After three years and a budget of $3.2 million, the Cherry Street Project welcomed its first tenants. Not in the 70-year old building contaminated with asbestos and lead. No, these tenants are living al fresco in a homeless encampment.
The photograph for this story was taken February 27, 2020. It shows a trashed out camp in the trees just below the empty building that was barged from Victoria, B.C. nearly three years ago. The grounds are now full of trash–a discarded tire, broken gate, plastic, construction waste–and showing signs of severe erosion. The encampment itself is a heap of soggy sleeping bags, discarded clothing, loose garbage, bags of unknown items, and what appeared to be drug paraphernalia. More than one person has set up camp in the heart of what was once a very nice neighborhood.
Property values of surrounding houses were no doubt already in decline due to the proximity of the unfinished building and the neglected lot. It is unlikely the building will ever be completed. Our last report detailed how Homeward Bound Community Land Trust, the group behind the building–which already has nearly $2.2 dollars of taxpayer commitment through a loan from the City of Port Townsend and the gift of $600,000 in land–is going to default when its first payment is due this summer. They have been burning through the grace period that was supposed to have seen completion and rental of the building so that the group could start earning income with which to pay back the taxpayers. We explained more than a year ago how the loan package was doomed to result in default. See our December 12, 2018 report, “The Tragedy of the Cherry Street Project.”
The last word from the group behind the project, as we reported previously, was they needed at least another million dollars to finish the project.
A letter to the Port Townsend and Jefferson County Leader from former Port Townsend City Councilor Bob Gray, published after our last report, explained that nothing is happening to move the project forward because neither Homeward Bound nor the city has the money the project needs so that it can be rehabilitated, brought up to code and rented.
Who is responsible for this mess? Who should be held accountable? On one side is Homeward Bound, the group that has received generous taxpayer funding but in three years has failed produce any shelter except for this homeless camp. Kate Dean, a Jefferson County Commissioner, has been deeply involved in Homeward Bound for the past three years and is one of their longest serving board members. On the city’s side, Mayor Michelle Sandoval was the most vocal supporter of the project at its start when she boasted it would be “a demonstration project.” Our upcoming report will focus on the role these two officials have played in this fisaco.
We are not putting our survival in danger. Apocalyptic fear mongering about climate change has no basis in science. Those who fan the flames of climate panic are causing real harm.
So says award-winning, highly respected environmental champion Michael Shellenberger. He was named a Time magazine Hero of the Environment. He enjoys international respect. He’s had it with people who exploit climate fears to push political agendas.
He would no doubt roll his eyes were he to attend the meetings of the Jefferson County Board of Health. There you can hear all kinds of fantastical, speculative scenarios being used to lay the groundwork for declaring a “climate emergency. (We’ve written about this in two earlier reports, here and here.)
Everything from drowning communities, uncontrollable forest fires, Biblical natural disasters, lethal contagions, to murderous heat waves. When we will not be expiring from unrelenting heat we will be succumbing to killing cold, and we’ll be fighting massive flooding when we’re not dying from dehydration in permanent droughts–because “climate change” explains everything that can possibly go wrong. And if the dire predictions don’t come true, that is also due to “climate change.”
I put “climate change” in quotes not only to indicate sarcasm but because with all the fabulist, ever-changing climate scenarios there’s just no knowing what this term means any more.
Don’t forget we’ll also be starving to death, because “climate change” will destroy agriculture. The mass migration of “climate refugees” will topple nations and engulf the planet in war.
These images are from the January packet of information presented at the Board of Health’s meeting to justify declaring a “climate emergency.”
Back to Shellenberger.
He’s had it with this stuff. These apocalyptic scenarios are built on lies. Crop yields are not falling; we’re producing 25% more food than the world needs. What Africans need is better distribution and the same agricultural tools–tractors, fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation–the developed world enjoys.
We’re terrifying our kids, making them believe their lives are hopeless and doomed, when the planet does not face any existential threat.
We are seeing a huge decline in human deaths due to natural disasters, not an ever-rising body count caused by “climate change” This nonsense about “mass migration” and global population disruptions–well, it is nonsense and made up on the fly by opportunist climate panic exploiters.
Here is his article. Read it for yourself, and better understand why all this talk of a “climate emergency” is really mostly about politicians, their activist allies and bureaucrats grabbing more control over our lives and resources and not about anything based on solid data and science.
