‘Prince of a guy’

He’d strapped military equipment from parachutes and pushed them out of planes just to see how they’d land. He turned a summer internship with a high-tech icon into a lifetime career by simply refusing to recognize it was time to go home.

It was no surprise then that when Harley Halverson stepped down from the often controversial Liberty Lake Sewer and Water District this week, he landed softly and admirably. His tenure on the board, which began as an agreement to fill a partial term, lasted 14 years.

“He’s just a prince of a guy,” said Tom Agnew, Halverson’s fellow commissioner.

The departing commissioner leaves behind a term, much like the one he inherited in 1992, that has just enough time remaining to give his successor a taste for elected life before facing voters in November and a possible six-year commitment. Halverson, now in his 70s, would have been committing to a tenure of 20 years had he won re-election in the fall. That long a term was more than he wanted.

“I’ve enjoyed every bit of it except for the conflict. The reason I think it’s a good idea to go now is it allows a very orderly process for the person to replace me,” Halverson said.

Sewer board commissioners are hardly noticed in other communities, but in Liberty Lake they have the public’s attention. The job entails looking after an eye-catching water body held sacred by much of the public. The job also involves weighing in on community growth issues, at least as much as those issues pertain to providing the area with adequate water and sewer services.

And sewer and water politics have been intense in Liberty Lake, where the local municipality has argued in recent years that it should take over the community’s plumbing, much to the dismay of thousands of residents living outside city limits.

In short, the Western adage that “water’s for fighting over” holds true in Liberty Lake. That conflict had been in play more than a decade before Halverson’s arrival.

The sewer and water district formed in 1973 by public vote to confront a lake that was putrid with blue algae. Nutrients from the lawns and septic system surrounding the lake were seeping into the watershed and killing what had been for more than 60 years a favorite weekend retreat for Spokane residents.

By 1982 the district built its first sewer plant and the fight was on. The initial sewer plant was built to handle a million gallons of sewage per day, more than three times what the community needed. So was the cost, but there were big things planned for the meadows north of the lake, and developers and corporate landowners there agreed to pay extra in order to have sewer present when the boom occurred.

High-tech giant Hewlett-Packard had big plans for the community. The company that built the sprawling Agilent Technologies campus off Mission Avenue intended to build at least six more side by side.

Developer Bill Main had plans for 1,200 homes in the area. Another landholder, Liberty Lake Investments, had plans to build a mall out by Interstate 90. Because each of the three interests made the larger plant possible with big cash infusions, each had reserved capacity at the sewer plant.

It was a decade before any of those plans materialized. Meanwhile the big three grew restless about paying for services they weren’t using. Then the boom came, at least for housing, and tensions rose as Main’s development quickly consumed its reserved capacity at the plant and began eyeing Hewlett-Packard’s unused reserved capacity.

The situation immediately around the lake was becoming just as politically charged. The sewer and water district created strict storm drainage rules. They demanded the contractors put up hay bale restraining berms around building projects to keep the construction silt from draining into the lake.

Then the district demanded that new homes come with grassy diversion trenches, or swales, where storm water could collect and seep into the ground, rather than run overland and into the lake drainage. When builders balked, the district played hardball, padlocking the waterboxes to deny new homes water. The district even began requiring that its engineer inspect sewer construction work before it was buried to make sure it was correct.

There also were conflicts among the sewer board members, who were so split when Halverson arrived, they couldn’t even agree on how replace a commissioner who resigned some seven months earlier. The decision was up to current commissioner Frank Boyle and then commissioner Jack Blair.

Boyle had just won re-election in a bitter campaign. Blair suggested they fill the vacancy with Boyle’s opponent and from then on they weren’t to agree, even on Halverson.

Halverson was presumed by the Liberty Lake Property Owner Association to be a ringer for Hewlett-Packard, which a few years earlier had been part of a group of businesses suggesting the district shutter its sewer plant and hook onto the county system. He’d been with the company since college.

Halverson joined Hewlett-Packard as a graduate student at Stanford, a school he’d landed at after two years in the Air Force doing parachute research. Halverson was with HP before the company dabbled in computers. He made radio frequency control equipment for the company in Palo Alto, Calif.

“Bob Hewlett and Dave Packard would come and look over your shoulder,” Halverson recalled.

He’d joined the company as a summer intern and liked the work so much that when summer was over, he just kept coming to work, hopeful that no one would tell him to go home. They never did.

Boyle was suspicious of Halverson for no other reason than the engineer was Blair’s nomination. At the time of his nomination to the sewer board, Halverson had been retired from HP for a couple of years.

“I didn’t know him, didn’t know him at all. So, what I did was I said I want to talk to Harley and see where he’s coming from,” Boyle said. “I was, in fact, going to recommend we appoint him. But the board only has 90 days to appoint someone. If we don’t, then the County Commission does.”

The Spokane County Commission ended up appointing Halverson because Blair and Boyle didn’t act within 90 days. The Brookings, S.D., native proved to be anything but the pro Hewlett-Packard swing vote the public feared he’d be. His stated purpose was to make as many board votes as possible unanimous.

That philosophy of moving forward with everyone on the same page actually comes from Hewlett-Packard, said Tom Agnew, Halverson’s co-commissioner. When he isn’t slogging through sewer board matters, Agnew is a planning and business management consultant.

“The HP that was a really remarkably likable company with extremely productive output for society as well as its people and every egalitarian,” Agnew said. “He’s clearly a product of that culture.”

Halverson is also a man who likes to redirect credit and compliments to others.

“Frank Boyle has an incredible memory and he’ll say, ‘I believe the reason behind so and so is … and I remember the resolution.’ Sometimes he remembers the resolution number,” Halverson said. “Tom is a professional manager. His job is training executives and he’s very knowledgeable about government. Both Frank and Tom have been presidents of the Washington State Associations of Sewer Districts.”

Politically, Halverson sees a day in the future when the sewer and water district’s conflicts with the city of Liberty Lake will expire, largely because at some point the developable land served by the district will be built out. The district will cease to be a player in community growth matters and focus will shift to maintaining the infrastructure it has and protecting the lake.

With recent city annexations, already the portion of the city served by the district is just a piece of the suburban puzzle.

“The ordinance to assume is still on the table,” Halverson said. “If you talk to (city) council members, they believe it’s dead in the water.”