The people of Franklin County, Washington deserve fair representation — but they’ll have to overcome Republican opposition to get it

Although coun­ties in Wash­ing­ton have the option of adopt­ing char­ters to decide how to gov­ern them­selves, the vast major­i­ty of Wash­ing­ton’s thir­ty-nine coun­ties have nev­er exer­cised this author­i­ty. In fact, only sev­en coun­ties have suc­cess­ful­ly adopt­ed char­ters since the Wash­ing­ton State Con­sti­tu­tion was amend­ed to allow them in the 1940s, and all of those coun­ties are locat­ed west of the Cascades.

In Cen­tral and East­ern Wash­ing­ton, coun­ties use the com­mis­sion form of gov­ern­ment pro­vid­ed for in Arti­cle 11, Sec­tion 5 of the State Con­sti­tu­tion, which pre­scribes a set of defaults for coun­ties that have not writ­ten and adopt­ed their own char­ters as per­mit­ted by the home rule clause.

While many coun­ty com­mis­sions have sad­ly been unrep­re­sen­ta­tive of the com­mu­ni­ties they serve, the recent­ly enact­ed Wash­ing­ton Vot­ing Rights Act (WVRA) has made it pos­si­ble to effec­tive­ly chal­lenge coun­ty elec­toral schemes that dis­crim­i­nate against and dis­en­fran­chise com­mu­ni­ties of color.

Here in Franklin Coun­ty, civ­il rights lead­ers have brought such a chal­lenge, hop­ing to lib­er­ate peo­ple from the scourge of unrep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment.

At stake in this case is the soul of our coun­ty, and the integri­ty of our local democ­ra­cy. What our com­mis­sion­ers have offered in response is a poor­ly planned bat­tle against the inevitable that lays bare the racism that exists in our county.

The plain­tiffs in the afore­men­tioned legal chal­lenge went through the appro­pri­ate process man­dat­ed by the WVRA to bring their com­plaint, and to work with the coun­ty to bring changes to our com­mis­sion­er dis­tricts and vot­ing sys­tem. One could go so far as to say the plain­tiffs have gone above and beyond to work with our coun­ty gov­ern­ment to reform our dis­crim­i­na­to­ry and ille­gal vot­ing system.

Yet each attempt by the plain­tiffs to work with our coun­ty com­mis­sion­ers has been met with deri­sion by Franklin Coun­ty Com­mis­sion Chair Clint Didi­er and has become the basis for Com­mis­sion­er Didi­er to pub­licly bul­ly and attack Franklin Coun­ty Pros­e­cu­tor Shawn Sant, a rea­son­able Repub­li­can who is attempt­ing to rep­re­sent the coun­ty in this case as the law requires.

Time and time again Com­mis­sion­er Didi­er and fel­low Com­mis­sion­er Rocky Mullin have treat­ed this case as noth­ing more than an excuse to act out and embar­rass Franklin Coun­ty. An exam­ple of this can be seen in how they treat­ed the ini­tial com­plaint let­ter deliv­ered to them by the plain­tiffs as required by the WVRA.

Upon receiv­ing the let­ter, they had one hun­dred and eighty days to work with the plain­tiffs to forge an equi­table com­pro­mise. They did absolute­ly noth­ing, choos­ing instead to rail against Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee and glee­ful­ly vio­late his mask man­date, effec­tive­ly cre­at­ing legal chaos for the county.

Anoth­er exam­ple of our commission’s destruc­tive con­duct occurred when the com­plaint passed the one hun­dred and eighty day mark and local news out­lets began report­ing that the coun­ty would be tak­en to court.

Com­mis­sion­ers Didi­er and Mullin respond­ed first by denounc­ing the WVRA, then pro­claim­ing that Franklin Coun­ty “wasn’t racist,” and then form­ing a redis­trict­ing com­mis­sion of their own… com­posed almost entire­ly of rep­re­sen­ta­tives from con­ser­v­a­tive lean­ing groups and promi­nent sup­port­ers of their campaigns.

Thank­ful­ly, their efforts to sub­vert the law and avoid going to court failed.

Sant cor­rect­ly explained to them that the court hear­ing the case, not their hand­picked Repub­li­can redis­trict­ing com­mis­sion, would choose the maps our coun­ty would use. Didi­er and Mullin respond­ed to this guid­ance by pub­licly lash­ing out at Gov­er­nor Inslee, Sant, and fel­low Com­mis­sion­er Brad Peck, who has been the sole voice advo­cat­ing for the coun­ty to com­ply with the laws of our state.

