Another Green Tuesday: Bonnie Mager

As you presumably read last week , for every Another Green Monday (and, yes, this edition is on a Tuesday due to a technical error ) leading up to November 2nd, I will write about what’s on your ballot. There are too many initiatives this year but I’ll do what I can as well as covering local races. I started with Referendum 52 and now I would like to discuss a (gasp!) candidate. That would be County Commissioner Bonnie Mager who is up for re-election.

Why Bonnie? Because this is the most important race in Spokane that impacts our environment.

I’m not going to mention the jail , the racetrack or her opponent . (Whoops.) Out of the local races, she is unquestionably the best environmental steward and is often the lone vote on a board of County Commissioners who fail on transportation and land-use but succeed on sprawl . She likes to say her special interest is community but when you look at her track record it’s no platitude. Before representing District 3 on the County Commission that makes up most of southwest Spokane County and the city of Spokane, she was the former executive director of Citizens for Clean Air, which was formed in response to the Waste-to-Energy Plant in the late 1980s. Also, she was the former Eastern Washington Coordinator for the Washington Environmental Council and co-founded and served as executive director of the Neighborhood Alliance of Spokane County . (More listed here .)

In office, she has stayed true to her involvement in advocacy. She voted against the $254 million dollar contract with CH2M Hill in 2009 for a wastewater treatment plant that discharges into the Spokane River, subsequently posing environmental and legal problems under the federal Clean Water Act. “I’ve seen far too many times where we’ve rushed forward as a community only to find we didn’t thoroughly research the consequences and then wound up shooting ourselves in the foot,” she said, explaining why she voted not to sign the CH2M Hill contract .

Three years ago, a developer asked the commissioners to close Ben Burr Road for a development near farmland at Glenrose. Engineers recommended against the closure since the road was still in use. Her fellow commissioners, Todd Mielke and Mark Richard, were supportive to allow it but were convinced otherwise from their county attorney based on the engineers report. But there was a twist.

From the Inlander’s The Odd Duck : This year, Spokane County-specific legislation in Olympia came forth that would have eliminated the need for an engineers report, clearing the way for the developer to proceed. Mager says it was another commissioner who advocated for the legislation.

“The engineers report was the only thing that stood in the way of the road closure. … I was able to get that legislation killed,” Mager says. “The risk really is if I’m gone, there will be nobody there to shine a light on them. You don’t know how much worse it could be.”

It could get worse. After a notice was filed against the City of Spokane’s Regional Solid Waste System for mercury emissions from their incinerator, she hoped it would force the plant to always operate under a carbon pollution control system. She was the only one not to not tip-toe around the issue and state “there’s no safe level of mercury.”

And I can’t help myself: She voted against that stupid racetrack. The Department Of Ecology found significant amounts of cleaning solvent in their tests of water wells on the site. The initial findings were so bad they put the level of contamination on par with the pollution at the Kaiser Trentwood rolling mill, which cost millions to cleanup. Commissioners Mielke and Richard attempted to downplay the pollution while she feared taxpayers would be on the hook for the fix. However, they already borrowed $4.5 million to buy the 315 acres.  “I remember thinking we would for sure pull back,” Mager told the Center For Justice . “But there was no way. There was no stopping them.”

Her steady outspokenness reinforces our need to protect the environment. She shines a light on the issues that fall through the cracks, making sure the community has a strong voice, not just a small set of fiscally reckless interest groups.

I hope November 2nd is Bonnie’s night.