District 12 legislators host virtual town hall

OLYMPIA — District 12 State Representatives Mike Steele (R-Chelan) and Keith Goehner (R-Dryden) held a virtual town hall Wednesday evening, allowing constituents to ask questions about the current legislative session, bills and any concerns they may have.

“We are certainly excited to get to know the new portions of the recently redistricted 12th legislative district,” said Steele in the opening of the meeting.

The 12th District, after redistricting finalization in 2022, includes Chelan County, a small part of Douglas County and parts of Snohomish and King counties.

Steele is serving his fourth term in the House of Representatives. In the 2023 session, he is the ranking member on the Capital Budget Committee and is also on the Appropriations Committee and Education Committee.

Goehner is serving his third term as a representative for District 12 and is the ranking member on the Local Government Committee and is also on the Rules Committee, Transportation Committee and the Environment and Energy Committee

“We are interested in hearing your thoughts and your concerns,” said Goehner. “We have a lot of interesting bills coming through and we’re interested to hear some of your feedback and your thoughts on some of the things that we’ve been dealing with.”

The town hall featured pre-submitted questions as well as live questions from constituents attending the Zoom meeting.

The first question of the hour-long webinar was a pre-submitted question asking how the legislators planned to represent the newly-added communities of District 12. Moderator Kurt Hammond said that this question echoed other pre-submitted questions regarding the process of redistricting and how some communities ended up as part of District 12.

Steele began to answer the question first, addressing that the redistricting is done by a commission that is independent from the legislature and current boundaries are based on the 2020 census.

“So once those numbers were counted, we had to figure out a way to pick up an additional around 60,000 folks from the west side to the east side,” said Steele.

He also explained that as state representatives, he and Goehner were not involved in the redistricting process.

“We were kept outside of the whole process until the final map was announced and so the commission felt that this was the best way to increase that population size,” Steele said.

“So we end up being probably the most unique district in the state,” Goehner added to Steele’s response.

Other questions through the evening touched on topics about cost-of-living adjustments for plan 1 retirees of the teachers' retirement system, process on the capital budget, climate change being added to the growth management act, rising taxes and quality of education, among other topics.

“We think there’s a lot of commonalities and a lot of things that make us more united in this 12th Legislative District than keep us from understanding the various parts of east and west,” said Steele.

Goehner added that despite priorities and issues in some areas being different from the east side of the state to the west, that a lot of issues have common ground across the state.

“Some of these issues, they don't have a Cascade divide at all and we’re very much united on solving the same types of issues,” he said.

Rebecca Pettingill may be reached at rpettingill@columbiabasinherald.com.

Contact your legislators:

Mike Steele

122A Legislative Building

P.O. Box 40600

Olympia, WA 98504-0600

(360) 786-7832

mike.steele@leg.wa.gov

Keith Goehner

122B Legislative Building

P.O. Box 40600

Olympia, WA 98504-0600

(360) 786-7954

keith.goehner@leg.wa.gov