Forget facts. Forget failed predictions. Forget the best, most relevant science. Climate fear exploiters are set to ram through a “climate emergency declaration” that will give the Jefferson County Board of County Commissioners greater powers to dictate just about every aspect of life in our community, and make everything we do and need much more expensive.
The groundwork is being laid in the Board of Health, on which all county commissioners sit. The charge to declare a fake climate emergency is being spearheaded by County Commissioner Kate Dean and Hospital Commissioner Kees Kolff. Once the Board of Health declares the fake emergency the next step will be having the Board of County Commissioners implement what will no doubt be explained as “emergency measures” to address the fake crisis.
The fears behind any emergency declaration are baseless, a bit dishonest and grounded in something closer to fervent religious belief than an objective, dispassionate consideration of the best available science.
Instead of fear-mongering, these leaders should be celebrating good news on the climate. But it seems that good news is the last thing they want to hear.
Take for instance, the best, most relevant predictions on what would happen in Jefferson County if the theory of man-made catastrophic global warming proves true. (A big “if,” as the computer models predicting disaster by now have repeatedly been proven wrong. See further discussion below).
As we previously reported, the best, most relevant predictions for Jefferson County show we do not face a climate emergency. This conclusion comes from University of Washington atmospheric scientist Dr. Cliff Mass and his team of researchers. They have concluded that climate change poses “no existential threat” to Washington. Jefferson County and the Olympic Peninsula are actually in a “sweet spot” and will see no severe increases in temperatures, no droughts, no significantly increased fire risk and no heightened danger of extreme storms.
But, never mind that good news. It is “Polly Anna,” according to Kolff, who without any scientific foundation for his claim, insists we will see even worse temperature increases than predicted not only by Washington’s preeminent meteorologist, but also by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
At the Heath Board meeting in January, Kolff claimed repeatedly that “99% of scientists” agree with his catastrophic climate predictions. “The consensus is almost unanimous,” he said. But, when faced with contradictory conclusions from Mass and his University of Washington researchers, Kolff breezily acknowledges that there exist “different schools of thought,” and promptly rejects Mass’s work out of hand.
So far nothing has been presented to the Board of Health that contradicts Dr. Mass’s predictions. Nothing has been presented to show that Mass has it wrong. Nothing from the IPCC or the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group addresses as specifically as Mass what is the most likely scenario for western Washington in the context of a climate change analysis.
Mass explains that, due to the cooling Pacific Ocean (underway for decades) temperatures in western Washington will continue to be moderate and will not experience sharp spikes. Kolff dismisses the best science available with the claim that “researchers have shown that people have already died in King County” due to increasing heat waves from climate change.
The fake climate change emergency declaration may rest on falsehoods such as this. King County in recent years has experienced but a single death somewhat connected to heat. That was in July 1999 when heat was ruled merely “a factor” in the death of a 66-year old man who already suffered from hypertensive and artherosclerotic heart disease. On that day, Seattle experienced its hottest day on record, 103 degrees, quite hot for the Pacific Northwest but hardly life-threatening.
Global warming cannot be blamed for a hot day in summer. The hottest day in June in Seattle history was in 1955, decades before global warming became a thing. The hottest August day was in 1960. Washington, particularly the eastern side of the state, suffered through prolonged heat waves in the 1930s, well before global CO2 levels were rising significantly.
That ten-year record for July has not been broken, even though climate fabulists tell us we are experiencing runaway temperature increases right now. Indeed, rather than seeing runaway high temperatures, the Puget Sound this past winter saw record low temperatures. February 2019 was the coldest on record since SeaTac airport started keeping track in 1945.
We have been warned that “snow would be a thing of the past.” Not long ago Gov. Jay Inslee predicted nearly snow-less winters as our state’s future. But February 2019 saw record-breaking snowfall and this year the mountains are again doing well, and winter is still with us.
Never mind facts. Never mind actual data. Kolff, Dean and others are going to get their climate emergency declaration regardless.
Surely news of record cold temperatures should come as relief if one is laying awake worrying we are all going to die from heat waves that will produce desert conditions in the Pac NW.
That last bit you may take as unfair. Kolff, Dean and allies certainly can’t be saying that the Olympic Peninsula will become another Sahara.
