The photo above shows the skeletal remains of a streatery tent in front of Alchemy Steak & Seafood (aka Alchemy Bistro and Wine Bar), where according to their website “A New Culinary Adventure Begins.” The photograph accompanied an email to the Port Townsend City Council from Harvey Windle on November 25th.
Windle is not the only one raising concerns about the shredded — and on closer inspection, mold-ridden — structure, he is just the most vocal among neighboring businesses. Numerous people had commented to us about the trashed and unused eyesore fronting prime real estate, a blight in our historic downtown.
This filthy and tattered mess is the legacy of a policy that, despite near-unanimous opposition from business owners and residents alike, continues to scar Port Townsend’s commercial landscape.
The Road Getting Here
To help out restaurant owners during the pandemic — while assuring the rest of the business community that it would only be a temporary measure — the city created an emergency program allowing outdoor dining to be set up in parking spaces edging downtown and uptown commercial streets. As the emergency wound down, prior to any public process, it was announced that an ordinance to make the program permanent was in the works.
The public backlash over this bait-and-switch was immediate and intense. Over the months we covered this controversy (see our extensive coverage below), it became clear that both staff who had developed the policy and a majority of the council were loathe to give up their pet project: tables and tents sitting in high-traffic streets, with vehicles driving next to them and diners breathing in exhaust fumes, for the stated purpose of adding “vitality” to shopping areas. Statements from our mayor and other city councilors revealed that the intended permanent streateries program was driven by an agenda inching towards eliminating vehicles from our commercial districts.
Unable to ignore the overwhelming resistance from downtown businesses to a scheme that offered a giveaway of precious public parking spaces for the benefit of a few select restaurateurs, the City Council grudgingly rejected establishing permanent streateries downtown in May of this year. But despite an unambiguous public directive to remove what residents had begun calling gutter dining — and get rid of it now — our electeds nonetheless unanimously approved extending the downtown streateries for nearly eight months, until the end of 2022.
As we reported, public sentiment couldn’t have been clearer. Over the course of several meetings, hours of public testimony amassed. All of it was in opposition except one notable proponent: restaurateur Kris Nelson.
Nelson, whose streatery at The Old Whiskey Mill was benefitting from usurping not only all the parking in front of her restaurant on Water Street, but obstructing the frontage of Quimper Sound and another adjacent business, explained that she had a vision to create a “special and magical” space. And despite fellow business owners’ objections, including a letter to the city from Quimper Sound’s owner upset over harm the tent blocking his storefront was causing his business, Nelson maintained that she knew what was best to improve downtown. Every other public commenter at the city council meetings and all but a single two-sentence note (“Hooray for the streeteries”) among many dozens of sometimes deeply-researched and often passionate letters submitted to council opposed the scheme.
But public be damned. Initially Libby Wennstrom tried to persuade fellow councilors that, like Nelson, she possessed insight — that the community at large lacked — into what was best for this town. Her former hometown of Ithaca, New York had eliminated street parking in three blocks of a shopping district despite a similar outcry fifty years ago, she said, and it turned out to be a rousing success. There had been “huge screaming from all the surrounding businesses” with similar objections to those “we’ve heard here tonight… but in that case it didn’t pan out,” she asserted. A Free Press contributor then discovered that three parking garages had been developed to offset those losses, one garage for each lost block of street parking.
When that misdirect was revealed, Wennstrom asked with exasperation, “Can’t we just try something different?” And countering criticism from many business owners that a giveaway of public parking space for the benefit of select restaurants was unfair, she then proposed a free-for-all lottery: allow ALL businesses who wanted to put their wares in the streets to participate. As it turned out, it wasn’t so much about creating streateries, it was about eliminating vehicles in our commercial cores.
At another meeting Wennstrom resorted to an emotional plea for her elderly mother. If immediate removal of the five existing streateries were to be enacted per public request, she complained, “We are essentially telling residents and visitors that you are not welcome to eat in Port Townsend. As someone with an 82-year-old mother, I’m disappointed because I was hoping this summer she’d be allowed to eat outside.”
The absurdity of these five sites being the salvation for people still afraid of dining indoors was belied by a list from one citizen who had catalogued all the outdoor dining options in Port Townsend — al fresco settings that were not in the city streets, did not encroach on other businesses, and did not eliminate parking spaces. There were already more than forty such places, including sidewalk tables at The Old Whiskey Mill. The few streateries that did eliminate parking to the detriment of surrounding businesses that Wennstrom and her colleagues appeared so anxious to preserve were irrelevant in providing outdoor dining given the dozens of options already existing.
When a motion from Ben Thomas to table the policy nearly found purchase at one meeting, the distress from Aislinn Diamenti was palpable. Thomas walked back the motion, causing Wennstrom to lean over to Diamenti with comforting words: “The bad thing didn’t happen,” she said.
At the final meeting on May 16 council was tasked to approve an ordinance bundling an extension of downtown streatery use until 2023 with a program to allow permanent streateries in uptown and other business districts. Again public feedback was entirely negative.
Mayor David Faber had earlier pressured his fellow councillors to move forward with the program because “it’s frustrating when… we task staff with something and then we pull back.” Before the final vote, the mix of statements from councilors revealed the pressure they felt to affirm all of staff’s hard work, as well as their misgivings about faulty public process and concerns over future problems that an extension would cause.
