MONTESANO — On a 2-1 vote, the Grays Harbor County commissioners decided to accept a $16,500 grant from Oregon State University to have staff work on assessing the potential health impacts of climate change.
County Commissioner Wes Cormier questioned the grant, saying he thought it was a waste of time for county staff to devote resources to the issue when there are so many other things the staff could do. County Commissioner Frank Gordon said, to him, “Climate change is very real and not something we can ignore.”
In the end, the decision came down to the vote of Commissioner Herb Welch, who sided with Gordon.
It’s a reversal for the county commissioners. Last month, when Welch was sick, Gordon and Cormier deadlocked on the issue. Without two votes in favor, the motion was denied.
Cormier tried to strip the item off of the agenda during the meeting Monday morning, calling the issue already decided, but Gordon and Welch decided the issue deserved another public airing with all three commissioners present.
Environmental Health Director Jeff Nelson was pushing the commissioners to accept the grant funds, which he said would split $16,500 over the next three years and allow the county to look at not just climate change, but also sea level rise and possible salt water intrusion into shallow water wells, with state and university officials.
“Regardless of the cause, climate change is occurring and I will continue to support the expenditure of resources to consider and prepare for local impacts,” Nelson told the commissioners.
“I agree with Wes on why are we spending money on looking at health issues to do with climate change?” Welch said.
“However, after listening to our environmental health director, he felt some of the issues we were going to do anyway. This way we’re going to receive some money for it. That weighed heavily.”
Cormier said he is a “skeptic” when it comes to whether climate change is real.
“I think climate change could go on and maybe is going on, but why is the biggie to me,” Welch said.
Cormier noted that the grant will also have staff look at ocean acidity and produced an Oct. 29 article from The Daily News, citing a recent court case where the state Department of Ecology says “there was no conclusive evidence that Washington’s coastal aquatic life are being impaired by ocean acidification.” An online clarification posted by The Daily News states that the Ecology opinion “is not in conflict the Gov. Jay Inslee on the issue and considers the threat of ocean acidification real.”
Cormier also produced a paper by the Washington Policy Center calling the OSU study into question. The policy center states, “Ultimately, when assessing effects on human mortality and morbidity, the University of Oregon authors misquote the studies they cite, use only the most extreme projections, cite claims that are not backed up or sourced, assume that Seattle and Los Angeles are comparable in response to temperature and air quality and are, at the very least, unclear about how they arrive at their calculations.”
Beyond the issues of whether the study is worth participating in, Cormier said that the county is going through a tough financial time and it should be diligently figuring out what staff should be doing, not finding “busy work” of working on climate change issues.
“You might as well be studying the health impacts of someone moving here from California,” Cormier said.
Gordon said that every dollar counts in the county’s operating budget and if it means spending $16,500 and charging those hours to the grant, he’d rather have staff do that work than not have the money at all.
“There are shallow wells in Grayland that could have saltwater in them if the sea level rises,” Gordon said. “That’s an issue that we should be allowed to look at and our environmental health director wants to look at it.”
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