“It went from a small size to increase in size very, very quickly,” DNR Public Information Officer Guy Gifford said. “This fire in August will be a different story. The key thing here is June, we still had a lot of green out there to help slow the fire down in spots.”
Welcome to the WUI, the Wildland-urban interface, the zone of transition between unoccupied land and land developed by human activity—an area where the built environment meets or intermingles with the natural environment. The entire Latah Valley, including the Grandview/Thorpe and Latah/Hangman Neighborhoods, is part of the Wildland-Urban Interface. One might blithely assume that an elected official representing such a region would diligently work to make sure that fire infrastructure and adequate evacuation routes were in place before pushing for development that will put more structures and families at risk for wildfire.
Spokane County Commissioner Al French, arguably the most powerful elected official in Spokane County (something little recognized), is a tireless advocate for additional development, both commercial and residential, on the West Plains and in the Latah Valley, both within and outside the city limits of the City of Spokane. Infrastructure, including fire stations and staff, access and egress routes, and the health of his constituents (see PFAS and SIA) take a back seat to his advocacy for development (except in election years). He interjects at every opportunity his disdain for any moratorium on development in the Latah Valley, even as he claims, rather disingenuously, that additional Latah Valley development will provide “low income housing.” He fights building code changes, claiming added expense that will “hurt the poor.”
His election year awakening to the infrastructure inadequacies for those living west of Spokane seem a late epiphany for a man whole dominated the previously three person Spokane County Commission starting in 2011 and served on the City of Spokane City Council for nine years before that. He lives in Eagle Ridge in Latah Valley within the City limits and he is supposed to represent his neighbors to the county commission. Where was he in dealing with glaring infrastructure inadequacies for more than twenty years?
Development in Spokane’s western WUI is still profitable for the companies engaged. If there were not a high likelihood of turning a healthy profit by building and selling houses developers wouldn’t take part. But here’s the thing: once the houses are sold and the profit turned, developers can walk away. The folks who buy the houses have a reasonable (if, in this case, a bit naive) expectation that government has overseen the provision of fire protection, ample and safe ingress and egress, and efficient and clean water and sewer. Those same homeowners (and ultimately the rest of us, too) can wind up paying a steep price for infrastructure shortfalls. They pay in fleeing wildfires on inadequate road systems and in paying ever higher dwelling insurance costs on account of long fire response times, too few fire stations, inadequate water pressure, and less than robust building codes (the evil “regulations” that Republicans continually decry). Insurance companies make money by carefully assessing risk and charging accordingly. They are the canaries in the coal mine. They offer a soberly researched assessment of the risk of losses that would bankrupt them.
When houses burn and lives are lost in the next wildfire, it is then that community sympathy, goodwill, and tax dollars (local, regional, and national) will be deployed (over and above what insurance companies are on the hook to pay out) to help shore up the losses of the un- and under-insured. Developers and builders will have long since moved on with their profits to the next thing.
In August and November vote for Molly Marshall for County Commissionerfrom District 5. She is embedded in these communities on Spokane’s west border. She has the expertise and has been doing her homework for the people of the WUI.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. It is a total misconception, a misconception under which I once labored, to imagine that county commissioners concern themselves only with those parts of the county that lie outside urban boundaries. In fact Mr. French is supposed to represent the considerable population that lives in City of Spokane neighborhoods as well as those living in the WUI on the West Plains outside the city boundaries. Many of the people of the West Plains have been drinking PFAS-laden well water for years longer than they needed to thanks to the silence of Spokane International Airport in which Al French played a role.
A lot of import events happen in Spokane County that are not covered by the regular local media. If they are reported, the reportage is scattered and covered in terms of “this or that agency” did this or that. The PFAS poisoning of municipal and private wells on the West Plains—and the associated cover-up and slow walk—is one of those stories. Fortunately, we have the writing of local independent journalist, author, and nature photographer Tim Connor, who has chronicled this story from the beginning in his Substack publication, “Rhubarb Salon.” I urge you to click that link and sign up to receive Rhubarb Salon as an email. Better yet, click this link, “The Daily Rhubarb,” subscribe, and donate to receive the full breadth of Tim’s writing and photography.
