Tumbleweird reached out to every candidate that is on the ballot for the General Election in Benton and Franklin County.

Candidates for City Council were asked the same three questions:

• Why did you originally choose to run for office?
• What are the 3 most important things you want to do if you are elected?
• Imagine a world in which elected officials always do the right thing. How would that world differ from our own?

Candidates for school board were asked the same 3 questions:

• Why did you originally choose to run for school board?
• What are the 3 most important things you want to do if you are elected?
• How would you define equity in education, and what role do you think the school board should have in making our public schools an equitable learning environment for every child?

The following interviews were conducted with four different candidates for local office.

Candidate for Pasco City Council, District 3

Bryan Verhei

Why did you originally choose to run for office?

I’m running for City Council because Pasco is such a vibrant place and has so much potential, but we’re missing opportunities in the name of trying to save money. A great example is the rental inspection program. We had a program that prevented landlords from being slum lords. I think it was $50 a year for them [landlords], and they had to have an inspection of the rental to meet standards. That protected Pasco residents. I saw things like that going away. I saw things hitting the council agenda that should be discussed. And I just saw a lot of ‘us versus them’ mentality coming out of the city council.

With everything going on in the world, we need to make things better where we can, and I know that I can do a great job — making housing more affordable, so younger folks can have an opportunity to afford rent, let alone buying a house. To make transit more obtainable, so if you can’t afford to have a car, you can at least get to work. And to really bring community back into the council. There’s a strong feeling of ‘us versus them, and we are here for us’ mentality that I feel from the current council — with the exception of maybe one, maybe two council members — and that’s just not serving the people of Pasco. And so someone had to step up. And I decided to step up.

What are the three most important things you want to do if you are elected?

So I want to start the process of bringing down the cost of housing. I’ve been a realtor for just about 10 years. In that time, I’ve seen housing increase over and over, and it’s great for people making an investment. However, we’re at the point now that the average apartment to rent starts at $1200 a month. That’s not obtainable for people. If people my age, I’m 39, cannot even afford to move out of their parents’ house, that’s scary for the future of our country, of our city. So to address that, obviously we need to make it as easy as possible to invest into new construction, removing any cost [we can], and we also need to look at where we can bring partnerships.

I want to have genuine conversations with Habitat, Youth for Humanity, Land Trust … all the nonprofits that want to help bring down the cost of housing, and see if I can get everyone on the same page so we can work together in concert to alleviate this problem. [We can] still work on the market based solutions with ordinances and everything that we can do to make it easier for builders, but at the same time, let’s bring some below market options on.

Second priority goes hand-in-hand. We need to expand transit now. What do I mean when I say expand transit? I don’t mean just more bus stops or more bus routes. In fact, that could be detrimental, depending on where you are and what ridership is, because there’s a cost of that. But let’s take a cue from other cities and see what we can do about a voucher program. You know, obviously there’d have to be criteria to qualify for it, but I want to work with our partners in Benton County and the other cities to maybe look at bringing a voucher program. If you can’t afford to have a car [and] you have to get to the doctor, but you don’t quite qualify for Dial-a-Ride, you can have a voucher once, twice a month. It would have to be worked out through the program, but you can have a voucher to take an Uber to that doctor’s appointment or be able to get groceries — ways to make it so people can afford to live in the city.

And then finally, there have been — and this council has done it — jobs outsourced; not even out of city, but out of state. For some city jobs, one of them was having to do with housing and code work and design work. I know people that live in the Tri-Cities that do that work. I want to keep Pasco workers in, specifically Pasco union workers, at work in Pasco. That’s keeping money with our own citizens and our own residents, but then they spend it locally for the most part, so then we’re having more tax revenue from our money, and we’re keeping our money in our ecosystem.

Imagine a world in which elected officials always do the right thing. How would that world differ from our own?

My educational background is actually in political science, so this kind of thing is something I think about a lot. Did you know that the average politician’s first move — more at state level and above than local on average — the first thing they do is they hire a fundraiser for their re-election campaign?

