Who one commissioner nominates, another commissioner may send away.

Island County commissioners will meet in special session Monday, Dec. 29, to reconsider last week’s appointment to the county planning commission.

The unanimous appointment of David Sherman, an Oak Harbor school board member, was made last Monday at the suggestion of outgoing County Commissioner Mac McDowell. But Commissioner-elect Angie Homola, a Democrat who beat the longtime Republican incumbent by 60 votes in November, is protesting the appointment.

McDowell said Friday he was only following accepted procedure in making the nomination. He said Sherman, because of his community involvement, would make a good planning commissioner.

Sherman is a longtime Oak Harbor resident and a construction manager for Island Construction.

McDowell’s term on the county commission ends Wednesday, Dec. 31. He has been a commissioner for 16 years, and said the appointment fits with how the board has filled positions in the past.

“Whenever we have a vacancy in an appointed position, we typically either reappoint the person in that position or appoint someone else to that position before it is vacant,” McDowell wrote in his nomination letter to the board dated

Dec. 22, the day of the appointment.

County Commissioner John Dean said county commissioners thought the planning post, currently held by Bill Massey, who also had been nominated by McDowell, had already expired when the appointment was made.

But Massey’s term expires Jan. 2, Dean said, at which time Homola will be in office.

Homola objected to the appointment, saying she should be the one to make the nomination, Dean said.

“This has nothing to do with Dave Sherman,” Dean said. “It’s about Angie Homola getting into office and making her own nomination.”

“Angie has a point,” Dean continued. “We made the appointment as a courtesy to the outgoing commissioner. Maybe we should be making an appointment as a courtesy to the incoming commissioner.”

Dean said Homola expressed respect for Sherman, but she also expressed her “concern and disappointment” at not being able to make a nomination herself.

Homola did not respond to a request for comment before The Record went to press.

Dean said he is seeking legal clarification on the appointment.

McDowell said it isn’t good policy to vote on something, then turn around and change it.

“The board can do whatever it wants. There’s nothing illegal about it,” he said Friday. “But once you vote on something, then it’s history. You normally never go back because somebody new starts complaining.”

Traditionally, each of the three county commissioners nominates three members each to the nine-member planning commission. Planning commissioners serve four-year terms.

Helen Price Johnson, who joined the county commission last month, said she voted for Sherman, thinking the position was vacant.

Since then, she said she has “done some more research” and said she may reconsider.

“I believe it’s not the right time to make that appointment,” Price Johnson said Friday. “I feel its important to do the right thing at the right time.”

She said she is also concerned that Sherman’s nomination wasn’t printed on the agenda for the meeting.

“It’s really a procedural issue, and we should be more transparent,” she said.

“It’s part of my being on the job a very short time,” Price Johnson added. “David Sherman is caught in the middle. It’s unfortunate.”

McDowell said county commissioners commonly add and subtract agenda items at the beginning of regular meetings, and that he wasn’t trying to push anything through.

“The planning commission doesn’t work like that,” he said. “You appoint them and they’re independent. I never once have suggested to any of them what they should do.”

The special meeting of the county commissioners will be at 10 a.m. Monday,

Dec. 29, in the commissioners’ hearing room in the basement of the County Annex Building, 1 NE Sixth St., Coupeville.