Transparency, accountability critical, incumbent commissioner says

EPHRATA — Rob Jones said he’s running for a second term as Grant County Commissioner because there are some important initiatives coming up and projects he wants to see through.

“The second term, for me, is to kind of continue the good that is changing in the county. More so on the administration side of what we do, (rather) than the legislative side. But also it applies to the legislative side,” he said.

Jones said he has worked to increase accountability in county government, among other things advocating for commission sessions to be available to constituents online, and to make important county documents more accessible.

“When you look at public works, putting our plans online so they’re transparent. You can access our six-year (transportation) plan. You can access gravel-to-oil projects, and how they’re planned to be rolled out through the years — they’re not currently funded, but the plans are online,” he said.

When commissioners and county departments are more readily accessible it increases transparency, he said.

“It’s just transparency, it’s accountability,” he said. “And once that happens, there’s no more misinformation.”

Jones said in a second term he would keep looking for ways to make government more accessible. One possible proposal would be to change the time of one commission session per month. They’re held at 2 p.m. Tuesday.

“I hate 2 p.m. Tuesday meetings,” he said. “I’m trying to get a night meeting once a month that’s open to the public.”

Construction began on the Grant County Jail earlier this year, and Jones said that’s one of the projects he wants to see through. County officials are also working on building a new morgue and an animal shelter and discussing an events center at the Grant County Fairgrounds. Along with those, county officials are working on planning for a new landfill; Jones said that will be an area of focus if he’s reelected.

Originally county officials believed the current landfill would be full in seven to 10 years, he said.

“We were rushing (because commissioners thought) ‘We only have five years. We’re in a bad spot.’ Some of that has eased up. We were given an estimate of seven to 10 (years) depending on growth, but the consultants are pretty confident (the county has) nine to 10 years. Which is good news,” Jones said.

For 2025 he would concentrate on the 10-year update of the comprehensive plan, he said.

“It’s just huge — 2025 is going to be the year that the (comprehensive) plan is gone over in detail and zoning changes are going to take place,” he said.

Current zoning in the unincorporated areas is inconsistent.

“If you look at Grant County now, you see residential next to heavy industrial. And we really need to clean that up,” he said. “There are certain things you can’t do in existing zoning, so we always have comp plan amendments and conditional use requests, and 2025 is big on getting all of that updated.”

Theoretically, there’s a lot of land available for development in Grant County, but in practice, land is limited, he said. That makes it important to put together a consistent zoning plan, he said, and work with city officials countywide —not only on zoning but other issues like transportation and infrastructure.

While a county commissioner represents a district, Jones said he works across the district lines, citing the example of road improvements around the Gorge Amphitheater southwest of Quincy. That’s also an example of finding a new solution when the first one didn’t work, he said.

The number of visitors on concert weekends affected cell service, which affected the ability of farmers to monitor their irrigation systems, he said. Jones said county officials worked with the companies that provided cell service but couldn’t come to a workable solution.

While the cellular access issue wasn’t solved directly, improving roads near The Gorge helped. While farmers still can’t monitor their irrigation systems via cellular access, the work on Silica Road and Road One Northwest in and out of the concert venue allows farmers to access their equipment directly during concert weekends. Jones said he worked with Central Services Director Tom Gaines and Jerry Gingrich, former deputy clerk for the commissioners to find the solution.

Fellow Commissioner Cindy Carter and venue owner LiveNation representatives were also involved, according to previous reporting by the Columbia Basin Herald.

Jones said that if he’s reelected he would support hiring a county executive, similar to a city manager but at the county level, to take over some of the administrative functions that are now the job of the commissioners.

Grant County is growing to the point that administering it is a full-time job in itself and commissioners have other responsibilities, he said. In addition, a county executive would remove the temptation of residents to go to a second commissioner if they didn’t like the answer they got from the first one which has been a problem, he said. It would free up the time of commissioners for other jobs.

“If (the commissioners) were on the ground doing the public relations, letting people know what’s going on, what’s coming, what’s going, what’s happening, you would probably be more effective,” Jones said.

Jones is running against David Henderson. Both prefer the Republican party.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.