As the Republican incumbent leaves to run for county office, six hopefuls have filed to take over his position in the 6th Legislative District of the state House of Representatives in the first open race for the seat since 2018.
The district runs mostly rural, encompassing large areas west and north of Spokane, including places experiencing fast-moving development and water contamination. It also contains Airway Heights — home to the international airport and an Air Force base — and Medical Lake, home to a mental health hospital and the site of a devastating wildfire in the summer of 2023.
Mike Volz, the incumbent, cites high levels of homelessness, fentanyl use and a higher cost of living as the largest issues in the district. He says one of the best ways to fight these problems is to “improve the business climate,” which he argues will allow the government to relax taxes and drive job growth.
He is leaving the seat this year to pursue a position as the Spokane County treasurer. Four Republicans, Sueann Davis, Jennifer Morton, Alan Nolan and Isaiah Paine, and two Democrats, Michaela Kelso and Nicolette Ocheltree, are fighting to make it through to the general election. If the seat flipped, it would be the first time a Democrat has held it since 2009.Broadly, Republicans aim to improve people’s living conditions through eliminating what they describe as onerous government restrictions on businesses and improving the rate of homeownership — mostly through making it cheaper to build — and halting new taxes.
Paine promoted his ties to the real estate industry as evidence he is laser-focused on increasing homeownership.
“I’ve been working the last five years on housing policy, really championing home ownership,” he told a crowd of voters recently gathered at The Pursuit Church in Browne’s Addition. “We talked about property rights, and really homeownership is a big part of that. It's a gateway to the middle class. All sorts of socioeconomic indicators go up with homeownership.”
On his website, Paine says fees and regulations represent much of the cost of home-building and proposes to change that, rather than embracing more European-coded housing policies like building denser housing in urban centers.
Nolan, the runner-up to Paine in raising campaign cash, has emphasized opposing a ballot initiative to renew a sales and use tax that supports public transit.
“Who here is tired of taxes?” Nolan asked at the same Pursuit event. “This is an opportunity for us to get a small win. We go there and we start reforming government agencies, and this is how we do it by going out to our neighbors and telling them, ‘You need to know about this, and you need to vote against it.’”
The Democrats instead have emphasized enshrining rights to housing and employment protections. Kelso, a German immigrant and US Army veteran, agreed with her Republican opponents that more housing needs to be built — but with a caveat.“We need to build the right way, and corporations will only do the right thing if they are forced to do it,” Kelso told the crowd at a recent nonpartisan race forum. “Clean water was only possible because of regulation, and it's going to be the same with housing.”
Ocheltree, a Spokane city council staffer, highlighted her experience fighting for labor rights and government transparency while working at the city.
“You should Google the RANGE article about me, where I had to take a day off to know what my government was doing because I was kicked out of an open public meeting as an employee,” Ocheltree told the same candidate forum. “So I went up, took the day off, came back downstairs as a private citizen, and watched what my government was doing.
Another issue that has surfaced in the race is the Growth Management Act (GMA), the state law that regulates how local communities develop infrastructure in order to manage a growing population.
The Urbanist, a publication that writes about how cities develop, recently noted that Washington used less land to absorb an increase of 2.2 million people than Colorado — which does not have a law like the GMA — did for its increase of 1.7 million people over the past quarter-century.
Still, Morton said she’d repeal the GMA, and Nolan said he’d reform it.
“You hear EPA,” said Morton, who sits on the Airway Heights City Council. “You hear SEPA, NEPA, you hear the GMA, all these terms, and I would say … remove some of the restrictive laws inhibiting building building and land restrictions that the state has passed.”
If fundraising indicates which two candidates might face off after the August 4 primary, Paine has a significant advantage. He’s brought in $31,156 in cash contributions, including large donations from the Washington Affordable Housing Council, Washington Association of Realtors Political Affairs Council and the Max J. Kuney Co., a prominent general contractor.
Nolan is behind Paine, but far ahead of everyone else, having brought in $19,135.09 in cash contributions.
Between them, the other four candidates raised $6,950, though Morton reported $3,598.05 in in-kind donations, which amount to the value of goods and services rather than cash.
Some of Nolan’s large donors: an executive at the real estate firm Windemere, Nathan Parrenoud, a roofing contractor who skirted city inspection rules on more than 1,000 projects, and Vitaliy Maksimov, an immigrant engineer who was a vocal defender of Anthony Bosworth, who was convicted in 2015 of refusing to leave a courthouse after he was kicked out for carrying guns.
Yong-Yu Huang contributed reporting.
