How the politicization of public health in Spokane is spinning into a dark comedy.
Hats off to the Spokesman-Review and reporter John Stucke for this morning’s front page story on the terms of the contract rejected by Dr. Jason Eberhart-Phillips–Spokane County’s choice to fill the position of county health officer.
This is a story with a colorfully disturbing history but before getting to that, Stucke’s story is
worth a second look as it reveals both first-rate public affairs reporting and, at the same time, the limits of contemporary journalism conventions. The particular limit, in this case, is that reporters are not allowed to interject into their copy annotations to the readers such as: Can you believe what this guy just said?
What Stucke’s reporting pointed out is that the contract that Eberhart-Phillips walked away from did not include any severance pay, but did include a gag clause. The gag is very explicit in the contract in clause 5 (r): “Seek concurrence of the SRHD Board of Health prior to taking a public position on potentially controversial issues surrounding public health.”
The real action in Stucke’s story is, regrettably, past the jump onto page A15, but you’ll want to take the time to flip back there, because it’s on A15 that the health board’s chairman, David Crump, denies that the contract clause is an effort to muzzle a new public health officer. Here’s how Stucke reported it:
And he [Crump] rejected any notion that the board was seeking a health official who would set aside his or her professional opinion and blindly agree with a board made up of elected officials and political appointments.
“A yes-man or a puppet and anything like that – no way,” Crump said. “We need someone with expertise and judgment.”
One part of the contract would have required the new health officer to “seek the concurrence of the SRHD Board of Health prior to taking a public position on potentially controversial issues surrounding public health.”
Crump acknowledged that Eberhart-Phillips had questions regarding that language.
“We talked about that one quite a bit,” he said. “What we were really trying to say … if the board has taken a formal public stand, we’d expect the health officer to go along.
“It doesn’t mean you can’t say anything without going to the board first.”
Actually, a literal reading of the contract clause says exactly that. Anything that comes out of public health officials mouth about health (e.g. whether or not we should have fluoride in our drinking water) is potentially controversial. And you’d have to think that a health officer without a severance package would want to err on the side of first running anything other than “no comment” by the board given the clear language of the contract.
Especially given our recent history.
This gambit obviously goes back to Dr. Kim Thorburn who, at the time she was dismissed by the county board of health two years ago, was also the head of the state’s Board of Health.
Thorburn’s dramatic dismissal left a sizable dent in the county’s credibility, in that two leaders of the purge were two of Spokane’s three county commissioners, Todd Mielke and Mark Richard, both known for their conservative, pro-business views.
“I’m stunned,” Mary Ann Murphy, the executive director of the non-profit Partners with Families and Children, told a reporter at the time. “It’s a huge loss. I can’t imagine another doctor with moxie will come here.”
(Yeah, and especially a doctor that notices the anti-moxie clause in the contract offered to him or her.)
At the time, the board blamed unspecified communications issues with Thorburn, but it’s reasonable to suspect that this was, in part, payback from the two county commissioners on the board for Thorburn’s defense of Erik Skelton.
Skelton, you may remember, was the former director of the Spokane County Air Pollution Control Authority. He was nationally respected both for his expertise and for his moxie. It was Skelton, for example, who slammed the door on the City of Spokane in 1998 when he learned that the city was importing shipments of pesticide containers and dangerous old field wastes from Alberta to burn at Spokane’s municipal waste incinerator. But mainly, Skelton will be remembered for his work in getting the city off the federal air quality non-attainment list. That was in August 2005. The next month, citing harassment from the pollution control authority’s board (on which Mielke had recently joined then-county commissioner Phil Harris) Skelton announced he’d “simply had it” and resigned.
Thorburn had been outspoken in her defense of Skelton.
Skelton is now a senior policy analyst at the Northeast States Center for a Clean Air Future. He was replaced by William Dameworth, a former timber company environmental manager who quickly became embroiled in controversy when he questioned whether air pollution is a cause of global warming. (The Center for Justice has a pending legal claim against the clean air agency board, alleging that the decision to hire Dameworth violated the state’s open meetings law.)
Thorburn, of course, went on to challenge Mielke this fall but he successfully defeated her to win re-election.
Where the health board goes from here is unclear. Stucke reports this morning that Eberhart-Phillips (who is currently the public health officer for El Dorado County, California) was the only finalist for the Spokane position.
–Tim Connor
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