by Ana Wolpin | May 14, 2022 | General
In a letter to the Port Townsend City Council on May 2, 2022, I wrote:
“There is apparently a vision to eliminate or at least reduce use of the ‘personal automobile’ in our commercial districts… Those of you and others you know who are sold on this vision of a vibrant, car-free shopping/dining/recreating community experience have idealized a concept. You’ve seen it work in Europe or three blocks in Ithaca (where I recently learned a parking garage was built for every block closed to traffic) or during a festival…
A concept is one thing, Port Townsend’s reality quite another.”
My letter was one in a packet of 59 pages of submitted written comments—all negative—about making streateries permanent. At the city council meeting on May 2, following in-person and livestream public comments that with one exception also unanimously opposed the proposal, the notion of codifying streateries long-term was almost tabled. (Thank you, Ben Thomas and other council members who initially supported that motion.)
However, as reported in the Free Press on May 5th, the motion to table the initiative was withdrawn. Instead, what some have taken to calling “gutter dining” was extended in the downtown commercial district until December 31st as an ongoing temporary measure. An ordinance to allow permanent streateries uptown and in other business districts was put off for revisiting at the following council meeting on May 16.
So now, despite all the public backlash — talking about how toxic it is to eat in the street amid waves of exhaust fumes, how ugly and unused the tents are, how significant the loss of parking is, and how there is no longer an emergency threatening to put restaurants out of business — these temporary downtown installations are slated to remain for almost eight more months. And an ordinance to permit streateries permanently in other commercial areas is still on the table.
Do a search for streateries online and here are the kinds of images that come up:
These are streateries in Cincinnati, Ohio… Stamford, Connecticut… Bethesda, Maryland… Georgetown, DC. They embody the buzzwords we hear so often about the movement to eliminate personal vehicles in urban areas: friendly, walkable, bikeable, vibrant. What do these welcoming images all have in common? Shirtsleeve weather, roads closed off, no traffic.
What is the reality in Port Townsend? Weather is just one challenge. Safety is another. Not only has the long-lamented parking problem not been addressed for almost two decades, none of the kind of planning needed to reorient traffic patterns to make this kind of streetscape safe is in process. There is a complex set of factors that need to be considered.
But in service to an ideology, in a classic cart-before-the-horse move, the city council still appears intent on creating an ordinance to “just try” some permanent streateries in high-traffic zones. While permission for the downtown streateries is being extended—not eliminated—in temporary status pending the completion of a parking plan, there is a new version of the proposal to create permanent streateries uptown and in other commercial districts coming before council on May 16.
The uptown streatery on Lawrence outside the Seal Dog Coffee Bar appears to be driving this intent. When some of the councilors say “I love streateries,” beyond the ideology they are most often referencing that quaint, funky collection of tables uptown loosely contained by a picket fence where there used to be street parking that is pictured at top. It’s a place where regular patrons like to hang out on nice days, and they enjoy the community it creates.
But tables in the street? Though traffic is slowed coming to and from the corner of Tyler and Lawrence, the set-up along the road is still an accident waiting to happen. The exhaust pouring out of slow-traveling vehicles, often idling just feet away, is noxious. Will a permanent installation fix this?
And what will the visual impact actually be? As I wrote in my May 2nd letter:
“Has anyone actually looked at what a permanent structure would consist of at Seal Dog Coffee Bar uptown? If, as Steve King said, the width of the streatery would be limited to the tiny coffee house’s building frontage, that existing installation would be somewhere between a third and half the size it is now. Two tables if they are sufficiently distanced to pacify those now living in perpetual fear of a virus, three, possibly four small two-tops at a real squeeze. Is that worth a major investment for a small restaurateur?”
Here is that streatery on Thursday, May 12th, a cool, rainy spring afternoon. Empty. The coffee shop itself occupies the middle storefront with the lower neon OPEN sign. It’s 17 or 18 feet in width. While the 34-foot fenced streatery was vacant at about 12:30 pm, the warm and dry “tiny coffeehouse in uptown Port Townsend” with “welcoming cozy vibes” was hopping inside.
