Rep. Jean Silver Closes Career In Legislature North Side Republican Says She’s ‘Going To Take A Little Time Off’

Rep. Jean Silver will not seek re-election, instead choosing to end 14 years in the Legislature.

“I’m tired of driving from Spokane to Olympia. That’s one of the main reasons,” Silver, 70, said Wednesday. “I’m going to take a little time off.”

She won’t miss the time away from Spokane and her family, but she will miss her work in the Legislature.

“I enjoyed the people that I worked with, I felt that I made a difference and that was important to me,” the North Side Republican said. “But now it’s time for someone new to take over.”

She is proud of working on the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute and on the state’s Basic Health Plan for low-income residents.

But some of her best memories involve helping individuals who came to her office when they ran up against the state bureaucracy.

One particular case involved a 7-year-old Spokane boy who was being taken out of his home because his father was violent and his mother was using drugs. His grandparents wanted the boy to live with them; the state cited regulations that said he should go to a foster home. Silver said she helped convince Child Protective Service to place the boy with his grandparents.

“I see the grandmother from time to time. She tells me the boy’s doing fine in school,” Silver said.

Elected in 1982 in the old 5th District, Silver was an amiable moderate on social issues and a tight-fisted conservative on most fiscal matters. When the legislative boundaries were redrawn in 1992, the 5th disappeared and she was redistricted into the 6th and easily won two elections.

As a Republican, she spent most of her career in the House in the minority. Her background as an accountant gave her a skill with budgets that allowed her to rise to a prominent position on the chamber’s main spending panel, the Appropriations Committee.

When the 1994 elections swept Republicans into power in the House, she became chairwoman of the powerful committee. But members of her own party said she was not up to the task, and in late 1995, she was removed from that panel and given a new job of coordinating the different fiscal panels.

“There were a number of people who wanted my job” as Appropriations chairwoman, she said Wednesday.

House Speaker Clyde Ballard named her chairwoman of House Ways and Means, a newly created committee that had no members and no scheduled meetings.

“That worked out fine. It took some of the pressure off me,” she said. She was not involved in the final stages of budget negotiations because they occurred while she was helping her husband, Chuck, who was ill.

After the 1996 session ended, Silver declined to say whether she would seek re-election, even when another Republican announced plans to run for her position.

But her retirement was considered likely because she had not raised any money for an upcoming campaign.

Silver said she had no time to endorse a candidate.

Brad Benson, a former banker who now co-owns Hansen Creamery in north Spokane, is seeking the Republican nomination. Democrats Judy Personett, a former Veterans Affairs nurse, and Kerry Luciani, a financial analyst for Group Health, are also running.

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