From the very beginning, we at The Chronicle have been vocally in favor of efforts by One Lewis County and the Centralia-Chehalis Chamber of Commerce to initiate the home rule charter process.
We agree with One Lewis County’s premise that poor financial management, conflicts and expensive lawsuits show it’s time for citizens to get involved and restore much needed checks and balances to county government.
We also agree that commissioners’ decision earlier this year to hastily create 15 freeholder sub-districts — a process not provided for in existing state law — was ill-advised at best and if found to be illegal could derail the charter process altogether.
However, we’re concerned that taking the freeholder and home rule charter votes off the November ballot, as One Lewis County wants to do, will cause the movement to lose momentum. Once the process is stopped, can One Lewis County get it going again?
Let’s recap. The Lewis County Board of Commissioners had a rough few years.
Since 2015, the county has paid out settlements to ex-employees claiming hostile work environments and members of the public for public records and open public meetings laws violations. The 911 center is in disarray and mired in controversy, the board has faced criticism for its use of millions in reserve funds to balance its budget while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a taxpayer-funded tourism website and attempting to cut funding to senior centers across the county.
With all of that and more on their minds, early supporters of the home rule charter began meeting. Last summer, One Lewis County began circulating a petition to get the measure on this year’s general election ballot. They’ve proposed a five-member county council and a county manager position codified into Lewis County’s laws.
In February, they had enough signatures.
The next step happens in November — voters will need to vote to start the charter process and elect 15 “freeholders” as their representatives.
The county commissioners are cut out of much of the home rule charter process because of a conflict of interest, but have a few important tasks outlined in the state constitution.
One of those is to determine how freeholders are elected. The constitution gives just two choices — (A) elect freeholders by legislative district or (B) by commissioner district. That’s it. Just those two choices. It’s easy. Straightforward.
They chose option C. Of course they did.
The Lewis County Prosecutor’s Office recommended electing freeholders by commissioner district, but commissioners directed the office to research creating sub-districts, or splitting commission districts further down to five freeholder districts each.
At the time, Deputy Prosecutor Eric Eisenberg said he estimated the size of subdistricts. based on rough population numbers. The final map was approved, after two months of hemming and hawing, in April.
Commissioners debated in minute detail other aspects of a freeholder election policy not specifically addressed in the constitution too — including freeholder pay, mileage reimbursements, filing fees, term limits and more.
The three commissioners took a simple task and made it as complicated as possible. They took three well-defined districts and made 15 convoluted ones.
And because they went outside what is allowed by the constitution, they’re being accused of gerrymandering by One Lewis County — or manipulating voting districts to get a desired outcome.
Whether it was premeditated or not, the effect of their action is a built-in legal challenge to the charter if this goes unquestioned.
For that reason, we support One Lewis County’s lawsuit against the county, and support their request for the commissioners to pass a resolution placing the charter on a February special election ballot to allow time for the issue to be resolved.
This is a historic opportunity — we’ve got to get it right.
But if the commissioners refuse to move the vote, the vote will have to wait until a future general election.
The county commission had an eventful and controversy-laden few years, but things are calming down. We urge anyone who believes as we do that the commission form of government is no longer adequate to keep up the momentum that led us this far.
Don’t let this movement die in the slow grind of the court system — pressure your elected officials to reset the vote for February. We will.
