After initially failing to adopt Thurston County’s Solid Waste Advisory Committee’s (SWAC) hazardous waste management plan in August with a 4-3 vote against it, the Yelm City Council finally approved use of the county’s plan during a meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 9.
Council Tracey Wood was the lone vote against adopting the SWAC’s hazardous waste management, while councilors Joseph Richardson, Joshua Crossman, Stephanie Kangiser, Brian Hess, David Johnstone and Terry Kaminski voted in favor of approving the measure.
Implementation of the plan was initially shot down during an Aug. 12, Yelm City Council meeting when Crossman and Wood raised concerns about racism and DEI language being included in the SWAC’s hazardous waste management plan.
Throughout the hazardous waste management plan, “racism” was mentioned in several sections, which also brought concern to Crossman. Specifically, listed in chapter six section four of the plan is a proclamation regarding racism from the Thurston County Board of Commissioners. This can be viewed on pages 132 and 133 of Yelm City Council’s agenda packet for the Tuesday, Aug. 12 meeting.
Crossman, during the meeting in August, stated there wasn’t any further information about racism within the county or specifically within waste management. He had several questions during the Aug. 12 meeting about the reasoning behind that specific language being included.
“It’s waste management. Is there racism involved? Number two, would there be racial profiling when I go to dump my waste materials off? The wording that was involved was kind of concerning to me in that document. Is that a problem? It didn’t list any issues specifically, and it didn’t list any solutions as well,” Crossman said. “We say this is a problem, but there’s no solution and there’s no instance of that being a problem … What do I do with this information? How do I process this?”
Councilor Wood, on Aug. 12, added, “they’ve put information in there that’s irrelevant to this whole hazardous waste management plan. I guess what I would ask, as well, is if we could gain some information somewhere and somehow as to what the thought process was in applying this DEI — we’ll call it what it is — to hazardous waste management. We’d be curious to hear what the relevance is … I don’t think it would be responsible to move forward with this until we have all the information regarding these sections of this management plan.”
