Remote Surveillance Trailer in Pasco, WA

Pasco Mayor Pete Serrano has been appointed by President Donald Trump to serve as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Washington.

The appointment, which will require confirmation from the U.S. Senate, is a big political promotion for Serrano, a champion of conservative issues from anti-COVID vaccine mandates to gun rights and a former attorney for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Serrano, 44, will be the third individual to hold the office since the start of the second Trump Administration nearly seven months ago.

Two have served in acting roles. Richard Barker served February to July, and current Acting U.S. Attorney Stephanie Van Marter has been in the role for the past month.

Serrano could not be reached Thursday or Friday by the Herald but he told The Spokesman-Review he was “excited and waiting for it to be finalized.”

Pasco Mayor Pro Tem David Milne told the Herald he’d spoken to Serrano, who planned to submit his letter of resignation from the city council before the weekend.

Serrano has served on the council since 2018 and was chosen by the council as mayor of the 80,000-person city in January 2024.

“He’s an outstanding individual, hard worker. Definitely knows his stuff. We’re very excited about his new job opportunity, but his leadership will definitely be missed on the city council,” Milne told the Herald.

News of Serrano’s appointment also received kudos from U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside.

From California to Washington

Serrano and his family moved to Washington state from the Sacramento area in 2015. He began his legal career at a boutique firm that sued states over the Clean Water Act.

Before establishing the conservative legal nonprofit Silent Majority Foundation, Serrano worked as an environmental lawyer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford nuclear site near Richland.

There he helped transfer 1,500 acres of government land into a solar farm and worked with the department to ensure safe and effective cleanup at the site that produced plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program during the Cold War. He also worked for the DOE’s legal team during the 2017 PUREX tunnel collapse.

Days after his election as Pasco mayor, Serrano threw his hat in the ring to run for Washington attorney general. He said his experience in environmental law and belief in “common sense regulation” made him a right fit for the office.

He squared off against Nick Brown, the former U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, who ultimately won the 2024 general election by 12 percentage points.

In debates against Brown, Serrano called the Capitol rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, “political prisoners,” and said he would struggle to defend the state’s laws protecting abortion access, according to the Spokesman-Review.

Serrano co-founded the Silent Majority Foundation in 2021 to protect “our God given constitutional rights” and ensure “equal protection under the laws of the United States of American and each state,” its website says.

The group has most recently represented a Kelso gun shop, Gator’s Custom Guns, in challenging the state’s 2022 law banning the sale on ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.

The shop argues the law went against the state constitution and federal Second Amendment rights, but the Washington Supreme Court disagreed in a 7-2 ruling earlier this year, reversing a Superior Court’s decision and upholding the law.

With that loss under their belt, Silent Majority this week solicited another firm to file a Hail Mary petition this week with the U.S. Supreme Court to review its case against the state.

Serrano and the nonprofit also organized a failed 2021 lawsuit to overturn federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates on behalf of 300 Hanford site and Pacific Northwest National Labor workers, and last year sued Washington State University after it declined to renew the contract of an associate professor who was critical of the vaccine.

Serrano and his wife, PJ, live in Pasco with their three kids.

Last month, Pete Serrano left an open District 4 seat on the Pasco City Council when he was sworn in as the the interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington.

Now the Pasco City Council is getting ready to appoint a new person to fill the vacant position.

On Monday night, the council reviewed seven candidates and selected a smaller pool to interview.

The city requires that they live in Pasco’s District 4 and are registered to vote.

The candidates are:

Three other candidates applied. They were Rob Waiters, Ruslan Stetskiy and Travis Gallion.

The council discussed the qualifications of the candidates in a closed session and narrowed the list to four.

Interviews will be conducted at a meeting on Sept. 15 that’s open to the public.

The council plans to appoint the new council member on the same night.

That person will serve until the end of this year, and then the council will have to go through the same process again and name someone to fill the new two-year term that begins in January 2026. Voters will get to choose their own replacement in November 2027.

Serrano was running unopposed this year for another four years on the council, so his name will still appear on the November ballot.