Below I have copied and pasted Tim Connor’s account of Spokane County Commissioner Al French’s reception Monday evening a week ago (June 3) at a meeting of the West Plains Water Coalition in Airway Heights. Read, absorb, and share. All of Tim’s posts on PFAS on the West Plains are assembled and available to read here.
There are ordinary public relations disasters. Then there’s the sort that the Spokane International Airport is still a wing and a prayer from being able to escape. The troubling gravity consists of stubborn facts.
Put to story it happened this way. A bit more than seven years ago, Fairchild Air Force Base let it be known that it had a serious groundwater contamination problem. It had found variants of PFAS—the so-called “forever chemical” that, until recently, was used in aviation fire-fighting foam—in its monitoring wells. In short order, it also found that the dangerous chemicals (so dangerous it is regulated in parts per trillion) had migrated off the base and contaminated drinking water wells, including wells supplying water to approximately 10,000 people in the nearby City of Airway Heights. It made the newspapers. It aired on TV.
One of those who noticed, with alarm, was David Snipes. As the Seattle Timesreported last fall, Snipes is a 70 year-old farmer who raises cattle not far from the runways of Spokane International Airport (SIA). He wanted to know if water he, his family, and their cows had been drinking for years had been contaminated. So on May 18, 2017 he sent an email to Larry Krauter, the CEO at SIA which, as a joint venture of the City of Spokane and Spokane County, is a public entity. Krauter wrote back assuring Snipes:
“Fortunately, we do not have any kind of a situation here at SIA that is similar to what is occurring over at the base and in Airway Heights…”
Perhaps as a result of Snipes’s query, SIA then decided to test its groundwater. And in three of the four wells it tested, it found high levels of PFAS. When SIA sampled again in 2019, it found levels as high as 5,200 parts per trillion (ppt), greatly in excess of the federal interim action level of 70 ppt. (In April of this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), finalized the federal drinking water standard for most PFAS variants at 4 parts per trillion).
SIA never got back to Snipes with the new information-nor anybody else for that matter. The documentation of SIA’s PFAS problem only came to light last year as a result of a citizen activist’s public records request.
To be sure, there is a lot going on, now, to deal with PFAS on the West Plains. On the surface the vibe is American potluck grounded in what some would call “Spokane nice.” But barely beneath the surface there is an unmistakable edge of frustration and exasperation. At times, there are open flames of distrust. All three were present last night [June 3]shortly after County Commissioner Al French took to the podium.
County Commissioner and veteran Airport board member Al French taking questions before a restless audience Monday night.
These are a hard facts to ignore given the weight of national press about the looming PFAS in drinking water crisis not to mention the flurry of activity right next door, so to speak, when FAFB was (and still is) struggling to get clean water to those whose wells have been contaminated with PFAS emanating from the base. In November 2021, Washington’s Board of Health announced the state’s new “action levels” for PFAS in drinking water, setting the bar at 10 to 15 ppt for most PFAS variants. And, still, SIA failed to disclose the high levels of PFAS—exceeding the state’s new action levels by orders of magnitude—in its groundwater.
One of those who knows this history very well is Craig Volosing.
Volosing is the president of the Friends of Palisades, a neighborhood-based conservation organization rooted just to the northwest of SIA where scores of private wells have been contaminated with PFAS. He was in the audience last night at a meeting in Airway Heights where several speakers had been invited by the West Plains Water Coalition to address different facets of the PFAS problems. To be sure, there is a lot going on, now, to deal with PFAS on the West Plains. On the surface the vibe is American potluck grounded in what some would call “Spokane nice.” But barely beneath the surface there is an unmistakable edge of frustration and exasperation. At times, there are open flames of distrust. All three were present last night shortly after County Commissioner Al French took to the podium.
At the start of the program, the coalition’s president, John Hancock, reported Krauter and another SIA executive had declined invitations to appear at last night’s event. But Hancock had also invited French, currently Spokane’s longest-serving elected official, and arguably its most influential politician. French is running for re-election this year. He accepted the invitation.
