Most everyone has heard that Jefferson County is interested in creating affordable housing and jobs. We have heard that over the past 15 years, at least. But housing costs continue to escalate and jobs are scarce.
Our children know this. They mostly have to move away to find a job and housing they can afford. So, why, after all the talk, do we not have affordable housing and jobs?
To understand this we must first understand that even in this day of virtual reality, data on the cloud and telecommuting most jobs are at a physical location. An actual place where work is done. Whether the job is manufacturing, retail sales or service industry, they all require a place to do the work. So, land and buildings are a requirement.
Housing also requires a physical location. No one as yet can live in a virtual apartment or house.
A piece of land is a requirement as is a building. But, first you need to have the “right” under zoning regulations to perform the particular business or construct housing on any particular piece of land.
We do not lack land in Jefferson County, but we do lack appropriately zoned land. As an example, should Tesla wish to build a manufacturing facility to manufacture one of their new green battery powered vehicles they would need to find an appropriately sized and zoned piece of property. Next they would have to propose the facility, buildings, etc. by applying for permits from the Jefferson County Department of Community Development.
They would need a good sized piece of industrial zoned land. We have the land. Rayonier (formerly Pope Resources) has large tracts of land. But, there is no large parcel of land in Jefferson County that is zoned for industrial activity. Under the Growth Management Act we could designate an area for a large manufacturer but the county never has done it.
Of course, some would say that Tesla, or any other industrial or manufacturing concern, would never locate here. Many excuses could be made–not enough people, not enough transportation. But most likely the fundamental reason is that there is not enough vision by our leadership.
Next, let’s look at affordable housing. There are over 300 subdivisions in Jefferson County. Subdivisions used to be done but no more. They used to be done by developers to lower the cost of a single family home. Rather than build one home on a 5 acre parcel the land it could be subdivided under State of Washington septic rules into as many as 17 building lots. The lots could then be sold to individuals so affordable single family homes could be built.
This is no longer being done as Jefferson County implemented a minimum 5 acre lot size, in some cases the minimum is 10 or even 20 acres. This has resulted in stopping many potential single family homes from being built. The existing building lots have escalated in value. Basically, the minimum lot size rule ended affordability in single family homes.
Then there are apartments. The problem with apartments is that due to tightened septic rules they have to be hooked-up to a sewer system. The City of Port Townsend is the only place where apartment buildings can be built in Jefferson County unless and until a sewer is provided in Port Hadlock.
So, affordable housing and jobs have been stymied by rules. Rules created by our elected officials. It might be a good time to reflect on this.
Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County requested a police escort for its Juneteenth march down Port Townsend’s Water Street. They got it, at taxpayer’s expense.
A public records request by Port Townsend Free Press has obtained the application for the special use permit under which BLM Jeffco was able to block off and claim the use of Water Street and part of Sims Way for its June 19 march. They also were granted use of Pope Marine Park. The application was submitted by Sean Vinson, who has identified himself as lead organizer for the event. He was the keynote speaker at the conclusion of the march.
The application also covered painting of a block-long mural on Water Street outside City Hall. Vinson requested that that portion of Water Street be closed to traffic through midnight of Sunday June 21.
BLM has called for the abolition and defunding of police across the nation. On a recent KPTZ show, another lead organizer of the local BLM said there was nothing police could ever do to satisfy them. Police were inherently racist, white supremacist and must be abolished altogether so that “the people” could do the job themselves.
But BLM of Jeffco wanted a police escort enough to ask for it twice in its application.
At this time, while our public records request has not received a complete response, it is unknown exactly how many law enforcement officers and vehicles were provided in response to the request of BLM Jeffco for an officer escort. Photos of the event published in local newspapers and on social media show law enforcement officers at the front and along the route–as BLM Jeffco had requested.
“Special use permits will not be issued until insurance has been approved.“
So states the application submitted by BLM Jeffco.
