Grant County Treasurer retires after 4 decades

EPHRATA — For Darryl Pheasant, it’s always been about the details.

“He knew how everything worked,” said Grant Commissioner Rob Jones. “He knew all the accounts; he knew if the accounting was off, and he knew what the county accounts’ balances were all the time.”

Pheasant retired at the end of June after almost 40 years as Grant County Treasurer, possibly the longest tenure of a county treasurer in Washington state history. Through his efforts, in 1995, Grant County became the first cash-basis county in Washington to open a county investment pool. The pool takes the money that the county collects from junior taxing districts like school or hospital districts and invests it so that rather than sitting in the county’s coffers, it generates interest, explained Grant County Commissioner Cindy Carter.

“He’s made more money for the county than any other treasurer,” Carter said. “We’re actually the envy of other counties around us.”

Pheasant managed this through careful attention to details, Carter said.

“He’s conservative, but he wasn’t afraid to put in the hours to do the work to follow those investments,” she said. “He’s not afraid of getting into the details and following through. That’s an additional task that he has taken on to do the investments instead of taking the easy route.”

Those investments have supplied the county with a new MACC Dispatch Center, a new jail and a future morgue, Pheasant wrote in an email to the Columbia Basin Herald, as well as the Grant County Fair and preservation and renovation projects at the courthouse.

That attention to detail made him a fount of information for the board of commissioners, Carter said, which was a great benefit when she was first elected 19 years ago and overwhelmed by the different aspects of county finances.

“If I had a financial question on taxes or how things work, I could go to Darryl and he could explain it,” she said. “Darryl was a wealth of information to get me through the first year. Even still, I’ll go and ask questions like, what’s this new legislation? How does this impact the counties? He is not afraid to research.”

Pheasant was the liaison between the Washington Department of Revenue and the Washington State Association of County Treasurers for 20 years, becoming the association’s go-to guy regarding changes to state law. There’s a process whereby a county treasurer can propose legislation, and if the association agrees, it will get a legislator to sponsor it. Pheasant was able to get eight laws passed over the last 30 years, he said, mostly to remove loopholes or unfair rules in real estate or tax law.

“Mobile homeowners, for decades, were treated as second-class citizens,” Pheasant said. “If you became delinquent on May 1 on your taxes for the current year, you were immediately subject to distraint and foreclosure. A stick-built home (owner) would get three years, and then there would be a long process through the courts before an actual sale could happen. So low-income people had different rules. If a person has a short-term cash flow problem and they're only delinquent for the current year for a couple of days, they shouldn't be having to worry about those things. Over the years, I've had multiple legislative proposals for mobile homeowners, to be treated the same as a stick homeowner.”

Pheasant was elected to the position at the age of 26, he said, partly because a job at a bank hadn’t worked out, and he needed something else.

“My mom found an ad in the newspaper for an opening in the treasurer's office, so I decided to do an interview under (then-Treasurer) Jim Archer,” Pheasant said. “He also mentioned in the interview, how he was retiring after his term was over and looking for someone to run his position. Well, my ambitious manner thought that would be a great challenge despite my age.”

Pheasant was no stranger to work. He grew up in a farming family in Soap Lake and later Ephrata, he said.

“I keep telling my parents and my brothers and sister that my life would have been way different if I was allowed to play Little League baseball,” he said. “I would have been something, but I had to be working in the orchards. No one was available to take drive me into town and back for Little League practice and games, because our whole family was working all the time and we didn't have time for that.”

After graduating high school in Ephrata, Pheasant spent a year at Whitworth University and then four years at Eastern Washington University, earning a bachelor’s in finance with a minor in economics. He had a job at a bank ready and waiting for him, he said. But the Sunday before he was to start, Mount St. Helens erupted and the ash fall shut down everything in the Inland Northwest.

“I had to wait till Thursday or Friday before the buses were able to put on the filters and I could take the bus to get to back to Cheney,” he said. “And of course, that was my first week of work and I couldn't get to work ... I got paid for that my first week of work where I didn't show up.”

In addition to shepherding the county’s money, Pheasant has been involved for many years with the Masquers Theater in Soap Lake, both appearing on stage and handling publicity for the troupe. 

“It was always nice to see him come in and talk about the play he was doing at the Masquers and what his character was,” Jones said. “I think his personal side is what I enjoyed the most about him. We’re all different from what we are in (our jobs) and it’s refreshing.”

Pheasant plans to continue with the Masquers after he retires, he said, as well as the Rotary Club and the Ephrata Senior Center. He’s also not stepping away from local government just because he’s not an elected official anymore.

“I’ll continue being the person that goes to meetings and ask the questions the public wants asked but are afraid to speak up,” he said. “I am still being contacted by county treasurers consulting them on multiple issues. It is not easy making a clean break.”