On September 17, Spokane County Commissioner Al French announced that the county had completed several steps toward his ambitious plan to bring clean drinking water to rural West Plains residents after years of contamination. Many have found toxic “forever chemicals” in their well water, carried from contaminations at Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport.
The press release encouraged people with contaminated wells to call French’s office to be added to a list of residents who need a filter system, and that the county was pursuing grants to finance the cost of those filters.
The release also claimed that the county had hired a lawyer to “draft agreements, which will be submitted to the Washington Department of Ecology” to facilitate a system of pipes French wants to build from the Spokane River to the West Plains to replace residents’ private wells.
“This effort for piped water, enough to support up to 80,000 residents in West Plains, is moving forward,” the release said. French’s press release was not clear about what the agreements would be specifically designed to accomplish.
According to a September 20 email from county prosecutor Larry Haskell to County Commissioner Chris Jordan, though, no lawyer had actually been hired to draft agreements to pipe water.
Jordan told RANGE he inquired with Haskell’s office about it because he felt “surprised” by the press release and was not aware the Spokane County Board of Commissioners (BOCC) was planning to draft agreements on piping water.
The prosecutor’s office helps cover many county legal needs. Jordan told RANGE he assumed Haskell would have known about the hiring of a lawyer for the specific purpose of drafting pipe agreements.
“I was immediately quite concerned whether there was misleading information in there, specifically the statement about the county having retained an attorney to draft agreements,” he said.
“Nothing of that sort had been vetted by the board or had been, to my knowledge, vetted by our water resources team,” Jordan told RANGE. “There’s a world of difference between conceptual conversations with an attorney and … a decision to pipe water to 80,000 people.”
French would offer a partial answer to Jordan in a few days, but that answer was not good enough for Jordan and RANGE was unable to verify the claims
Details like this seem small in the scheme of things, but such details have begun to matter to many West Plains residents who regard French’s plan — and specifically his timelines for when they will get clean water — with skepticism.
French spent much of the summer boosting his water piping plan to the West Plains community currently living with contaminated water. He initially promised they would have water by next summer, but the project would be a massive undertaking involving governing agencies at every level and laying uncounted miles of pipe in hard basalt. In one meeting with West Plains residents, members of the audience laughed at this timeline.
French stopped mentioning that timeline in June, promising an interim solution of filtering all contaminated wells until the piping project could be completed.
He also said he had many agencies on board with that project, but when RANGE called several of the agencies he named, they either didn’t know what French was referring to or they said they could not commit to specific projects without more information.
The BOCC has never weighed in on his plan, and when RANGE asked for cost projections after French started promoting the piping system, the commission said no such numbers exist.
French is up for reelection to his 5th District seat on November 5.
In his email to Haskell, Jordan had asked two questions: first, whether any attorneys hired by the county were working to draft agreements for Ecology and, second, whether any of the county’s hired attorneys had plans to submit those agreements to the agency.
The prosecutor’s response was brief: “Good Morning Commissioner! The answer to both of your questions (below) is ‘no.’ Please call me with any further questions/clarifications as needed.”
Jordan, who said he often consults with the prosecutor about legal matters, called Haskell the following week. Jordan declined to give details about their conversation, but said he came away from it confident that Haskell’s email had been accurate.
Jordan returned to the topic in a September 23 strategic planning meeting with the entire BOCC, including French, saying “I was not aware of any efforts to draft agreements on the piping of water, or to submit agreements to the state.”
French defended the press release by explaining that the drafting of agreements was folded into the scope of long-term planning work the county had hired the Seattle-based Cascadia Law Group. According to Jordan, though, that contract does not include drafting agreements to send to Ecology.
If there were other tasks Cascadia was assigned to,, Jordan said, the entire BOCC should have known about it.
French responded that he’d had two meetings with Cascadia lawyer Tom McDonald to discuss the drafting of agreements. He said those meetings were attended by the county’s assistant chief deputy prosecutor Jessica Pilgrim.
“If the prosecuting attorney is not aware, Jessica Pilgrim is aware” that Cascadia would be drafting agreements, French said.
RANGE contacted French’s assistant, Viktoria Lyfar, to ask for comment. She said she would give a message to the commissioner but doubted he would call back because “he’s not very happy with your reporting.”
During the September 23 meeting, Jordan thanked French for his reply but asked that he be more accurate when communicating with the public about his efforts. In response, French questioned whether Jordan wanted West Plains residents to have clean water.
“Based on your comments, am I to assume that you’re opposed to trying to find clean water for the West Plains?” French asked Jordan.
“I don’t know how you could possibly believe that from what I said,” Jordan replied. ”What I’m suggesting is we should be accurate in our communication.”
Jordan is spearheading his own effort to create a Spokane County task force to address the contamination. In an interview with RANGE on November 1, Jordan re-emphasized that he wants solutions but also wants accuracy of information. “My belief is that if the county speaks on this issue, we ought to be accurate and truthful,” Jordan said. “I remain open to learning about any proposals or solutions going forward,” he told RANGE.
To determine whether Cascadia Law Group is actually doing the work French claimed it was doing in his press release, RANGE reached out to McDonald, Pilgrim and Haskell. None returned requests for comment from RANGE before publication. We will update this story if they do.
West Plains residents have been showing up to BOCC meetings in recent weeks to demand action from the county on a widespread “forever chemicals” contamination of the groundwater between Airway Heights and Spokane. PFAS, or per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a family of chemicals used to make a firefighting agent used at Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport (SIA). Both airports discovered the chemicals in onsite test wells in 2017.
Fairchild let local authorities know about the chemicals as soon as the base knew about them. SIA did not disclose its contamination until last year when Ecology learned of it through a citizen’s public records request and is enforcing a clean-up order at the site.
The science around PFAS is still progressing, but exposure to some forms of PFAS is increasingly linked to higher risk for several serious diseases, including some deadly and rare forms of cancer. In April, the federal Environmental Protection Agency revised its guidelines on PFAS, creating a “Maximum Contaminant Level” for drinking water at 4 parts per trillion, which is the smallest level most technologies can find. .
French, who represents the West Plains area on the BOCC, knew about SIA’s contamination in 2017 and also stayed quiet about it until this spring when he began promoting his water piping plan at gatherings of West Plains residents.
Editor's note: This story has been revised to clarify the county had not hired lawyers for the purpose of drafting agreements to pipe water, though it had hired lawyers to help with long-term planning. It has also been revised to clarify the questions County Commissioner Chris Jordan had asked county prosecutor Larry Haskell.