French has been a stalwart on the SIA board for many years, and a leader in “S3R3” Solutions, a non-profit formed to recruit and service business interests in the “West Plains Airport Area.” French is chairman of S3R3. SIA CEO Krauter is vice-chair. There is a paper trail of evidence, supported by on the record interviews, that French delayed and nearly succeeded in killing a key groundwater study crucial to securing a better understanding of the scale of the contamination, at and beyond the airport.
In retrospect, there’s little question the study would have uncovered the PFAS plume(s) from the airport. Indeed, in his 2017 email to Krauter, David Snipes noted that the wetlands on his property feed the Garden Springs creek that emerges near the Finch Arboretum in west Spokane. Sure enough, one of the delayed study’s first findings—made public just a couple weeks ago—is that David Snipes had every reason to be concerned: there is elevated PFAS in Garden Springs creek.
Tarmac at Spokane International Airport, looking north from main terminal
Last night and in other recent public appearances, French now presents himself as a champion of that same study. He asks his audiences to look forward and not backwards. That doesn’t sit well with those, like Volosing, who were alerted to French’s foot-dragging years ago and now demand accountability.
Questions were limited last night, but Volosing made sure his was one of the first hands to go up.
“I know you certainly don’t want us to be reliving any history,” Volosing told French. “But one really burning question would help us understand how we got here.”
He then walked French through the history and argued that French was in the best position—as County Commissioner—and board member on both the regional health district and airport board—to observe and influence the process.
“Will you please help us understand what guided keeping a lid on this?”[the airport’s PFAS contamination] “Keeping it from the public? Keeping it from downstream well owners?”
Volosing continued, referencing the delays in the groundwater study.
“What happened where we could have utilized this process and having it begun five, six years ago, and have a whole bunch of remediation underway by now? Why did you keep it under wraps for so long?”
A wave of applause rose and rippled through the audience.
French absorbed the question and the applause for Volosing. He then said, in essence, that he couldn’t remember very well, but that he was having staff—at both the airport and the county—investigate his conduct.
French put it this way:
“So in the last seven years, this has been a evolving topic. And we’ve learned a lot from the science and from a variety of different sorts of– so to answer that question, I now have staff that’s going back through the last seven years of my activity at the county and involvement with the airport as well as others. And so we are going to be coming forward with a record, with documents to back it up, so that we can answer that question. Because quite honestly, I don’t remember everything that happened seven years ago. But we do have records that can identify that. And we’re going to make it public so that you will know everything that I knew at the time.”
“And again,” he continued, “I’m one person on an airport board of seven. And the airport is located in the city. There are three other elected officials that have the same information that I did and also not coming forward. And there’s reasons for that. And so we will provide that for you. And what are those reasons that it has to go to this big investigative process that’s inside your own office? And there’s legal reasons for that that I cannot speak to at this point. And I’m working to try and get the freedom to be able to talk about those.”
Volosing then asked a followup, which was more of a statement than a question.
“Our investigation shows that the primary reason that you have kept a lid on this is financial. It has to do with all the wonderful big money deals going on in property development around the airport. And you didn’t want any bad news to screw up those deals and devalue the property. You have played to your constituents and those who fund your campaigns rather than consideration for the downstream people, knowing full well for years.”
To which French replied: “Well, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion. I think what you’ll find is the record doesn’t support that. And so we’ll be coming forward. And you’re all entitled to an opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. And we’ll be coming forward with the facts.”
With that he left the podium, to a cordial smattering of applause.
As he began to dismount the stage, a woman from the audience shouted:
“You said you’re coming forward with this information. Can you give us a timeline on that?”
His reply: “Probably within the next two or three weeks.”
French asking the airport and county staff to help him investigate himself is noteworthy. It does look back at a crucial period of decision-making, but it is hardly independent, especially given French’s repeated excuse that answering questions about his and the airport’s decision-making on PFAS is curtailed for “legal” reasons.
As I’ve reported previously, quite apart from Ecology’s intervention under the state’s Model Toxics Control Act to compel and devise a cleanup plan for SIA, there is the short-term emergency to better identify and assist well owners whose water is presently contaminated with PFAS. In February, Ecology and EPA teamed up to in February to sample more than 300 wells in the zone north of SIA and east of Fairchild’s response area. These were residents who weren’t eligible for testing and remediation under the Fairchild program. The results—via EPA sampling and testing—were striking, with 172 wells found with PFAS above action levels. It has been the state’s role to deliver bottles of clean water to those whose wells are contaminated.
