The Chelan Douglas Health District board of directors on Monday voted to form a committee to establish a code of conduct for members after Bill Sullivan made news for allegedly assaulting a local YouTuber on Wenatchee Avenue in August.
I got the video and covered that story earlier this month, and you can read it here:
After that altercation I reached out to Sullivan and the Chelan and Douglas County Commissioners who unanimously voted to appoint Sullivan to the board despite his ardent belief in scientifically-debunked anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
But my questions were about the alleged assault, not Sullivan’s crusade against vaccines. In my email, I asked the commissioners if they support or condone Sullivan’s actions on Aug. 5 and if they don’t – are they going to do anything about it?
I also reached out to the members of the health board.
Only CDHD Board Chair and East Wenatchee Mayor Jerrilea Crawford responded, after consulting the board’s lawyer Erin McCool.
“The event in which you mention is not a health district related matter and therefor the Chelan Douglas Health District Board does not have a response to your questions regarding it,” she wrote. “The Chelan-Douglas Health District is governed by a 12 member Board of Health consisting of local county and city elected officials and appointed community members by Chelan and Douglas County Commissioners. The Board sets county-wide policies and regulations to protect and promote the health of residents of Chelan and Douglas Counties. There is not a code of conduct policy for board members.”
From the lack of citation to a board policy or state statute to back up that legal opinion to the copy/paste job answering a question I didn’t ask – it was an unacceptable answer.
And while the lack of response from the commissioners who put Sullivan on the board is not surprising, their lack of transparency and accountability to the public and the press is also unacceptable.
So I decided to take my questions to public comment time and ask my questions face to face.
I filmed my remarks and Sullivan’s response and you can watch that in the video above.
Although he was not allowed to respond to my comments at the beginning of the meeting, the topic of a code of conduct for health board members did come up on the near the end. It was at this time that Sullivan confirmed he did get into an altercation with Heath Poitra, aka El Dope Dogg, and filmed the whole thing from his point of view as well.
He was also clearly concerned this agenda item was coming up because of that altercation, and reiterated there’s no proof of any assault.
Crawford and Chelan County Commissioner Shon Smith soothed him by reminding him that discussing a code of conduct has been on the CDHD agenda for months.
The item has been on the agenda since January, and was put their after it was identified as one of the needs in a health district “After-Action Report” published last year.
I will keep an eye on the progress of this fledgling committee in coming months.
In Related News
Sullivan’s organization, TAPWA, will be hosting its second annual “Pandemic Harms Listening Event” on Saturday at the Wenatchee Convention Center. He emceed last year’s event featuring NBA Hall of Famer John Stockton, and I covered it at the time.
It’s unclear if he’s emceeing this year’s event, but Stockton will be back. And he’ll be joined by a slate of anti-vaccine speakers including Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who faced charges in Texas after the state board of health filed a complaint against her for “unprofessional conduct” and prescribing Ivermectin to hospitalized Covid patients.
Also featured on the speaking ticket is Pete Serrano, who is running for state attorney general as a Republican. Serrano’s background is in environmental law, not medicine.
Chelan Douglas Health District Board Forms Committee to Establish Code of Conduct for Members