Of course customers will choose a cozy indoor space over sitting outside in the rain. To shelter customers from our weather nine months of the year, a tent or other structure will be necessary. We are told that granting permanent use of parking spots is incentive for the restaurant owner to invest in better structures than the open seating or tents. And we are to trust that because the permanent installations will go through HPC review, they will not detract from one of PT’s biggest draws, our nationally designated historic character.
Per the ordinance, a permanent streatery is to be no more than the width of the storefront unless neighboring businesses agree to encroachment. If a permanent streatery outside the Seal Dog consisted of a tent the width of the building frontage, here’s a facsimile of what that would look like (minus the picket fence):
It might have windows. It might not be a tent. But that is more or less the size it would be, intruding on our streetscape. Cars would be able to park on either end where the fence is.
If, as suggested at the meeting by Public Works Director Steve King, permission to encroach on the adjoining businesses was given, the streatery could expand to two allowable parking spaces. Here is what a 40-foot tent or other structure taking the maximum of two spaces might look like:
The window frontage of the Uptown Pub on the left and the Second Child Studio on the right is now obscured. And these sketches don’t depict the concrete barriers, industrial railing or other protective barricades around the tent or solid structure that will be critical to provide even a modicum of safety from vehicular traffic. A quaint picket fence is only a visual deterrent, not a long-term safeguard. The necessary barriers will add to the visual blight.
Are permanent streateries the right solution?
As previously reported, there are already more than forty outdoor dining areas in Port Townsend, nearly all in existence before the pandemic, that are not in the city streets, do not encroach on other businesses, and do not eliminate parking spaces. These include sidewalk cafes like The Old Whiskey Mill’s below, that have tables already allowed by existing city code.
Photo: Stephen Schumacher
At the May 2 council meeting, Ben Thomas pointed to these tables on the sidewalk as an example of other ways to achieve the same goal. Why not make it easier for restaurants to create sidewalk cafes?, he suggested.
But the council instead has an ordinance that was set in motion on March 14 before any public process, which staff and the council have put great time and effort into, offering restaurant owners the permanent use of public parking spaces for street dining installations within busy commercial roadways.
Permanent streateries not only require enclosed structures for all-weather use and high-impact safety barriers because of proximity to traffic, at the May 2 council meeting there was talk of wooden platforms to raise them off the street, and propane heaters to warm them. The whole construct then sits on the street alongside moving and idling traffic spewing toxic fumes. To snap that rainy day photo of the uptown streatery during the lunch hour, I had to wait for a break from a stream of cars and two buses that went by in those few minutes.
Over the course of three city council meetings where permanent streateries have been addressed, only one person has spoken or written in favor of them: restaurant owner Kris Nelson. The proprietor of both Sirens and The Old Whiskey Mill claimed in her public comment on May 2nd that her streatery on Water Street outside the Whiskey Mill had been used all but “approximately 27 days” last year. She acknowledged that the vaxx card requirements, no longer in place, likely accounted for most of that use. Still, we have to wonder what “used” means. Did her wait staff count people at the sidewalk tables which are not in the street and by definition not part of the streatery? Those are already a permitted use in the city code. Since indoor dining restrictions have been lifted, how many meals have been served in the street tent itself?
In the last few months, the tented streatery has been empty in every photo I’ve seen of it, every drive-by, regardless of time of day, level of traffic, rain or shine.
Here is the vacant Old Whiskey Mill streatery on the afternoon of March 30th:
Photo: Harvey WIndle
Again completely empty at 5:00 pm on April 29th:
Photo: Stephen Schumacher
On May 1st at 6:10 pm, the streatery and sidewalk seating looked like this:
That May Day evening, the dinner hour was relatively warm — no wind, no rain, pedestrians strolling the sidewalk. Stephen Schumacher, who sent the above photo to me just after he took it, wrote:
“There were a lot of folks walking around the sidewalk at that time… I had to cool my heels a minute then shoot quickly to avoid getting pedestrian faces in the photo. Strangely there was a guy eating a slice of pizza at the small round green table on the sidewalk NEAR the streatery but not IN the streatery.”