The agencies subsequently announced that funding is available to extend the program to another 125 well owners, beginning thus month. Last night Ecology’s Bri Brinkman made an added and urgent appeal to well owners who’ve had their wells tested to provide their data tables to the agency, as the data are vital to the science of better understanding where and how contaminated groundwater is moving through the highly complex West Plains aquifer system.
—tjc
Reporting on the West Plains “forever chemicals” saga is provided free as a public service. Please consider supporting this work with a paid subscription to The Daily Rhubarb by clicking on the tab below.
For the last week and a half the airways and the digi-verse were saturated with commentary on the significance of Donald Trump’s conviction as a felon. A unanimous Manhattan jury found that Trump engaged in criminal falsification of financial records in order to obscure that he directed money to be paid to silence a porn star—and thereby to enhance his chances of being elected President in 2016. If Trump had not committed this felony of records falsification and the sex story had broken in the media immediately following the Access Hollywood tape, the story might have turned off enough voters that Donald Trump would not have been elected President—and the course of national and even world history would now be different. Trump’s involvement in the felonious falsification of financial records was all about stealing the 2016 election by keeping voters in the dark. Don’t let our very human pre-occupation sex cause us to obscure that.
Trump was NOT convicted of having sex with Stormy Daniels (that’s not a crime), nor did that act need to be proven, although, based on prior behavior and reports of his boasting at the time, it seems highly probable that he did.
I was taught in school and by my parents to respect the decision of a jury that has had to sit for days and listen to the back and forth of lawyers and witnesses and actually examine the physical evidence—listening and inspection that I did not do—so, in general, who am I to dispute their conclusions?
The best summary of the significance of Trump’s guilty verdict and all the commentary around it was written by Doug Muder. Some of the best parts of Muder’s last Monday’s (June 3rd’s) post are copied below.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Everything below is copied from a post on Doug Muder’s The Weekly Sift. If you do not already read The Weekly Sift I encourage you to click on the title below and sign up with your email in the left hand column. It is both profound and entertaining.
The very last line in the quote is the clincher. [The Bold in the quote is mine.]
An innocent man running for office should want to clear his name before the election, but Trump has used every device at hand to delay his trials until after the election (when, if he wins, he will gain new powers to obstruct justice). But Trump lacked any leverage for delaying the Manhattan trial: Because it’s a state trial, the Supreme Court had no grounds to stop it; because New York is a blue state, no state officials got in the way; and the judge overseeing the case was not indebted to Trump.
So the trial was held. It was a fair trial. Trump had been indicted not by President Biden or the Department of Justice, but by a grand jury of New York citizens. He exercised a defendant’s usual right to participate in selecting the trial jury. His lawyers were allowed to cross-examine the witnesses against him, to introduce relevant evidence in his defense, to file motions, to object to prosecution questions and witness statements, to call witnesses of their own, and to give a summation to the jury. The judge ruled on those motions and objections, sometimes favoring the prosecution and sometimes favoring the defense. Trump himself had the right to testify, but chose not to. The jury was instructed that they should acquit if they found any reasonable doubt about his guilt.
In short, Trump received every consideration the American justice system grants to defendants. In certain ways, he was treated much better than most other criminal defendants: Just about anyone else would have been jailed after 11 violations of the judge’s orders, but Trump was not.
The response. Rational people might begin to have second thoughts about supporting a candidate convicted of felonies, but that is not how the Republican Party works these days. With very rareexceptions, Republicans doubled down on their Trump support, choosing instead to attack the American justice system.
At this point, you might be wondering: Is any of this surprising? Trump always claims he’s the victim of a conspiracy, and Republicans always end up backing whatever Trump says.
But that’s precisely the problem. The current Republican party is so hostile to the foundations of the American political system that they can be counted on to attack the possibility of a fair Trump trial. Either Trump should be able to do whatever he wants with no accountability, or it’s proof that the entire edifice of American law and politics is rotten.
