One Lewis County members Alicia Bull and Kelly Smith-Johnston addresses attendees at a Centralia-Chehalis Chamber of Commerce luncheon Monday. The organization explained its decision to file a lawsuit challenging the upcoming freeholder election.
The lawsuit hanging over Lewis County’s upcoming freeholder election was a necessity, One Lewis County leaders told the local business community Monday, even if questioning the election’s legitimacy before ballots go out has left all involved on edge.
“There’s a black cloud,” said Centralia-Chehalis Chamber of Commerce executive director Alicia Bull. “People are frustrated. So am I.”
That cloud is the result of a convoluted series of moves between One Lewis County and county government. The group, a political action committee formed by the Chamber, collected enough signatures in March to put a home rule charter on the November ballot.
That measure will ask voters if they want to re-draft the way county government is set up, while simultaneously electing 15 freeholders to carry out that drafting process if it passes.
Compelled to add the charter question to the ballot, county officials divided their three commissioner districts into 15 sub-districts for the election of freeholders. State law does not explicitly allow or ban sub-districts.
One Lewis County leaders said they spent the summer getting no answer from the county on how they came to the conclusion their plan passed constitutional muster. Last month they felt compelled to challenge the election, filing a suit in Thurston County Superior Court.
“Let’s just say this (election) moved forward without us saying a word,” Bull said. “A vote happens. At that point, somebody could right then come back and say ‘No.’ Because they didn’t win. Now it’s unfair.”
She also outlined a possibility that freeholders could spend a long time drawing up a new county charter, only to have the whole process undermined by a late-arriving constitutional challenge.
Bull and fellow One Lewis County member Kelly Smith-Johnston spoke Monday at a Chamber Forum held at O’Blarney’s Irish Pub in Centralia. They addressed concerns raised by freeholder candidates, many of whom have told The Chronicle they’re frustrated that the group that initiated the charter process has cast their election into doubt.
Six freeholder candidates attended the luncheon Monday, part of One Lewis County’s ongoing outreach. The group invited all candidates to a meeting last week, an event that seven attended.
“It was a very productive meeting,” Smith-Johnston said. “It wasn’t that everybody was in agreement, which wasn’t the goal. But the one thing we heard from them was they appreciated us walking them through it all. Some of them I think learned some things.”
The next hearing on the subdistrict challenge is set for Nov. 1 in Thurston County Superior Court, by which point ballots will already have been mailed to voters. Bull said One Lewis County will accept the results of the court ruling and the election, pledging not to appeal if the measure is ruled constitutional. The group is hopeful that its challenge will result in a new election, electing five freeholders from each commission district, in November of 2019.
Despite frustration with the last-minute challenge, One Lewis County leaders said it was not a “smoke and mirrors” tactic designed to uproot the election in order to seat more of their favored candidates, as some have claimed. They said the group spent it the summer fact-finding and seeking more information from the county, requests that were largely pushed aside.
“Why did it only come out when we filed suit?” Smith-Johnston said. “We wanted to preserve the integrity of the process. … We were really hoping to find out that this was not a concern.”
Asked why the group did not raise questions about the plan before commissioners finalized it in April, Bull said the group did not realize at the time that the constitutional validity might be in question.
“I started having concerns when filing week happened (in May),” Bull said. “We didn’t understand. This is new for us as well. … It took us digging into that after it was brought to our attention. Just because something’s late in the game doesn’t mean that wrong is right.”
Many candidates have said the unsettled legal question has likely doomed the home rule charter anyway, as voters are unlikely to approve a measure whose validity is uncertain.
“That doesn’t mean that we can’t do it again,” Bull said. “We need to continue to look at how we’re going to make our county strong.”
Even though all involved admit the current murky circumstance is not ideal, Bull noted that lawsuit will at least serve one important purpose.
“This is setting case law,” she said. “It’s setting a precedent for our state.”
