In his final bid for office, County Commissioner Al French faces challenge from a National Guard veteran, neighborhood activist

Spokane County Commissioner Al French will need to survive a challenge from a career Air National Guardsman -turned -neighborhood activist if he hopes to serve a fifth term on the county’s governing board.

Among elected city and county officials in Spokane County, no one has served longer than French. The conservative architect by trade spent eight years on the Spokane City Council in the 2000s before he was elected to the county commission in 2010.

French said this will be his final run for office, but given the closeness of his last race and the focus on the contest from local Democrats, it could be one of his toughest election bids. He faces Molly Marshall, a first-time Democratic candidate best known for her work advocating for the Latah Valley neighborhood.

Marshall held an early lead as August’s primary election results trickled in, but French eked out a majority by the time the last ballot was counted. French took 51.1% of the vote to Marshall’s 48.7%.

The district the candidates are hoping to represent covers most of the southern and western portions of the county, including the West Plains, northwest Spokane and the South Hill above 29th Avenue. The district was drawn to lean only slightly in favor of Republicans when it was created in time for the 2022 election for the expanded five-member county commission. French won his race for a two-year term that year by taking 51.6% of the vote over Maggie Yates, a Democrat who now is Spokane’s deputy city administrator.

This time, French is seeking a four-year term.

Johnathan Curley

Tensions flare

The race for the county commission seat has seen its fair share of contention.

Marshall all but accused French of orchestrating a cover-up of the PFAS contamination on the West Plains at a June campaign event in which her supporters got physical with a disrupter.

The protester, John Estey, said he was there to put Marshall on the spot with tough questions about issues he cared about.

He later filed a police report after Marshall’s supporters tried to corral him at the event and threatened him with physical violence.

Marshall refused to comment on the ordeal at the time, saying she could not see what occurred and that she had “no idea” if she and her supporters could have handled the disruption differently.

“We’re all – I’m new to politics,” Marshall told The Spokesman-Review at the time. “You just don’t know how to handle that stuff. So I guess we’ll come up with a solution for that. It’s just unfortunate that that has to happen.”

Marshall held the event to share her strategy for addressing the contaminated waters of the West Plains, which may be the most consequential issue in the minds of the district’s voters this November.

Both candidates have released their own plans for how the county should respond, and both plans have received criticism. While Marshall’s lacks tangible solutions, there’s skepticism over whether French’s proposal of piping clean water from the Spokane River is actually feasible.

French has had to respond to a barrage of accusations about his response to the contaminated water for months. Some believe he has not been transparent about his knowledge of the situation and should have had the county respond sooner. Others have gone as far as alleging a cover-up, saying French kept the information from the public to protect the interests of the airport board and future development of the area.

Last month, a progressive advocacy group helped a few West Plains residents file a recall petition against French that was dismissed last week by a Whitman County Superior Court judge who ruled it was filed in an untimely manner, lacked a valid legal argument and was factually insufficient, French’s attorney Mark Lamb said.

French has strongly denied the notion he orchestrated or participated in a cover-up, highlighting the fact he’s one person on the multi member governing boards for the county, the health district, the airport and the public development authority overseeing economic development of the area. He said the other board members and organization leaders would have received the same knowledge he did.

“When I started this race back in the spring and knew who my opponent was going to be, I knew that this was not going to be a race about issues,” French said. “This was going to be a race about accusations, slander, mistruths, half-truths, because she has no record to run on.”

French’s responses, releases of documents and interviews rebutting the allegation have not landed with Marshall and her supporters. She said the district deserves more from their elected representative.

“I do not believe he is serving their interests by not meeting their needs immediately, and with this potential cover -up, I think he has put the special interests before the community,” Marshall said.

On housing, homelessness and economic development

If elected, Marshall said she would work to advocate for the district’s residents and the issues important to them.

Marshall believes the district is growing at an unsustainable rate and development is occurring without the proper improvements to public transit, wildfire resiliency, infrastructure and emergency services in the district.

Her platform touches on many of the same points she’s hammered as co-founder of the advocacy group Citizen Action for Latah Valley, which successfully lobbied the Spokane City Council to enact a building moratorium for the neighborhood earlier this year.