Every special use permit seeking use of city spaces requires that the organizer provide proof of insurance to indemnify the city in the event of damage to property, personal injury or other loss. City businesses that seek to use a portion of a sidewalk or the edge of a street for outdoor dining and display of merchandise must prove that they have obtained adequate insurance.
Coverage under the required insurance policy must be primarily for the City’s benefit. It must provide a minimum of $1 million commercial general liability coverage and $500,000 automobile liability.
Evidence of insurance meeting these requirements must be submitted no less than 15 days before the event.
In this case, BLM Jeffco was given exclusive use of nearly all of Water Street, Pope Marine Park and part of Sims Way. They had an entire block of Water Street for several days while painting the BLM mural on a city street with paint supplied by taxpayers.
By June 19th, the nation had seen massive violence and destruction in the wake of BLM protests and marches. Criminals in these “protests” killed or attacked people in dozens of cities, most of them Blacks or other minorities. Seattle by June 19 had experienced destructive and violent rioting, resulting in the torching of police vehicles, injuries to scores of officers and first responders, arson of private property, hundreds of smashed windows and the vandalism of hundreds of businesses.
BLM Jeffco could not have obtained the required insurance. It was not at the time any sort of legally recognized entity that could sign a contract. It had no structure, no officers, no board of directors nor any registered agent. BLM Jeffco did not file for non-profit status until July 22. That action followed our report published July 17 raising questions about where donations to BLM Jeffco were going.
So far, no proof of insurance for the event has been produced in response to our request for public records.
Even now one thing is clear: the City did not obtain any proof of insurance as required by its own special use permit law. Proof of acceptable insurance must be submitted no less than 15 days before the event. This is intended to give city staff adequate time to examine and verify the insurance. Vinson submitted the application for a special use permit less than two days before the march.
In light of its preferential treatment of BLM Jeffco, the City will have a hard time in the future enforcing its special use permit regulations against other groups. It cannot enforce the law in a way that discriminates on the basis of the content of the message advanced by groups wanting to march in its street. It cannot enforce against other groups the regulations it chose not to enforce against BLM Jeffco.
A young man who has been involved with events in Portland and Seattle told me has been thinking about organizing an armed open-carry march down Water Street, something that is completely legal. The requirement for insurance in the name of a legal entity may have been an obstacle he could not overcome. But no longer need he be concerned about obtaining insurance if he moves forward with his idea.
Outside money bankrolled Lorna Smith. An out-of-state donor made the largest single contribution to top finisher Heidi Eisenhour. Even Amanda Funaro, who is in third place after the first count of ballots, received sizable contributions from outside Jefferson County and the State of Washington.
Eisenhour and Smith will move onto the general election. Funaro’s first attempt at public office is over.
Outsiders Bankroll Lorna Smith
Lorna Smith
Eight of ten of Smith’s top donors were from outside Jefferson County. Not including loans from herself, she raised just under $20,000 from 188 separate donations, of which 84 were not from here. Many of those donations were from out of state.
Smith’s largest single donations came from Seattle residents Martha Kongsgaard and Peter Goldman of the Kongsgaard-Goldman Foundation. The wealthy husband and wife contributed $3,000.
Smith received $11,518 from donors outside Jefferson County, or 58% of all funds she raised. Smith received more money from out-of-county and out-of-state donors than Funaro raised altogether. Without help from outside donations, Smith would have raised under $8,500, less than Funaro raised within Jefferson County.
Funaro raised a total of $11,084, not including $1,020 she donated to her own campaign. Of that amount, $1,957.40 came from five out-of-state donors. Funaro’s second largest donation, $1,000, came from Carolyn Elgin of Talihina, Oklahoma.
Eisenhour Received Significant Outside Money
Top vote-getter Eisenhour raised a total of $28,020. Her largest contribution, $1,000, came from rancher and conservationist Seth Hadley of Tucson, Arizona. Of 191 separate donations, 33 came from outside Jefferson County or outside Washington state. Outside donors gave Eisenhour $6,375, or 23% of her total.