The council already appointed its new mayor since Serrano resigned. Mayor David Milne was selected Aug. 18 to fill the position through the end of the year. He was previously mayor pro-tem.

District 2 Councilman Charles Grimm was appointed mayor pro-tem, replacing Milne.

The mayoral post for the rapidly growing city of 80,000 is largely ceremonial.

The council will also appoint a new mayor in January 2026.

At a time when the Pasco School District is under incredible financial stress, how was it able to open two new high schools this month?

Construction of Sageview High School and Orion High School cost the district $155.8 million together — or, respectively, about $127 million and $29 million.

That was covered by a 21-year, $195.5 million capital bond measure that voters passed in 2023. That bond will also will help pay for $7.5 million in future land purchases and several projects next year, including athletic improvements at Pasco High School and career and technical education modernizations at Pasco High and Chiawana High School.

In Washington state, bonds are for building schools and facilities while levies pay for learning and education programs. Unlike levies, which are a regular tax on property owners, school districts sell bonds to investors and rake in large chunks of cash to be repaid by tax payments over time.

Superintendent Michelle Whitney said because Pasco’s secondary schools were so large, and the bond projects reduced student density, the school district already had the staff on hand to open the buildings, so they simply moved people around.

“It really, truly is staffing neutral because we were so overcrowded,” Whitney told the Tri-City Herald. “We just spread that staff out across three buildings because the enrollment of students is being spread out across three buildings.”

About 5,200 full-time high school students were enrolled in Pasco schools last school year. The opening of Sageview, Pasco’s third comprehensive high school, means several portable buildings at Pasco High and Chiawana will go unused this year.

Move-in, hard goods, curricula and other similar costs were covered by the total bond amount, Whitney said. Their intention is to keep operating costs neutral, too.

The total cost for consumables in both schools was $200,000, said construction manager John Weatherby. Those items, which include paper and pencils, will be covered by the district and individual schools.

Salaries and benefits are the largest expenditure for Pasco, as well as nearly all other public school districts in the state — it’s people teaching kids and keeping school buildings running efficiently. Those costs make up nearly 85% of Pasco’s general fund budget.

Pasco School District has five budgets: A general fund, capital projects fund, debt service fund, an ASB fund — which is money raised by students to pay for extracurriculars — and a transportation vehicle fund. Revenues for building improvements and new construction do not intermingle with the general fund, which covers routine operations.

Enrollment is important because Pasco receives thousands of dollars in state apportionment for each full-time pupil. That cash makes up the foundation of public school budgets while other revenue sources, like federal dollars and local levies, help supplement education and additional academic needs, school programs and extracurricular activities.

For years, prior to the pandemic, Pasco schools was adding hundreds of new students each year to its enrollment. Some years it was enough to fill a whole new elementary school.

But as demographics change in the rapidly growing city of 80,000 — with more retirees moving in, more young people delaying having children and more families pursuing education alternatives to public schooling — Pasco schools is seeing its reality slowly shift away from the era of rapid growth it had once seen.

As enrollment plateaus, Pasco School District is taking a more conservative approach to budgeting.

Last school year, it planned for 17,663 full-time students and was nearly 70 students short. The school board this month passed a conservative $343 million budget that assumed 200 fewer students would be in its classrooms. That would amount to about $2 million in potential lost apportionment.

When asked if Pasco would need three high schools in 40-50 years, Whitney said their high schools were overcrowded by more than a thousand students to begin with.

With its nearly 1,200 freshmen, sophomores and juniors set to start class in a week, Sageview is already a large high school, she says. The Lobos will compete as a 3A school in the Mid-Columbia Conference.

“Enrollments in a community wax and wane and, historically, in times of tension and crisis people just don’t have too many kids,” she said. “So, I would fully expect that pendulum to swing back to where people are having more children, because part of why we’re reducing enrollment is we just don’t have as many kindergarteners coming in.”

She says Pasco is different from other school districts in that it had seen such consistent, strong growth in enrollment. Their reduction in enrollment is more of a stabilization, Whitney argues.

“I don’t see, like, at some point this place is empty,” she said standing outside Sageview High School. “A lot of communities, their high schools are much smaller than this.”