County Should Give These Kids A Break

“We’re on solid ground,” John Roskelley declared after he and the other Spokane County commissioners approved an outrageous fee increase for the Junior Livestock Show and other youth groups that use the county fairgrounds.

It’s not ground they’re standing on. As any 4-H kid with a nose could tell them, the commissioners and their lawyer are hip deep in a mess of their own making. And as any 4-H kid with common sense could demonstrate, when a barn stinks you don’t stand there looking for a cow to blame. You grab a shovel and get to work.

The commissioners claim their lawyer recently discovered they must start charging youth groups rent for the fairgrounds. Other lawyers disagree. Regardless, commissioners set rent at a level which says they have lost their minds.

Next year, rent for the Junior Livestock Show will rise to $18,000, a 700 percent increase from fees of recent years. This year, the fees double.

The result is that this four-state show, the nation’s largest and an attraction any sane county would work to keep, is being invited to other locales. Moses Lake is among the possibilities.

For decades, Spokane County did welcome the show, without legal complaint or discernible injury to the Constitution, taking pride in the 700 wholesome young participants, the thousands of spectators and the tourism dollars.

John Schultheis, a veteran appellate court judge who serves on the livestock show’s board and knows a thing or two about state law, says there is no legal mandate for the commissioners’ fee increase. State law gives commissioners broad discretion to set fees for youth events as low (or high) as they desire. RCW 36.34.145 says fairground rents shall be set “considering the benefit to be derived by the county.”

There is indeed a public benefit - RCW 15.76.100 says so - in funding agricultural education programs for youth. The 4-H kids and Future Farmers of America who have raised livestock for the Spokane show for the past 60 years are not, Schultheis notes, likely to need any of the other, more costly youth services the county subsidizes. Jails and courts, for example.

It is intriguing that the same commissioners who were afraid to raise golf fees to cover the cost of flood repairs or needed park improvements have put the screws to farm kids. Their judgment is the problem, and they’d be wise to reconsider before voters descend with wheelbarrows and shovels.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board