People certainly find al fresco sidewalk dining appealing on a beautiful summer day. They may even try a meal in a tent on the street with cars spewing exhaust just feet away when they have no other choice. But absent the restrictions that ban indoor dining, as I wrote in my letter:
“The streatery was being avoided. This is not a festival with streets blocked off… people do not want to dine in an active city street.”
With so many outdoor dining areas in Port Townsend already available, with sidewalk tables already allowed by existing city code, and with the possibility for our city council to encourage more sidewalk seating through easing of fees and/or regulations, why do we need to put diners in the streets?
At the May 2 meeting, Kris Nelson explained to council:
“My vision of our streatery would be a place… that you can sit outside and eat and drink that feels special and magical and different [her emphasis]… that adds to the fun experience of Port Townsend.”
This photo of a Washington, DC streatery during the pandemic is one of the few I could find that didn’t consist of open air tables in fine weather. It has a floor, propane heaters, draped walls and festive lighting… the kinds of amenities we can anticipate if streateries are allowed to be permanent here. And with heat radiating both down and beside the tables, still the diners are eating and drinking bundled up in their winter coats and hats, with cars driving by just beyond the veil. Is this the kind of special, magical, different dining experience we can look forward to?
Would the Seal Dog Coffee Bar want to invest in the kind of permanent structure pictured above? Would its neighbors permit encroachment of their storefronts? The Seal Dog’s existing tables with picket fence eliminate parking, but at least they do not obscure adjacent businesses.
There’s got to be a better solution than a streateries ordinance to allow modest places like the Seal Dog a few tables on the sidewalk where people can enjoy gathering outside in pleasant weather. Do we really need to gift public rights of way in perpetuity to select restaurants in order to achieve a few more outdoor drinking and dining spaces?
On Monday, May 16, the city council will discuss this proposal once again. Public comments can be given at the meeting or written in advance and emailed to publiccomment@cityofpt.us.
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Additional Streateries Reporting:
Strangulation by Streateries?, March 30, 2022
Public Streets and Public Process Subverted, April 17, 2022
Who is City Council Serving in Their Push for Streateries?, April 30, 2022
Council Backs Off From Downtown Streateries, Contrary to Leader Misreporting, May 5, 2022
by Ana Wolpin | Apr 30, 2022 | General
“I don’t really see the need for streateries in our code. Many of the restaurants already have courtyards or some kind of space outside. We’ve spent a bunch of energy putting together public spaces where people can take take-out food and sit next to the water.
I believe that it’s probably unfair for me to be taking up [parking] spaces that we should be sharing with all of the rest of the downtown businesses. I agree that it’s not really fair to prioritize restaurants over other businesses…
Nine months of the year it’s raining and cold and miserable here. If we put permanent structures on the street, those nine months of the year are taking up parking spaces that keep people away from the doors of businesses and they’re only used for three months.”
– David Hero, Silverwater Cafe
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Public backlash over streateries continued at the Port Townsend City Council meeting on April 18. With one exception, the council’s determination to make them permanent installations continued as well.
As reported in earlier Free Press articles, when the health department restricted indoor dining during Covid, the local business community agreed to grant restaurants emergency use of public parking stalls for outdoor dining in the city streets: streateries. Local shop owners were assured that this private use of public rights of way would be a temporary measure. Then in March — prior to any public process — the city council directed staff to draft an ordinance making the streatery program permanent.
As described in “Strangulation by Streateries?” and “Public Streets and Public Process Subverted,” the fast-track process that was developed to meet requirements for public input looked to be after-the-fact window dressing on a done deal. Every step of the way since, the council majority has dismissed and overridden public opposition, apparently bent on codifying the program despite widespread objections.
First, a March 29 open house designed to promote the concept brought overwhelming dissent from approximately two dozen business owners who attended. That was ignored. Then a poorly distributed survey, also designed to boost support, deleted from its published results a portion of comments that had been submitted. Still, hundreds of negative comments did show substantial opposition. (Those survey results can be seen here and here). They, too, were dismissed. Mayor David Faber characterized them as a “loud and angry minority.”
