Commissioners Quiet Since April About Their Raises Salaries To Double In 4 Years In Lincoln County
Democrats don’t often get to call Republicans spendthrifts, but it’s happening in Lincoln County, where commissioners doubled their pay in April and didn’t tell the public for months.
“In Lincoln County, it’s kind of a one-party system, and this is what happens when you shut the other party out of the system,” said Brad Lyons, chairman of the county’s anemic Democratic Party.
Commissioners’ salaries will jump from $23,040 to $30,333 next year and to $37,666 in 1998, $45,000 in 1999 and $46,350 in 2000. That’s a 101 percent increase over four years.
The commissioners - two Republicans and a Democrat who says he’s really a Republican - say they did nothing wrong and a raise was long overdue.
Commissioner Bill Graedel said Lyons is just upset because Graedel endorsed incumbent Republican Cathy McMorris for the 7th District state House position Lyons sought unsuccessfully in the Nov. 5 general election.
Davenport resident Russ Goodman, 66, said he has no ax to grind but was so upset by the commissioners’ action that he is investigating a wide range of county financial dealings.
“To me, right is right and wrong is wrong, and this is as wrong as anything I’ve seen out in this county,” said Goodman, a former Lincoln County sheriff’s deputy who retired from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
“I don’t like to see anybody get into somebody else’s pockets without even giving them a chance to say something about it.”
Graedel said commissioners weren’t required to announce the pay raise.
He said he wished commissioners had said something, “but with all the things we had to do, it just got overlooked.”
The proposal wasn’t advertised or even listed on the sketchy agenda newspapers receive before commission meetings.
As with most commission actions, no member of the public was present for the vote. It was the last item of business at the April 1 meeting and got only two lines in the minutes. A reporter from the Davenport Times had already left the lengthy and apparently routine meeting.
The weekly newspaper didn’t find out about the action and break the story until Oct. 24.
Publisher Kyp Graber apologized to her readers in a Nov. 14 column and chided commissioners for their silence. She was particularly critical of Commission Chairman Ted Hopkins, who writes a column for the Times and other Lincoln County weeklies.
The commissioners’ biggest mistake was not taking the action years ago when their workload increased beyond full time, Graedel said. Commissioners work 80 to 90 hours a week, he said.
Graedel cited a successful effort to sidetrack a federal proposal to regulate a vast Columbia Basin aquifer as an example of how commissioners earn their pay.
He said the pay increase will put commissioners in line with other Lincoln County elected officials, most of whom now are paid $43,438 a year, and will help attract qualified candidates.
“We don’t view the commissioners as second-class citizens in the county,” Graedel said.
However, commissioners in other northeastern Washington counties often are paid less than other elected officials.
Commissioners in comparably sized Pend Oreille and Ferry counties are paid $23,760 and $25,470 a year, respectively. Stevens County, with three times the population of Lincoln County, pays its commissioners $34,640.
The first report of the salary increase came too late for anyone to file against Graedel or Commissioner Deral Boleneus, who were re-elected this month without opposition.
Hopkins, a conservative Democrat who says his heart is with the GOP, won’t be up for re-election for two years.
Boleneus and Hopkins were not available for comment Wednesday.
In his column last week, though, Hopkins vowed not to write for the Davenport Times anymore because of the publisher’s “malicious” criticism.
, DataTimes