Right now the process is set up so elected officials are more incentivized to work on their re-election campaign than to even listen to their constituents. If politicians were always doing the right thing, they would get fact-based evidence. They would disregard things that aren’t provable or evidence based, and — this is probably the biggest one to me — they would have honest conversations with their constituents and listen to what their constituents want.

That’s not to say that they’re always going to vote 100% in line with the majority opinion of their constituents, because they have to weigh the other facts and make decisions based on the long-term health for the community they serve. But so many decisions would be different if politicians just thought and listened and paid attention to what their constituents want. So often we see politicians come and do events where they’re supposed to listen to their constituents, and they spend their entire time defending their actions instead of listening.

I think that’s the biggest missing piece. We need to listen to people, understand what they want, and if they want something that may not be in the best interest of the community, having honest conversations about why we disagree, to try to bring people along and try to have that leadership mentality instead of the boss mentality. You know, I will tie this to a current issue going on in Pasco. There is the possibility that we could remove fluoride from our water. Where did that come from? That came from one person on council saying, “I’ve heard a few people talking about this, so I think we should look into it.”

And all of a sudden, there is a flow of conspiracy theory information about lowering IQ and bone density and other things that have been debunked. We had a council that was ready to remove [fluoride] without going through proper procedure. The only reason it wasn’t removed without a listening session is because the city attorney came in and said, “State law requires that we have a listening session and that we do these things.”

The final thing I would say is, if politicians always did the right thing, they would have a clear, documented process and consistently follow [it]. Local and higher levels have failed to, and that just erodes trust and makes it harder to believe that your leaders are having your best interests at heart.

Candidate for Kennewick City Council, Ward 1

Austin Miller

Why did you originally choose to run for office?

My original decision mostly came from kind of a personal response to the presidential election last year and feeling a sense of almost dread … that things are going to get bad and just feeling like I, at first, [was] very helpless about it.
I was very shocked that this person got elected again. After we saw what type of presidency he had the first time around, people decided they wanted more of that. That’s very disheartening, but I came around to think about, what can I actually do?

What can I do?

And this was one of those things. Running for local office was one of those things that I realized I can do. Even if it’s not the most comfortable thing for me and it’s not the type of thing that I would normally do, it is something that I can do. And so I decided to put myself out there [and] figure everything else out.
Once I did make that decision, I started looking and thinking about what city councils do and what I can actually accomplish. My background [is] in economics and policy analysis. I started coming up with a lot of what I think are really good ideas of what we can and should do as a city — to support the people, to interact with people, to support people economically.

What are the three most important things you want to do if you
are elected?

Okay, so I’ve answered this question a few different times in different ways; and I think that, depending on when I’ve been asked, my priorities — the order that I put things in — has changed. But the three things stay the same. So, I’m not sure what order to put them in right now, but I’ll start with the number one priority: community building.

I want to work to build a stronger sense of community, not just in Kennewick, but also with the neighboring cities in the area. I think we’ve lost a lot of sense of community in the past years, decades, and I think that in order to regain that, it will take some deliberate effort, and that’s an effort that I want to do. So whether that’s reaching out to people in the community and just making sure that they know that their voices matter, finding organizations that are already doing good work, talking to people and being a voice for different groups the city can amplify those voices.

I’ve found that the people that tend to be most involved in city politics tend to be the people that have the most to gain, personally, and that the rest of us tend to not think about city politics very much.

I want people to realize that their voice matters most locally, and that even if they feel like they haven’t been listened to, their voice hasn’t mattered, that it will and it should. So that’s number one.

The second thing is supporting the local economy. And I have a lot of specific ideas of how I think we can do that, and it really comes down to supporting small businesses. And when I say small businesses, I mean the smaller, the better. I think more and more people lately are taking second, third, fourth jobs, just to make ends meet. And a lot of people are starting businesses not because they have some passion for some product they want to make, but because they feel like they have to just to survive. And there’s a lot of things we can’t do as a city, right? We can’t fund Medicaid, we can’t regulate large corporations, federal or multinational corporations. We don’t have the authority to do that. What we can do locally is, again, supporting the small businesses, encouraging people who do have to start these small businesses to work together, encouraging people who have successfully started small businesses to kind of share ideas within the community about how to do it.

