State Sen. Craig Pridemore’s campaign for Congress got a boost Friday with an endorsement from the Sierra Club, the nation’s oldest conservation group, which has 25,000 members in Washington and about 800,000 nationwide.
Pridemore, D-Vancouver, was nominated by the local Sierra Club chapter and interviewed, along with Democratic candidates Denny Heck and Cheryl Crist, by a panel of Sierra Club members drawn from across the state. The final endorsement decision was made by the club’s political arm, which also will decide how much money to give Pridemore’s campaign.
The second-term state senator was recognized for his commitment to the environment, both in the Legislature and in his previous position as a Clark County commissioner, said Holly Forrest, political chair of the club’s Southwest Washington chapter. Club members held a rally for Pridemore Friday on the Columbia River waterfront.
“Pridemore has a proven track record throughout his career, in land use planning, in transportation planning,” Forrest said. “The Sierra Club has supported him since his very first campaign.”
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Kathleen Ridihalgh, senior field manager for the Sierra Club in Washington and Oregon, said 2010 will be a critical year for climate change, the club’s top priority, and the club is looking for candidates with strong environmental records to support that agenda.
“If a climate bill passes this year, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to get us to where we want to be,” she said.
Pridemore said the support he expects to receive from the Sierra Club and other environmental groups will be critical to his campaign.
In the Legislature, Pridemore has successfully sponsored key climate change legislation as well as an electronics recycling law and, this year, a bill to promote the safe recycling of compact fluorescent light bulbs, which contain mercury.
But Pridemore has not marched in lockstep with the Sierra Club’s goal of closing the TransAlta coal plant in Centralia, the state’s only coal-fired electrical plant.
In 2009, Pridemore introduced legislation to eliminate the plant’s $5 million annual tax break, which the Legislature granted when the company still operated its own Centralia-area coal mine. That mine closed several years ago, but the tax break remains in place.
Pridemore declined to support similar legislation this year, even though eliminating the tax break was the club’s top legislative priority.
He said he sponsored the 2009 bill as a way to force TransAlta to the table to negotiate the conversion of the plant from coal to natural gas. Those negotiations are now underway with the governor, he said. For that reason, he said, “I felt that to sign on this year would have been counterproductive.”
Forrest said club members were aware of Pridemore’s stance on TransAlta, but ultimately that was outweighed by “the huge preponderance of legislation that he has sponsored and passed, and the actions that he has taken to support the environment.”
Kathie Durbin: 360-735-4523 or kathie.durbin@columbian.com.
