The ruling is in — the results of the home rule charter and freeholder measures on your ballot will count. We’re just hoping the news didn’t come too late.
The effort to begin the home rule charter process in Lewis County, which would allow elected freeholders to rewrite the county constitution and present it for a vote to county residents, started strong and gathered momentum in leaps and bounds since it began in mid-2017.
However, just weeks before the election, the movement ran smack into a major roadblock. Troubled by the Lewis County Board of Commissioners’ decision to create sub-districts for the 15 elected freeholders — a process not strictly provided for in the state constitution — charter proponent One Lewis County filed suit to invalidate the election. They argued that if the sub-districts were not constitutional, the charter process could be challenged in the future. The suit asked a Thurston County judge last month to order the charter be removed from the 2018 ballot and run again in 2019.
But it was already too late to remove the measure from the ballot, and the judge needed time to formulate her decision. Finally on Thursday — just five days before ballots were due — the judge ruled in favor of Lewis County, saying the freeholder sub-districts were constitutional and the election results would count.
The judge’s ruling legally sets aside One Lewis County’s challenge to the election, but doesn’t undo the damage done to the home rule charter effort’s image and momentum.
While we shared One Lewis County’s concerns, the legal challenge simply came too late to do any good. Furthermore, it came at the expense of any effort to promote a ‘yes’ vote on the charter. Money and time that could have been spent campaigning to pass the charter was instead spent trying to get it off the ballot.
If One Lewis County won the suit, it might have been worth that gamble.
We still recommend a “yes” vote on the home rule charter measure. This isn’t a rubber stamp on a new charter, but simply lets the team of 15 freeholders get started on a new charter. When they’re done, we’ll have a chance to check their work and vote again before it goes into effect.
If we don’t give them the chance to get working, supporters of the charter will face a hard road to try again. By law, the process has to start from scratch, gathering new signatures to place the measure back on the ballot.
We hope, if the measure doesn’t pass Tuesday, that the events of the past two months don’t discourage voters from signing on for a second time.
