Vote Clerf for Commissioner -- Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:

This year I have been spending my political volunteer¹ energy on the race for Kittitas County Commissioner, District 1. I have been working with Catherine Clerf, who is running against incumbent Paul Jewell.

Both are Republicans, and Catherine is actually more conservative than Jewell. Why would I support her? There are reasons for almost everyone to support her.

All county residents will appreciate that Catherine knows more about how county government works than does any other private citizen. She has attended almost as many county meetings as the commissioners themselves, starting before Jewell was elected. In many areas, she knows more than the sitting county commissioners.

Here’s an important example: Catherine is right, and Paul Jewell is wrong, on the water and well moratorium issues.² Jewell inherited this problem when he was elected, and could have been a voice of reason in a difficult situation. Instead, he forced the Department of Ecology to use the big stick of the upper county moratorium, a choice that laid the foundation for the proposed county-wide well moratorium.³ Jewell may say he opposes the expanded moratorium,⁴ but he himself made it inevitable, and his opinion makes no difference to the reality of the situation.

Continuing with reasons for almost everyone to support Ms. Clerf: for Democrats, there's the fact that Jewell is an Establishment Republican and Catherine is a traditional Republican.⁵ She may be conservative, but she's not partisan. A vote for Catherine Clerf is a vote against dysfunctional Establishment politics.

Another example: the prospect of everyone being able to generate and sell their own electricity via the grid is being called “the third industrial revolution.” Catherine Clerf has championed the idea locally for years and has testified in favor of it in Olympia. Paul Jewell cast the deciding vote⁶ against allowing this opportunity into Kittitas County and he testified against it in Olympia. Jewell is not a leader or a visionary when it comes to energy policy, but Catherine is.

Independent voters will recognize Catherine’s independence. This year in both races for county commissioner, the good old boys⁷ are, well, boys.⁸ The groupthink that comes with good old boy politics has not served the county well. It is past time for a fresh approach, and electing Catherine Clerf is a big step in that direction.

For an annotated version of this letter, see my blog at whathappensinthecourthouse.blogspot.com.

Steve Verhey
Ellensburg

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Annotations:

¹Full disclosure: I first got involved with Catherine's campaign when she asked me to make her website. There was talk of this being paying work, but I haven't accepted any money yet. I didn't know her very well when we first started working together, but since then I have chosen to spend considerable time advising, writing and editing, and generally helping Catherine on her campaign on a volunteer basis.

²I started this blog when I was considering running for County Commissioner in 2010, and I spent a lot of time researching and writing about the issues (I eventually did decide to run, and lost in the general election to Obie O'Brien). I wrote an extensive post about the well moratorium in July 2010. At that time Catherine was arguing that surface water was indeed connected to ground water, and that surface water rights holders were having their rights taken by excessive groundwater uses -- the opposite of what Paul Jewell, development speculators, and the rest of the Board of County Commissioners were saying. Science and the State Supreme Court have since agreed with Catherine.

³Paul Jewell was kind enough to meet with me in June of 2010, when my campaign was just starting and I was learning about various issues. At that meeting he emphatically declared that the Department of Ecology's proposal to meter wells was "illegal! illegal!" This exactly mirrored what I heard when I met with a builder's association (the organization ended up endorsing my opponent) that included Steve Senger (who was  defeated in this year's primary for Commissioner, District 2). Like Jewell, Senger expressed genuine anger as he talked about the moratorium, calling both the moratorium and the earlier proposal to meter wells illegal. (The Department of Ecology had offered metering of wellwater usage as a perfectly reasonable alternative to the moratorium. When the county refused in a huff, the state had no choice but to act. In my well moratorium post I wrote about how it was clearly the case that the state was trying to help.)

⁴Late in the classic movie Casablanca, Captain Renault exclaims, "I'm shocked -- shocked -- to find that gambling is going on in here," an instant before he is handed his winnings, and it's meant as comic relief. The Commissioners' response to the recommendation that the well moratorium be extended county-wide was the same kind of comedy. The recommendation was made by the county Proscuting Attorney's Office, which acts as the county's attorney, based on a white paper that was drafted last fall. The recommendation was not a surprise.

⁵The local Establishment Republican Party has in fact publicly disowned Catherine at least once. For one thing, they don't approve of Republicans running against Republicans in primaries. Some of us thought primaries were part of the democratic process, but the local Republican party doesn't.

⁶I was actually present for this vote, and I was a bit stunned by it. I wrote about it at the time, initially saying that I felt Jewell had acted in bad faith by seeming supportive before voting against it. Jewell complained, and I removed my comments about bad faith negotiating. Nevertheless, the Board of County Commissioners' action had what pundits call poor optics -- it looked bad.

⁷ This is of course not a slam against good old boys. If it weren't for the groupthink problem, there would be nothing to worry about.

⁸ I had to use the word "boys" for parallel construction with "good old boys;" it is naturally not meant as any kind of insult.