Opposition continued at the April 4 council meeting. Without exception, all public feedback about making streateries permanent was again negative.
Two weeks later, the overt agenda to put a permanent streatery program in place regardless of public input persisted.
The April 18 City Council meeting
Discussion at the April 18 council meeting confirmed that the majority of councilors already had their minds made up long before any of this fast-tracked public process.
Again the public feedback — predominantly from business owners, both in written letters submitted to council and voiced in live public comments — consistently urged the council to drop the proposal. Every councilor except one, Ben Thomas, made it clear that they were determined to approve a permanent streateries program despite public objections. The discussion was not about IF it should move forward, it was about hashing out the details.
After City Manager John Mauro expressed appreciation for all the public feedback, Public Works Director Steve King presented an overview of a streatery “draft ordinance in preparation for its final adoption.”
Public Works Director Steve King at 4/18/22 City Council meeting. Click on image for the video of the meeting. Streateries agenda item starts at 24 minutes.
The proposed ordinance allowed six streateries downtown, three uptown and one per block in other business districts, he said. There would be a lottery process for annual permits. Once an applicant was approved, there would be an annual renewal process, but no need to reapply for the annual lotteries. A permitted streatery would have exclusive use of those former parking spaces during business hours in perpetuity. Each streatery granted would be allowed up to forty feet of street frontage — eliminating two parking stalls where there was existing parallel parking, more for angled. An annual fee of $2000, or possibly $1500, was suggested. King explained that “the principle behind streateries is that it’s a use of public space for some private use, but it’s mostly a public enhancement.”
Prior to public comments, council members reviewed the draft ordinance. Libby Urner Wennstrom kicked off the discussion with this inversion:
“There’s a lot of businesses that are fairly supportive of this and there’s a handful of businesses that are very vehemently opposed.”
That assessment is the opposite of what multiple sources who have been canvasing businesses have told the Free Press. They say that Port Townsend’s business community is overwhelming opposed. The “vehement” opposition was so worrisome to Wennstrom, she asked King if a restaurant could sabotage the unwanted program: “I could see someone putting in a proposal so that it’s going to kill a lottery slot,” she said.
Monica MickHager asked if a streatery could have the option of putting all their outdoor seating on the sidewalk rather than the street, redirecting pedestrians into the street itself. Essentially, could they swap a permitted take-over of the parking strip for commandeering the entire sidewalk instead? When told yes, that was an option, she said she was “excited”.
According to the proposed ordinance, this sidewalk seating in front of The Old Whiskey Mill (the streatery also pictured in the feature photo at top) could be expanded to completely cover the sidewalk, forcing foot traffic into the street where the tent now stands in order for pedestrians to get around the blocked sidewalk.
MickHager also asked if a restaurant sold their business whether the new owner was buying the right to have the streatery permit “as part of their private business.” That, too, was answered in the affirmative.
Receipt of letters written to council (grouped at links 1, 2, 3) were acknowledged by the City Clerk. All of them expressed opposition to continuing streateries. No letters were in support.
Harvey Windle, owner of Forest Gems wrote of the city’s long-time mismanagement of parking and of the streatery program taking public property, “given to a special class of people.” He shared a circulating petition titled “City Ordinance Change Benefiting Restaurant Special Interests.”
Michele Gransgaard, a concerned resident who has been canvasing businesses, criticized the survey used to help justify the program: “To report results from a sloppy, biased survey is disingenuous, anti-democratic, and clearly lacks integrity.”
She also warned of the toxic emissions diners in the street were exposed to: “The pollutants from car exhaust consists of lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone and airborne particulate matter.” Gransgaard additionally noted that there are already “many options for restaurants that offer outdoor dining.”