Even after all of that, the two-mem­ber major­i­ty on our three mem­ber Franklin Coun­ty Com­mis­sion are dig­ging them­selves into an even deep­er hole.

Just when things couldn’t be chaot­ic or embar­rass­ing enough, Com­mis­sion­ers Didi­er and Mullin have decid­ed to sack their own legal counsel.

This new effort start­ed just a few weeks ago when local media report­ed that the coun­ty had made a for­mal legal fil­ing agree­ing with the plain­tiffs’ com­plaint, acknowl­edg­ing the prob­lems with our cur­rent sys­tem, and sup­port­ing the plain­tiffs’ points with their own data and sta­tis­ti­cal analysis.

Despite receiv­ing a for­mal legal memo about their legal team’s plan, and hav­ing at least one exec­u­tive ses­sion where the county’s legal posi­tion was reviewed at length before all three mem­bers of the Franklin Coun­ty Com­mis­sion, Com­mis­sion­ers Didi­er and Mullin now claim that they were not prop­er­ly briefed by coun­sel. Last week, they vot­ed in a hasti­ly called spe­cial meet­ing to con­demn our county’s pros­e­cut­ing attor­ney for doing his job, get a spe­cial coun­sel to rep­re­sent them, and most aston­ish­ing of all, to ask the court to ignore their pre­vi­ous fil­ings.

In defense of their deci­sion, Com­mis­sion­ers Didi­er and Mullin have claimed that the pre­dom­i­nant­ly white farm­ers of North Franklin should be con­sid­ered a “pro­tect­ed class” under the law. They have also sug­gest­ed repeat­ed­ly that the peo­ple of North Franklin, who make up less than 20% of the total pop­u­la­tion in our coun­ty, deserve to be rep­re­sent­ed by two of our three commissioners.

While their rea­son­ing is not clear, their sug­ges­tion of this obvi­ous dis­par­i­ty is usu­al­ly accom­pa­nied by claims that they are “not racist”, that they are “stand­ing up for con­ser­v­a­tive Lati­nos” and fre­quent pub­lic com­ments by their sup­port­ers in coun­ty meet­ings that con­tain cod­ed lan­guage that has been uti­lized against com­mu­ni­ties of col­or since before the 1950s.

This is then fol­lowed by attacks on Gov­er­nor Inslee and claims that they are “stand­ing with the Unit­ed States Constitution.”

I am often asked what it is like to live in this coun­ty, and my response is sim­ple: it’s a liv­ing hell. Didi­er (who also serves as the Chair of the Franklin Coun­ty Repub­li­can Par­ty) has pro­mot­ed a hos­tile envi­ron­ment in this coun­ty for any­one with the nerve to dis­agree with him on anything.

As our coun­ty faces an uncer­tain legal sit­u­a­tion due to his actions in the redis­trict­ing case, Com­mis­sion­er Didi­er, with the sup­port of Com­mis­sion­er Mullin, has cre­at­ed an envi­ron­ment of fear, intim­i­da­tion, and chaos.

The cru­el irony of this moment is that when both Didi­er and Mullin ran in 2018 and 2020 respec­tive­ly, they each talked about ush­er­ing in an era of trans­paren­cy and a clos­er con­nec­tion to the peo­ple on the part coun­ty government.

Any­one who watch­es a Franklin Coun­ty Com­mis­sion meet­ing, or who observes their com­ments about the redis­trict­ing case, would be hard pressed to find a moment where either com­mis­sion­er has lived up to their promises.

Any­one who watch­es these meet­ings or who has read the sto­ries about this coun­ty should under­stand that Franklin Coun­ty now sits at a crossroads.

The cur­rent redis­trict­ing case rep­re­sents every­thing that is wrong with our coun­ty and every­thing that is hold­ing us back.

The aggres­sion direct­ed at peo­ple who dis­agree with this two-com­mis­sion­er major­i­ty isn’t new, and if you are any­thing oth­er than a cis-gen­der, het­ero­sex­u­al white male in Franklin, you have had to live with this kind of dis­re­spect and aggres­sion direct­ed at you for far longer than the media cov­er­ing this realizes.

The one glim­mer of hope we have in our coun­ty at present is that despite what the coun­ty com­mis­sion­ers may think, even their own legal coun­sel has acknowl­edged that the facts and the law are not on their side.

No mat­ter what they try to do, they are going to lose this case, and there is no get­ting over the fact that the entire state has now clear­ly seen what any­one who is not a cis­gen­der, white male Repub­li­can in this coun­ty has had to deal with.

Times are chang­ing and progress is coming.