But they are. Here is an image from the information packet distributed at January’s Board of Health meeting. This was from a page depicting what climate change will do to our area:No serious scientist has predicted anything like this for the Pacific Northwest, let alone Jefferson County where the predictions are for continued moderate temperatures with increasing precipitation.
There is lots of good news on climate. None of it is welcome by activists and politicians who want to use the excuse of climate panic to boss other people around.
But good news does abound. Snow is not a thing of the past. We are not seeing the predicted global crop failures, endless droughts and famine.
In 1998 the Pentagon commissioned a study on the impact of global warming, examining what would happen if the doomsayers were right. That study, which the military kept secret because it likely would have caused panic, predicted that within twenty years millions–millions-of people would be killed in wars, famines and natural disasters caused by runaway global warming. The world was going to teeter at the edge of anarchy as civilization unraveled and people murdered each other for scarce food and water. A dramatic rise in sea level would drown cities, maybe entire countries. Britain would be trapped in a permanent Siberian winter because global warming was going to interfere with the Gulf Stream.
None of it happened. None. Great news, right?
Not if you want to terrify people so you can grab more power over their lives.
Here’s more good news: CO2 emissions have leveled off. Advanced economies are actually decreasing their CO2 emissions. At a time of historic economic growth, of record low unemployment for Blacks, Hispanics and women, with wages rising for those lowest on the income ladder and manufacturing expanding, when it has attained energy independence and leads the world in production of oil and gas, the United States also led the world in reducing CO2 emissions, cutting its output by 2.9%. Wow.
The sky is not falling. We do not face any climate crisis that would justify an emergency declaration. The only crisis confronting us is one of confidence in our local leaders.
Realtors drive up housing prices. The restraints of trade ingrained into the way realtors work make the housing affordability crisis worse. Even the buyer’s agent is part of the problem, for they are incentivized to seek a higher sale price though that goes against the interest of their client.
But things are changing. The same lawyers who took on Big Tobacco are seeking to change the way realtors work. The Federal Trade Commission is pursuing anti-trust investigations of realtors. Technology is shaking up the industry and stripping away justification for high real estate commissions and disrupting realtor controls on markets and data.
Housing activists have been slow to focus their attention on the impact realtors have on housing affordability, even though the transaction costs realtors impose on the market are a huge part of the problem. In the face of resistance to increasing property and other taxes–both political and practical, as many homeowners face losing their homes under the pressure of rising taxes–activists would do well to turn their attention to a sector of the housing market that profits handsomely without contributing to building or maintaining housing.
In our first installment in of this series, we proposed that housing activists should seek an increase in the negligible taxes on broker commissions, a step that could generate sizable funds for affordable housing without adversely impacting housing affordability.
Rigged for Ever Higher Prices
Realtors on both sides of a transaction get paid from the standard 6% commission that comes out of the sale price. It is easy to see why the seller’s representative wants a higher price. The buyer’s representative faces the same incentive structure. Except for a bit of fleeting gratefulness from their client, the buyer’s agent really has no motivation to pursue lower priced properties. Splitting 6% on $600,000 puts more money in their pocket than a 6% commission on a $400,000 house.
Industry observers have noted that there is evidence that realtors representing buyers steer them away from “for sale by owner” listings, because those homes are often priced lower, and also don’t come with the prospect of a 6% commission to divide. Ever notice how a FSBO property goes unsold for a long time, but, when the owner throws in the towel and signs with a realtor it suddenly sells, even at a higher price? This could be the result of realtors steering their clients away from the FSBO. There has been some litigation around the country raising claims of boycotts by realtors of FSBO properties, a violation of anti-trust and fair trade laws.
The inherent conflict of interest in this arrangement–where the buyer’s representative personally does better if their client does worse–would seem to crumble under the pressures of a freely working marketplace. But realtors have not worked long and hard for a free market place. Their industry has repeatedly been described as “a cartel” that suppresses competition and imposes rules to exclude innovation that would undercut their control and profit margins.