More than a few Port Townsend al fresco dining options have been in place for many years, off the city streets. Gransgaard has catalogued more than forty of them. They include Alchemy Bistro & Wine Bar, Aldrich’s (2nd floor outdoor patio), Batch Brothers, Bayview, Bishop Block Bottle Shop & Garden, Blue Moose, Cablehouse Canteen, Cafe Tenby, Cellar Door, Courtyard Cafe, Doc’s Marina Grill, Dogs-A-Foot, Elevated Ice Cream Co., Finistère, Hacienda Tizapan, Hudson Point Cafe, Ichikawa, Jen’s Marina Cafe, Key City Fish Tacos-to-Go, Lighthouse Cafe, Lila’s Kitchen, Mo-Chilli BBQ, O’Yummy Frozen Yogurt, Owl Sprit, Pho Filling, Port Townsend Vineyards, Pourhouse Beer Garden, PT Soda Fountain & Diner, Quench, Réveille Café, San Juan Taqueria, Sirens, Sea J’s Cafe, Spruce Goose Cafe, Sunrise Coffee, Taps, The Castle, The Cup, The Old Whiskey Mill, Tommyknockers, and Vintage by Port Townsend Vineyards.
PT Shirt Company owner Frank Iuro noted that as shown in the list above ALL of the current streateries downtown “already have outdoor seating areas that have been in existence since before the pandemic.” He wrote that the program would “rob other businesses of available parking for their customers.”
Seating under umbrellas off the city street seen at left provided outdoor dining for Alchemy Bistro & Wine Bar before a tented streatery was added in the public parking strip.
Alchemy’s street tent eliminated at least three angled parking spaces and is reported to have been largely empty for a minimum of the last five months.
Maestrale owner Jennefer Wood summarized the objections of many with these bullet points:
- Downtown parking has always been a major issue, taking more parking away only exacerbates the problem. A 2004 analysis of the problem in no way offers a solution like this;
- “Streateries” take away from badly needed downtown parking, adversely impacting businesses;
- They are unsightly, dangerous to see around, and too close to traffic – eating while breathing car exhaust does not sound appealing;
- They are not in alignment with any historical preservation of PT’s past;
- It is unjust and unlawful to allocate public land to private businesses;
- They block visual access to neighboring businesses, thus negatively impacting business;
- There are now “Parklets” available for the public to use for take out dining;
- A “public survey” was not widely advertised in order to receive public input, and negative feedback is being suppressed;
- Streateries were introduced under the covid emergency. The emergency is over.
- Let’s put this proposal in perspective of the larger parking problem and have a proper analysis from that point of view.
Several other PT residents, including a Water Street historic building owner who said the installations visually degrade the public space, also wrote letters in opposition. Letters from Annette Huenke and myself expanded on concerns described in the two Free Press articles linked above.
Public comments in person and by livestream also resoundingly opposed the program.
Gail Boulter and her husband own six long-standing shops downtown, The Green Eyeshade and The Clothes Horse among them. She said that when Covid first began restricting indoor dining in restaurants, City Manager Mauro called her.
“[He] wanted our impression about how we felt about the streateries… I said we would be happy to do anything we can to help our restaurants. However, under no circumstances would any of us merchants downtown want to see this to be a permanent situation. He assured me at that time Oh, no no no, this is a temporary fix.”
“Parking has always been the bottom line issue in Port Townsend,” she told the council. “Please take note of how the merchants feel about all this.”
Pat Louderback is owner of Getables downtown and a Main Street board member:
“During the last council meeting when discussing the downtown parking issues and the more than 300 discarded negative submissions about streateries,” he said, “it was stated by the council that the parking issues were a red herring designed to take us away from the real topic of streateries.”
“The red herring here is the streateries, drawing us away from the real problem, which is parking.“
Louderback pointed to comments in the survey from people who said if they can’t find parking downtown, they go home and order online. “This is all counterproductive to our often-heard Shop Local campaigns. So how do we as businesses and community TRUST the city, the council, which seemingly are influenced by special interests versus representing the community as a whole?”