Notable Out-of-State Environmentalist Funding
Both Smith and Eisenhour have earned national recognition for their work in conservation and wilderness protection. It is unsurprising that they have substantial support from environmentalists, some quite notable. Smith received $500 from Brock Evans, a legendary activist who has held high level positions with the Oregon Environmental Council, Audubon Society and Sierra Club. He is currently president of the Endangered Species Coalition. Smith has received support from other individuals well known for their work in protecting wilderness, such as the Jones sisters of Boulder, Colorado. These twin sisters currently hold the positions of Boulder Mayor and county commissioner.
Eisenhour can claim her own legendary conservation support. Her largest contribution, as mentioned, was from Seth Hadley. He and his family have created a very successful collaborative effort between ranchers and conservationists in New Mexico’s Bootheel and the Guadalupe Mountains, known as the Malpai Borderlands Group. The Hadley patriarch–cowboy, poet, conservationist–the late Drum Hadley, created the Animas Foundation, to acquire the 502 square mile Gray Ranch at the tip of the Bootheel from the Nature Conservancy. The Gray Rach has since become one of the world’s leading models for how a working ranch can responsibly manage and protect grasslands and fragile habitat.
This may be an over generalization, but if any difference in the environmentalist support received by these candidates stands out, it is this: Smith’s endorsements come from professional activists who protect land and animals by removing people or prohibiting human activities, while Eisenhour’s endorsements run more along the line of land trusts and conservation easements which keep land in productive use while protecting its natural and wild characteristics.
[Editor’s note: This data was compiled from campaign finance reports filed with the Public Disclosure Commission. In another life I was executive director of a small national environmental group and a statewide wilderness alliance and so became familiar with the people and organizations mentioned in this article.]
The KPTZ program called “The Reckoning,” was supposed to be a moderated conversation between Jefferson County Sheriff Joe Nole and a Native American woman, an organizer of Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County and an Hispanic man, with Port Townsend’s Mayor jumping in at the end. It was announced as “an open conversation about racial prejudice in policing, especially in our county.”
The show aired for two hours on Thursday, July 30, 2020. The moderators were far from impartial. One of them, KPTZ radio show host Paul Rice, has encouraged activists to pursue and harass a local law enforcement family and in the past has himself attempted to injure the reputation of at least one other law enforcement official. This program was created and sold as a kind of set-up of our Sheriff. It fell short. Instead of a set-up, it was pathetic
“The Reckoning” was hardly a conversation about prejudice in policing in Jefferson County because the panelists offered nothing on the subject that could be substantively discussed. They threw around vague, sometimes vicious allegations against no one in particular. They never offered proof or evidence for their wild claims.
Much of what the panelists said was irresponsible, intending to fan the flames of racial tensions rather than making it possible to achieve any sort of understanding and accord.
First some facts on the Sheriff’s office: The Jefferson County Sheriff has had no officer involved shootings since the 1930s. No complaints of racial prejudice have been filed against any Sheriff’s deputy in recent memory. There has been civil litigation over the years over everything from the death of a violent prisoner with a bad heart racing on meth to public records act disputes. As far as I know, though, the Sheriff’s Office has not had any court judgments against it nor settled any claims based on charges of racist behavior. It has not been the subject of any investigation for abuses of force or racial misconduct by the Washington State Attorney General or the U.S. Department of Justice.
Now, on to the panelists:
Cameron Jones, one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County, claimed that 30% of Jefferson County’s Black citizens have been imprisoned in the county jail in a single year. Where in the world did he get that from? Jefferson County in the 2010 census had about 30,000 people, 1% of whom were Black. That would mean that 100 Black residents of Jefferson County (1/3 of 300) were in our county jail that year. There would be a list of those 100 Black inmates–if those alleged prisoners existed. Jones did not offer or claim to have such a list. He never explained the source of the information for his wild allegation.