It can be very daunting to start out with some new idea, and the more we can work together to lift each other and help each other learn how to navigate all of the processes involved with starting and running a small business And then also, kind of more long term, is prioritizing for mixed use development that is prioritizing projects that are very neighborhood focused, so allowing more small commercial spaces inside (or nearby) neighborhoods allows people to have more spaces to run a business, for example, without having to be all in the same place right now. We all live in various ‘outside of town’ places, but then we all drive downtown or into the same shopping district to do all of our shopping. I think we can prioritize pushing more small businesses closer to our neighborhood, so that each neighborhood is serviced by a smaller collection of businesses, so people don’t have to travel as much, maybe making things more walkable, revitalizing old neighborhoods.

My other [reason] was what we, as a city, do in response to federal overreach and the constitutional crisis that is happening in the federal government. Like I said, that was a big part of why I decided to run in the first place. I really thought about: What can a city actually do? In terms of working together with other cities and other organizations to stand together and make sure that our voices are heard, that we do not support a lot of these unconstitutional federal acts. I’ve considered submitting — suggesting city ordinances that prohibit the use of city resources [and] the participation of city employees in unlawful, unconstitutional federal investigations without court orders and things like that. There are ways that we, even as a small city in eastern Washington, can push back collectively that I think are important.

Imagine a world in which elected officials always do the right thing. How would that world differ from our own?

I generally have a hard time with hypotheticals that ignore a lot of things that I understand about reality. There are some things that are true about human nature that we’re never going to get away from, and that includes the desire to to gain power or use power for personal gain. Or there’s this inherent [sectarianism] within us that exists that we have to be aware of and fight against. So I think this magical ideal form of governance [is] acknowledging those things and coming up with ways to overcome and prevent that. That’s why the Constitution was written the way that it was. We recognize human frailties and passions, and we wanted a government that was ruled by law and agreed values and rules, rather than swaying with the whims of the people who happen to be in charge that day.
So I think refocusing on and building ways to make sure that we are a place that is governed by the rule of law, not by the rule of individuals. And I think an important aspect of that is nowadays, with the rise of the internet and social media and things like that, we’ve kind of lost this shared sense of civility that I think maybe we used to have.

It’s okay to be angry and about things, but especially if we’re representing people in any sort of public office, I think it’s not okay to be mean and to use that anger to hurt people, that we should have an accepted type of discourse where we hold each other accountable; and when people start to cross the line, we say, “Hey, I understand you’re upset. That type of dehumanizing language will not be accepted.” It’s okay to moderate speech, to be civil, and it’s possible to do that without limiting the expression of ideas. I think we’ve kind of convoluted the idea of [what] free speech means: “I can say whatever I want.” People get hurt. I think we can do better. Yes, you can believe what you want, you can have the ideas that you want. You have to be able to express them in a way that is civil. I think there’s a way to do that.

Candidate for Pasco School Board, District 3

Amanda Brown

Why did you originally choose to run for school board?

I [first] ran three years ago. We were just coming out of the COVID pandemic, and I am a teacher, and I watched school boards here in our area, in the state and across the nation, trying to navigate the ‘new normal’ of COVID. There were a lot of tough decisions to be made, but COVID was also highly political, and how people handled it, how people handled themselves…. I saw on school boards that a lot of board directors took a very political stance with how they chose to make decisions around what schools were going to do, and a lot of that included stating what they believed was happening in schools, which, as a teacher, I knew was not happening.

That was my first inclination to run — when I felt that school boards really needed someone who was in schools every day, who could bring a voice of reason and a voice of logic and make decisions that were not political, but that would have the most effective impact on students and not on local politics. So I ran, and I won in my race by 122 votes. I think the people of Pasco were ready for a new, fresh voice on the board, and they showed that in the polls three years ago. I’m positive they’ll show the same this time.

