Friday's postcard, and the cracks in Al French's looking glass

September 6, 2024

Sunset behind a storm, Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge south of Cheney, WA

How a prominent county commissioner’s self-investigation into his role in the West Plains PFAS fiasco doesn’t help his cause

When last many of his constituents saw Al French he was holding forth before a large and mostly hostile audience in Airway Heights, struggling to answer a string of questions and accusations. This was on June 3rd.

On one hand, it was a brave thing to do. Spokane’s longest-serving elected official had faced pointed and angry questions at public events in his county commissioner district in April and May. He had every reason to expect even rougher treatment at an event organized by the West Plains Water Coalition. The coalition is a still young citizens group focusing on informing and helping those who are either experiencing, or may soon be experiencing, the reality that their well water is contaminated with highly toxic PFAS. PFAS is the active ingredient in aviation fire-fighting foams used, until recently, at both Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport (SIA).

The base and airport are in French’s district, where he has been a key member of the SIA board of directors for years and a vocal supporter of the airport’s top executive, CEO Larry Krauter. There is compelling evidence in documents and recorded interviews that French—rather than swiftly acting to inform and protect his constituents—was consumed with shielding the airport’s reputation and considerable real estate interests.

On the other hand, for a man facing re-election this fall, French had few options. He has been openly evading the key questions for months, including ducking an interview I’d requested in the run up to a lengthy article, Al French and the Forever Chemicals Coverup in late December.

Confronted with PFAS questions at an April 23rd appearance alongside sheriff John Nowels, French fended them off by saying he’d “answer any question you have except anything that involves the potential litigation and some of the other disputes that are going on.”

At a public meeting May 22nd, French conceded he knew about the PFAS groundwater contamination at SIA in 2017 and, in the next breath, suggested the discovery “started the conversation between SIA and Ecology.” In retrospect, this was a signal he’d be trying shift blame for the SIA PFAS fiasco onto state officials, by suggesting it is Department of Ecology regulators who somehow failed to take timely action, not SIA nor Al French, for that matter.

I’ll come back to this.

County Commissioner Al French announcing his pledge, June 3rd, to research and explain his actions in response to the discovery of toxic PFAS contamination in groundwater at the Spokane airport.

The flash point of the showdown on June 3rd came when Craig Volosing rose from his seat only a few steps from French’s podium and aimed a pointed question at the commissioner about his handling of the PFAS controversy. Volosing is a life-long Spokane County resident who presides over the Friends of Palisades, a conservation organization rooted in the wooded, rural community not far from the Spokane Airport, where dozens of residents’ wells have been contaminated with PFAS.

Volosing’s salient question was this one: “Will you please help us understand what guided keeping a lid on this information, keeping it from the public, keeping it from the downstream well owners?” Volosing repeated the essence of it, twice, drawing applause from the audience when he finished with, “why did you keep it under wraps for so long?”

To which French replied: ..(S)o to answer that question, I now have staff that's going back through the last seven years of my activity at the county and involvement with the airport as well as others. And so we are going to be coming forward with a record, with documents to back it up, so that we can answer that question. Because quite honestly, I don't remember everything that happened seven years ago. But we do have records that can identify that. And we're going to make it public so that you will know everything that I knew at the time.”

Pressed by another member of the audience about how long that would take, French replied, “just three weeks.”

Map showing PFAS contamination in well water north (downgradient) from Spokane International Airport as of June 2024. (Source: Washington Department of Ecology, & U.S. EPA)

Two months passed. Then came French’s answer. But rather than making the documents public, he took them to the Spokesman-Review newspaper, along with other documents critical of the management of the West Plains Water Coalition.

The S-R’s story ran on August 4th. Two thirds of the article looks at French’s effort to answer questions about his conduct. The remaining third was based on emails French provided the newspaper showing disarray in the ranks of West Plains Water Coalition and friction over management of state grant funds. After the story ran, I filed a public records request with Spokane County for the documents French delivered to the newspaper. A first batch involving French’s investigation of himself is available here. The second batch pertaining to the troubles of the coalition is available here. I would only add there is nothing in the second batch of documents that sheds light on how French dealt with the PFAS issue in his multiple roles as county commissioner, airport board member, and regional health district board member.

