CANDIDATE PROFILE-Commissioner District No. 1: Challenger John Marshall

John Marshall is pursuing Adams County Commissioner Rudy Plager for the second time. Four years ago, he unsuccessfully sought to unseat the incumbent. He returns to the political arena again this year as Plager’s opponent, having brushed up on more of the issues facing the county and working to build stronger recognition all across the county.

Marshall, 61, moved to Adams County nearly 27 years ago, and chose to settle in Ritzville because of its central location in Eastern Washington. Marshall currently owns and operates an auto body repair shop, Landcraft Repair Research & Development, in Ritzville while remaining active in the community.

He and his wife, Janis, have three children.

A veteran of the Ritzville City Council and an active voice on the Ritzville Public Development Authority, Marshall has long invested his time working to preserve and build the economy in Ritzville. He passionately believes that Adams County could do more to plan for the future and bring it to fruition.

The following are his responses during a recent interview with The Journal. He and his opponent answer the same 10 questions during private interviews.

As a challenger, he leans toward supporting term limits for elected officials, as he chased a 12-year veteran of the county commission.

“While I’m not a politician, really, I have been in our local politics for 12 years or so and it didn’t seem to make much difference at the city council level and I didn’t really understand term limits until I ran against an incumbent,” he said. “Having done that once and doing it again now I start to understand why people are concerned — because an incumbent is deeply embedded. What I hear from people, who surprisingly I thought were solid supporters of my opponent is ‘he’s been in office long enough.’ There becomes complacency day-to-day and things are overlooked or ignored.”

While Plager aims at maintaining county services with its few resources, Marshall’s long term vision is more aggressive.

“At the meet and greet forum, my vision was nothing will change if you don’t change your county commissioners because,” he said. “My personal vision for what I’d like to see is for Adams County to grow and prosper. That’s a simple statement that all four of us will make but the fact is you have to actively pursue that, you can’t sit back and wait for it to come to you. Growth in our county will come from the private sector as it does everywhere. You can’t expect growth to be government in Adams County.

“Government is here to facilitate, provide and encourage growth,” he explained. “And we need to make it easy for growth. Maybe I am off of the direct point of the question, but my vision is to improve local government, county’s government, by providing things like a flow chart for development that any builder or developer can refer to and go down the lines of the departments or permits.

“It would be putting in place an attitude or a presence of service and I have said before, put service back in public service. I think that most of our courthouse departments that I have encountered have pleasant people willing to help. But I don’t see it is so everywhere in the county. I want to create an attitude of hopeful progress. I see even our economic development guy saying, ‘times are tough, nobody’s interested,’ we need to make them interested. And we need to have that attitude before anybody will be.”

Marshall was quick to offer a couple of top priorities and then resurrected his strong belief during the last general election that the health department needs a bigger presence in Ritzville.

“To get with the department managers and insist that they help us with planning and resulting therefore in budgeting as well,” is Marshall’s top priority. “To look at our current economic development profile, how we’re handling economic development, what we’re doing to pursue that.

“Restore the now health department services to eastern Adams County. Those services, more and more services should be made available online,” Marshall said.

“I will give health department credit for trying to make restaurant health cards available online. I think a lot of training in a lot of departments could be done online and expenses and exposure to travel could be reduced.”

Both candidates agree agriculture is a major player in the county’s future.

“Huge. Can I do it in one answer, huge. Three things raised the west, the railroad, farming and ranching. This economy has changed greatly over the years. Ritzville’s heyday may have been in the 50s when its population was the highest. Retail and services have reduced. Agriculture and ranching and the railroad are still strong,” he said. “Our retail and for that matter wholesale economy is totally different. It has evolved. You can buy a tractor online and in the 30s you had to go back to the Midwest to see one manufactured. It’s not the same. Nobody wants it to be the same. Have we locally kept pace. Yeah, we’re buying out of town, we kept pace. But we’ve suffered from it. While I believe in historic preservation in every case before a downtown rebuilds itself, industry of any kind has to come back to the community. It is location, location, location in real estate. Our (Ritzville’s) location is the freeway.”

Bringing industry to the county is important and Marshall said the county commissioners should do more.

“What ever we can do, what ever our economic development person and money can legally do I will want to do. Some of what they want or need is in fact done through government and politics. If we can help with that we should be there,” he said. “Yes we ought to be there to help them, through our agencies and departments. We should facilitate whatever we can help with. We can’t help them we should have enough knowledge or interest to find out where they need to go. I think there’s four communities at risk almost daily — East Adams County, Ritzville, Lind, Washtucna and Hatton. It’s going to take some creativity and some diligence to see something happen.”

As the county prepares to make a major upgrade to its radio communications for emergency services, Marshall said he thinks better planning would have led to quicker solutions.

“This is not the county’s problem. It’s a national problem its an FCC mandate unfunded. I have said that the commissioners need to demand a five-year plan from each department that’s updated yearly. If the state hasn’t demanded it, the commissioners have not lead their departments by asking for one,” Marshall said. “It’s not that the sheriff’s department hasn’t been working on it. But as you read in your own paper, WSP planned and implemented a program and still have time to use the current system as back up while they jump the normal hurdles. Adams County should have done that and your commissioners should have made them.”

Marshall, during a recent public forum, took a hard stance on the need for a facility’s master plan.

“I talked about it when we were at the forum and they absolutely should have a facilities plan. They have property, real estate, real property and requirements all over the county from one end to the other,” Marshall said. “So why would you not have at your fingertips a list of facilities, age and condition and an annual inspection so you can create a maintenance plan and schedule it in your budget? The plan that I speak of are really is about budgeting for necessity.”

The national economy and its trickle down effect is the number one weakness for Adams County according to Marshall.

“Certainly, the economy is tough in the nation, and it hands down to us,” he said. “Through planning and coordination, stabilize your budget. Where my opponent says the budget is stable, he hasn’t done anything to make improvements or even stay on top of it.”

Candidates had a chance to talk about the county budget and what they feel is in need of more funding in order to be effective. Marshall focused on law enforcement.

“I do feel like to have full staff at the sheriff’s department is impossible at the level of funding they have now. I don’t have a scanner, I don’t follow every call and as a county commissioner it wouldn’t be my job to do that either not that I don’t think it would be interesting. I’m not upset as much as I am concerned at response time and if you’re running three or four deputies short your response is not ever going to be as good if you were fully funded,” he said. “Safety is important. That courthouse for 10 years has, through departments, expressed concern about improvements in maintenance and space. Certainly that can boil down to a funding issue. And, health department services. I would expect it to be spent offering more hours, more accessibility and in short that means a couple more days a week in Ritzville. The office is down to one day here.”

If there is something the candidates haven’t addressed, Marshall feels it’s the need for a probations department for the purpose of monitoring convicted criminals and collecting fines and fees.

“In law and justice we don’t actually have a probations department. The sheriff’s department does the best they can to keep law and order and collects up the people who are a problem, interpreted as people who are breaking the laws on the street,” Marshall said. “When they are guilty they are sentenced and fined and you rely on a clerk system to call them and track them and you have no probations system, nothing, no officer of the court who is responsible to see that those people pay their fines.

“After we have gone to all of that expense and at no small risk to our employees, brought them to justice and nobody is assigned to see that that happens,” Marshall concluded.