Clark County's longest-serving elected official says claims are off base, inaccurate
By Tyler Graf
Published: May 20, 2014, 5:00pm
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The challenger to Clark County’s longest-serving elected official says she’ll bring strong leadership and real-world experience to an office run in absentia.
The sitting treasurer, meanwhile, called the claims off base and inaccurate.
Camas resident Lauren Colas, a Republican who filed Friday to run against county Treasurer Doug Lasher, says she’d work to streamline transactions, bolster online resources and bring more transparency and accountability to the office. The nine-year county resident’s only political experience has been as a precinct committee officer, a position she’s held for about a year and a half.
She said Lasher, a Democrat who’s served as treasurer for 30 years, has been in office too long and has gone out of favor with county residents. She said it appears Deputy Treasurer John Payne is a more visible county figure than Lasher.
More recent concerns about how the office manages online payments helped Colas make the decision.
“I’d been considering (a run) for a long while,” Colas said. “The one thing that put me over the tipping point was when the system went down when the property taxes were due.”
The county’s online property information center, a repository for all publicly accessible property data, crashed the weekend before taxes were due. However, the online system that processes people’s payments — which is separate from the property information center — remained operational.
That distinction is important, Lasher said, because it means people who had access to their tax bills were still able to make payments online or over the phone.
Lasher also said Colas’ criticism wasn’t valid or based on facts.
He said he agreed that the county should pay for someone to be on-call in case the county’s information center breaks during non-business hours. Real estate professionals in particular rely on the information-rich online system, and Lasher’s office invariably fields calls about its failures when it goes down. Funding the position rests with the county commissioners, though, not the treasurer’s office.
The system’s crash that preceded the tax deadline was the first of three in recent weeks. The second crash led Lasher to write the commissioners a letter, in which he called on them to expend more financial resources to pay for a person to be on-call to respond at night or during the weekend when the system isn’t working. The commissioners are the ones who control the purse strings for the county’s general information system, which operates the center.
“She doesn’t get it,” Lasher said. “I’m the one crying out, saying you can’t run an operation like this.”
And while Colas has called the treasurer to task for not doing more to reduce paperwork in the office, Lasher points to various new online features that have been implemented or improved in the past four years, including online systems for billing and property tax assessment and collection. Other features include an online banking system for local taxing districts.
He said his 30-year track record and knowledge of county treasury speaks for itself.
But Colas points to her business experience as a reason why she’d be a good fit for treasurer.
For the past six months, Colas has been providing project accounting work for Rentrak, a company that measures media consumption. For years, she worked as a business consultant in Alaska. She touts an MBA from the University of Washington.
“I have a lot of expense accounting experience,” she said. “I know that a lot of the functions of the office are given by state statute. But how they are performed can be improved.”
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