2 Seek To Challenge Mark Sterk One’s A Traditional Demo; The Other Sounds More Like A Republican

Fourth District voters looking for a Democrat to represent them in the Washington state House of Representatives have a distinct choice in Tuesday’s primary.

One candidate, Mary “Chey” Austin, is a longtime party activist cut primarily from traditional Democratic cloth.

She advocates spending more money on public education, protecting abortion rights, and, generally, an active role for government.

Austin, 56, often wears a donkey-shaped lapel pin.

Her opponent, Daniel E. Meckel, can best be described as a Republican in Democrat’s clothing.

Meckel, 51, thinks businesses are over-regulated and property owners over-taxed. He’s strictly anti-abortion, anti-spending, and generally, anti-government.

Meckel didn’t even join the party until this year, calling himself “non-partisan” up to now.

He became a Democrat because he wanted a challenge, he said.

“It would have been easy for me to join the Republican Party. That’s where my beliefs are,” Meckel said. “But I would have been preaching to the choir.”

The two candidates do have one thing in common: Neither has run for public office.

Otherwise, there are no blurred lines in this race.

The winner faces incumbent Mark Sterk in the Nov. 7 general election.

Sterk, a Spokane police officer who was appointed to the District 4 seat earlier this year to fill out the term of Mike Padden, is the only Republican in the race and is unopposed in the primary.

District 4 encompasses most of the Spokane Valley and part of the Hillyard neighborhood.

Austin, who works in the blood bank at Sacred Heart Medical Center, is pumping a pro-education agenda. She wants to add staff and programs at every level of public education, from kindergarten to college.

She advocates creating what she calls “vocational high schools.” They would be places where students who don’t want to go on to college can learn a trade, like carpentry or engine repair, she said.

Austin also wants to start new programs in K-12 schools for children who are at risk of falling in with gangs.

“Education can solve a lot of our problems, intensive education,” she said. “A lot of people do stupid things because they don’t know any better. Nobody ever told them.”

The so-called “fiscal conservative” concedes taxes may have to go up to achieve her goals, but she stands by them.

“That money’s not going down a rat hole,” Austin said.

She also thinks lottery proceeds should be earmarked for education.

Meckel is for education reform and thinks schools should return to teaching the basics.

“They should be teaching the three R’s,” he said. “No, make that four. Add responsibility to that list.”

Meckel also thinks local school boards should have more control over curriculum and other matters.

The self-employed computer salesman and Herbalife distributor said kids aren’t being taught the value of life at home or in school. That leads to a lack of compassion and increased violence among juveniles, a major problem in the Spokane area, Meckel said.

“They think, ‘That kid could have been aborted, it doesn’t matter,”’ he said.

One way to address the problem is by breaking down the walls separating church and state, Meckel said. Putting the Ten Commandments up at public schools would be a start, he said.

“The state cannot mandate values on people, and I wouldn’t want it to,” said Meckel, who is involved in the Promise Keepers movement, a Christian men’s group. “But they need to allow the parents and the schools and the community to decide if the Ten Commandments should be there.”

Meckel also is interested in welfare reform.

A breakdown of the two-parent family is at the root of many problems, including crime and welfare dependence, he said.

Divorces are too easy to get, said Meckel, himself twice divorced with children from both those marriages.

“A family is a team, and when you take a member out of that, it’s not good,” said Meckel, who has been married to his third wife, Linda, for seven years. “If single-parent families are so good, why weren’t we designed to produce kids on our own? We weren’t. It takes two.”

He doesn’t know what a state representative could do to keep families together, but said welfare moms need to get off the dole.

“When you have that safety net there, people don’t learn to be responsible,” Meckel said. “Parents, not the state, should be responsible for under-aged children.”

He said he supports putting a cap on the amount of welfare people can draw.

Austin agreed that juvenile crime is gobbling up children and resources.

It should be easier for prosecutors to treat juveniles accused of violent crimes as adults, she said.

She said Kenneth Comeslast, a teenager accused of gunning down two girls in the Hillyard area recently, should never get out of jail.

Meckel also is interested in removing regulations that he thinks curtail business growth in Washington and would like to abolish affirmative action laws.

“It divides the community,” he said.

, DataTimes MEMO: See individual profiles by name of candidate.