Deputy Mayor Amy Howard stressed she supported a long-term streatery plan, but registered opposition to the extension of the temporary use permits. She didn’t want to “leave the ugly tents up longer.” She was surprised to learn that the decision to extend had already been made at the previous meeting. Generally when staff is directed to prepare legislation for approval at the next meeting, revisions can still be made before a vote. The date for the extension was in the ordinance. Couldn’t that be changed?, Howard asked. No, it was too late, she was told: “the temporary use permit was already extended.”
Howard’s frustration was echoed by Ben Thomas:
“We end up with a pretty imperfect position right now. We wouldn’t have created this particular thing from scratch, I don’t think. It feels kinda weird to be charging forward with this… [but] we’ve already done all this work…”
In his final statement before the vote, Faber explained why — contrary to public sentiment — he thought public parking should be given away for street dining, but sidewalk cafes should not be encouraged. He summarized his underlying ideology with this word salad:
“Preferring to use sidewalk space for other use than a right-of-way instead of a parking space is prioritizing disrupting the flow of pedestrian traffic in favor of allowing the storage of personal property on the street. It’s a car-centric model that I don’t think makes much sense.”
“December is gonna be here before we know it,” councilor Monica MickHager said cheerfully just before making the motion which passed unanimously.
After joining in the vote to approve the ordinance, Thomas later said he didn’t realize the vote had included the permanent policy. The confusion among council members about what had transpired and where they’d ended up was striking.
Chickens Come Home to Roost
Why was the extension for the downtown streateries such a big deal?
Among the many objections citizens brought to council last spring was degrading aesthetics. Even then, the existing installations were raising significant concerns about being a visual blight. Uptown and downtown commercial areas are, after all, on the National Historic Register, our picturesque Victorian seaport the bread and butter of Port Townsend’s appeal.
Which brings us back to Alchemy.
Along with Amy Howard repeatedly voicing her worry that the “ugly tents” would sour the public on future support of streateries, Monica MickHager noted the even-then-tatty Alchemy tent was not being used. She asked for confirmation that if a streatery had been abandoned for 60 days, the city could ask for removal. At that point, according to neighboring businesses, Alchemy’s street tent had been mostly abandoned for five months.
Public Works Director Steve King answered her: “I’ve already contacted the new owner of the Alchemy and he’s gonna re-apply.” Whatever that meant. Nobody asked further questions.
In Faber’s comments prior to the vote, he agreed that “the other major concern I heard repeatedly is that they [current streateries] were dilapidated.” He, too, noted the “unsightly weathering” of the Alchemy tent, saying the ordinance they were passing with “this code does not allow that level of dilapidation to even exist in the streateries.”
The discussion about dilapidation, “unsightly weathering” and abandonment took place seven months ago regarding the Alchemy tent. At that time it looked like this:
That is what council members called dilapidated last spring. A tacky assembly detracting from a handsome downtown building. But at least it was intact. Here is what it looks like now:
Black mold grows on what remaining material hasn’t been wrecked by the elements. Does the Health Department consider it safe to eat in this environment?
This frankly disgusting ruin has removed 3-5 parking spaces from service for more than a year now in a downtown plagued by parking shortages. It has created bad blood between one business and many others.
In his November 25 letter to the city, Harvey Windle, just down the block from Alchemy, wrote:
“A neighboring business my manager spoke with is very irate over the Alchemy tent as most all who see it are. The pissed off neighboring business folk park all day in public space damaging all business access as so many do. Seems they only see what they want to as does the Council of Shame.
They spoke to Mari Mullen of City controlled Main Street Association that assisted in tweaking negative public input. She said something to the effect that it was allowed until January, and that would be here before you know it. Sounds like what Monica MickHager said when community input pushed back against the special interest parking losses…
I did have black spray paint in hand at one point and was going to call the police and notify them I was going to tag the structure with warnings about the toxic mold. I chose this course instead.”
This structure sits right at the entry to one of our most photographed city landmarks, Haller Fountain Plaza, a stone’s throw from the iconic fountain, the historic stairs to Uptown, and the site of the annual Christmas Treelighting Celebration. This photo is from Port Townsend Main Street Program’s “Holidays in Port Townsend” page on their website, announcing this year’s tree lighting on December 3rd.
The scene below, in the process of being festooned in Christmas finery on November 30, shows the proximity of the Alchemy tent to the fountain (just left of the pole):
Alchemy’s building flanks the fountain plaza. City Hall is just down Washington Street, three blocks east.
Again, from Main Street’s website for this year’s tree lighting, here is their photo featuring the entrance to Alchemy during the holiday season:
Here, this year, is the reality:
Larger Questions Loom
What happened to the 60-day rule that MickHager asked about that the city was supposed to enforce? Why no enforcement action for seven months? The unacceptable state of Alchemy’s tent had already been roundly noted before the May vote to extend the downtown streateries. How could the city then turn a blind eye?
On November 28, I emailed city Public Works Director Steve King that we were publishing an update on the streateries story and asked him what was going on:
“Why hasn’t the city required removal of this downtown eyesore which has been unused for the better part of a year, continues to degrade, and eliminates valuable parking spaces?”
King responded:
“I’ve reached out several times to Alchemy asking their intent for removal. I haven’t heard back. All streateries are to be removed by the end of the year. We plan on issuing a reminder notice.”