More to the centerpiece of his promise: French’s delivery to the newspaper offered no narrative guide on how to interpret his documents in relation to the question he’d promised to answer on June 3rd. The most favorable document to SIA is an email sent to a KREM-2 reporter in late November 2017 which responds to her inquiry by acknowledging that PFAS had recently been detected in three groundwater monitoring wells at SIA. The full chain acknowledges the reporter’s receipt of the email, yet KREM-2, inexplicably, did not air a report based on the SIA memo.

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The unfixable problem for Al French and SIA is that even the KREM—SIA email exchange begs the central question: Why didn’t French and the SIA leadership promptly alert public health agencies and neighboring well owners to the groundwater contamination? An SIA report (not included in the documents French provided the S-R for its August 4th article) shows that two weeks after the KREM email exchange the airport got new sampling results confirming the presence of PFAS in SIA groundwater at concentrations well above the then-federal action level. Yet, the contamination-confirming results were kept under wraps until they came to light through a public records request last year.

In retrospect, it matters that a model for doing the right thing was just a few miles to the west where, on May 23rd, 2017 Fairchild Air Force Base commander Col. Ryan Samuelson convened a public meeting at a nearby high school to brief the community on PFAS in groundwater downgradient of Fairchild.

Concurrent with taking his documents to the Spokesman-Review, the paper reported French offered the following statement in an interview:

“There’s nothing I did that was inappropriate or biased or trying to hide anything. It’s not a thing. There’s not a single record that supports that claim other than their claim, and they got no basis for it.”

But French’s adamant self-exoneration is rebutted by records and on the record interviews that fuel allegations from his critics that he obstructed and forced a years-long delay in a key study that threatened to implicate the airport as a major source of the West Plains PFAS contamination.

One of the damning records is actually in the small stack of documents that French provided the newspaper. It is a September 8, 2021 email from Spokane County CEO Scott Simmons. The email is in response to a Sept. 2nd message from Lindsay, the county’s Water Programs Manager, in which Lindsay reports the Spokane Regional Health District is requesting assistance from the county in administering an “Area-wide Groundwater investigation Grant: West Plains PFAS Groundwater Fate and Transport Study.”

This is Simmons’s message in its entirety: “I had a chance to discuss [the grant] with Al [French] yesterday. He indicated he would like to discuss further with Airport prior to our committing to get involved. I’ll let you know more after I hear back from Al.”

The S-R makes no mention of this email in its story, but it obviously undermines French’s assertion that he was not out to “hide anything.”

“I’m just very concerned about being potentially implicated in what I see as an obvious attempt on the part of the airport director and potentially others to hide information. And I can tell you that when I spoke to you last time, [in early June of 2023] I was unaware. I was as surprised as anybody to learn that the airport board or the airport management was aware of PFAS in their wells as long ago as 2017 and 2019…it just makes me want to ask those folks out there ‘what did you know and when did you know it? In my opinion it’s lying by omission.”

–Spokane County Environmental Services Manager Rob Lindsay, in a 12/13/2023 interview

What’s missing from French’s document (and the S-R’s article) is the fuller context.

Here it is.

At the time of Simmons’s email September 2021 email, the effort to get the crucial groundwater study underway with county support was already year and a half old. I have multiple, reliable sources for this but the two principal sources are Lindsay, who is still a top environmental manager with the county, and Mike Hermanson, a highly-credentialed technical specialist with valuable knowledge of West Plains hydrogeology.*

*In 2019, Hermanson was one of the co-authors of a technical paper—along with EWU geology professor Chad Pritchard—that brought attention to the looming PFAS problem on the West Plains and the urgent need to better understand the area’s complex groundwater flows.

The news Simmons conveyed in his Sept. 2021 email was not the first time French had moved to undermine the study. On one of his worst days at the county, Hermanson remembers hearing from Lindsay in early 2020 that French had intervened to remove Lindsay’s briefing on the study and grant request from the county commissioner’s agenda, thereby blocking its path to approval. Lindsay confirmed hearing this directly from French and says he remembers promptly warning the commissioner “this isn’t going away.”

