Making the case for Washington’s counties
Eric Johnson, executive director of the Washington State Association of County for 16 years, retired May 31, 2024. (Jerry Cornfield/Washington State Standard)
Eric Johnson first dipped his toes into the waters of public service as a Western Washington University student. He liked it enough to submerge himself for 45 years.
His journey included a stint as an elected Lewis County commissioner and, since 2008, executive director of the Washington State Association of Counties. He retired last week.
The association gives voice to the wants, needs and concerns of the state’s 39 counties in dealings with state and federal government. Economic downturns, a pandemic and political tumult made delivering those messages louder and more forcefully a requisite for Johnson, and now his successor.
The Standard sat down with him last week to hear what changed, and what is different since he embarked on this career.
Public service is tough. It isn’t the same as when you got that first job in parks.
It has changed. The tenor of relations in and around the county courthouse now is much different than it was when I started. The interactions within the building, the interactions with the public, with elected officials, there’s definitely a lack of patience, at times a lack of civility. There is an inability to disagree in a manner that is respectful. I think, am I romanticizing the past or is it different? It really is different.
Do you find this same kind of change in your interactions with state lawmakers?
Are there some legislators who disregard you and disrespect you as soon as you don’t agree with them? Yeah, there sure are some that take it very personally when your organization disagrees with a direction that they want to go. In general, the relationships are still pretty healthy. I think a lot of legislators still understand that when we disagree we can’t damage the relationship because we are going to be working with each other on other things.
You know the saying, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Does it apply for counties in your experience?
I would say there’s been one common theme … that is the challenges county governments face in paying for services. It started with the loss of timber revenue for the rural counties, which was a dramatic revenue loss. Then you had loss of federal revenue sharing during the Reagan administration. Then you have the property tax shift and so there’s been no new revenue replacements.
Since 2020, there’ve been some revenue capabilities for counties to be stable. That horizon is tailing off. We’re starting to see the end of the American Rescue Plan Act dollars, the end of Coronavirus Relief Fund dollars, and sales tax is starting to stabilize. We’re going back to the structural deficiency of county government financing and that’s the challenge that we have faced the entire time I’ve been in county government.
How are counties responding?
There are things we are not doing anymore. I can point to the county I came from, Lewis County. We delivered a load of senior service programs. That’s all offloaded to nonprofits. We had a youth recreation program, no longer exists. And I can go on and on and on. We have three counties that have closed their jails in the last year. A fourth one is on the way to make that decision if they’ve not already made it.
We don’t speak about it but we are close to about a third of our counties that don’t have 24/7 law enforcement coverage. And that includes some counties you wouldn’t necessarily think that to be true.
Does that mean no deputies on the road?
Yeah. There could be a state patrol officer out there. There could be a fish and wildlife officer but they do not have a county deputy sheriff on the road 24/7. Do they have someone on call in case something comes up? Sure.
It’s a good spot to ask, what three big problems in need of solving are you handing to your predecessor – who, for the time being, is Derek Young?
Public defense. There’s no doubt we are in a crisis in this state. It is a lack of resources to the system. It is a lack of attorneys that are willing to be in the system. We have worked legislatively to try and have acknowledgment of that, and we’re now trying through the judicial process to find resolution.
Number two, for me, clearly does continue to be the fact that the county’s revenue structure just is not stable. We are in a constant structural deficit and the lack of recognition by the Legislature has been really challenging for us.
And number three, with the churn of the Legislature, is the constant need to remind and help our legislators understand that county government, constitutionally, is an agent for the state of Washington to do regional services. They are your services. They’re not county services. Constitutionally, the trial court in the state of Washington is the county Superior Court. That’s actually the State of Washington’s court. We conduct the election system on behalf of the state. We assess property on behalf of the state. The lack of recognition for their obligation to assure that those state services are adequately delivered and provided is an ongoing challenge that I don’t think will ever be completed.
You mentioned at the outset an increased degree of incivility. Has the emergence of political forces like the Tea Party or even Donald Trump altered what you see in counties?
I may get myself in trouble here. Folks associated with the Tea Party, they generally had what I would call a rudder, a set of values that they were working toward. It was around fiscal responsibility and a smaller, leaner government. More recently, I would say a variety of elected officials at the city, county and state level, they just want to be obstructionist to governing. That’s been the biggest challenge.
When you come into county government, you are making decisions every day to govern. You might be changing the speed limit on a road. You might be dealing with a dangerous animal ordinance. You might have to update your county growth management plan. You might have to be setting rates for the dump. You have to govern every day. I think what we saw, particularly in the Tea Party days, is that realization that they have to govern. I think we have folks who come in as elected officials who haven’t made that transition. You may not completely agree with the policy, but you still have to govern within that framework.
Is this fueling what sometimes seems to be stark differences between urban and rural counties?
For a long time people thought it was an east-west divide but I think as [the association] matured, it’s definitely a more urban-rural divide. The issues are the same. It’s the approach of how you deal with the issues. Sometimes it is driven by the different community values and sometimes it’s the different values of the individuals that get elected in those counties. I always remind people [the counties’] 143 different commissioners, council members…they’re all people. They all come with a set of perspectives.
And politics?
We’re a partisan organization, the only other partisan organization besides the Legislature here in Olympia. Most of our folks have Rs and Ds after their names. There are personalities. There are big personalities. There are individuals that have strong, strong perspectives. And if you don’t think conflict arises within 143 elected officials, then come do this job for a while.
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