That any business would show this level of disregard for its neighbors is alarming. But most disturbing is why the city is not able to take decisive action given the concerns City Council expressed back in May about disallowing this kind of degradation. How can a business owner repeatedly ignoring inquiries be allowed continuance of this level of violation?
Where is our Historic Preservation Committee?
How is Main Street — the organization’s purpose being “Enhancing the Historic Districts,” “committed to protecting our small town charm” — able to ignore this? Their enthusiastic tree-lighting promotion tells us that on December 3rd:
“Santa is coming to town!… At 4:30pm, Santa will leave the Flagship Landing area on the Kiwanis Choo Choo and head over to the Haller Fountain to light the Community Tree.”
Perhaps it will be dark enough that no one will notice the alchemy brewing in plain sight. Or just crop the scene tightly and maybe it will disappear…
———————————
All photos of the Alchemy tent in its current condition taken during the lunch hour by Harvey Windle on Nov. 27 and Nov. 30, 2022.
A future article will cover the other streateries remaining since the extension was granted (including additional questions posed to Steve King and his responses).
We took on relaunching the Free Press in 2021 with a commitment to creating a space for uncensored conversation, discourse that other local media does not permit. Throughout that time, readers have asked, Do you have a Letters to the Editor section? We didn’t.
And because we require comments under articles to be “on topic”, we found that readers who want to speak to other important issues, events and concerns that our small crew can’t cover don’t have a place for that. We couldn’t accommodate readers who wanted to bring up other topics, post news flashes, announce community events, or express concerns outside of the selected subjects we write about.
In the spirit of offering Letters to the Editor as a traditional platform for lively, wide-ranging conversations in the public square, we invite you to write about whatever is on your mind. As with our issue-specific articles — and unlike print media — this online format supports feedback, exchanges and debate.
How this will work:
For example, if there hadn’t been an article it related to, this post under a recent story would have been an excellent Letter to the Editor, generating its own comments. It would likely have been censored by local newspapers and deleted on NextDoor.
Submit your letter in the white box below CommentGuidelines at the bottom of the page containing the muted prompt “Enter your comment here…” Either provide your own title to the letter as a top line or we will title it for you.
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Jefferson County PUD leadership, including the General Manager, legal counsel and two-thirds of the elected commissioners (the Fab Four) have not gone so far as The Atlantic‘s Prof. Emily Oster in asking for “pandemic amnesty,” but they share her interest in ignoring a dark and still-open chapter from our Public Utility District’s recent history — just moving on, turning the page — pretending their mandate was not the crime that it was. And still is.
At the November 1st PUD meeting, GM Kevin Streett dropped this lame stratagem at the very end of his manager’s report:
“Well, on our vaccination policy, we have come to agreement with the Laborers Union. We’re moving forward with non reps [non-represented employees] and contractors. I did talk to the IBEW late yesterday, and again this morning. We feel there is a pathway forward for us, so I will keep the board informed. But per the Governor’s resolution, that took some of what he had imposed, [it] went away. As of tomorrow, we will slowly be moving in a little bit different direction with our vaccination policy. And with that, we’re done.”
“A pathway forward.” Moving “slowly,” in a “little bit different direction.” Weasel words for a weaselly policy shift. You’d think he was negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine. No, simply reversing a year-long wrong-headed and deleterious decree.
Commissioners Jeff Randall and Ken Collins, General Manager Kevin Streett
My public comment followed immediately after.
“Good afternoon, Commissioners. Thank you. Ken. I hope that you’ve heard about the case in New York, where the court lifted the mandates for New York City employees. They have to have back pay, they get their jobs back, and the mandate was called arbitrary and capricious because of how they treated people differently, and other details. But the PUD has violated all the same things, and it is just, it’s beyond unconscionable that you’ve dragged your feet like this. The only PUD — twenty-six other PUDs did not do this. You did not need to do this, and you still manage to drag it out for a year. It is just unconscionable.
I don’t know — if this doesn’t make you feel ashamed, I don’t know what would. We knew a year ago that these products did not prevent transmission and infection. I will read to you from the Free Press article that went out last December, where Kurt Anderson is reminding you…”
I proceeded to read a paragraph from the Free Press Dec. 23rd, 2021 article wherein this courageous soon-to-be-fired lineman addressed the absurdity of the mandate. Counter-factual discrimination was the rule:
“One only has to look to the PUD roster to see this truth, after being fully vaccinated a PUD employee contracted covid. The fully vaccinated coworkers of this individual were allowed to continue working regular and overtime hours, the unvaccinated coworkers were sent home on unpaid time off for 10 days quarantine with the requirement to complete a covid test as directed by the county health department, option to use PTO [paid time off] allowed. Some online training classes were set up to help offset the unpaid time off.”
I returned to my own comment:
“These are exactly the sorts of things that were in that lawsuit in New York. And, frankly, you really deserve to be sued for this. It was so unjust, and the fact that the rest of the PUDs did not do that simply exposes you… it’s mendacious, is what it is.”
At that point, just over two minutes into my comment, board chair Ken Collins abruptly stopped me with “thank you for your comment,” moving on to ask if anyone else had a comment. My audio still on, I responded “You’re not supposed to cut off the commenters, Commissioner…” I had intended to say more, but lost my train of thought with his autocratic interruption.
