LA CENTER — The La Center city councilors have picked Joe Valenzuela, a former Cowlitz County fire chief, to fill the city’s open council seat.
The councilors voted 3-2 Wednesday night to pick Valenzuela, 66, from a field that included a longtime casino manager, a retiree who ran for the council and lost in 2009 and Steve Workman, the vice-chair of the city’s planning commission. Workman and Valenzuela each received two votes before Mayor Jim Irish cast the deciding vote for the latter candidate, said Suzanne Levis, the city’s finance director.
Valenzuela spent most of the 1990s as a fire chief in Cowlitz County and Klamath Falls, Ore. Before that, he put in seven years with the Yakima Fire Department as a captain and battalion chief and had a brief stint as the chief of the Gresham Fire Department.
In addition to his firefighting career, Valenzuela has experience as a community organizer and a sewer maintenance crew worker, he said. Valenzuela retired in 1998, and he’s lived in La Center for the past decade.
