Washington has a new Commissioner of Public Lands this year: Dave Upthegrove. The former King County Councilmember beat former Republican Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler by over 200,000 ballots to claim the position in November — after only squeaking into second place in the primary by 49 votes.
“This really feels like coming home, and a chance to provide some leadership and make a difference on the issues that I'm most passionate about,” Upthegrove told SPR News. “And for me, it's not a stepping stone to higher office. It really is the culmination of a life and career that's been spent on natural resources and environmental issues.”
The commissioner directs the State Department of Natural Resources, which is responsible for managing and stewarding many of Washington’s state-owned lands, particularly timberlands, aquatic lands and agricultural lands. Those areas are managed in trust for beneficiaries like schools and local governments.
In addition to that work, it’s the department responsible for wildland firefighting and wildfire prevention.
“It's an agency that touches a lot of people's lives sometimes in ways they don't see it. We protect life, health, and public safety. We create economic opportunity and jobs in rural areas,” Upthegrove said. “And we try to make sure that we have a healthy, sustainable state and planet for generations to come.”
Since starting his term, Upthegrove has ordered a pause on logging sales in "certain structurally complex mature forests" for about six months, starting to fulfill a campaign promise to set aside nearly 80,000 acres of older trees.
Upthegrove was sworn in on January 15, and the next day, he sat down for an interview with SPR’s Owen Henderson.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: Now that you've got the job, what are your priorities? What are the first things on your docket?
COMMISSIONER DAVE UPTHEGROVE: I've boiled it down to, at a high level, to three priorities. The first is to protect our clean air, clean water, and habitat. Secondly, and in eastern Washington, probably firstly, is to continue to improve wildfire prevention and response.
And then the third thing that really gets me excited is I want to make sure we're continuing to expand recreational opportunities so more people have the chance, like I did as a Boy Scout, to actually get out.
Whether we're talking about hiking or horseback riding or target shooting or mountain biking, there's a lot of opportunities to get out and use our public lands, and I want to make sure more people have those opportunities. So at a high level, those are my top priorities.
Within those priorities, woven through it all also, for me, is a passion for environmental justice. And by that, I mean I want to make sure that we're doing our work in a way that contributes to a more fair and just society.
Climate change disproportionately impacts low-income communities, communities of color. So as we do our work, we've got to make sure we're improving that, not making it worse.
Tribal sovereignty needs to be embedded in all of those issues too, making sure we're strengthening the co-management role of Washington's tribes and entering into those partnerships with respect.
OH: Well drill down on that just a little bit for me, in terms of how you might weave environmental justice into [something like] wildfire prevention and management.
DU: When we're partnering with local governments on community resilience planning, we need to be including folks who are low-income and people who don't always participate in government processes in that planning so we understand their needs.
We need to be doing things as simple as translating our materials. If we're providing information about evacuation plans and safety planning for wildfire, we need to be communicating that in ways that people in central Washington who speak Spanish can access.
When we're siting clean energy facilities on state lands, we need to be talking up front with tribes and with communities that might be impacted. A lot of it comes down to communication and who's at the table when making decisions, but it also means doing practical things as simple as translating materials.
You know, I think even though we're a land management agency, how we conduct ourselves as a government agency and what does our footprint in communities look like has an impact broadly not just on the environment but on the people in those communities.
OH: Looking forward, what are some of the challenges that you're anticipating in your new office?
DU: The state's facing a large budget shortfall right now that affects all of the state agencies and so we're going to have to be smart about how we manage our work in some tight budget constraints and we're going to advocate to the state legislature the importance of maintaining these investments in wildfire prevention response.
The state legislature needs to maintain the funding to not only respond, you know, we will get reimbursed for response, but we need to be investing in wildfire prevention. I know it's a cliché, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The legislature would be much wiser to invest a dollar in prevention than invest a hundred dollars in response and recovery. We cannot let what happened in California happen here. We have an opportunity as a state to make those investments, to manage our forests in ways that reduce that risk, to invest in resilient communities to do that local planning and preparation. I think that's the real challenge that we're facing right now.
We also have another — a few big challenges on the horizon. The state of Washington, the legislature, has set a requirement coming up soon — I think 2045 — all of the energy from utilities has to be from clean energy sources in this state and the state department of natural resources as a land manager can play an important role in helping us meet those targets by providing space for utility scale clean energy projects as well as transmitting that energy where it needs to go.
It's very challenging because we need to respect tribal sovereignty, we need to work with local communities, and we need to be sensitive to impacts on agriculture and on important habitat.
That's a challenge, but it's an exciting one. How can we help meet those clean energy goals but do it in a way that's inclusive? We're seeing the impacts of climate change and loss of biodiversity all around us impacting forest health, impacting more wildfires on the west side, and making sure that we are responding to the changes in today's world and our management decisions.
So there's a lot, I think a lot of opportunities, a lot of challenges coming up in the next four years.
OH: Lastly, you're Washington's first openly queer statewide executive. What does that mean to you?
DU: In some ways it's kind of unremarkable. It was not a big political issue, but I have to admit I got choked up yesterday [Jan. 15] in my inaugural address talking about it because it's a quiet reflection of how far we've come: the fact that it was not the defining issue in a political campaign. We were busy debating forestry policy, not my sexual orientation. When I started in politics that wasn't necessarily the case.
We take a lot of our rights for granted, and we have a U.S. Supreme Court right now that's ideologically very different than the one that recognized a right to marriage equality. So it makes me wonder if marriage to my husband — is that secure?
We see transgender kids being bullied and demonized as political weapons. So I think visibility matters still, and the best thing I can do to advance that cause of equality is to just be a good commissioner and do this job really well, and show people that it really doesn't impact one's ability to lead and do a job.
But yesterday [Jan. 15] was a remarkable moment. The first out LGBT Supreme Court justice, swearing in the first out LGBT statewide elected official in front of a joint session of the legislature led by a lesbian speaker in the house and a gay majority leader.
It was a historic moment in a lot of ways, and I recognize that, and I think it is important to reflect on those milestones.