Arbitrary and Capricious
The New York Superior Court October 24th ruling laid the case bare, concluding that the mandate was “arbitrary and capricious” on numerous counts [see p. 13]. Here is an excerpt:
The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health; it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued… we shouldn’t be penalizing people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down. If it was about safety and public health, no one would be exempt. It’s time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just… The terminated Petitioners are hereby reinstated to their full employment status, effective October 25, 2022, at 6:00AM.
And so should be the case with fired PUD employees (reinstate full employment with back pay) and with contractors. The National Law Review provided a Covid-19 litigation update in this Oct. 21st report, showing that legal efforts seeking redress for these injustices are nowhere near over:
Of late, the greatest source of new cases challenge the steps taken to stem the COVID-19 tide, in the form of vaccine mandates. The number of such lawsuits has surpassed 1,200. Many of these complaints opposed governmental mandates at all levels, Biden Administration efforts to implement mandatory vaccinations upon large swaths of the U.S. workforce often being the targets. Overall, however, approximately 70 percent of these lawsuits have been filed against individual employers that have adopted policies requiring vaccination as a condition of employment.
PUD Dishonest from the Outset in Union Contracts
For months now I’ve been Zooming in to PUD meetings to inquire about the timeline for dropping the bogus mandate. I was initially ignored, then GM Streett began blaming the holdup on the unions. A public records request did not confirm that to be true, but revealed that the IBEW business representative, Jonathan Finch, perceived the mandates to be an obstacle to enticing new hires in this communication with the PUD HR manager on July 22, 2022:
“Additionally, your team approached this office with a desire to roll back the vaccination mandate for work on the property. I have some ideas of what that might look like and would like to have further discussions. This too may have an impact on recruitment.”
The Zoom meeting where the incentives and jab mandates were covered happened on August 8th. The Open Records Act didn’t require recording of that internal meeting, so we are not privy to what happened there. We are also not privy to Finch’s singling out “work on the property” in the mandate “roll back.” What does this mean for those who work in the field? I also recently learned that legal counsel Paisner’s communications are not subject to the Open Records Act because he is not a PUD employee, he’s a consultant. Have strings been pulled behind the scenes since July to maintain the mandate proponents’ position until the clock runs out on Dec. 31st?
The preamble of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Laborers and International Brotherhood (IBEW) Unions presents the foundational lie:
“…The [Governor’s 21-14-COVID Vaccination Requirement] Proclamation prohibits state agencies from permitting contractors who engage in work for the agency if the personnel performing the contract (including subcontractor personnel) have not been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as set forth in the Proclamation. Jefferson County PUD has a contract with WSDOT and, as part of the performance of that contract our personnel are subject to the vaccination requirements set forth in the Proclamation.”
Fact Check: Misinformation!
Jefferson County was the only PUD out of 27 in Washington State to choose this route. The other 26 followed the Washington PUD Association’s (WAPUDA) guidance issued after consultation with the WSDOT, exempting PUD’s from the vax requirement. The drive to impose a mandate came from GM Streett, counsel Joel Paisner and Commissioners Collins and Randall.
Legal Counsel Joel Paisner – shielded from Public Records Requests?
The IBEW and Laborers’ Unions represent thousands of utility workers in Washington. JPUD employees appear to be the only ones in the state restricted by a mandate that was signed into effect on October 25th, 2021, strangely set to expire at the end of 2022. Why this artificial deadline so far out, when breakthrough infections were already occurring? Why is the Union official so tentative in his language, nearly as cautious as Streett, about dropping the mandate when the MOU says it can be ended at any time by mutual agreement?
Emergency Orders and No-Bid Contracts
There is suspicion that the molasses pace of rescinding the jab mandate has more to do with the bidding process than protecting public health. As we reported in February, the winter storm at the end of 2021 opened the door for a Declaration of Emergency, which opened the door for no-bid contracts. Miraculously, the outcome coincided with the Fab Four’s strident wish for a “fully vaccinated” PUD. The whole process was suspect. Our dock crew — the back-up electrical line crews that smaller PUDs rely on to get through emergencies like the one we just experienced — was FB Titan. They were essentially fired by the new JPUD policy, explained in our coverage at the time:
Streett said Titan left because of the mandates and “vaccinated crews were tough to come by.” He claimed that there were some locally, but they were busy. He admitted that Palouse “is a bit more expensive.” Commissioners Dan Toepper and Jeff Randall inquired further about bidding, with the latter asking if there will be a bid process. Streett replied, “For the next while Palouse will be our contractor… We’ve gone through our [RCW] obligations, it was difficult” referring to the challenge of finding vaxxed crews.
Yes indeedy, Palouse is a bit more expensive than Titan. Roughly 100%, at last tally. I won’t be expecting an honest accounting from our PUD any time soon. Maybe ever. Then there’s the added expense to the customer/owners, aka ratepayers, of now needing hiring incentives like moving and housing expenses and guaranteed overtime.
The PUD will cry foul, and say that recruitment has been difficult for most utilities for years. Exactly. That’s probably why all the other PUDs, and the investor-owned utilities too, decided that a jab mandate was a terrible idea.
Did the delay in rescinding it have anything to do with state bidding requirements or retaining Palouse through next year?
They can’t say they weren’t warned.
