Spin Control: A bit of the East Side coming to State Capitol

Starting next year, East Side visitors to the state Capitol Campus might feel a bit closer to home as they walk the grounds.

The state is finishing touches on a planned Eastern Washington Cultural Landscape Feature, which will include local trees, native plants and other items more familiar to the drier side of the state.

The idea for the feature originated with Rep. Joel Kretz, R-Wauconda, who decried the “remarkable absence of anything” from Eastern Washington when introducing the bill earlier this year. Kretz even mentioned some of his favorite East Side flora.

“There’s nothing like the ponderosa pine,” he opined at the time, according to The Spokesman-Review report.

Kailee Moulton, of the state Department of Enterprise Services, recently told the State Capitol Committee that the feature will have those trees – as well as western larch and quaking aspen – along with such plants as snowberry, camas and Oregon sunshine, plus a barley meadow for ground cover.

It also will include basalt columns and some benches made of aspen, plus interpretive signs that name the features.

Most of this will be located in an area near one of the major entrances to the main campus, just off Capitol Way, where Sid Snyder Avenue and the South Diagonal form an acute angle. For those familiar with the campus, it will be east of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

The quaking aspen, however, will be relegated to a space near the Executive Mansion parking lot. Aspen, Moulton noted, have a tendency to spread, and one root system can put out tens of thousands of stems.

“We were afraid of how the aspen might take over the area from just one tree,” she said.

The department will leave in place a large western red cedar that stands at one end of the planned site, which is designated as a memorial to Carleen Jackson, the former State Heritage Center director.

With the cedar at the west end of the feature, it will signify the change in flora as one crosses the state from west to east, going from cedar and Douglas fir to ponderosa pines and tamaracks, and other drier-side plants, Moulton said.

Correcting an error

While leaving the cedar in place can be explained somewhat logically, it may also be a sign the department learned a lesson from a major mistake earlier this year. Without public discussion or notification, the Capitol grounds crew cut down a cherry tree on the east side of the domed Legislative Building after deciding it had “reached the end of its life.”

No one wielding the chain saw seemed to notice that the tree was marked as a memorial to former State Sen. Cal Anderson, the state’s first openly gay legislator and a outspoken champion for equal rights.

Not surprisingly, some of his former colleagues, including current members of the LGBTQ+ Caucus, and others were incensed at not being notified before the memorial tree was removed. This led to some soul searching within the department about the need for better communication with the public, the Legislature and the Capitol Campus Committee, as well as better training of grounds keeping staff.

“It was a humbling experience,” Tara Smith, Department of Enterprise Services director, told the committee last week. The department is working with legislators and LGBTQ+ groups to come up with a replacement for an Anderson memorial, which may not be in the same spot because that area is scheduled for a major utility project upgrade in the coming years.

The mistake was also a sign the department needs to do a better job of keeping track of the memorials scattered around the Capitol Campus, Linda Kent, the department’s public affairs director, told the committee.

Some of them aren’t even listed on the various campus maps.

(That includes the previously mentioned Carleen Jackson memorial cedar, which will escape the fate of the Cal Anderson cherry tree.)

Lt. Gov. Denny Heck, a member of the committee who served with Anderson, acknowledged the department’s efforts to avoid such mistakes in the future but said it was part of a larger issue.

The fault does not lie solely with the worker with the chain saw, he added, but with a campus that seems at the mercy of legislative log rolling, ad hoc planning and “anyone who’s got a pet project.”

Everyone involved needs to take their stewardship of the campus seriously, he said.

“This is our altar of democracy,” Heck said. “This is an almost sacred place.”

Weighing in on the Middle East

House Republicans in Olympia want to make clear they stand with Israel in its current battle with Hamas and against “anyone in Washington who wishes to celebrate” the terrorist organization’s attacks on civilians, women, children and the elderly.

“We stand firmly in solidarity with the Jewish community – here in Washington and across the world – against forms of anti-Semitism in word or deed,” House Republican Leader Drew Stokesbary said in a recent news release.

They plan to introduce a joint memorial resolution on the first day of the legislative session that calls on the U.S. Congress to provide “full and unequivocal support” to defend Israel, rescue American hostages and bring justice for the attacks.

Considering the first day of the session isn’t for 2½ months, one could hope Congress will already have done some of those things.

But considering the pace of selecting a House speaker, maybe not.