making that everyone should be able to question.

One of the frequent criticisms of the Thurston County Commission is that usually the people who serve on commission come from where most people in the county live, one of the three major cities.

The criticism goes, being city residents, though, they aren’t necessarily impacted by the policy decisions they make for residents in unincorporated areas. We’ll just ignore the fact that unincorporated rural landowner and incorporated landowners pay the exact same rate to the county in taxes for the the rest of this post.

So, here’s a crazy idea: why doesn’t the entire unincorporated part of Thurston County become its own city? And, I’m not just talking about the parts of rural Thurston County that really should have their own local government (looking right at you Rochester and Grand Mound), but I mean the entire unincorporated swath of it.

That way, the rural Thurston City government would take over nearly every local government function like planning, policing, and garbage pickup.

Thurston County would still exist, but would be stripped down to the things that really only counties can provide, like courts, elections, that sort of thing.

Their is a history of large rural area of a county declaring themselves free from the tyranny of local county government by becoming a city. In 1990 Bainbridge Island became its own city when the pre-existing city of Winslow swallowed up the rest of the island.

The article I linked to shows some of the issues that the islanders had to face to with being their own bosses (increased population growth, growing pains of ramping up services and just paying for government), but it would be interesting to see rural residents stand on their own.

Because, as you might know, landowners in Olympia pay the same rate to the county as the ones living off Fir Tree Road.