Free Press editor Ana Wolpin’s coverage of the PUD’s October 4, 2021 meeting detailed employee and customer-owners’ realistic concerns. She reiterated what she had already put in writing to the board:
1) Given the well-documented viral spread by those fully vaccinated for Covid, why are the unvaxxed being singled out as potential health threats? On its face, these mandates are simply a way to stigmatize those who are refusing experimental shots. There is a growing body of evidence that the mandates are political, not valid health measures.
2) Our PUD cannot afford to lose more staff. Attracting qualified employees has been a challenge for Jefferson PUD without this added restriction. Loss of staff if a mandate were to be enacted could potentially cripple our utility’s ability to function.
After absorbing what took place at that same meeting, I wrote to the commissioners and GM on Oct. 7th, 2021 with my observations:
Gentlemen:
I listened to the recording from Monday night’s meeting. I wish to raise a few concerns.
Jeff — to suggest that “debate” in the chat box is somehow problematic for a Public Utility District indicates contempt for democracy and the first amendment. You basically said “we gave you your three minutes (which we are not obligated to respond to), shut up and move along now. We’ll take it from here.”
Some of us are not willing to move along now. The chat box is one of the few remaining community forums that we have a paid right to access. Our voices are censored from local media, and now it seems you would like them confined to three easily-ignorable minutes per agency. Perhaps you would like them removed from the public square entirely.
Most of us in this small town do know someone who works in the JH hospital system. I’m hearing a different story than “the hospitals are full of unvaccinated covid patients.” I’ve heard that half of the covid patients are at least partially jabbed. I hear that JH is internally in chaos.
Hospital administrators bear great responsibility for this meltdown. Twelve-hour shifts, requirements for cross-training, unpopular managers and mandated jabs have all contributed to staffing issues you readily blame on the unvaccinated. Shrinking staff results in shrinking beds. Our hospital is not “full.” It is understaffed, and according to many who have or continue to work there, poorly run.
Ken — your intimation that those of us who listen to the many renowned scientific/medical experts (now censored) who have no ties to industry/NGOs, or the agencies that lubricate their influence, are plagued by confirmation bias is patently offensive. That suggests you feel you are above confirmation bias. Please…
Local electeds’ continual alluding to resisters as partisan is pure projection. A lifelong independent voter, my party activism consists solely of caucusing for Dennis Kucinich. I’ve wanted nothing to do with aligning with either of the majority parties, which I view as toxic wastelands.
I don’t imagine that the unions or either of you would be in favor of these mandate policies if they came from Trump, or if our governor was a Republican. I recall the video of Kamala Harris stating defiantly that she absolutely would not take a vaccine that Trump mandated. Now the administration she is part of is simply playing through with the same Operation Warp Speed conceived during Trump’s admin. The Dems, including the rank and file, are blindly unaware of their own unbridled political partisanship.
The jabs are not preventing transmission or infection. Their purported benefits are grossly exaggerated while the serious risks are minimized. Many whistleblowers are saying the hospitals are not full of unvaccinated people, rather people who have had one or two jabs. They’re threatened with their jobs for speaking out about it.
If these mandates were truly necessary for population-wide public health, there would be no exemptions for anyone, including congress, the “vaccine” makers, USPS and all the rest of the uber-menchen I sent along earlier.
This is not about public health. If you don’t have the time or desire to dig deeper than NIH, CDC and FDA special interest-conflicted Newspeak and do your own research, don’t condemn those of us who make it a priority.
Annette Huenke
District 1
Commissioner Collins replied less than 2 hours later:
Annette,
There is absolutely no point in trying to have a dialogue with you on vaccine mandates.
Kindly do not copy me on future emails as you will not get a response.
Sincerely,
Ken Collins
Commissioner Collins’ rejection of dialogue around “vaccine” mandates a year ago persists today, as revealed in his cutting me off mid-comment at the November 1st meeting. All too common in government today, he views himself above having to defend his position.
I saw him walking across the street in downtown PT a couple of weeks ago on a nice fall afternoon, wearing one of those blue polyester masks that don’t prevent viral or bacterial spread, but do shed microplastics when you breathe. Not a soul anywhere near him.
It appears that our rights end where his fear begins.
The approach to Port Townsend’s gateway runs past the city’s Fentanyl Forest, where addicts survive night to night, fix to fix, saying they have no drug problems unless they don’t have enough to stay high. This is where campers rousted from Kah Tai Park go.
Those kicked out of the county’s Caswell-Brown encampment on Mill Road find refuge there. Colonies of addicts have been living in the dark woods for years, rotating in and out of campsites cleared in the forest, piling up unimaginable heaps of trash and debris.
There are always newcomers, more broken people finding their way into the woods and occupying an abandoned tent or making a new spot for themselves among the thorns and bracken. Fentanyl, those inexpensive, deadly blue pills mass manufactured in Mexico and China, now matches or surpasses the popularity of methamphetamine, the long-running scourge of our community. Heroin has dropped pretty much out of sight.
At least with addicts inhaling the fumes of burning Fentanyl off tin foil instead of injecting heroin there are fewer needles littering the ground. But don’t forget alcohol. There are still plenty of liquor bottles and beer cans around most campsites.
What about the county’s $2 million Caswell-Brown camp set up for the homeless?
Jefferson County’s Caswell-Brown homeless shelter marks the entry to the Fentanyl Forest. It houses fewer than twenty people remaining from those relocated from the chaotic, tragic Fairgrounds camp. Managed under long-term contract by OlyCap, the camp is a gated community in the Fentanyl Forest, but still part of its surroundings.
