Board Members

Mark began his legal career in Kittitas County in 2001, serving as a civil and criminal Deputy Prosecutor, and also served on the Planning Commission. In 2006, he was elected Kittitas County Commissioner and opened a general practice law firm.  In 2011, Mark accepted a position in the Pacific County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. He was later promoted to Chief and twice elected as Pacific County’s Prosecuting Attorney. Mark has also served as a Deputy Prosecutor in Lewis and Spokane County, where he served as their land use attorney and later Chief Civil Deputy Prosecutor. After leaving Spokane County, Mark served as an Administrative Law Judge and Hearing Examiner before being appointed to the Growth Management Hearings Board.

Rick Eichstaedt was appointed to the eastern Washington regional panel of the board in 2020. He previously served as the director of Gonzaga University’s environmental law clinic representing organizations and individuals on a variety of environmental and land-use matters in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. He started his legal career as a staff attorney for the Nez Perce Tribe in north-central Idaho. During his seven years with the Tribe, he worked on a wide variety of water right, environmental, natural resource, cultural resource, and treaty rights protection cases. Mr. Eichstaedt also served as the executive director of the Center for Justice, a Spokane-based public interest law firm. Mr. Eichstaedt has a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology and political science from Hamline University and a law degree with a certificate in environmental and natural resource law from the Northwest School of Law of Lewis and Clark College. Mr. Eichstaedt is licensed to practice law in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, as well as federal courts in all three states, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. He has published articles on environmental and natural resources in various journals and legal publications.​​​​​​

Alex Sidles has been a land use and environmental lawyer in Seattle since 2017. Prior to joining the Growth Management Hearings Board in 2024, he was a land use hearing examiner for two years and a litigator in private practice for five years before that. Prior to becoming a lawyer, Mr. Sidles was a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps and a high school and elementary school English teacher in Micronesia. Mr. Sidles has a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and a law degree, both from the University of Washington.​​​​​​

Ms. Ehrlichman was appointed by Governor Ferguson to the Growth Management Hearings Board in 2026. She joined ELUHO in May of 2024 as an Administrative Appeals Judge for the Pollution Control Hearings Board and Shorelines Hearings Board.  Prior to that, she was a municipal lawyer in local government, with an emphasis in land use and environmental law.  Ms. Ehrlichman was lead of the land use division in the Snohomish County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office and was later appointed chief civil deputy (1996-2007).  She was a full-time quasi-judicial hearing examiner for Snohomish County (2007-2010) and later for the City of Seattle (2018-2000); she has served as a part-time hearing examiner for the City of Bellevue since 2017. ​​​​​During the period 2010 – 2018, Ms. Ehrlichman was an attorney in private practice representing a wide variety of clients, including municipalities, federally recognized Indian Tribes, landowners, farmers, business owners, and citizen groups, with an emphasis in land use and environmental law.  More recently, Ms. Ehrlichman served as chief civil deputy prosecuting attorney for Island County and as civil deputy prosecutor for Jefferson County (2019 – 2024). 

Ms. Ehrlichman graduated cum laude from University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and received her undergraduate degree from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.   After law school, she clerked in the Alaska state courts in Anchorage, Alaska and the Washington State Court of Appeals, Division One in Seattle.​