Marshall said the same stressors facing Latah Valley, which is in the city’s jurisdiction, are popping up all around the county because leadership is not following its comprehensive plan, which lays out goals for infrastructure and emergency services improvements that should occur before houses go up.

She said she’s not against development, but that it should occur “with thoughtful planning.”

“We can make communities better connected, that have these resources, that are bikeable, walkable, that have medical facilities, that have schools,” Marshall said. “You can create connected communities that can support all types of housing.”

Marshall said most development is occurring on the outskirts of the county, and that the focus should shift to developing more urbanized areas where the infrastructure, community resources and businesses are already in place. Doing so would drive down the cost of housing, she argued.

“I think it really is tied to building homes where we don’t have to add services,” Marshall said of driving down housing costs. “That adds another burden to people that are paying for the homes, but also other taxpayers.”

On homelessness, both Marshall and French said they’re supportive of a regional approach in which industry experts, service providers and all of the area’s municipalities can come together to find solutions.

As he has in past elections, French is touting his history of economic development in the region and greater county.

He said keeping a good balance of commercial, residential and business development allows the county to address rising housing costs and homelessness, and to secure funding without increasing taxes.

“If you want to get somebody out of homelessness, they have to have a job,” French said. “And if you don’t have a job, it doesn’t matter how many services you provide for them, they’re still not going to be financially independent. They still are not going to have that freedom that comes with financial security.”

French said Marshall’s criticisms of the development in the district is “just factually inaccurate,” noting that the nonprofit Smart Growth America considers the county to be at the forefront of smart growth strategies.

“She takes the failures of the city with regard to Latah Valley, and I live in Latah Valley, and tries to make them a county problem,” French said.

He said the county has and is making the proper investments, like the new West Plains park in the works.

French’s concerns around development are centered at the state level. He said the state’s new building codes are making the cost of developing, including affordable and low-income housing, more expensive.

Those costs are then passed down to would-be homeowners, driving up housing costs, French said. He’s supportive of using the tax increment financing model to alleviate some of the costs for developers and incentivize them to construct low-income and affordable housing. Under tax-increment financing, some property taxes paid in a specified area are diverted to be used to improve streets and other infrastructure in that same area.

The county is using the model for the Mead Works development near the Costco north of Spokane, which will bring 1,400 residences to 400 acres. French said the developer, Greenstone Corp., has committed to making at least 25% affordable or low-income housing.

On public safety

French said his knowledge and experience will allow him to lead the county’s effort to build a new detention facility, if he’s re-elected.

The county ran a sales tax ballot measure last year to try and secure the funding, but the proposal was rejected by voters. It lacked the support of the City of Spokane, and faced heavy criticism for being too vague about how exactly the funding would be used.

Overcrowding at the county’s detention facilities has only increased since voters opted against the measure, and French said the county will make another attempt next year. He believes voters rejected the first iteration because the city was not clear on how they would have used the portion of the funding they would have received.

“We’ll be much more engaged with the community,” French said. “We’ll start earlier, and hopefully by the time we get to the ballot, people would feel comfortable enough with it to where they’ll approve it, and we can improve the quality of public safety in the community.”

Marshall puts much of her platform, like her desire to have the county improve their response to the PFAS-contaminated groundwater on the West Plains or increase wildfire resiliency efforts, under the larger umbrella of public safety.

She acknowledged the challenges with the county’s detention facilities, but stressed investments need to be made at all levels of the criminal justice system. She would like to see full staffing levels, competitive wages for prosecutors and public defenders, and investments in reformative justice and social programs.

“We have to have a robust system to handle and to mitigate the issues,” Marshall said. “If we don’t have prosecutors to prosecute, we don’t have a jail that is manned fully or really meets the needs of both people that work there and that are held there, we don’t have mental health, addiction, behavioral health services tied into this system, then we aren’t doing our job.”

The candidates agree that conversations on how to bolster the region’s criminal justice system should include all of the involved parties, including local experts and elected leaders from each municipality.

“As a community, we need to come together and put together a really thoughtful, responsible, comprehensive plan surrounding our justice system so we can actually attack it at all different angles,” Marshall said.

Editor’s note: This report was changed on Sept. 30, 2024, to correct the title of the judge who dismissed the recall petition against French. The title was incorrect in the original version of this report because of an editor’s error.