Brown Seeks To Let Spokane Choose Own Clean-Air Rep

State Sen. Lisa Brown has introduced a bill to let Spokane choose its own representative on the county clean-air board.

“This is a fairly straightforward issue. Spokane’s representative should be chosen by a body accountable to Spokane voters,” Brown said Friday before a hearing in Olympia on her bill, SB 5044.

It has the support of City Hall, but faces opposition from some rural legislators who fear it dilutes the power of the county’s small towns.

The Spokane Democrat’s bill was sparked by a bitter political fight in Spokane County last year over who represents the state’s second-largest city on the Spokane County Air Pollution Control Authority.

Six small-town mayors, a majority of the county’s 11 towns, ousted City Councilwoman Cherie Rodgers from SCAPCA last year and replaced her with Mike Brewer, a retired councilman and agricultural burning advocate.

After the February 1998 vote, an angry Mayor John Talbott said Spokane had been disenfranchised. He said the vote “boils down to money - money for a few - over Spokane’s interest in cleaner air.”

Rodgers had served one year on SCAPCA and had been elected chairwoman for 1998 when the small-town mayors voted to remove her. It marked the first time in SCAPCA’s 30-year history that the towns had rejected Spokane’s nominee for the position.

The vote was seen as political payback for Rodgers’ support of a three-year bluegrass burning phase-out ordered by the Washington Department of Ecology in 1996. Brewer opposed the state phase-out.

Spokane clean-air groups were angered by Rodgers’ ouster. “One hundred and six grass growers once again control the SCAPCA board, and 200,000 citizens of Spokane have no representative on the board at all,” Patricia Hoffman of Save Our Summers said at the time.

Brewer called that charge “hogwash” and said he could represent Spokane’s interests on SCAPCA.

In the past year, he has opposed asbestos regulations and voted against a major expansion of the county’s no-burn boundaries for open burning of yard waste.

Rodgers, who attends each monthly SCAPCA session and observes from the audience, says she would have voted the opposite of Brewer to protect public health.

As currently written, a section of the state Clean Air Act allows a county’s small towns to vote for the largest town’s representative on air pollution control boards statewide.

The rural mayors get to vote twice. They also choose their own small-cities representative to the five-member board, currently insurance agent Kevin Ottosen of Fairfield. SCAPCA’s board also has two county commissioners and a member representing the public.

Brown proposed a similar amendment last year, but it failed in the session’s final days.

This year, the city of Spokane sent a letter from Talbott to Olympia supporting Brown’s bill.

Sen. Karen Fraser, D-Olympia, Senate Environmental Quality and Water Resources Committee chairwoman, will determine when Brown’s bill will get a committee vote.

“We could be in the Rules Committee and on the Senate floor within a week or two,” Brown said.

In the House, the bill faces opposition from some rural Eastern Washington legislators who say it would dilute the power of small towns.