Anonymous for a short time, a Lewis County group announced late last week that it would start a new effort to expand the Lewis County Board of Commissioners from three seats to five.
It’s not a new idea in Lewis County, but it did come from a different place this time, and seemingly without the involvement of the organizations and individuals who organized a similar effort through the county charter process roughly eight years ago.
A new group called Lewis County 3 to 5 published a news release on Thursday, Jan. 22, that announced the start of a signature-gathering effort to expand the Lewis County Board of Commissioners.
The original announcement was seemingly anonymous, with only the Lewis County 3 to 5 title to identify the new group.
Public Disclosure Commission documents connected the new effort to the Lewis County Democrats. The local political party’s email was used to register the new political group with the state's Public Disclosure Commission. That led to the Lewis County Republican Party condemning the effort less than a full day after it was announced.
Lewis County Democrats Chair Zac Eckstein, who spoke to The Chronicle about the effort, said there are supporters not linked to the party.
According to the release and the group's website, the effort seems to be in large part prompted by a feeling that the three-person commission does not adequately represent Lewis County, among the largest counties in the state geographically.
As things are right now, the county’s third commissioner district stretches from the southern part of the county — including Toledo and Vader — all the way to the eastern border, encompassing Mossyrock, Morton, Randle, Packwood and everything in between.
Eckstein, who is helping to organize the new effort, said the new attempt to expand the county commission is different from previous efforts. Instead of a charter, the move would only expand the commission with hopes that the expansion may prompt other reforms that were also part of the charter effort in 2018.
“The charter process is a big, long, complicated process that has to do with freeholders, and it’s actually two elections long,” Eckstein said. “We’re not tackling that process … It’s very limited, very one line, to what we’re trying to do.”
Lewis County 3 to 5 is hoping to use a section of Washington state law under RCW 36.32.055 that establishes a process for a non-charter county to expand its board of county commissioners from three members to five, but it's unclear if the law applies in this case. The first line of the policy appears to establish a process for counties with between 300,000 and 400,000 to expand the commission; however, a second line without a population-specific threshold states that expansion can also be prompted by a petition to create a ballot proposition, bringing the issue to the voters. That line is what is guiding this new effort.
That second line requires a petition to have signatures from 10% of the active voters in the county which, according to Lewis County 3 to 5, would be 2,000 signatures, but the group says they’re shooting for 2,500 signatures to be sure the petition will be validated. According to Eckstein, the group already has about 200 signatures and will be hoping to submit a petition with the necessary signatures in early August.
The group believes that if they can get the adequate signatures that the proposition for an expansion of the county commission will then appear on the ballot in the November 2026 general election for a vote. Whether it does or not will likely depend on how the Lewis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office interprets the law. According to Lewis County Elections Manager Jolene Manuel, if her department under the Lewis County Auditor’s Office receives a petition to add a proposal to the ballot, it would go straight to the prosecutor’s office to determine if the petition had a legal standing.
According to Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer, that process is less a ruling and more advice for the county’s best steps forward and how it can follow state law. If a case is truly ambiguous or unclear, the office might even reach out to the Washington state Attorney General’s Office for added clarity.
Lewis County 3 to 5 is very clear that this effort does nothing more than expansion. That being said, the group also sees the expansion as a first step in reforming the county’s government.
Should the expansion go through, Lewis County 3 to 5 hopes that they can convince an expanded commission to pass deeper reforms. Chief among those reforms is getting rid of the county manager position and reducing the pay for county commissioners. Smaller salaries for commissioners and removing the county manager, Eckstein says, could bring down the cost of paying the board by roughly $100,000.
“Now that's what we'd like to see, but we can't do that by vote, so the first step that we can do is expand to five and hope that we can get commissioners in place that are willing to do these reforms, you know, to bring a little bit more normalcy to the structure,” Eckstein said.
In the past, the idea to reform the Lewis County government, including expanding the board of commissioners, has not been a partisan issue. The Centralia-Chehalis Chamber of Commerce was the main group responsible for an effort to establish a county charter in 2018, which would have allowed the county to establish what is essentially its own constitution and reform its own form of government. The chamber at the time established an independent group known as One Lewis County that included other community members and organizations that supported the effort.
The charter that was discussed notably advocated for the expansion of the Lewis County Board of Commissioners to five members. It also took a stab at reducing commissioner pay, but through a different avenue. The group called for reducing commissioner hours to part-time and hiring a county manager to do more of the administrative work expected of the county commissioners.
That’s how many local city councils operate, including Centralia and Chehalis, which have paid city managers and city councilors who receive stipends and health insurance for their service.
While One Lewis County managed to get enough signatures to put the issue to a vote starting the charter process, it ultimately failed on the November 2018 ballot. They went so far as adding freeholders to the ballot, which are elected positions that would have been responsible for drafting the new charter. Current County Commissioner Lindsey Pollock happened to be one of those free holders, although she hasn’t signaled any support for the new expansion effort.
The county does now have a county manager in Ryan Barrett. The position was created by the county commissioners to help with the work load amid the pursuit of home rule charter changes in 2018, but the salary or hours of the commissioners have not changed. Eckstein argues that puts Lewis County in an odd place for noncharter counties in the state.
“That process they went through that eventually failed resulted in this kind of weird hybrid county government model where we have three commissioners and then a county manager,” Eckstein said. “We typically don't have a county manager in a non-charter county model, so we're sort of in this weird place.”
However, it's true that noncharter counties having a county administrator or county manager, while not the norm, is also not uncommon. For example, Cowlitz County, which is a noncharter county, does not have a county administrator, but Mason County — another noncharter county — does have a county administrator.
Learn more about Lewis County 3 to 5 at https://lewiscounty3to5.com.
