Julia Payne is one of three candidates in the race to replace 6th District Republican Rep. Jenny Graham. The others are Republican Jonathan Bingle (who didn't respond to our request for an interview) and Independent Aaron Croft. The Democrat says an experience lobbying in Olympia convinced her she should run to be a state representative.
This interview is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Julia Payne: I am a mom, a foster mom, a wife, so I do stay pretty busy. I'm a disabled individual and I spend a lot of my times doing volunteer work. I've volunteered with Spokane Pride, Spokane AIDS Network, I've volunteered a little bit with Trident. I've helped out sometimes, making sandwiches with Jules Helping Hands, just that sort of thing. I like to stay busy, I don't sit still very well. I do not work anymore, haven't for quite a while because of my physical condition.
DN: Deciding to run for office is something that you don't just jump into, so why did you get in this race?
JP: I did sort of jump into it.
I have spent the past several years helping, as I said before, with Spokane Pride and Spokane AIDS Network and just noticing a lot of the struggles that they face on a regular basis, dealing with the government, getting funding, trying to justify what they're doing when they're helping people that don't fit the norm, like they don't have ID. They don't have what people would expect for identification, that sort of thing.
I also had some wonderful opportunities to go lobbying with Planned Parenthood, which was usually in conjuncture with the Trans Day of Awareness of Visibility and after multiple occasions of going to Olympia, and for me, that kind of travel is a big thing. I use a wheelchair, so I either have to travel via a Greyhound bus or I drive myself, any of those things, it's an overnight stay, etc. We would make appointments with representatives to go and see them with the expectation that they would be at those appointments and a majority of the time they weren't. They would either have their assistants do it because they were busy or they would cancel at the last minute and that just felt like a complete lack of representation to me.
I came back from this most recent one rather fired up about a conversation I'd had and just the entire demeanor. My husband had been kind of reminding me that I needed to be doing something because I get bored very easily and I came home and said, hey honey, I know what I'm doing. And he said, what's that? And I said, I'm running for office. He goes, that's not what I meant.
So it did take a bit of a long conversation, and I started digging into the processes of what that would require and everything. That decision was made in February of this year. I have spent years volunteering with Pride and doing that sort of thing and just being out and talking to people and being in the public and being representative of the people that came to me and trusted me with their stories. It just felt like the next step.
DN: What kind of influence do you hope to have as a state legislator?
JP: My goal is really the visibility of somebody that uses a wheelchair, uses a cane to get around. I'm still perfectly capable of being here and representing you. I'm somebody that's never been financially rich. We are financially stable after many years of struggling to get there.
I'm also a mom of a young man who identifies as the LGBTQ community. I'm a foster mom. I've helped homeless kids. I can walk around downtown Spokane and a bunch of the kids come running up and call me auntie.
I want to be a person that goes to Olympia and says we need to be seeing these people and we need to be hearing these people and we need to be helping these people. I feel like being middle class like that and being on the ground is going to be my biggest influence.
DN: I think you got an endorsement from the local Democratic Party, is that correct?
JP: I did.
DN: So you've been around elected officials in Olympia. What have you learned from your experiences being around elected officials as to what the job might be about?
JP: I actually had a wonderful opportunity to go and do a training with the Vote Lead Run Action group and they gave us just a priceless opportunity to actually speak with three individuals that are active representatives. One of them started her 20 minutes with us individually by saying, I'm going to tell you how a bill really becomes a bill or becomes law. She said Schoolhouse Rock lied to us and so learning the ins and outs of that process, seeing the people walking the halls of the Capitol Building in Olympia and having those conversations, it really brought it down to earth for me.
I looked at what these people were doing and said, wait, I'm capable of doing that. It doesn't require a law degree. It doesn't require 20 years of experience in this, that, or the other thing. It just requires the ability to have a conversation, listen to what the other side has to say, and then try to find a compromise, because the art of compromise is that nobody's happy but everybody can live with it and that is something I'm pretty good at. I have utilized those skills several times working with Pride and the other groups and volunteering, even communicating with police officers who were dealing with unruly teenagers downtown. I've helped defuse those situations. I want to take that strength and that experience and go to Olympia and start making some changes.
DN: So you've hit on a few areas that you are particularly passionate about, but what are a few of the other areas that you think you could work on as a state legislator?
JP: Well, accessibility and really making sure we're focusing on people who need our help. The cost of living. Affordability is the key word to everybody right now, but I do feel that some of the people who are using those words don't quite understand them.
If you haven't had to work a completely opposite shift of your spouse and not see them for months on end because you can't afford daycare, if you haven't had to dig in the couch cushions for money for milk because your kid wants cereal for breakfast, can you truly understand affordability? If you haven't had those experiences, the next best thing you can do is go talk to people who have had those experiences and ask them how they get through it.
Now I've lived those experiences. There's plenty of experiences I haven't lived, but I feel like it gives me a pretty good view on where we need to make some changes so that the people who are struggling aren't taking on the full burden of everything.
Our recessive tax code is definitely one that I want to address and be a part of the conversation. Housing affordability. Communicating with the agencies that are already working on creating more housing options because a lot of our problems here in Spokane with housing is not that people don't want to be housed, it's that there literally is not enough places for them to live.
The next one that's a really big thing right now that everybody's keyed up about is the data center situation, AI, just the reality that technology has gone from something we were all comfortable with to something really big, really fast. And I feel like we need to go to Olympia and we need to make sure that we're putting down some groundwork and some policies and some guidelines to make sure that as this expansion happens, it doesn't victimize people who can't afford to speak up when their area is being abused or used and we need to make sure that we have specific guidelines that protect our environment because Spokane is beautiful and we have so much wildlife and the ability to enjoy it out here and we need to make sure to protect that.