The source of the $450,000 grant was and is the toxics waste program of Washington’s Department of Ecology. In order to do the study, Ecology had to route the funds through a program created to provide assistance to a local government entities dealing with toxic waste remediation.

Because French had blocked the county commission from taking up the grant request in early 2020, there was a hurried push at the staff level to find an alternate path to the Ecology grant funds—to at least keep the prospect of the study alive. In a matter of days, up stepped Mike LaScuola, a veteran problem-solver and environmental specialist with the Spokane Regional Health District. LaScuola (who’s now retired) sought and got approval from his supervisor to make the application on behalf of the health district, a move that (notably) didn’t require action by the SRHD board on which French was also a member. Suffice to say, finding a way to work around French’s expected obstruction was considered crucial to keeping hopes for the grant funds alive.

Keeping the grant application viable through the health district worked until it didn’t. The 9/08/2021 email from Simmons, included in French’s package to the newspaper, was circulated at the time of Ecology was preparing to award the grant not to the county (where French had closed the doors), but to the health district. But the health district had to certify it had the expertise on hand to do the work.

Hermanson’s involvement— under Pritchard’s leadership—was critical to the necessary certification the health district needed. Thus, the issue had to come back to the county commission to authorize Hermanson’s work on the project. And it is in this context that CEO Simmons’s 9/8/21 email delivers the news that French was still going to be an obstacle. Hermanson cites the continuing obstruction as part of the reason he resigned his position with the county a few months later.

To keep the vital project alive, Pritchard had to shop the grant to other municipalities in Spokane County. Against the odds, he finally found a sponsor in the City of Medical Lake, where he is also a city council member. The study is now in full stride and slated for completion next year.

Ultimately, the episode begs a simple question: if French supported the project—as he conveyed when he met with Volosing and three other members of the Palisades community in July of 2022—why did Pritchard have to work for nearly four years to find a fiscal sponsor beyond French’s sphere of influence? Obviously, the swiftest path was for the county to simply take the state grant money Ecology was offering and do the work, as the county clearly had the expertise (with Pritchard and Hermanson in the wings) to do so. But the evidence from emails recovered via public records requests and interviews is that French had squarely positioned himself between the investigators and the grant funds.

Aside from his blanket assertion he did nothing wrong, the other loose but sharp edge in French’s approach to the S-R is his attack on the Department of Ecology. Again, French’s documents don’t come with a coherent, written narrative. The report he promised in June is a stack of disconnected records that even the S-R described in its headline as “muddling the waters.” That said, here’s how the S-R summarized French’s views based on their interview(s) with him.

“While local leaders have had to answer for what they knew and when, particularly French, he believes that attention and criticism should also extend to the Washington State Department of Ecology.

“He questioned why an Ecology response to a hazardous waste spill on the airport grounds more than a decade ago differed from its extensive response to the PFAS contamination, and why it took years for the department to find a fiscal agent to award the $450,000 grant currently being used for an areawide groundwater investigation. (my emphasis added)

“They [Ecology] were the ones that actually delayed the study for three years trying to get somebody else to to their work,” French said. “Why did they? Why didn’t they just step to the line and do that studies from the very beginning back in 2020? That’s their job. They have the authority, they have the resources.”

French’s assertion that Ecology is somehow to blame for not responding sooner to the airport’s PFAS problem is chutzpah for the ages. As I reported last September SIA’s response to Ecology’s move to compel the airport’s PFAS cleanup under the state’s Model Toxics Control Act was met with a brick wall of denial and resistance, including a scorching letter from a Washington, D.C. law firm representing the airport. Among other empty allegations, the letter disputed whether Ecology could even “confirm any release of of hazardous substances..can be proved” at SIA.

If anything, French’s document release to the Spokesman-Review, and the paper’s reporting on it, may have only added fuel to the fire he was trying to quell with his promise to re-examine and explain his actions. Last week a newly formed local citizen organization backed by FUSE Washington—a statewide, progressive advocacy organization—filed a recall petition accusing French of covering up the PFAS contamination at the airport. French quickly blasted the petition, denouncing it as a political ploy to help his opponent, Molly Marshall, in this fall’s election.

—tjc