“It’s the brick and mortar businesses, services, retailers and restaurants that draw consumers here,” he continued. “Further, reducing even ONE parking spot negatively impacts downtown businesses. You’re turning your back on these small businesses, slapping them in the face after they have struggled to survive, and supported this community.”
David Wing-Kovarik, owner of Frameworks Northwest, put aside his prepared statement after listening to the initial council discussion.
“$2,000 a year? That does not address the thousands of dollars lost in retail sales for those parking spaces for surrounding businesses. I’m in great support of restaurants; I send people to restaurants every single day. But every single day I have someone coming in complaining about the inability to park here… I have no idea what businesses you have been talking to that are in support of this.”
He said every business he has spoken to told him, We were told that this would be temporary by the city and by Main Street. “They’re NOT in support of this,” he emphasized. Of the many business owners he has talked to, only “ONE business said they were, and that was it.”
David Hero has co-owned the Silverware Cafe for 32 years. In addition to the statements he made in the quote featured at top — that there is already a plethora of outdoor dining options, that prioritizing public space for restaurants over other businesses is unfair, and that people only use al fresco facilities three months of the year — he pointed out that current code already allows restaurants to set up sidewalk dining with a minimum 6-foot right of way. The earlier photo of sidewalk tables outside The Old Whiskey Mill on Water Street is an example of that. We should encourage more use of “the already-existing sidewalk rules where we technically can put tables on our sidewalks,” he said.
Hero concluded: “I think it’s important to really think about how much use and how many people are actually going to use these outdoor facilities that are taking up valuable parking spaces during the nine months of the year when nobody can sit outside anyhow.”
Scott Walker commented:
“I have been involved in trying to advocate for parking management in this town for more than 20 years. I was on the Parking Advisory Group back in the early 2000s,” involved in the study council adopted nearly twenty years ago to institute managed parking downtown. “We haven’t done that yet and this proposal is getting the cart in front of the horse. You need to have an understanding of what the value of a parking space downtown IS before you give it up for $2000 a year, $1500 a year, or whatever number you come up with.”
“This proposal, I highly encourage you to kill it right now and get to work on the downtown parking management plan.”
Samantha Ladwig, owner of the Imprint Bookstore concurred:
“It is a frequent topic from customers who come in, the difficulty of parking, and how they have continually shopped less and less over time as it has become more and more difficult to find a space. I don’t think this is a good solution for tourists or the community to take away parking which is a growing issue.”
Not a single letter writer, in-person or virtual commenter expressed support.
The council deliberates
The discussion that followed all this public feedback demonstrates the disconnect between the citizens and those elected to serve them. (Full comments can be watched by clicking on any councilor photo.)
Ben Thomas expressed the only cautionary note, which was immediately argued against. He “likes the streateries,” he said, but agreed it is putting the cart before the horse. “I’m just really concerned listening to all these business owners… Some people may close businesses because of it, is my concern. I feel like there’s a social contract with our businesses that we don’t make it harder for them.”
Libby Wennstrom discounted his concern based on her experience 50 years ago in her hometown of Ithaca, NY. She said that when Ithaca closed off three blocks to make it pedestrian-only in 1972, there was “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… These streateries have been incredibly successful in towns all over Puget Sound.”
Wennstrom is so keen to remove parking, she suggested that the gift of public street space could expand to retailers as well. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be a restaurant that chooses to do this,” she directed at the objecting business owners present. “You could apply, with a business, to have a street space if you wanted to.”
Aislinn Diamanti expressed her commitment to the proposal: “We don’t want to go into another season that is likely to need these again as cases are going up.” They need to be given permanent status, she said, so that restaurant owners have incentive to invest in them over the next two years. Then, Diamanti suggested, after the council revisits the parking plan they “can come back” in two years and change the code again. “It would be a loss to go dark in that meantime because this use of twelve parking spaces isn’t known to be the highest and best use intrinsically.”
Monica MickHager worried that “we’re still in a pandemic… I think the streateries are a necessity for us, just on the mere fact alone that we’re still dealing with Covid.” She acknowledged the critical parking issues, however, and suggested reducing the numbers of streateries the ordinance allows, “until we have an adopted parking management plan.” She proposed that the downtown streateries be limited to their current number, not increased to six.