OlyCap’s Executive Director Cherish Cronmiller maintains that Caswell-Brown hosts 17-23 residents. In April 2022, Kathy Morgan, OlyCap’s Director of Housing and Community Development, told the County Commissioners they were hosting 19 adults and one child.
According to information from the Jefferson County Sheriff Office obtained through a public records request, since April, OlyCap has trespassed — ejected from the camp — at least eight of the residents. If so, only a dozen people may currently be living there.
Reports from the Sheriff’s office and my interviews with former residents reveal that the camp experiences drug use and trafficking on a significant scale. One resident told us that 60% of the residents in the Caswell-Brown camp continue to use drugs. As for dealing in order to pay for drug use, he said, “Everyone has their own gig.”
Cronmiller told us she cannot deny that the campers are using. Abstinence or participation in a recovery program are not required as a condition of living there.
Quite a few of the tents and RVs at the Caswell-Brown camp are empty. Cronmiller told the Free Press that OlyCap is allowed to admit only those people who previously lived in the cleared out Fairgrounds camp. That explains why it has been turning away people despite being less than half full.
This makes no sense to the people in the woods who had hoped for a safe place to set up a tent. It makes no sense, period, but that is how the County Commissioners wrote their order establishing the camp as an emergency shelter.
The Fentanyl Forest stretches south to Mill Road where the multimillion-dollar Caswell-Brown camp is situated, west and north to Sims Way, and east to where Larry Scott Trail reaches the water.
2022 Google map aerial view of large wooded tract north of the mill. Dense tree cover camouflages the sprawling encampments scattered throughout the woods comprising the Fentanyl Forest.
It encompasses the city’s newly acquired Evans Vista parcel and land belonging to the Port Townsend Paper Company (“the mill”), claims the trees around the field with the state Department of Social and Health Services building (DSHS), and ends behind Les Schwab and the other businesses on that side of Sims Way at the first roundabout.
Community angels help dozens in the forest.
I tagged along with crews of volunteers who deliver sandwiches, hot meals and fresh water, but mostly love and encouragement to the forest dwellers. The teams are led by Michael McCutcheon who has been conducting his outreach for over ten years, including four years when he worked for Olympic Peninsula Health Services.
Those helping included an entire family with young children and a man just out of prison. A Marine vet who has overcome alcohol abuse and a woman who recently, tragically lost a child, were also among the volunteers.
McCutcheon knows something about addiction, desperation, withdrawal and recovery. He lost a large construction company — twice — and two wives to 38 years of opiate disorder. He recovered his life, he says, when he gave it to Jesus Christ. With invaluable support from the Food Bank, helping others find their pathway to freedom is what he does now, all the time, seven days a week, 24/7.
The photos I took on those outings tell more than I can convey in words. I have not photographed the inhabitants of the forest out of respect for them. None could be said to be at their best. As telling as the photos are, they don’t impart the sense of surrender and despair, the stench of feces and rotting food, of mildew and mold on everything.
Dishing out love and enchilada casserole
For each outing, the teams prepared food for forty people, the approximate population in the woods around the large grassy field to the east of the roundabout at the city’s entrance. This day’s meal was enchilada casserole. The week before it had been pastrami, ham and roast beef sandwiches. There’s always a side dish or salad, and always homemade cookies. The teams also distribute gallon jugs of water. McCutcheon started doing that after encountering a woman trying to wash her face with alcohol wipes.
Arriving at the field we parked by large cement blocks where the blacktop ended. The spot serves as a trailhead into the undergrowth. There we encountered a man who looked to be in his twenties, groggy and stumbling out of the bushes. He was soaked through after spending the night unconscious outdoors, oblivious to the rain. He gratefully accepted breakfast and McCutcheon asked his clothing sizes so he could return with something dry for the young man to wear.
Temporary home of former business owner.
The week before, we had encountered a man in a hole scooped out of a hillock at the edge of the forest. He shouted paranoid stuff at us when we asked if he needed water. McCutcheon and others in the team knew him. He had run a profitable pot shop but had been taken down by Fentanyl. He was gone a week later. All that was left was a kind of open grave.
Immediately behind the hillock is a derelict RV engulfed by blackberry bushes and mounds of refuse. It reeks of gasoline and solvents. On the first outing we pushed through branches arranged to create a barricade intended to keep out police. We learned that one of the young men in the trailer had OD’d the night before. He’d been saved when his roommate administered Narcan, a medication used to treat opioid overdoses. McCutcheon distributes Narcan and ensures that the camps remain stocked. It is needed far too often.
Four people live in the RV under the tarp.
On our second visit there were three men and a woman in the RV. One of the men had previously lived at the Mill Road Caswell-Brown camp. They were all using Fentanyl and meth. McCutcheon says that everyone out there who uses Fentanyl also uses meth, but not necessarily the other way around. We left water for them.
Several trails lead from here into the woods. Take any fork and you will almost certainly come across an inhabited camp and piles and piles of trash accumulated by current and past residents. How much of the stuff was stolen is hard to say.
There are appliances, welding equipment, expensive tools, rusted knives and axes, upholstered furniture and strollers, shopping carts, makeshift kitchens, small mountains of rotting clothing and bedding. Solar-powered lights and candelabra are nailed to trees along the pathways. There are hundreds of abandoned bicycles in the woods and thousands of bicycle parts.