What are the three most important things you want to do if you
are elected?

Number one, student achievement scores are low. We do have lower than state average test scores in Pasco. So, I really think it’s important that we look at more data than just a Smarter Balanced [Assessment]* when we’re making decisions about how we improve student achievement in the district. As a board, we have developed a new superintendent evaluation, which directly ties in student achievement with her performance, and that is something that hasn’t been done before.

Also, in our data that we see … about student achievement, we use more than just Smarter Balanced.* We’re looking at a more equitable math and reading test which we use in the Pasco School District called STAR** test. [It] looks in K – 5 at the formative assessments that are administered by teachers in classrooms — which have a better boots-on-the-ground picture of what’s going on in classrooms — rather than the bird’s eye view of the Smarter Balanced. We can make decisions that are more informed about how to improve student achievement.
The other thing I will say about student achievement in Pasco is that we have double, more than double, the state average of English language learners (ELL) in Pasco. And that needs to be taken into consideration when we talk about student achievement. The Smarter Balanced assessment is only administered in English for the ELA {English Language Arts] version; and that, of course, has an impact on scores. The kids can take math in Spanish, but still, access to their instruction is primarily in English, and that’s going to have an effect on how they perform [on] that test, as well.

The second most pressing issue is budget. So this last year, we decided to pull half of our reserves out to avoid layoffs; because like many other districts in the area, in the state, and nationally, we are in a little bit of a budget crunch, and we fell $5 million short of what we expected to spend because of rising costs. Those are around the materials, supplies, and other costs … So in order to avoid layoffs, we as a board decided that we were not going to handle this budget crunch with layoffs. We wanted people to retain their jobs. We’re handling it with attrition, and we have a four year plan to build back up our reserves … but until then, we do have to tighten our belts and limit some programs, and that’s really saddening to me. But I’m hoping that if we manage our money wisely and go forward with our plan, then we’ll be in a much better place in four years.

And then the last thing is the levy. We are going to direct the district to prepare a levy to go to voters next February. Because the state does not fully fund education, the levy provides a lot of funding for programs like security. That’s above and beyond what we have with a partnership with the police department, for extra programs and resources for our migrant students, for dual language, and also bridges the gap in teacher pay. So we use a lot of the levy to pay our teachers, which, again, we want to avoid layoffs; and so I think it’s really important that we maintain a balanced voice on the board so that we can have the community see that we are doing what’s best for our students, not what’s best for political agendas, and that the community can have faith that we’re going to continue working to serve students on the board, so that they will vote yes in the levy and we continue to have the funds that we need in order to operate our district.

How would you define equity in education, and what role do you think the school board should have in making our public schools an equitable learning environment for every child?

I answer this question the same way as a board director as I do as a teacher, which is that equity means that we give each student the resources and materials that they need in order to be successful. It doesn’t mean that we treat each student equally. It means that each student — whatever their needs, whether they are around language or a disability or higher capable learning — that every student has what they need. If they are performing above level, then they have the resources to go above their grade level and extend their learning. If they’re performing below level, then we have materials and teachers and interventions in place to be able to get them to where they need to be at grade level, and those who are reporting on grade level are still expected to perform and grow at their grade level. And so we, as a board, have approved instructional materials [and] curricula that support all of those programs. As a board member, I think that equity — what I’ve heard as I’ve run two campaigns now, and as a teacher and being three years on a board — is that equity is a word that’s been demonized and is weaponized to mean that we are serving certain groups of students more than we’re serving others. And that’s simply not true. What we’re doing is making sure that every student has the opportunity to have success. And it’s not true equity if it takes away an opportunity for another person. It’s true equity when all can succeed.

^{*ospi.k12.wa.us/student-success/testing/state-testing/washington-state-smarter-balanced-assessment-consortium}

^{**renaissance.com/products/assessment/star-assessments}

Candidate for Kennewick School Board, District 1

Robert Franklin

Why did you originally choose to run for school board?

