Whitman Races Focus On Land-Use, Budget, Access

Steve McGehee and Hollis Jamison are both political animals, but of very different stripes.

McGehee’s a student - and sometime teacher - of politics, with a doctorate in political science and eight years of experience as a Palouse city councilman. He’s 48, and a Democrat.

Jamison would probably object to being characterized as a politician at all. But at age 60, he’s put in decades on farm boards, grange boards and a school board. He’s a Shriner, a Mason, and an Elk. He’s also a Republican.

The two men face off Nov. 5 for a seat on the Whitman County commission. Jamison beat incumbent Commissioner Jim Potts in the September GOP primary.

A second commissioner’s seat is also on the ballot this year. Incumbent commissioner Nora Mae Keifer, a Republican, is running for a third term against Democrat Charlie Russell, a self-employed environmental consultant from Colton.

In some ways, the McGehee-Jamison race seems like a contest between the county’s liberal-leaning intelligentsia and the Republican farmers who’ve long held the county reins.

McGehee says he doesn’t see himself as a liberal, instead calling his politics “eclectic.” He hunts and supports the death penalty, for example. He’s a businessman, owning a classic car parts business.

He said he wants to repair an unresponsive, good-old-boy county government that he says seems to be mostly serving the interests of a small group of people around Colfax, the county seat.

To encourage input, he says, he’d restore the county’s toll-free number, and hold meetings around the 2,100-square-mile county.

“You have a lot of people who feel that their participation will avail them of nothing,” he said.

He also wants more flexible land-use rules, to make it easier for businesses to locate where they want to in Whitman County. He’d also lobby for a Spokane Community College branch in Colfax, for job training.

Jamison came home from the Army in 1965, after a combine gravely injured his father and someone needed to run the farm. Today, Jamison, his son and his son-in-law farm 2,300 acres of wheat, barley and lentils.

Jamison said he has three top priorities: harmony among the recently feuding county auditor’s office and commissioners, a tighter budget and zoning that steers incoming businesses to the county’s 16 communities, instead of farmland.

“I’m a farmer; I’m for the farmers,” he said.

In the Keifer-Russell race, Russell’s battling Keifer’s widespread name recognition from eight years in office and business and charity work.

“The key difference is that I’m a fiscal conservative,” said Russell, a 53-year-old Democrat. “I think the county, as it is, is not minding the store.”

The other main plank of Russell’s platform is openness. He also suggests a toll-free number, and the advertising of meeting topics on cable TV and in local newspapers.

“The budget as written is completely unreadable,” he said. “The taxpayer deserves some sort of simplified annual report - something they can get through over a cup of coffee.”

Keifer, a Republican who’s often jokingly accused of secretly being a Democrat, ran a Pullman clothing store for 12 years. She’s director of Pullman Child Welfare, a non-profit aid group.

Keifer, 63, says the county budget is conservative, with staffers “doing double duty” compared to their counterparts at other counties.

“We sit down with those department heads and go line by line,” she said. She said much of what voters perceive as county money is so-called “pass-through” funds - state or federal grants disbursed by the county to local groups, like the Quad Cities Drug Task Force.

More than half the budget, she said, comes from state and federal grants, not county taxes.

“If we don’t get it, someone else will. We pay the taxes no matter what,” she said. “That’s distasteful, but that’s reality.”

Much of the county’s recent spending, she said, has been on badly needed updates for county facilities - a phone system, the mainframe computer, the courthouse roof. Letting those things slide would have cost the county more, she said.

“To me, it would not have been good business to let all that slide,” she said.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: THE JOB Whitman County commissioners serve four-year terms and are paid $38,556 a year.