Sheriff Nole told Jones he was absolutely wrong. Jones might be confusing our small jail with the STATE correctional facility at Clearwater on the west side. That large facility holds people from all over Washington. And there’s that little problem of size: our county jail cannot hold 100 people.
Later Jones challenged Sheriff Nole to explain what he was doing about the “white supremacy and vigilante groups operating” in Jefferson County. He also suggested that somebody had lynched five Blacks in Jefferson County. Yes, Sheriff Nole said, over a number of years there have been five Blacks who died by hanging in different areas of the county. Nole said each sad, tragic case had been investigated and no evidence of any malicious activity had been found. These were suicides. We do have a serious problem with suicide that we don’t like to acknowledge. We have also had several White people who have hung themselves in recent years.
Jones said “someone in our group” had been researching the cases and found suggestions of foul play. He didn’t say what that evidence was, who was doing this research or offer to share it with the Sheriff so the cases could get another look, if warranted.
Jones also didn’t offer any evidence–not a single specific instance–of any activity by “white supremacist and vigilante groups operating in Jefferson County.” Who are these groups? I emailed Jones to ask what information he had on them and what they had been doing. This is something law enforcement, city, local, state and federal should know about. He did not answer my questions. It is not unreasonable to conclude he is just making this up in an effort to paint Jefferson County as some sort of Klan infested, deep South backwater from last century. That misperception helps his group’s political activities and fundraising but disserves a county of good, decent people who would not tolerate such organizations in their midst.
Jones also said “people of color are afraid to move here “because we don’t have a multi-cultural community center” and Port Townsend has Victorian architecture. Seriously, he said this.
Jones leveled hearsay allegations by an anonymous source that ten years ago a former school resource officer–now Port Townsend’s Interim Police Chief–had “acted with petulance toward youth of color,” whatever that means. And he complained about an ongoing case in which a Black man called law enforcement to report his truck stolen. It was located by deputies and found to have been burned. The complaint by this man is that police “questioned him aggressively” and “showed up in excessive force.” Not that they used excessive force. He just believes too many police responded to the call and he is upset they did not immediately believe him. No allegation of deputies using racially pejorative terms has been raised.
On his Facebook page the owner of the burned truck alleges that, though he does not know who allegedly stole and burned his vehicle, he believes he was the target of racial animosity. BLM of Jefferson County says of this incident, “The escalation continues,” though they don’t know what happened. A Go Fund Me campaign has attracted over $8,000 to help this man buy another vehicle. This is an active, unsolved case for which I am trying to obtain records. From what I can gather at this point, the question of whether a theft really occurred remains unanswered.
Jones read a statement by Paris Jade, a Black woman. She had three incidents to report. She said that in the first three to four months she moved here she was followed by the same officer “almost every day on my way home, and out and about and especially at night.”
This officer must have been working a double shift for 3-4 months, and not doing anything else but following Ms. Jade. One also must wonder how could she know it was the same officer behind her…at night?
She was never stopped, never arrested. She was never questioned. She never filed a complaint. But suddenly and without explanation it all stopped and she’s still here. She mentioned no other contacts with law enforcement in the past three years.
From my ride-alongs with police, I know they are in almost constant contact one way or another with a network of law enforcement resources. Officers and deputies can see on their computer where other units in service are and know generally what they are doing. I might be overstating that a bit, but officers are not free without explanation to follow a car for any signficant length of time, over and over, day and night, for more than 120 consecutive days. It might be possible that what Jade claims happened happened. It is highly improbable.
Her misperception, overreaction, whatever you want to call it, to the two other incidents she brings up undermine her crediblity on this claim of being followed almost every day and “especially at night” for up to four months. In the first, she saw someone wearing a MAGA hat and, in the second, she saw another person wearing traditional clothes of a culture not their own. This is being exposed to racism, she claims.
If this is all the “racism” she has experienced in PT in more than three years of living here, it is a pretty solid acquittal of our community.