I chose to run for school board because I am a career educator. I have a passion for teaching. I am the son of a high school teacher, and as a professor, I know how hard educators work.

I wanted to run to bring my perspective and my support to educators and students. I’m also a parent, so I’m kind of in that sweet spot of understanding future students and parental concerns.

I’m also someone who’s worked interpreting a segment of this community’s history to very different audiences, and I am pretty skilled at working with people from different perspectives.

I thought that all of those would bring a really good skill set to the board. The board has to navigate between the different constituencies it serves, and we live in kind of a slight majority conservative area. There’s a wide ideological diversity here. [It is] important to me for the board to have someone who has my skill set on it.

What are the three most important things you want to do if you
are elected?

The first is to find a way to support social emotional learning and mental health services for students. Those are kind of core needs that students have that schools can fill when students have had mental health counseling in schools.
Those contracts got lost because the funding was temporary. I think the board should look to find a way to fund those contracts. I think helping students with mental health, helping them feel valued, will do more to increase their test scores. [In Kennewick schools] there are school counselors, but professional mental health support services where students who are struggling can receive help inside of school instead of having to go outside of school. When I asked that question at the school safety meeting earlier this week, there was a vague mention of outside counseling. The school district doesn’t see it as a priority, and that is a problem.*

The second thing I want to do is make sure that we have and can expand access to programs like Tri-Tech, but also alternative high schools like Phoenix. Those are really core components of our really wonderful parts of the Kennewick School District. I just want to make sure that those programs continue to have support and students have pathways to graduation and also to trades.

The third thing I would do if elected to the board is to take the board away from divisive culture war issues and stop engaging in activities that could expose it to litigation. The board has to comply with state, federal, and civil rights laws instead of taking on culture war issues regarding students’ gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity. I’d rather see the board refocus its support into using taxpayers’ money wisely to pursue improving reading and math scores. [They] are abominably low. Only 30% of Kennewick third graders can read at grade level.
I understand that the culture war stuff is important to some people, but I think very few people think that that’s more important than reading and math levels.

How would you define equity in education, and what role do you think the school board should have in making our public schools an equitable learning environment for every child?

Well, first of all, I don’t shy away from that word. I am a deep believer in understanding … in having equity for principles and understanding equity gaps.

It’s what I do in my classroom at WSU. I’ve been part of an Equity Academy there to improve student performance in our gender and curriculum equity. We have to start with equity with the goal of getting towards equality, and that means recognizing and having policies and staff [that] support traditionally underserved populations. It means increasing programs like social emotional learning, to focus on student belonging. [So] students see school as a safe place, but also see the value of school and the value in their classmates and the value of their teachers.

What the board does for that is it creates a climate of understanding and learning, and it supports teachers in best practice learning. So things like social emotional learning, despite what its critics say … studies show the impact of belonging exercises and investing in social emotional learning. It leads to improved test scores. And so, supporting educators as they pursue building equity in the classroom for students — and taking the time to understand which students in which schools are struggling and how to distribute resources — [is] to help all. But changing language, changing approach, and often just building a culture where learning can take place, creates a supporting environment that’s welcoming to all students. We all want equality; but when we have equity gaps, just putting forward ‘equality’ really just perpetuates the current system. We have to use equity-based language and model to get to something approaching equality
of outcome.

*Editor’s note: Mental health support counselors were funded by a special grant to help schools after the Covid pandemic using Elementary and Secondary School Emergency relief funds (ESSER). The $1.1 million annual cost contracted Comprehensive Healthcare. This funded nine therapists that provided mental health screenings, conducted assessments, and implemented treatment plans. According to an article in the Tri-City Herald from 3/21/24, the district chose not to continue funding the mental health counselors. There are school counselors at each of the high schools whose responsibilities include guidance and counseling work that helps students with their academic, career, personal, and social needs. Each of these counselors serve between 300 and 400 students.