Goldmark courts West Side votes, dollars

SEATTLE – Peter Goldmark’s campaign for state lands commissioner is heavy on his man-of-the-land roots. His Web site video shows the longtime wheat grower and cattle rancher at ease on horseback and piloting his small Cessna over the thinly populated high country of north-central Washington.

But as he tries to unseat two-term Republican Commissioner Doug Sutherland, Goldmark, a Democrat, is navigating a different kind of terrain: the urban canyons of Seattle, rich in campaign donors and votes.

“He grew up in Eastern Washington but understands Western Washington,” said state Sen. Ken Jacobsen, D-Seattle.

Jacobsen was one of more than 250 people who crowded a recent Goldmark fundraiser at an art-filled pavilion overlooking Seattle’s sculpture park. Below, a commuter train rumbled along the waterfront and ferries trundled across Puget Sound.

Inside, King County Executive Ron Sims and Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, both Democrats, urged the crowd to donate to Goldmark. They and Goldmark paint the race as a battle for the future of millions of acres of Washington’s public lands.

“You can bet the timber companies, you can bet the shipping companies, you can bet the energy companies, they’re not going to give one danged dime to Peter Goldmark,” Schweitzer said at one point, his voice ringing off the walls.

It seems to be working. Seven months before Election Day, Goldmark has raised nearly as much as Mike Cooper, the last Democrat to challenge Sutherland, spent on his entire campaign. And even before the art-pavilion event, well over half of Goldmark’s roughly $250,000 had come from donors in and around Seattle.

“My goal is to raise a million dollars,” Goldmark said in an interview. When he challenged Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers two years ago, he raised $1.25 million.

Goldmark stresses that the Puget Sound region isn’t foreign territory to him. Although the congressional district he was running for is in far-Eastern Washington, he said he had several Puget Sound-area fundraisers during that 2006 run, and federal election records show that nearly one-third of his individual donors were from Seattle. He has an apartment in Seattle and recently was putting the finishing touches on a new campaign office there.

He’s becoming fluent in West Side environmental concerns – Puget Sound cleanup, a controversial gravel mine expansion on Maury Island. The rancher, who has a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of California at Berkeley, says it hasn’t been a steep learning curve.

“I think in some ways the greater task is actually to do the reverse: to educate the people of Western Washington about the issues of Eastern Washington,” he said.

Although far down the ballot in a big election year, the race will likely be feisty. Early polling, Goldmark said, shows the race to be “a dead heat.”

As head of the Department of Natural Resources, the state’s commissioner of public lands serves as chairman of the state board that manages roughly 3 million acres of taxpayer-owned forests, fields and rangeland, plus 2.6 million acres of tidelands, shorelines and underwater land. The agency battles wildfires and sets the rules for private timberlands. The state earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year from timber sales, grazing leases, shellfish beds and farmland, with the money paying to build schools, college buildings and other public facilities.

Goldmark and his supporters are trying to paint Sutherland as a rubber stamp for the timber industry and other special interests. Sutherland’s side portrays Goldmark as a left-leaning environmentalist who’s eager to bash the status quo but has no ideas of his own.

Goldmark “has yet to say what his plans are, and I think he’s grasping for a reason that he’s running,” said Todd Myers, a campaign spokesman for Sutherland. “The more he talks about what he’s going to do, the more votes he’ll lose.”

“He wears a costume well, the cowboy-hat environmentalist, but he’s a really bitter partisan kind of guy,” adds state GOP Chairman Luke Esser, citing the tenor of the congressional race two years ago. “He’s not this centrist that he’s trying to portray himself as these days.”

At the recent fundraiser, Goldmark blasted Sutherland as a tool of special interests, saying he would “sell off our forests for second-home development and strip malls” and increase timber harvests 30 percent. He called the “green timber” certification for state-forest lumber a “scam” and accused Sutherland’s agency of poor forest management that worsened Lewis County’s catastrophic flooding last December.

He also said Sutherland told an industry group last year that he doesn’t think global climate change is an important issue – a charge that drew hisses at the Seattle fundraiser. And Goldmark – a volunteer firefighter in Okanogan County – said DNR’s slow response to a local fire last year allowed a controlled blaze to get out of control and burn several thousand acres it wasn’t meant to.

“The incumbent is out of touch with our values,” Goldmark told the enthusiastic crowd. “… There are no jobs on mountainsides denuded by landslides. There are no fish in a river choked by debris and mud. We must – and can – do better.”

Sutherland’s side says Goldmark is out of touch with the truth. All land deals and the timber harvest level are approved by a board weighted equally among Republicans, Democrats and scientists, Myers said. Sutherland has been a leader, he said, in fighting the loss of forestland to developers. As for sustainable timber certification, he said, an industry group has certified Washington’s forests, and an environmental-group council has also recommended certification.

The accusation that state land rules were ignored in the flood area “is simply nonsense,” Myers contends. Contrary to what Goldmark says, Myers says, the fire was out of control when DNR crews arrived. And on global warming, Myers said, Sutherland said that although the science is unclear, the state should do what it can. Sutherland is a member of a state climate advisory team and has pushed for more wind power on state lands.

Goldmark is “sort of grasping for examples,” Myers said.

Democrats think Sutherland – who won less than 50 percent of the vote in both his elections as lands commissioner – is vulnerable.

“I’m not at all sure that Doug Sutherland has more name recognition than Peter Goldmark does,” said state Democratic Party Chairman Dwight Pelz, noting that Sutherland is “a lifetime politician.” Before becoming lands commissioner, Sutherland was Pierce County’s chief executive, “where the closest he probably came to a tree was a ceremonial planting of one,” Pelz said.

Myers points to Sutherland’s Spokane upbringing. He said Sutherland worked on farms and was a smokejumper.