Election results in state and Clark County races can be found at www.columbian.com/election.
Come Jan. 1, changes will come to county government.
At least that’s the way it looks after the first election returns Tuesday, which indicated a home rule charter was passing. The charter measure has received 55.8 percent of the vote, with an estimated 45,000 ballots to be counted.
At The Grant House on Officers Row, a party of charter supporters whooped and hollered as the results were announced.
Nan Henriksen — the former Camas mayor and chairwoman of the county freeholders who wrote the charter — said the changes it prescribes are long overdue.
“I am so excited and relieved,” she said. “We worked so incredibly hard.”
Retiring Republican Sheriff Garry Lucas — one of the faces of the pro-charter campaign whose photo appeared on much of the campaign literature — said he’d had no idea how the vote would go down prior to receiving the results.
“It’s hard to judge (something like this) because you get your feelings from a circle of friends you’re traveling with,” he said.
While he had a good feeling the charter could pass, he said he was surprised it staked out a 9,000-vote lead.
Henriksen said she believes the lead is insurmountable.
Past attempts to pass a home rule charter in Clark County fizzled, often before even reaching voters.
Home rule charters allow counties to enact changes to governance not outlined in the state constitution.
The charter has required a long and complicated sell for its supporters, Henriksen said.
It outlines a number of changes to county governance, most of which relate to what role county commissioners — called councilors in the charter — would play.
Currently, they have both executive and legislative authority, like a governor and a legislature, or a president and Congress.
The charter aims to decrease their executive authority to hire and direct county staff, while keeping their legislative duties more or less intact.
Some of the changes will take effect in January. They include renaming the county administrator the “county manager” and imbuing him with executive authority over departments.
Other changes will come later. Those include reducing the councilors’ pay to $53,000 a year. A council chairperson will receive around $63,000, however.
The winner of Tuesday’s county commissioner race will not receive the decreased salary. Neither will current Commissioners Tom Mielke and David Madore.
Changes to their salaries won’t take effect until after the 2016 election.
In 2015, there will be elections to fill the two new seats on the council. One of the elections will be for the chairperson. While the charter calls for councilors to be elected by district in the general election, the chairperson will be elected countywide.
The charter also creates an initiative and referendum process, which opponents have argued will be ineffective and toothless.
The opponents, led by the county Republican party, didn’t stop there in arguing against the charter.
They considered it too far-reaching — a muzzle, of sorts, on the two sitting Republican commissioners, Madore and Mielke.
They spent thousands of dollars on campaign videos and fliers arguing that the charter would place a “firewall” between elected officials and their constituents.
State Rep. Liz Pike, R-Camas, claimed the charter would turn Clark County into the most bureaucratic county on the West Coast.
With the election seemingly in the rearview mirror, Henriksen said Tuesday night she considered the actual changes to be “moderate.”
