Dave Upthegrove, a King County Council member whose District 5 includes part of Kent, is one of seven candidates for state Commissioner of Public Lands.<\/p>\n
The two candidates with the most votes on the Aug. 6 ballot will move on to the Nov. 5 general election. Filing week was May 6-10.<\/p>\n
Upthegrove, a Des Moines Democrat, has represented District 5 on the King County Council since 2014.<\/p>\n
The other candidates are Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican and former U.S. representative who lost her 3rd District Congressional seat in 2022; State Sen. Kevin Van De Wege, D-Port Angeles; Patrick DePoe, a Democrat from Neah Bay and a member of the Makah Tribe; Sue Kuehl Pederson, a Republican who lost to current lands commissioner Hillary Franz in 2020; Allen Lebovitz, a Democrat from Olympia; and Jeralee Anderson, a Democrat and Redmond City Council member.<\/p>\n
Franz, a Democrat, is running for Congress rather than reelection.<\/p>\n
The lands commissioner leads the state’s wildfire fighting force and manages nearly 6 million acres of public lands – from coastal waters and aquatic reserves, to working forests and farms, commercial developments and recreation areas.<\/p>\n
Upthegrove ran unsuccessfully for lands commissioner in 2016. He placed third in the primary election behind Republican Steve McLaughlin and Franz. Franz won the general election.<\/p>\n
Das drops out<\/strong><\/p>\n Democrat Mona Das, of Kent, announced her campaign for lands commissioner last year but dropped out of the race because her mother had a stroke in November 2023, Das said in a May 13 email.<\/p>\n “I have been taking care of her and could no longer continue to run,” said Das, a state senator in the 47th District from 2018 to 2022 who didn’t run for reelection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" His King County Council member’s district includes part of Kent <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":69375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-69374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69374"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69374"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=69374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}