Jim Armstrong to retire from Spokane Conservation District after 32 years

Jim Armstrong’s love for the outdoors has its origins in trips to the West’s national parks almost six decades ago.

“That gets you interested, seeing that kind of stuff,” Armstrong said this week from the desk where he’s spent most of his professional life as the first full-time employee of the Spokane Conservation District. “Seeing Glacier Lake, in Glacier National Park, and Yellowstone. Things you’ll never see again, because it’s changed so much. A lot of the glaciers in Glacier National Park are gone.”

Armstrong will call it quits at the end of the month after spending 32 years working to protect the natural resources of the district, whose boundaries have morphed over time but now include the entire county.

The son of a truck driver who grew up in suburban Spokane Valley, Armstrong knew from those early camping trips he wanted to be a steward of the land, he said.

“This job, it’s something you want to do anyway,” Armstrong said. “I was just fortunate enough to find a position where I’d get paid to do it.”

The Spokane Conservation District is a political subdivision created by the state but whose main funding stream, aside from grants, is a tax assessed by Spokane County.

Armstrong began his career with the district marking trees for a clearing project. The district needed to make money, so it began contracting with companies to clear small trees on private lands and selling the timber to area sawmills and community groups that needed firewood. Armstrong said the program was a precursor to the wildfire defense strategies employed today.

“I’d go out, or somebody I’d contract with would go out and mark the trees that had to be left behind,” he said. “Just imagine trying to do that now. The lawyers would go nuts.”

Standing beside Armstrong in those early days was Alan Hawson, who met Armstrong at Spokane Community College in the natural resources program. The pair worked with the state Department of Natural Resources as foresters before joining the conservation district just a few months apart.

“Jim and I consider ourselves twins of a different mother,” Hawson said at Armstrong’s retirement party this week, chuckling.

The early years of the district were fraught with concerns as well as successes, Armstrong said. Workers helped clear Liberty Lake Regional Park to raise money in 1985.

“We did whatever we could to keep this place’s doors open,” said Hawson, who retired a few years ago himself. “We worked our butts off to do it.”

In 1991, the Legislature gave counties authority to tax residents for conservation district activities.

“We haven’t looked back since then,” Armstrong said.

Vicki Carter, who is now head of the conservation district, joined the office around that time. She’s worked with Armstrong for more than two decades and said losing his expertise was like removing a safety net at the office.

“I told him, you were our institutional knowledge, now I’m our institutional knowledge,” Carter said.

Armstrong said the district’s major victories during his tenure are offering low-interest loans for no-till farming equipment, which he credits with saving millions of acres from intense soil erosion, and a recent assistance program for homes using septic systems above aquifers for repairs or hooking up to sewer systems.

With stints in radio and broadcasting, Armstrong was a natural pick to promote conservation efforts in the media. His final days with the district have been spent transferring old public television broadcasts from VHS tape to DVD in his office.

“That man always had the gift of gab,” Hawson said.

Armstrong, who owns land south of Spokane where he raises chickens and sheep and trains his two border collies in agility trials, said he won’t stop advocating for conservation just because his name is no longer on the door at the offices near the fairgrounds. After New Year’s, he plans to spend time at the office on video production projects and making his annual trip to Olympia to lobby on behalf of conservation districts statewide.

“I’m not going to get completely out,” he said. “It would be very difficult for me to get completely out.”