Enter the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Taking on the Realtors’ Cartel
A class action lawsuit was filed about a year ago against the National Association of Realtors claiming that NAR’s compensation policies, which require all member brokers demand blanket, non-negotiable buyer-side commission fees when listing a property on the Multiple Listing Service, constitute a violation of federal anti-trust laws. Sellers who listed their properties on 21 Multiple Listing Service around the country are plaintiffs, and more are being actively recruited. NAR has faced similar claims in the past, but none have been brought by such a well-funded, experienced and skilled team of attorneys. The lawyers bringing this lawsuit are among the nation’s most successful, and most feared class action lawyers. They have prevailed against Big Tobacco, Big Pharma and Big Tech. They now have the realtors’ cartel in their sights.
No plaintiff has yet emerged from Washington, though the same NAR policies challenged in the suit are in effect here. Anyone who has bought or sold a home in Jefferson County and used a realtor experienced the same fixed, mandatory commission arrangement.
Experts who have studied the lawsuit say it would revolutionize the American real estate market. Real estate commissions here are higher than in other countries where buyers and sellers each directly pay their own agent. A 2002 study by the International Real Estate Review, cited in the lawsuit, concluded that if buyers negotiated and directly paid their agent, listing commissions for seller’s agents would be closer to 3% than the standard 5-6%. Consumer advocates say we can do better than that, and expect to see commissions in the 1.5% range, what buyers and sellers pay “estate agents” in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
Further, the suit claims that the NAR mandatory payment arrangement results in buyers agents steering their clients to higher priced, and exclusively MLS listed properties.
According to Michael Walsh, CEO at Exclusively Buyers, quoted in a Forbes report on the suit, a rare real estate firm that works only with homebuyers, “This is no garden variety lawsuit.”
“Potential damages are estimated at $54 billion,” Walsh said. “The plaintiffs allege collusion, hidden payments and anti-competitive practices designed to maintain real estate commissions at artificially high levels.”
You can learn more about the lawsuit at the website established by the plaintiffs’ lead counsel, Hagens Berman of Seattle. If you sold a home in the past five years and believe that you paid too much in commissions due to your realtors’ participation in the NAR cartel scheme, the attorneys may be interested in hearing from you. You can contact them at the link we just provided.
The Federal Government Combats The Realtors Cartel
If realtors had their way, we would not be shopping for homes on the internet. Some innovators who threated their monopoly faced threats of violence, as well as business-destroying harassment by state real estate commissions dominated by and existing for the benefit of influential realtor trade associations.
In 2005, the Department of Justice sued to overturn the NAR’s barricades to allowing the public to search properties on the Internet. That was the advent of websites such as Redfin and Zillow. After three years of litigation, the National Association of Realtors surrendered and entered into a ten-year consent decree. Now most buyers find their properties on-line, many before contacting a realtor. But, real estate commissions have barely budged. Consumer advocates continue to insist that realtors’ anti-competitive practices preserve the inflated commission structure and much more work needs to be done.
The Department of Justice has stepped into the pending class action challenging the NAR commission mandates. Their first step was to inform the court that the NAR had been misrepresenting the consent decree. The DOJ is now an interested party in that lawsuit as it moves forward.
At the same time, the Federal Trade Commission has opened its own investigation into anti-competitive practices by realtors and their trade associations, with an emphasis on broker compensation and restricted access to listings.
In June 2018 the DOJ and FTC held a joint workshop on anti-competitive practices and barriers to entry in the real estate market, as well as the impact of past regulatory actions. These efforts by the DOJ and FTC come as the Trump administration has recognized a national affordable housing crisis. Dr. Ben Carson, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has won bi-partisan support for his proposals for regulatory reform to promote affordable housing availability.
Technology is Disrupting the Realtor Cartel
Zillow and Redfin have already made a huge impact, and shown that sky-high commissions for every real estate transaction are not justified and needlessly raise the cost of housing. Much of the work done in the past by realtors is now being done for them. More and more consumers question whether realtors are worth the enormous commissions they can make for very little effort.
The multi-billion dollar real estate industry continues to draw innovation as entrepreneurs see an opportunity to profit by disrupting the cartel and outmoded ways of doing business. Space does not permit an in-depth look into all the innovation afoot, innovation that will dramatically reduce transaction costs. Home buyers will benefit from lower prices and rechanneling of their scarce dollars into housing instead of unnecessary and inflated commissions.
What Housing Activists Can Do
First, housing activists should recognize that transactions costs are a real problem in making housing less affordable. Inflated commissions are factored into the ultimate sale price. That is why FSBOs are frequently priced lower: the seller does not have to factor into her bottom line having to pay a realtor tens of thousands of dollars. (High closing costs and title insurance are another area deserving of activists’ attention).