What exactly needs to be “set straight” is almost never spelled out. I have heard and read a lot of outrage from the MAGA cult, but few of them care to argue the facts of the case.They just think Trump should get away with it. They attack the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, and the Biden administration (which played no apparent role in this trial). They argue that Trump should never have been prosecuted (which is a strange thing to argue after the jury returns a guilty verdict [3]), or that an appeals court should overturn the verdict on some technical grounds.
But they don’t argue that Trump didn’t do exactly what the indictment says he did.
It came me in a couple of different, rather obscure sources, but this Substack email headline really nailed it: “‘2,000 Mules’ Retracted, Still Lodged in Grandma’s Brain,” (part of which post is copied below).Instead of grandma,I thought of the earnest sixty something man, Tim Kinley, who habitually appears at the 2PM Spokane County Commissioner Meetings (here at 5:32) and “demands” of the commissioners in a public comment that they “demand” an audit of “all our Spokane County voting processes.” I thought of all those true-believing Spokane GOP Republicans who, last March, adopted a platform demanding “an end to mail-in voting.” And I thought of all those condemned to listen to the talking heads on syndicated, right wing, stations owned by the “Christian” Salem Radio Network on their car and truck radios, talking heads anointed with supposed gravitas and solemnly featured in Dinesh D’Souza’s “documentary” film “2000 Mules.”
D’Souza’s documentary was so convincing to the un-critical mind that a pirated DVD of “2000 Mules” was broadcast mailed (at a cost of around a dollar each) to hundreds(?) of addresses in Eastern Washington ahead of the 2022 elections. The mailing came from “Spokane Citizens For Election Integrity,” an un-researchable group (?person) with un-researchable funding mailing from a non-existent return address. Was the DVD sent and funded by a true believer anxious to spread his or her “truth” or by a cynical Republican election operative? We’ll never know—but the result was the same: manipulating and poisoning un-critical minds with doubt and anger concerning our elections systems.
I made myself watch D’Souza’s film. Sadly, it is easy to see how a listener to the talking heads of the Salem Radio Network would be taken in. After all, if Dennis Prager, Sebastian Gorka, Larry Elder, Eric Metaxas, and Charlie Kirk are respected authorities in your world then their solemn nodding in agreement with the “evidence” presented must mean it’s true. It was and is a classic confidence scam.
I feel sorry for all the people taken in by Trump’s Big Lie and by Dinesh D’Souza’s propaganda film, “2000 Mules.” I feel far more sorry for the rest of us, condemned, as we are, to listen to people taken in by this shameless horse manure—and, worse, to possibly fall prey to the electoral consequences of their delusion.
The week following Trump’s felony conviction, the Salem Media Group’s retraction of “2000 Mules” is one more illustration of a truth expressed in the post below:
In the world we actually live in, it seems like the only real accountability we ever see these days is legal: Someone harmed by the laws takes the liar to court, proves the lie, and twists their arm into finally admitting the truth.
The trouble is that people need to pay enough attention to hear and absorb that what they were told by someone they trusted was actually a lie. Tell a friend about “2000 Mules” and Salem Radio.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Dinesh D’Souza, speaking at CPAC in 2016. (Photo by Zach D Roberts / NurPhoto via Getty Images.)
Ever since the “Stop the Steal” campaign in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the relentless barrage of election lies from Donald Trump and his allies have been like a river carving a gorge out of a mountain, dramatically reshaping the land long after the water itself has passed. Conspiracy after conspiracy appears, roars across social media at top speed, then is exposed and falls apart. But the dissipation of the individual conspiracies—the foundering of the court cases, the recantations from media companies that spread them, the eye-popping defamation settlements—do nothing to rebuild the trust already eroded as they flowed by. Among Republicans, belief that the 2020 election was stolen is more fundamental than ever—carved into the bedrock.
When Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2,000 Mules arrived on the scene in 2022, it was an immediate MAGA smash—a “masterpiece of meeting market demand,” as WaPo’s Philip Bump put it earlier this year. It purported to prove 2020 absentee ballot fraud on a massive scale. Its ridiculous claims were debunked almost immediately, but that didn’t matter—it became a tentpole of the 2020 MAGA mythology at once. Trump described it as “the greatest and most impactful documentary of our time.”
