To understand Spokane County Commissioner Al French’s timeline of his knowledge of the West Plains’ PFAs contamination, we need another timeline.
At a public event in Airway Heights on June 3, Palisades rancher Craig Volosing accused County Commissioner Al French of covering up water contamination that has plagued private well owners for years.
French has long served on several public bodies on which he was in a position to know about the forever chemicals contamination found in groundwater at Spokane International Airport (SIA). He was speaking to dozens of West Plains well owners at an informational forum organized by the West Plains Water Coalition (WPWC) about his new plan to pipe them water.
The commissioner assured Volosing he’d done nothing wrong, saying, “The record doesn’t support that. … You’re all entitled to an opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”
He said his staff was “going through seven years of my activity at the county” to clear his name. Within “two or three weeks,” his office would release the results of the investigation.
Two weeks later, RANGE requested the documents he was referring to through state open records laws.
On August 4, the Spokesman ran a story titled, “County Commissioner Al French fights back with newly released documents,” seemingly based on the promised records. The story referenced unrelated controversies in the Washington Department of Ecology and in the WPWC. It also described an email an SIA spokesperson had sent a reporter in 2017 detailing the discovery of forever chemicals in West Plains groundwater, which RANGE revealed in January.
The story described no evidence showing French had disclosed the contamination to the public at large.
Sometime between the publication of that story and now, a “timeline” of French’s knowledge of the contamination appeared on the commissioner’s official Spokane County district webpage.
On August 21, more than two and a half months after he first promised them and seven years after the contamination was discovered, RANGE received the documents from the county. French has refused or ignored nine interview requests from us about PFAS contamination and did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the documents.
His records, which reflect some of the information reported in the August 4 Spokesman story, do not clear him from allegations of a cover up.
Recently filed recall charges against French reiterate the cover-up allegation, which resonates with many West Plains well owners. The charges detail several actions taken by French to allegedly keep discussions about the contamination out of the public eye.
“This is one of the most egregious stories of corruption we’ve seen,” said attorney Knoll Lowney, who represents the group that filed the petition. “It actually involved an elected official poisoning their constituents. … If Al French, when he got this information, had done his job, this response would have started seven years earlier. The testing would have started seven years earlier, and people would have understood that their water was contaminated seven years earlier.”
The Clean Water Accountability Coalition filed the charges last week with the Spokane County elections office. They’re signed by West Plains resident Mary Benham, whose private well is contaminated with PFAS.
Benham said she has not yet seen the documents, which French quietly released in a hyperlink at the bottom of his county website in August.
She added that the reason people know about the airport’s contamination is not because French has been talking about it. Rather, as RANGE has reported extensively, a concerned West Plains resident requested SIA’s well tests and gave them to Ecology, which published them and is requiring the airport to clean up the PFAS contamination.
Benham said she felt compelled to act by signing the petition on behalf of the coalition.
“I would much rather have been doing other things,” she told RANGE. “When it first came up, I wanted to bury my head in the sand. Before we got our test, I had already decided I needed to support my fellow West Plains community members.”