Second, housing activists should work to end the conflict of interest present in the current mandatory NAR commission structure. They should press local government to outlaw the practice of sellers and buyers agents splitting the same pot of money. They should urge lawmakers to require that buyers agents be paid directly by buyers. Local laws can override the NAR’s anti-competitive rules.
Housing activists must pursue every opportunity to bring down housing costs. A market hobbled by decades of poor land use regulations, stifling building codes and exclusionary zoning laws–all of which have severely restricted the supply of affordable housing–needs lots of work before it is fixed. But in a crisis no opportunity for improvement must be ignored. Considering how much consumers hate paying sky-high real estate commissions, an effort to correct the anti-competitive forces behind those commissions might find a more receptive public than another call to raise property taxes.
Realtors Are Feeling the Heat
Facing a very serious class action that has been described as a “nuclear bomb” on the industry, and federal anti-trust inquiries, the realtors industry has announced that affordable housing has become “a top advocacy priority for 2020.” The National Association of Realtors is the nation’s largest trade association, representing more than 1.4 million agents and brokers. In a policy forum held this month at its imperial Washington, D.C. offices, the NAR announced it is getting behind various regulatory reforms to increase the stock of affordable housing and make home ownership more accessible at lower income levels. Echoing Secretary Carson, they have called for reforms on mortgage lending, zoning, and local development plans.
One idea they somehow failed to discuss: bringing down the cost of buying and selling by reforming realtors’ anti-competitive, conflict-laden commission structure.
National Association of Realtors, national HQ
In our next installment, we return to the proposal that realtors’ commission should be taxed at a higher rate to raise funds for affordable housing projects.
One segment of the housing market can and should bear higher taxes to generate funding for affordable housing. That is realtors, who take a percentage of the sale price of houses built and maintained by other people. As real estate prices rise, they earn increasingly higher commissions for the same effort. Higher taxes on realtors can alleviate the harm being caused by decades of poor land use and zoning regulations, stifling building codes and regressive, constantly rising property taxes.
Those harmful policies must be reversed, but it will take a sea change in political power and perspective. The current Democrat majorities at state and local levels will, until that change comes, continue to seek sources of funding for affordable housing. The taxes they choose, such as property, real estate excise and sales taxes, only aggravate inequities. Bringing real estate commissions into the mix can generate substantial revenue for affordable housing funds, and contribute greatly to eventful, more meaningful reforms. This can be done without making housing less affordable and less available, serious flaws in the other solutions housing activists have been pursuing.
Readers of this site are likely surprised to see me calling for a tax increase. But back during the Prop 1 campaign in Jefferson County in 2017 (a ballot measure to raise property taxes for affordable housing) I made the same proposal. The need for affordable housing has only gotten worse. I am not talking about housing the itinerant homeless. We are seeing working class people and small business owners unable to live to in our county because they cannot find a place to live. Creative, industrious people that can contribute to our growth and prosperity are departing or avoiding Jefferson County. The ripple effect of their aversion to participating in our community hurts all of us on many levels, now and in future years.
Make no mistake, the decades old policies and ideology of the Democrat monopoly on power is responsible for this situation. They have determined zoning, building codes, land use regulations and tax policy. They seem more averse to achieving substantial corrective policy reforms than they do to raising taxes. Currently, we are seeing housing activists, working with Democrat sponsors, pursuing and achieving increases in sales taxes and appropriations, which, of course, are funded by taxes.
The resistance in Jefferson County to raising property taxes presents an opportunity for considering what should have been to housing activists an obvious, just and simply administered source of tax revenue: real estate commissions.
I would venture that housing activists have not examined this idea because they have been co-opted, if not corrupted, by politically influential realtors and their trade groups. Perhaps I will expand on that observation as this series unfolds.
Consider the alternatives housing activists have been pursuing.
Increasing Property Taxes. Here, in Bellingham, Seattle, Tacoma and elsewhere, they have sought, and sometimes won, property tax hikes in the name of combating homelessness and housing insecurity. But when they have succeeded they have only made housing for everyone more expensive, placed homeownership out of reach for more people, and caused rents to rise.