Owen Rowe opined that “we are not seeing the end of Covid. So I think there is a good case to be made for extending the temporary use of streateries.” But we can’t ask the restaurants to invest in better, more permanent structures, he said, without giving them the assurance of program longevity. “We need to commit to whether this is going to continue beyond Covid.” He agreed with the suggestion to reduce the number allowed.
Mayor David Faber apologized “for making uncharitable comments at last meeting to members of the public who have concerns about streateries.” His disparaging remarks reflected his thinking that they were minority views that don’t represent the community as a whole. “Ever since I was first elected to council, I’ve been hearing from an untold number of people about how we need to stop designing our public spaces around the personal automobile.”
He said that even though the city needs to address the parking issue “asap”, it can’t take on parking management right now. “I think the proposal is extraordinarily modest. It’s not taking very much, not taking away any significant amount of parking spaces. it’s only formalizing what’s been in place for over two years.”
He agreed that “the survey was imperfect, it was quick, we agreed to do a quick process which people are understandably upset about.” But then he again referenced the flawed survey results as evidence that most were in favor of the proposal. “Every single person I talk to outside of downtown business owners have said favorable things to me about creating a permanent streateries program.”
“I love these things. I love the concept of what they bring to the community.” He also voiced support of the suggestion to “lock in” what’s already in place. “I think we should proceed with this.”
Ben Thomas again expressed concern over the business community’s opposition. It’s hard “to ignore the public comment,” he said, “not just tonight.” But he agreed with other council members that he’d like to see streateries: “I do think they are potentially a positive thing for us… just not expanding it at this time when there’s all this public pressure against it.” He, too, supported limiting downtown streateries to the current number.
The final number agreed upon was four streateries downtown, two uptown, and one per block in other commercial districts. The remainder of the discussion was about other details of the ordinance the council is scheduled to vote on at the May 2 meeting.
Just what ARE those parking spaces worth?
During deliberations, Wennstrom disputed the statement from business owners that a $1500 or $2000 annual fee would not even begin to offset the value of two or more parking spaces, that they were worth at least $13,000 a month to the business community. “I want to know any downtown business that’s paying $13,000 a month for a Water Street storefront,” she challenged. A voice in the audience schooled her that it’s not the rental value of the frontage that is relevant, “it’s in generated sales for surrounding businesses.”
As Annette Huenke wrote in a previous article, Main Street estimated in 2004 that “each downtown parking space generates approximately $150 to $300 per day in retail sales revenue.” In addition to retail spending in shops, restaurants, at the theater and other recreational activities, revenue is also generated by service businesses as well, including medical, insurance, financial, and legal:
“Adjusting for inflation using government calculations, at $300 per day, a single space contributes to downtown’s fiscal vitality $169,987 annually. Two = $339,975; the triplets in front of Alchemy and in the Tyler St. lot are worth $509,962 per year.”
Michele Gransgaard, who has been researching parking management strategies, notes that the businesses most severely affected by the loss of parking from a streatery will be those in closest proximity. Her research has shown that “40% of people won’t shop at a store where parking is a hassle.”
Not only does a business adjacent to a streatery suffer from lost parking, the visual obstruction from tents or the more permanent structures encouraged by this program damages one of a retailer’s most valuable assets — storefront visibility. Can you identify which businesses are next to The Old Whiskey Mill in this photo?
There’s Quimper Sound on one side, Commoner on the other. These businesses pay a premium for main street storefronts. Their expensive, well-designed windows and signage are a large part of what draws shoppers to their stores.
Peekaboo… The hip Quimper Sound logo is barely visible on its window through The Old Whiskey Mill streatery tent. Their neon “OPEN” sign is completely obscured, along with other window attractions.
One of the benefits of creating a permanent streateries program, say its advocates, is that it will incentivize the restaurant owners to invest in better all-weather structures than the tents. Picture a permanent structure erected in the parking strip where Tommyknockers’ tables and umbrellas now stand. Not only will their own restaurant signage be obscured, but the major draw of the Jeanette Best Gallery next door — the gallery name and art on display through the window — gone.
