State Senator Doug Ericksen appeared at a town hall meeting Thursday, October 12, in the Viking Union. The town hall was sponsored by Students for Life and WWU Young Americans for Liberty.
The meeting was an open-event held in the Viking Union Multipurpose Room. Ericksen has been the chair of the Senate Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee since 2013, and graduated Western in 1995 after earning a master’s degree in Political Science and Environmental Policy.
Ericksen has been representing Whatcom County’s 42nd Legislative District since 1999, serving a total of 12 years in the state House of Representatives before moving on to the Senate.
At about 6:00 p.m., an hour before the meeting started, University Police stated they were called to manage a “verbal argument that was starting to turn physical” outside of the Viking Union. One person was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor assault in the fourth degree, and “they were not a student or anyone with any connection to Western.” Police also reported that there were no injuries.
Ericksen began the event with a basic history and appraisal of Whatcom county, followed by slideshow-statistics and fun facts about our great community. Not only is Whatcom county the biggest source of Raspberry production in the nation, the county also used to be a major dairy powerhouse, and was listed in Guinness World Records one year for having the biggest powdered-milk plant ever. And just when I thought I couldn’t be more proud to live in Bellingham, State Representative Vincent Buys, who was answering questions with him, pointed out that Whatcom County also has “really quality seed potatoes.”
Once the Q&A started, relations devolved from their community-based comradery. One person raised two issues that they see prevalent in our community: general homelessness, and the reduction/cutting of mental health services (Washington is ranked as the 37th state in the U.S. for mental health services, they said.)
Ericksen responded “it’s a tough one. The more we spend on homelessness, the more homelessness we get.” In the face of this fact, it makes sense that Ericksen’s pragmatic response would be to spend less money on homelessness in hopes that this trend would reverse.
When asked if Trump’s stance with Transgender people reflected his personal values, Ericksen defended the strict gender binary, saying that “it’s the way we’ve done it in society for thousands of years,” and he wouldn’t want “that person going into a locker room with a bunch of 13 year-old girls.”
Michael Thompson, admin of the National Coalition for Deaf Men, an MRA group, asked if it was in the budget for a men’s safe space. Thompson said he was was “shocked and disappointed” at women’s advocacy groups for not creating a better safety space, where he hasn’t felt safe. Thompson has also been seen downtown holding a sign thanking Betty DeVoss. Ericksen promised to follow up with Thompson after the meeting with more information.
When asked why Ericksen doesn’t believe in climate change, he responded “climate always changes” and that “the Earth warms and the Earth cools.” He referred to the ‘97 percent of scientists believe in climate change’ as a “fake fact”, and then again emphasized the dynamically fluctuating temperature of our Earth. However, NASA’s website does state that “97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” This statement is based off of published scientific papers endorsing or denying climate change, and then gathered from that data (though Ericksen repeatedly referred to the 97-statistic as an unrepresentative poll of selected scientists).
In November 2016, Ericksen retaliated against protests of Donald Trump by authoring a bill that would treat protest actions like blocking traffic and rail lines as “economic terrorism,” and allowing for felony prosecution of participants. As 2016 was waking with environmental-conservation movements such as Standing Rock, it is clear where Ericksen arranges the environment within his priorities.
Someone in a Planned Parenthood shirt asked “if a girl is too young for an abortion, isn’t she too young to be a parent?” at which time Ericksen responded with the importance of a woman’s pregnancy being a “family decision.” He took a new line of defense that had almost nothing to do with the question, and began to talk about how “4 percent of college professors are conservative,” which Ericksen believed would be higher if professors weren’t “scared of identifying as conservative.”
He then advocated to advise Universities “to make 25 percent of new hires conservative or libertarian.” Echoing this isolation of conservative ideology was a few different students that voiced feeling like a red island in sea of blue.
Sophomore Peter Condyles agreed that it was tough, and that he felt “professors give their views as the facts,” which becomes problematic when wanting to give the right answer. Condyles announced during the meeting that he was interested in starting a Student Republicans group on campus, and that any interested parties should see him after the meeting.
President of Young Americans for Liberty Sean Rita said he thought it went well, and that “people thought (Ericksen) was going to preach hate, but he wasn’t up there preaching hatred.”
Rita credited some of the weary expectations with the “negative connotations in certain advertisements of the event.”
Karlie Lodjic of Students For Life agreed it went well, fulfilling the goal of being “able to have some differing views heard, and have questions answered,” and that it is “always interesting to hear an unheard view.” This sentiment was echoed in an earlier question from a student calling the University a “left-wing indoctrination center” with views only from the “Marxist, leftist perspective.”
After three hours of activity, the meeting came down to one final question, which concerned tax breaks for factors of the fossil fuel industry. The questioner wanted to know if Ericksen planned on cutting back government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, since he was cutting back resources for mental health and homelessness. After about 5 minutes of back-and-forth, Ericksen resolved “we don’t give them a tax break, we just don’t take as much money from them.” The meeting slid to a close after that comment, and a peaceful exodus ensued.