Valerie Thomas saw the poor treatment Indians received at the hands of health care workers and the justice system in Fremont County through her work as a public defender, she said in federal court on Tuesday.

But a proposal in the early 1990s to study setting up a temporary waste dump convinced Thomas to try to change the at-large method of commissioners, she said during the seventh day of testimony in the voting rights lawsuit by five American Indians against Fremont County.

"There was little to no accountability in the county commission," said Thomas, whose last name then was Phifer.

The five Indians, who are members of the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes, claim the at-large or countywide system results in discrimination by diluting Indians' voting strength, according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in October 2005.

They want the federal court to pressure the county to create single-member districts, one of which would include the reservation.

However, attorneys for Fremont County have responded that the dispute centers not on race as required by the Voting Rights Act, but on myriad issues related to the history of American Indians.

The dispute about at-large and single-member districts raged 15 years ago, too.

The southern half of the county had no commissioners representing its interests, Thomas said during questioning by the Indians' lead attorney Laughlin McDonald of the Atlanta office of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation Inc.

So in 1992, Thomas successfully ran for commissioner as a Democrat with strong support from voters on the Wind River Indian Reservation, she said.

Fremont County elections that year were shadowed by what Thomas regarded as a disconnect of the accountability of county officials and what citizens wanted with the study of the dump formally known as the Monitored Retrievable Storage project, she said.

"The majority of people were against it," Thomas said. "I was baffled as to why five of five commissioners favored it; I came to believe it was a matter of county geography."

In August 1992, Gov. Mike Sullivan used the power of his office to stop the program.

Besides Thomas' own full-time, seven-month campaign, she circulated petitions to put a proposal on the ballot to change the at-large method of electing commissioners to a single-member district system, she said.

She did not draw possible districts, nor have an idea for a single district to include the reservation, she said.

Opponents of her ballot measure claimed the at-large system offered voters more influence on the entire commission, she said.

Single-member districts also would make too much work for county staff and would pit commissioners against one another, according to her testimony and news accounts from the time.

About half the opponents refused to sign the petitions for racial reasons, Thomas said.

Voters defeated the measure by about 55 percent to 45 percent, she said.

She won her own campaign, though, and learned first-hand about the poor relationships between county government and the tribes, she said. "I would characterize it as fairly ignorant."

For example, county departments employed few or no Indians, and Thomas believes hiring was done on a who-you-know basis, she said.

Under questioning from Scott Detamore, an attorney for the county who is with the Denver-based Mountain States Legal Foundation, Thomas denied the nuclear dump issue was another version of a Lander-Riverton rivalry.

When he asked about relationships between the county and the reservation, she responded the local officials were running a county, but the tribal officials were running nations.

To approach the tribes on an equal basis, county officials needed to realize they needed to meet with the staff of the tribes and not to expect an automatic audience with tribal leaders, she said. "No one on the board understood how government worked on the reservation."

Another witness for the plaintiffs, Sarah Gorin of the Equality State Policy Center, outlined the history of the lawsuit contending the at-large method of electing legislators diluted voter power. The successful lawsuit led to the Legislature's 1992 reapportionment with the creation of the single-member district system of electing legislators.

Under questioning from Richard Rideout, another attorney for Fremont County, Gorin said the single-member legislative district system has provided greater voter participation.

"It's been good for Pat Goggles (D-Ethete) to be in the Legislature because it reminds everybody every day the tribes are there," Gorin said.

Reporter Tom Morton can be reached at (307) 266-0592, or at Tom.Morton@casperstartribune.net.