Though other panelists poured out subjective feelings and spouted political theory, including calling for the destruction of capitalism and insisting that “the people” can police themselves (good luck with those midnight domestic violence calls, robberies, burglaries, car chases, rapes, agg assaults, and murders), they cited not a single instance of racially prejudiced police misconduct.
At the end of the discussion, Port Townsend Mayor Michele Sandoval weighed in. She had powerful evidence of racism to offer. Here it is: she lost by 150 votes when she ran for county commissioner twenty some years ago. She emoted for several minutes, but never mentioned a single instance of racism by police or another member of a community that has kept her in office as Mayor or City Councilor for the past two decades. (Was the fact she was not elected unanimously in each of those elections evidence of racism? Is it racism if someone simply disagrees with her?)
Sandoval ended in tears and the broadcast was promptly wrapped up. Listeners were left at a loss to understand what she was crying about because in all the time given her she did not describe a single experience where someone hurt or discriminated against her or anyone else because of race or ethnicity–except maybe those 150 people twenty years ago who voted for someone else.
One could say that this was an unproductive waste of time and a cynical attempt by some to widen racial divisions with rumor and innuendo. But it did show that we don’t have a racism problem with law enforcement in this community. On the other hand, we do have a problem with people who desperately want to believe they are surrounded by racism when they are not.
Former Port Townsend Free Press contributor Scott Hogenson has an article in the August 2, 2020 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Scott and his family have moved to Texas. But he and his wife received ballots inviting them to vote in the August 4 primary election—in Jefferson County, Washington.
The WSJ story is paywall protected (sorry) at this link.
The Hogensons lived on Mats Mats Bay until late spring this year when they moved to Texas. As he points out, the fact they received Jefferson County ballots raises the question of how many nonresidents are voting in Washington state and local elections. The Hogensons won’t be among them. They know that would be fraud.
The article explores the problems with vote by mail. Hogenson writes, “Even if every bureaucrat and election volunteer involved in every part of the process of vote by mail was honest and efficient, it is still fraught with problems. In my case, I don’t suspect any sort of malfeasance on the part of election officials. It takes time to purge voter rolls and it’s entirely reasonable for this to not happen in the month between my moving away from Washington state and receiving my ballot in Texas.”
Two votes here, two votes there, two more over yonder. They could be enough to decide an election, for example the recent neck-and-neck Hospital Commission and PUD races.
The featured photo for this story is a shot of the envelope delivered to Hogenson’s house.
In an email to The Port Townsend Free Press, Hogenson writes: “I did not mention this issue [in the WSJ article] but a look at the envelope shows that it is labeled ‘Address Service Requested.’ Because this is an election ballot with a number of federal, state and local issues, shouldn’t the envelope be labeled, ‘Change Service Requested,’ or ‘Return Service Requested’ so the ballot is returned to the sender instead of being sent to an ineligible voter?”
The point of his questions is that when the Jefferson County Auditor’s staff sent the ballot with “Address Service Requested,” it gets forwarded, in this case to an illegible voter. If Jefferson County election officials had instead requested “Change Service Requested and “Return Service Requested,” the ballots would have been returned to sender and not delivered in Texas. But because county election officials sent this and presumably other ballots out with the “Address Service Requested” instruction people no longer living in Jefferson County can vote in county elections.
From the USPS website:
Address Service Requested provides forwarding and address correction services when possible. If the mail is undeliverable and not forwardable, it is returned to the sender with the reason identified on the mailpiece.
Change Service Requested provides address correction services without forwarding or return. If undeliverable, either the new address or the reason it is undeliverable is provided to the sender.
Return Service Requested provides address correction services and always returns the piece.
At this time, while our public records request has not received a complete response, it is unknown exactly how many law enforcement officers and vehicles were provided in response to the request of BLM Jeffco for an officer escort. Photos of the event published in local newspapers and on social media show law enforcement officers at the front and along the route–as BLM Jeffco had requested.
