New 15th District Rep. David Taylor scores a bull's-eye

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- New state Rep. David Taylor was once kicked in the head by a bull.

While that's no more than a sensational detail in the 37-year-old Moxee Republican's story, it speaks to the way Taylor grew up and the forces that shaped his political beliefs. His is an Ellensburg story, and in Ellensburg stories sometimes people get kicked in the head by bulls.

Long before commissioners from the 15th Legislative District's four counties -- Yakima, Klickitat, Skamania and Clark -- picked him to replace Dan Newhouse in Olympia, Taylor was a rodeo man. The kick came in the last rodeo of the 1993 season. Taylor, then a 21-year-old Central Washington University student and part-time bull rider, finished his 8-second ride when things started to go wrong.

"I was into the rope, and I was in trouble," he said Thursday by phone from his Olympia office, as he prepared for the end of the regular legislative session Sunday.

Caught up in his rope, he found himself attached to an angry bull that first took him down and then kicked him. This was in the days before bull riders took to wearing helmets, and Taylor ended up in the hospital. To make matters worse, he finished that ride just out of the money.

"I finished seventh," he said, laughing. "They paid six."

*****

Taylor was born and raised in Ellensburg, a town of 12,361 back in 1990 that by 2007 had grown to 17,304. He's the son of two schoolteachers who kept just enough cattle "to keep the pasture eaten down and have beef in the freezer." His mother, Lucretia Taylor, remembers him as a kid who always got his chores done.

"We brought our children up with good old-fashioned values," she said of Taylor and his younger sister, who now lives in Florida. "A good work ethic is one of them. Pride in what you accomplish and what you're doing, love of family and support of community."

It was that upbringing -- bucking hay, playing ball, and generally growing up with the trappings of small-town rural life -- that inspired in him a love of land he maintains to this day.

His agricultural background was a big selling point as he campaigned for appointment to the House. Newhouse, a Sunnyside farmer who left the House to become director of the state Department of Agriculture, implored the commissioners making the appointment to pick someone in the industry.

Taylor was appointed and sworn in March 30 and was in Olympia the next morning. As an appointee, he'll face election this fall. If he wins then, he'll face election again next fall when Newhouse's term ends.

Taylor keeps cattle on his small Moxee ranch, and Olympia notwithstanding, there's no place he'd prefer to be.

"When I'm out working the land, working the cattle, riding the horse, I see God every day," said Taylor, who says he prays every day and reads the Bible but is not a churchgoer despite his wife Molly's entreaties.

He graduated from Central Washington University in 1993 with a bachelor's degree in geography, focused on land use, and got an internship with the Kittitas County planning department in 1994. Within three years, at the age of 25, he was director of the department.

"The commissioners took a lot of risk doing that," Taylor recalled.

And, although there was that one time he showed up to a hearing black and blue with nine stitches on his face from another bull riding mishap, Taylor rewarded the commissioners' faith, recalled state Rep. Bill Hinkle, R-Cle Elum, who was a Kittitas County commissioner while Taylor worked for the county.

The precocious planning director streamlined the county's permitting process and shepherded the development of the MountainStar resort in Upper Kittitas County, now called Suncadia. Despite vocal opposition to that project and a number of appeals, Taylor's work ultimately held up in court.

"He was really a bright guy," Hinkle said. "He showed a lot of skills and talent."

With that experience and the private-sector experience Taylor has gotten since leaving the county in 2004 to start an agriculture and land-use consulting business, Taylor knows local government better than most state lawmakers, Hinkle said. "We love to find candidates like him, frankly -- people with real on-the-ground experience who understand the impacts of decisions that are made here," Hinkle said.

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People sometimes ask Taylor how, with two teachers for parents, he ended up a Republican. The state teachers union, the Washington Education Association, is a powerful lobby in Olympia, generally for Democratic causes.

But Taylor said he never heard much of that around the house as he grew up. While his mother is his "liberal conscience," as he put it, his father, Jim, is a conservative-leaning independent. Taylor himself didn't have a well-defined political philosophy until after college.

He counts Max Golladay, a former Kittitas County commissioner who is now chairman of the Yakima County Republican Party, among his political mentors. They met before Golladay was elected a commissioner, back when he was an activist for private property rights and agricultural interests.

"We're here to facilitate, not just regulate," Golladay said of government. "That was a strong belief of mine."

Taylor's convictions about local control and property rights grew under Golladay's tutelage. Though he concedes there are legitimate environmental interests involved in land-use regulation, he bristles at the idea of people in paved cities pushing a green agenda.

"There are people who have relied upon the land for, in some cases, generations," Taylor said. "And yet in many cases, the government thinks they know better on how to manage that."

Taylor is socially conservative as well. He voted against the recently approved expansion of domestic partner benefits for same-sex couples based in part on his conviction that traditional marriage is between a man and a woman.

"It's a heartbeat away from legalizing gay marriage," Taylor said of the bill. "And that's something I couldn't support from a personal standpoint."

On other issues, however, he prefers to take a big-picture view that occasionally may appear contrary to the values of a conservative. For instance, he voted in favor of a $2.4 billion tunnel project that would divert traffic from Seattle's Alaska Way Viaduct.

"I walked in here going, 'No way, there's no way I would support something like that,'" he recalled.

But ultimately the spending seemed in the best interest of his farmer constituents, who ship products through Seattle's ports.

"If we don't do that and have to go to tearing down the viaduct and rebuilding, there's a huge problem trying to get a truck to the port," Taylor said.

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The local agriculture community is not surprised by Taylor's ascent to state politics. They've seen his work ethic, and they know how he developed it.

"It comes back to having to be out there, to sweat and toil," said Yakima County commissioner Kevin Bouchey, a Lower Valley farmer. "We will get our money's worth out of David. There's no doubt in my mind he's going to work."

Taylor surprised legislative colleagues last week, drafting legislation during downtime in the House. It wasn't the bill, a proposal to set a mandatory public review period before hearings and votes on appropriation and revenue bills, that surprised them. It was that Taylor just sat down and wrote it himself.

"A couple of other (House) members said, 'You know, we have staff to do that,'" Taylor said.

But he figured he might as well be doing something productive. That story didn't surprise Golladay at all.

"He's a worker," Golladay said. "He has ambition and a great deal of curiosity and the ability to wade through codes and things and retain information."

That stems from an Ellensburg upbringing, Taylor figures. There are the occasional kicking bulls around there, but there's also a set of simple values, he said.

"People can count on what I say," he said.

* Pat Muir can be reached at 577-7693, or at pmuir@yakimaherald.com.

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