Extracting Concessions from Homebuilders. Housing activists sometimes simply want to have government require builders to create affordable housing. To the builder, that means spending their resources and time on housing that does not pay its way or earn a positive return as it is sold or rented at below market rates. Putting greater burdens on home builders in the name of increasing the supply of affordable housing makes no more sense than raising property taxes to promote affordable housing. Builders are the people who take the risks to actually build something. They have to make a profit in order to stay in business. Their continued success means that the next house can get built. Set asides–requiring them to restrict the income they can make from a certain percentage of new housing units–is a disincentive to building anything. At the same time they are being hamstrung in their ability to earn income from what they have built, their costs and taxes continue to rise. This is no way to encourage more home building.
Rent Control. Rent controls have been proven to limit the supply of new housing stock. Sure, if you are lucky enough to score a rent controlled unit, you are happy. But squeezing landlords, who are risking their investments and time to provide rental housing, does not encourage investment in more rental units. The overall effect is to stagnate the supply of habitable units as demand increases. Cities that have frozen or slowed rents do not freeze or slow the taxes and underlying costs that erode a landlord’s ability to keep her rental units in good condition. Legislation that ties a landlord’s hands in how they conduct their business–by prohibiting them from ensuring that prospective tenants will not be trouble, or requiring them to house for free deadbeat tenants for prescribed periods of time–do not encourage anyone to take on what is already a difficult and risky way to earn a living.
Realtors Are The Answer. Realtors can be taxed at higher rates and there will be no adverse consequences for the housing and rental markets.
Consider how they make their money. They earn commissions, usually around 6%, when a property for which they have the listing is purchased. They also make money on the other side of the transaction if they are representing the buyer. For a property that sells for $500,000, the realtors in the deal split about $30,000. They could make this amount of money in a few days, as frequently happens in tight markets like we see in Jefferson County.
Realtors earn this hefty amount of money without risking any of their own. They did not invest in that house. They did not fix the septic system. They did not pay taxes and maintain the landscaping. But they may reap a profit equal to what the homeowner spent to put on a new roof.
As real estate prices increase, realtors are not working harder to earn those higher commissions. They pretty much do the same thing for a $500,000 house that they do on a $250,000 house. Additionally, much of the leg work realtors did years ago is being done for them by Zillow, Redfin and similar websites. Taking photographs that make a room look larger than it is in reality may be a new skill for realtors, but it hardly justifies the huge commissions they earn when so much of the screening of a property is done for them remotely on the Internet.
Despite these new technologies, realtor commissions have not appreciably budged. Technology has benefitted consumers in just about every other industry by increasing efficiencies. Why haven’t real estate commissions dropped? We will discuss the anti-competitive legacy and impacts of realtors and their trade associations in keeping transaction costs high and contributing to housing unaffordability.
Currently, realtors in Washington pay a 1.5% tax on their commissions. That is higher than realtors pay in other states. But Washington, particularly western Washington, also has faster rising and generally higher real estate prices and a greater shortage of affordable housing than many other states. The amount of tax realtors pay on their commission is, unfairly, far, far less than the seller pays in real estate excise tax.
That 1.5% tax on a $30,000 commission on a half million dollar house comes to only $450. The realtors in the deal walk away with $29,550
Doubling that tax to $900 would be a drop in the bucket. Realtors would still take the listing. They would still take their photos for Zillow. They would still walk prospective buyers through the house and hand out their cards. The would still be telling the seller to spend more money to make the house more presentable.
And it would make no difference to the supply of housing. I submit that the real estate brokerage tax could be raised to 10% and still make no difference on the availability and price of housing. For the chance at netting $27,000, realtors will take that $500,000 listing. They still could make with a couple days’ work what is a year’s salary for many people in this county.
Next: Realtors’ History of Anticompetitive Practices Contributes to Housing Unaffordability.
now full of trash–a discarded tire, broken gate, plastic, construction waste–and showing signs of severe erosion. The encampment itself is a heap of soggy sleeping bags, discarded clothing, loose garbage, bags of unknown items, and what appeared to be drug paraphernalia. More than one person has set up camp in the heart of what was once a very nice neighborhood.
No serious scientist has predicted anything like this for the Pacific Northwest, let alone Jefferson County where the predictions are for continued moderate temperatures with increasing precipitation.
