Bobby Jackson listens to a discussion during a Twin Transit Meeting at the Lewis County Courthouse Monday afternoon in Chehalis.
Eric Eisenberg, Deputy Prosecuting Attorney talks during public discussion at a Twin Transit Meeting at the historic Lewis County Courthouse Monday afternoon in Chehalis.
The boundaries of the Lewis Public Transit Benefit Area were not expanded last year during a transportation improvement conference, contrary to recent claims by Lewis County Commissioner and former Twin Transit Advisory Board chair Bobby Jackson.
Deputy Prosecutor Eric Eisenberg told the Lewis County Board of County Commissioners on Monday that after researching the issue, he did not believe the boundaries were properly expanded at the conference or as part of a failed ballot initiative last fall.
“I can see why people might have been confused,” Eisenberg said. “There are two processes by which the boundaries could expand and in hindsight, it looks like both were overlapping and neither process was fully done.”
Jackson claimed at a Winlock City Council meeting and on local talk radio that a vote taken at the conference served to broaden the LPTBA countywide from its current territory of Centralia and Chehalis. To do so under the appropriate state statute, the BOCC would have needed to convene a second conference to affirm such a move, which did not happen.
Eisenberg revealed that the paperwork filed by the county in conjunction with the transportation improvement conference cited a state statue that allows for creation or expansion of a public transit benefit area by a vote of the people, not the one that allows a conference of elected officials to do so unilaterally.
Further inconsistencies within the resolution passed by the BOCC to put a two-tenths of one percent sales tax on the ballot to fund LPTBA expansion and the language of the explanatory statement in the voter’s guide led Eisenberg to conclude the boundaries remained unchanged and the county does not need to take any action to address the confusion.
“We would have needed to figure out something about what to do if it had passed, but I don’t know what that would have been,” Eisenberg said. I didn’t look into it too much, because the tax did not pass.”
Jackson stepped down from the Twin Transit board Friday after a Twin Transit employee named him in a tort claim. The claim alleges Jackson created an unsafe work environment by bringing then-general manager Derrick Wojcik-Damers onto agency property despite a directive for him to work from home while under investigation for complaints made against him by employees.
Winlock resident Mark Obtinario, whose complaint to the state Public Disclosure Commission triggered an ongoing investigation into whether Twin Transit used public funds to campaign for the expansion-related ballot measure, asked Jackson to explain why he had been saying the boundary expansion was a done deal.
After correcting parts of Obtinario’s statement, Jackson said he had thought Twin Transit could take four years to determine whether or not it wanted to keep those boundaries expanded. Funding sources to support countywide public transit do not currently exist in Lewis County.
“I believed the boundary had been expanded to the entire county,” Jackson said. “I said (in Winlock) that I wasn’t sure how it would look.”
Twin Transit attorney Janean Parker took responsibility for having advised the Twin Transit board at a recent meeting of the possibility the boundaries had already been changed. She concurred with Eisenberg’s analysis of the situation.
The BOCC did not name a replacement for Jackson to the Twin Transit board Monday, asking instead for Eisenberg to research whether the county representative on the three-person board must be a county commissioner.
Eisenberg is expected to elaborate on that issue Wednesday during a weekly meeting between the BOCC and county prosecutors.