Levi DuPuy, maintenance manager for the Port Townsend Paper Company says it costs the mill $8,000 to $10,000 to clean up each small to medium size camp. “As soon as we get a spot cleaned up, they’re back two weeks later,” according to DuPuy.
It is very, very grim, a human dumping ground for a county that pretends it doesn’t have a desperate addiction crisis with all its consequences: mental illness, environmental and health hazards, crime, violence and suicide.
But there are rare slivers of light.
We encountered a well-dressed woman walking a trail that would take her deeper into the woods. She had come to visit a friend living in a tent.
“Hi, Michael,” she said. Her eyes sparkled. Her clothes were color-coordinated from the stars on her Converse high tops to the scarf knotted at her neck.
She was the woman who had inspired McCutcheon to add jugs of water to his outreach. I recognized her from the Fairgrounds encampment. I had seen her pass out and crumple onto a muddy road. In the past year she had moved to Caswell-Brown, been trespassed from there, then found her “bottom” in a miserable existence in the woods.
Law enforcement intervened somehow and it turned her life around. She cried out for help and received the care and medications needed for her dual diagnosis of addiction and mental illness. She quoted the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous to McCutcheon and said, “You helped me a lot.”
“You look beautiful,” I told her. “Everyone says that now,” she replied. “Because it’s true,” McCutcheon and I said in unison. He was beaming with joy.
Pictures tell the rest of the story.
The following photos are but a small sampling of what’s under those trees. The featured photo (at the top of this article) shows a sprawling tent complex on city property. It is far too large to capture in one shot. The photo was taken in the approximate center of the complex, with debris and trash in every direction.
People in the photos below are all volunteers, part of the crew bringing food and supplies – not those who are dwelling in the forest.
Typical trash pile, on city property.
Elaborate camp behind Les Schwab.
Soggy tent and trash.
Two people and an undernourished large dog live here.
Choking, sobbing woman given help here.
Trail on city property.
Shelter hidden in the bushes.
Camp on city property.
Trash from large abandoned camp on mill property.
Camp on private property north of state DSHS building.
Camp on city property.
Camp and trail on city property.
Camp deep in woods.
Blue tents seem to be most popular, perhaps donated by some organization?
Huge tent complex on city or mill property.
Small tent at edge of larger campsite.
Kitchen and pantry. Pressurized tanks.
Another large tent complex.
Well established campsite, surrounded by debris. Several people live here.
Dozens of butane cannisters.
Trash just outside tent in lower right of photo.
A glimpse inside a tent.
People living under trash.
Delivering water to RV trapped by years of overgrowth.
Part One of this series addressed our health officer’s disinformation about the CDC’s cover-up of alarming safety signals from their v-safe database. While v-safe was developed specifically for the Covid roll-out — a digital app designed for registered vax recipients to easily report their side effects after the shots — there is another vaccine reporting system also in place: VAERS.
VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, has been the CDC’s primary tool for monitoring vaccine safety since 1990. It was established soon after the U.S. Congress removed all liability from the vaccine industry for their products. A system mostly used by health professionals, it was the public’s way to report injuries and deaths from vaccines for 30 years (until v-safe arrived with the Covid-19 injections).
VAERS differs from v-safe in several important ways. VAERS reporting is far more complex and detailed — not a user-friendly app, but a lengthy undertaking that must be completed on-line or, for individuals daunted by the process, by phone with the help of CDC staff. It does not provide “near real time” reports as v-safe was designed to do.
But most significantly, VAERS is the system that captures deaths following vaccination. Since only a living person who got the shot submits feedback to v-safe, deaths after vaccination are not reported on that app.
Our final Halloween “Berry Dropping” takes a look at how VAERS not only has been providing evidence of damage from Covid-19 shots, but more importantly the unprecedented death count since this new mRNA technology first rolled out. And how Allison Berry (and the CDC) have misrepresented that data and tried to discredit VAERS reports submitted in an effort to deny vax injuries and deaths.
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BERRY blaming anti-vaxxers for scary VAERS evidence:
“Unfortunately VAERS,
which was created by the CDC as a safety monitoring system,
has been largely hijacked by anti-vaccine groups,
who have gone in and actually started inputting false claims
into the database and then pointing back to the false claims
that they just put into the database as proof
for the lack of safety of the vaccines.” (10-20-22 BOH meeting)
I’ve searched the Internet every way I can think of, and I couldn’t find any evidence of vaccine skeptics inputting false VAERS reports, much less the widescale conspiracy that Berry alleges. Here are some typical search results:
As can be seen from these results (and all others I’ve found), what’s alleged by anti-anti-vaxxers is that vaccine skeptics make false claims about the VAERS database, not that they input false claims into the VAERS database.
“There are groups that have started putting in false information into VAERS, and then going back around and saying, ‘I found it in a public database. See, you’re hiding it!’ And that’s a real thing that’s happening unfortunately by some members of the anti-vaccine contingent. And that is usually where that ‘data’, quote-unquote, is coming from.”
Contrary to Berry’s pipedream about vaccine skeptics blithely putting in false VAERS information, consider that everyone laboriously entering their personal documentation into VAERS gets warned by the CDC that “knowingly filing a false VAERS report is a violation of Federal law … punishable by fine and imprisonment.”
