From left, Washington State Rep. Larry Hoff, R-Vancouver, state Sen. Ann Rivers, R-La Center, and state Rep. Brandon Vick, R-Felida, speak about the upcoming 2020 legislative session during a town hall at the Clark County Fire & Rescue administrative building Jan. 4.
Washington’s 18th Legislative District lawmakers are making a tradition of touring their constituency prior to the start of the year’s session, talking about bridges, fish and fuel capacity among other topics during town halls last weekend.
Washington State Sen. Ann Rivers, R-La Center, and state Reps. Brandon Vick, R-Felida, and Larry Hoff, R-Vancouver, hosted three town halls across the district Jan. 4, having took part in a similar tour at the start of 2019.
“It’s been an interesting day,” Hoff said at the beginning of Ridgefield’s edition of the town hall, hosted at Clark County Fire & Rescue’s administration building.
The three lawmakers had made stops in Washougal and Battle Ground before heading north for the last event of the day, where supporting salmon populations and work to replace the Interstate 5 bridge were chief among a variety of topics discussed.
Bridge replacement
The delegation had particular influence on bridge replacement discussions as two of the three lawmakers have direct involvement in rekindled efforts to see a project break ground. Vick is a revolving co-chair for a committee that features representation from both Washington and Oregon’s legislatures, and alongside Rivers is part of Clark County’s delegation for the group tasked with spearheading bridge replacement following the failure of the Columbia River Crossing (CRC) project last decade.
Though Hoff was not a member of the committee himself, he did offer support for replacement, stressing it would be important to frame the issue as a federal one with national impacts on commerce and defense.
Vick said the committee process was moving quicker than he initially thought, bringing up the difference between Oregon’s lukewarm response when the committee met a year ago to more recent discussions at the end of 2019. Starting in October, the committee had the first of three meetings with official members from both states, with Vick explaining much of that time was spent re-examining the technical work done during the CRC.
“It also has no bearing on what the next solution is, but it gets us all working in the same direction,” Vick said about looking over previous plans.
He said that although bridge replacement is the primary focus of the committee, there had been discussions on congestion relief in the area as a whole. Hoff later noted that looking at additional crossings over the Columbia River was not off the table.
“We are nowhere near a design, a footprint,” Vick said, “but as far as productive discussions, which have been absent for quite a while, we’re there.”
Rivers said that even if the CRC project didn’t collapse it wouldn’t have been complete by 2030, with much of permitting from that work still transferable to the new bridge replacement efforts. She noted the “hill to die on” during the CRC was insistence on light rail as the mass transit component. Now, she said, the discussion hasn’t focused specifically on that mode as what a new project’s mass transit would look like.
Vick said that funding a project would require federal help, something he said Hoff had been working on through communication with U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground. On Oregon’s side, he said the likely replacement for outgoing Rep. Greg Walden currently sat on the bridge replacement committee.
“I think we have a better inside track than before,” Vick said.
Salmon a concern
Hoff said salmon management and recovery had been a topic of all three town halls, agreeing with an attendee that looking into the state’s practices could give a better understanding on the issue. Rivers listed salmon recovery as one of her chief priorities in the session, noting that the 18th Legislative District had the second-highest number of fishing permits issued in the state.
Rivers said that a hatchery program in Alaska seeing positive results was using science researched in Washington, something she expressed frustration over as to why it was not being implemented locally. She said she’s been doing stakeholder work in the interim, adding that there would not likely be a complete solution by the end of the session.
Vick saw a potential point of issue in that anglers paid for licenses to fish with the expectation that money would be used to support fish populations, which often wasn’t the case. Outside of state efforts, Rivers brought up a federal development intended to protect fish populations by killing sea lions. She said there has been “significant harvest” of the predators that she said had to be proven to have preyed on fish before being culled, giving credit to Herrera Beutler for being instrumental in changing the law.
Kalama plant capacity
an issue for Rivers
Though not within district boundaries, discussion briefly turned to the proposed $2 billion methanol production plant in Kalama, which has seen regional attention over potential environmental impacts the plant would have. Rivers mentioned that she had been employed as governmental outreach for the Olympic Pipeline following the 1999 explosion of the pipeline in Bellingham which she said gave her insight on the industry.
Rivers was not concerned with safety issues of the plant, but rather the natural gas capacity of existing infrastructure. She said the infrastructure transports more than just methane, further limiting capacity.
“It chaps my hide to be giving our capacity that our residents need to China,” Rivers said, referring to the project’s plan to refine methanol to be used in plastics manufacturing across the Pacific.
Rivers added that the area the existing pipeline runs through was on “very seismically sensitive” land with limited available right-of-way for any expansion.
The lawmakers and the rest of the legislature are scheduled to return to the statehouse for the beginning of the 2020 session Jan. 13.
