Kennewick has new mayor. 1st controversy on the agenda is ethics complaints

Kennewick has new leadership as the council elected a mayor and mayor pro tem from among its members at its first meeting of the year Tuesday night.

In a vote of 5-2 Councilman Bill McKay, a small business owner and developer, was picked as mayor. He has been a councilman for four years.

Gretl Crawford, also a business owner and developer, was picked as mayor pro tem in a 6-1 vote of the council. She was elected to her first term on the council in November.

Both McKay and Crawford were touted in the November election as part of a “dream team” with incumbent Councilmen John Trumbo and Brad Beauchamp and newly elected Councilman Loren Anderson.

At the first meeting of the newly configured council, members also had a discussion of Kennewick’s two-year-old council ethics policy but took no action.

The policy will be discussed at a council workshop next Tuesday, with a decision on whether to change the policy expected at the Jan. 18 meeting of the council.

The first council meeting of 2022 marked a new era for the council, which sometimes split over contentious issues in the last two years.

Then Trumbo, Beauchamp and McKay tended to be outvoted 4-3 on issues the council did not agree on, with returning Councilmen Chuck Torelli and Jim Millbauer, who were not up for election in November, then in the majority.

Tuesday night Torelli nominated Anderson, a dentist, to be mayor.

Although it was Anderson’s first meeting as a councilman, Torelli said Anderson was most qualified to unite the council and restore the trust that had been lost among council members.

“If we don’t have trust we don’t have progress,” Torelli said.

Both Millbauer and Torelli voted for Anderson for mayor, but McKay took the other five votes.

There were no comments made before the vote by the council members who favored him.

Millbauer also voted for Anderson for mayor pro tem, with no discussion on the vote before Crawford was elected to the position.

“I’ll try to do a good job,” McKay said.

He said he wanted to hear from his fellow council members about their preferences before he assigned them to city and other local government committees. He will not “play politics” with the committee assignments, he said.

The discussion of the ethics policy at the Tuesday night meeting occurred after former Mayor Don Britain and former Mayor Pro Tem Steve Lee signed ethics complaints in their final weeks in office against McKay, Beauchamp and Trumbo.

Ethics policy

Britain lost in the November election to Crawford and Lee lost to Anderson.

Britain attended the Tuesday meeting, speaking during the public comment portion, saying McKay violated the open meetings act in January 2000 by discussing an ethics complaint he planned to file against Britain with other council members. Among those he contacted were Trumbo and Beauchamp.

Discussing an issue with the majority of council members outside a meeting can be a violation of Washington state’s open meetings law.

Britain also said that McKay skirted the state’s public records request when watchdog Roger Lenk, who recently died, requested copies of emails related to the ethics complaint. McKay went to Lenk’s house to handle the request, bypassing the city’s public records officer.

Lee told the Tri-City Herald editorial board before the meeting that the four ethics complaints were something of a “Hail Mary pass to the community” so residents would know they have to pay close attention to the council’s new dynamic.

Britain said at the meeting that he would have filed the complaints over the summer but was undergoing cancer treatment then.

The first step for an ethics complaint is for Kennewick attorney Tom Atwood, the city’s ethics officer to review them. However, Atwood’s contract expired at the end of 2021.

At the 6:30 p.m. Tuesday council workshop, to be held via the internet, whether to extend Atwood’s contract, re-advertise the contract or no longer have an outside ethics officer may be discussed.

Possible changes to the two-year-old ethics policy or revoking it also could be discussed.

McKay, Trumbo and new members Anderson and Crawford all promised during the campaign they would serve with “integrity, transparency and honesty,” Britain said.

“Is your first action on city council to disband the ethics policy and sweep any misdeeds and illegal actions under the rug?” he asked.

Ethics complaint

McKay told the Tri-City Herald before the meeting that he learned two years ago that he was wrong to contact a quorum of other council members before the council meeting and to personally respond to Lenk’s public records request.

That an ethics complaint was not filed for two years “stinks of politics,” Anderson said. “I don’t what to do politics.”

There are clearly some issues, he said, but he questioned why they were not dealt with two years ago.

Beauchamp said in the interest of transparency the new ethics complaints should be addressed.

But he also said the council had already spent significant time over the last two years discussing the ethics policy, which was broken from the beginning, he said.

Members on both sides of the split council have said the ethics policy has been used for politics.

Two previous complaints have been filed under the ethics policy, one against Trumbo, which was upheld, and the one against Britain, which was dismissed.

Trumbo said Tuesday that he wanted the four new complaints to go forward to give Britain and Lee the opportunity to have issues important to them addressed.

This story was originally published January 5, 2022 at 12:40 PM.