As one commentator observed, “It’s a federal crime to file a false VAERS report. VAERS verifies reports and vax-status including type/brand, date and location. You think ‘anti-vaxxers’ are getting vaxxes (they don’t want) so they can risk fed imprisonment by filing a false report?”
Cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, who has filled out many VAERS reports (including for death following the Covid vax), underscores the threat of legal action for falsifying information. And the process of filing is challenging, he says, even for a medical professional:
“It takes a lot of effort [to fill out a VAERS report], it takes about a half an hour filling out multiple forms… falsification of a form is punishable by imprisonment or federal fines, very serious. These deaths that the CDC is telling us are happening after the vaccine, I can tell you, are real.”
Moreover, now that an unhinged Department of Homeland Security is classifying vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories (like Berry’s?) as a “Terrorism Threat”, DHS would hardly treat lightly any bonafide disinformation war against the VAERS system such as Berry imagines — each false report a self-documented felony.
Unlike most conspiracy theories, Berry’s would be an easy one to prove and prosecute if true, especially since it targets a demonized “terrorist” group, and pharma-funded media would have a field day with such a story — but I haven’t heard of even one lone nut accused of trying to do this, much less any widescale campaign large enough to move the needle on the millions of VAERS reports.
“Contrary to claims that most of these reports are made by lay-people … or those with malign intent … and are hence clinically unreliable, we identified … 72% authored by health service employees.
“50% died in less than 48 hours after receiving their COVID-19 vaccination. This increases to 80% when we extend to the first week post-vaccination.
“All 250 people in this interim collection were reported as COVID-19 deaths. This means that all, even those who received one or more negative test results, are erroneously counted in the officially reported national COVID-19 death tally.
“The quantity and quality of data provided by the USA VAERS dataset is capable of supporting meaningful research.”
The Elephant in the Room vs. the Naked Emperor
Why in the world are Berry and her ilk so intent on cooking up absurd storylines to discredit and distract from the plain results coming out of the FDA & CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System? The latest picture revealed by OpenVAERS is worth a million wounds:
The elephant in the room is that:
Just 3 covid vaccines have accounted for 1,447,520 adverse event reports in less than 2 years, massively more than the 39,000 reports for all vaccines in a typical year, and 62% higher than the grand total of all other vaccines combined throughout VAERS’ 32-year history.
31,696 deaths reported in just 23 months from mRNA covid shots alone is more than triple the 9,655 deaths reported in 32 years from a combined list of 112 other vaccines.
There are 150-300 deaths reported to VAERS per year from all other vaccines combined; in 2021 alone, 21,382 death reports from just the covid shots were filed.
How can this be? Either:
This rise represents a terribly-concerning unexplained safety signal that must be investigated and understood before injection roll-out can ethically continue;
— OR —
Don’t believe your lying eyes, because: “anti-vaxxers”, “correlation doesn’t equal causation”, “trust the science”, “safe & effective”, and other propaganda non-sequiturs.
The Hippocratic Oath for physicians to “do no harm”, the Nuremburg Code, and the Precautionary Principle all dictate that barely-tested experimental interventions must be considered guilty of possible harms until proven innocent, and experiments on live subjects (currently 71% of the world’s population) may not proceed without resolving potentially-deadly safety signals.
Beyond its role as a signal, the 48-hour time-to-onset in half the VAERS reports is a strong indicator of causality, confirmed by the many cases of “worsening of a side effect following repeated doses within the same individual” found by Israeli Health Ministry study of its own vaccine safety data.
Berry pretends to know that the unprecedented rise in VAERS reports is due to fraud and overcounting, but given hospital disregard and disincentives, it is far more likely that VAERS deaths are being underreported by an estimated 40 times, which matches the underreporting factor found when recently-released v-safe data was compared with VAERS.
This VAERS alarm unfortunately aligns with chilling insurance company statistics revealing “there has been a 40% increase in death rates for 18- to 64-year-old individuals across the U.S., when comparing Q3 2021 data to pre-pandemic data from the same period in 2019 … that cannot be explained simply by covid infections themselves.”
In the face of all these signals and in full “see no evil” mode, Berry reported to the Board of Health on October 20 that:
“Severe side effects from these vaccines are incredibly incredibly rare, on the order of less than 10 per million doses delivered.”
Not “rare” nor even “incredibly rare”, Berry’s “incredibly incredibly rare” claim of near-zero severe effects is gaslighting the vaccine-injured by saying their experiences never happened, they are just making it up, and their million+ VAERS reports (72% by healthcare providers) were all fraudulent. Move along, nothing to see here.
There’s a great divide between Berry’s rose-colored world of 0.001% severe side effects versus the 33% actually found in the CDC v-safe data.
There’s a huge credibility gap between Berry telling County Commissioners on November 15, 2021 that “No one else has died from their COVID-19 vaccine. I believe it’s 11 nationwide” versus the 18,461 deaths underreported to VAERS at the time of her statement.
Her VAERS conspiracy fantasy is just a particularly telling example, since her other statements about masking, covid deaths, case testing, vaccine trials, safety, and efficacy have likewise been exposed as vacuous misinformation throughout this series and earlier PTFP articles.
Berry is not an authority to be trusted. Her emergency powers arose out of fear, but the outsized authority she claims over our county, along with the dangerous injections she pushes, are what’s really scary.
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“The words of this wizard stand on their heads… help means ruin, and saving means slaying, that is plain.”
— Gimli in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
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