Now its distributors are retracting it. Here’s the New York Times:
The conservative media company Salem Media Group has apologized to a Georgia man who was falsely depicted as having committed election fraud in the film 2,000 Mules, which Salem co-produced and released in 2022 . . .
The film features surveillance video of the man from Georgia, Mark Andrews, as he places ballots into a drop box near Atlanta, along with voice-over commentary by Mr. D’Souza calling the action “a crime” and adding, “These are fraudulent votes.” . . .
Mr. Andrews sued Mr. D’Souza, along with Salem and two individuals associated with the right-wing election-monitoring group True the Vote, for defamation in October 2022. State investigators in Georgia have since found that Mr. Andrews committed no crime and that he had legally deposited the ballots for himself and several members of his family.
“It was never our intent that the publication of the ‘2,000 Mules’ film and book would harm Mr. Andrews,” Salem said in a statement on Friday. “We apologize for the hurt the inclusion of Mr. Andrews’s image in the movie, book and promotional materials have caused Mr. Andrews and his family.”
Salem, one of the largest radio broadcasters in the country, with 115 stations, also syndicates radio and podcast content, operates several websites and publishes a number of conservative Christian-themed magazines. It said on Friday that it had taken “2,000 Mules” off its platforms and that it would no longer distribute the film and the book.
In a less rotten information ecosystem, telling easily debunkable lies might result in some social consequences: The liar’s audience, trust broken, steamed at having been played for fools, recalibrates and tries to find more accurate information elsewhere. In the world we actually live in, it seems like the only real accountability we ever see these days is legal: Someone harmed by the laws takes the liar to court, proves the lie, and twists their arm into finally admitting the truth.
If you weren’t paying attention in the moment, it is genuinely difficult to communicate how thoroughly [Eric Schmitt was the eventual victor in this linked story] 2,000 Mules seeped into the right-wing consciousness in 2022. Seeing this sort of news, it’s understandable to wonder: Could this be the sort of moment to finally drop the scales from the eyes of those in thrall to Trump’s (and D’Souza’s) 2020 lies?
It was understandable to wonder that in the wake of Fox’s $787 million Dominion Voting Systems’ settlement last year, too. But it’s as true now as it was then: Mopping up the water doesn’t un-carve the gorge.
Eastern Washington Indivisibles Host a Debate at 5:30PM This Evening
Thanks to countless hours of volunteer effort by members of Eastern Washington’s Indivisible groups, this evening at 5:30PM you will have a chance to see many of the candidates vying to win one of the top two spots in this year’s Tuesday, August 6th, Primary Election. They are vying for the seat held for twenty years by the soon-retiring Republican Rep. McMorris Rodgers.
Welcome to the digital age, folks. This debate will be on “TV” but not exactly in the conventional sense of television.
Click on either of these links (or copy and paste into your internet browser, e.g. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, just before 5:30PM today to watch. (The one hundred seats for a live [but, hopefully, quiet and respectful] audience are already spoken for.)
Michael Baumgartner—perhaps trying to emulate Mr. Trump (?), Mr. Baumgartner declined the original invitation and the rescheduled date. The others below I understand had scheduling conflicts when the date for this debate had to be shifted several weeks ago.
Jacquelin Maycumber (R)
Jonathan Bingle (R)
Bobbi Bennett-Wolcott (R)
Bernadine Bank (D)
Get an early look at the candidates. Watch at 5:30 today.
In view of yesterday’s first ever guilty verdict of a former U.S. President I considered not posting at all today, but I wish to distract you with fascinating article I have now read twice while several readers independently flagged the article to me as a landmark story well worth the time to read.
Of course, the story’s local relevance plays out on the West Plains. Officials associated with Spokane International Airport, almost certainly including Spokane County Commissioner Al French (who serves the Airport’s board), knew that PFAS (the “forever chemicals”) from fire fighting foams used on site were found in test wells in 2017—but kept the discovery quiet even as French’s downstream constituents, kept in the dark, drank PFAS-laden water.
Read the story and marvel at how company profits override consideration of human health.