All streatery photos taken Thursday, April 28, 2022 around 5 p.m. by Stephen Schumacher. Additional photos taken at 7 p.m. show every streatery downtown still empty.
Perhaps “public enhancement” from a bustling streatery on a lovely summer’s day will add to adjacent businesses’ foot traffic and increased vitality in commercial districts. But what of the other nine months of the year that David Hero alludes to?
In an April 28 letter to Mayor Faber, Annette Huenke wrote:
Sadly, it appears to be a waste of time attempting a dialogue with you, council, King and Mauro, since you determined on March 14th that we will have streateries because you all enjoy them. The parking issues that have plagued PT for over 30 years, the fact that we already have a viable parking plan, the loss of revenue from sacrificed parking, your perverted public process, the utter fallacy that this can ever be made fair and equitable among downtown businesses, let alone restaurants… none of that matters. You like streateries.
Automobiles are essential for travel to Port Townsend, even for people who live here. Jefferson County has the highest share of population age 65 and older in the state. New homes are going up all over the 3-mile and beyond range. There is a 58-lot subdivision going in on Cook Avenue. Most of those newcomers will not share city leaders’ fantasy of walking, biking or busing 6 miles into town. I can count on one hand how many of my North Beach neighbors do. Nearly all take their cars wherever they go. Port Townsend is already naturally inviting, as well walkable for those with the ability and desire to walk it.
As the Port Townsend City Council overrides citizen feedback opposing their plan to replace parking with outdoor dining areas in our public rights of way, many residents are asking Who are our elected officials serving? At Monday’s city council meeting, 6:30 pm on May 2nd, the council’s vote on authorizing a permanent streateries program should give us an answer to that question.
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May 2nd Port Townsend City Council meeting Agenda – Streatery ordinances are agenda items VII and VIII
Proposed Resolution 22-020 Establishing Public Works Department Street Use Permit fees
Public in attendance and webinar participants will be able to provide up to three minutes of public comment during the meeting. Public comment will also be accepted by email and will be included in the meeting record, provided emails are received two hours before the start of each meeting. Please send public comment to: publiccomment@cityofpt.us.
by Ana Wolpin | Mar 30, 2022 | General
Political players at the City of Port Townsend have made no secret of their desire to eliminate vehicular traffic in the city’s primary business districts in favor of a more walkable, bike-able, maybe even pedestrian-only commercial hub. When John Mauro was hired as city manager to replace 20-year manager Timmons, it was on the strength of his “green” credentials. As reported in the Free Press in October 2020 (Who is John Mauro, Port Townsend’s City Manager?), in his prior position as Chief Sustainability Officer for the city of Auckland, New Zealand:
“He gave interviews and wrote climate action plans and plans for planting trees and adding bike paths and eliminating cars from Auckland streets.”
A green and sustainable environment may be a laudable goal. Is the elimination of parking in PT’s Historic Districts — by awarding use of publicly-funded street rights-of-way to some business owners, to the detriment of others — the right way to achieve that goal?
When pandemic response began dramatically changing our local landscape, temporary “streateries” were developed to enable restaurants to relocate their indoor dining to parking areas outside their businesses — literally on the city streets. Naturally, the loss of valuable parking spaces meant potentially reduced traffic for all other businesses along those streets. But, hey, this was an emergency, and the burdens on folks in the food industry were especially onerous.
The emergency is past. It’s business as usual again. But the restaurateurs who have benefited from the expanded real estate do not want to lose it. The city is now proposing that these “streateries” are granted permanent status — benefiting a small coterie of restaurant owners while the majority of the business community suffers the loss of even more already-limited parking options for their customers.
Water Street “streatery”, removing 46 feet of parking, as well as public sidewalk space.
The city posted notification of an “Open House on Streateries” on their website. The presentation took place yesterday evening. According to the timeline on the city webpage, this is the fast-track schedule to codify their proposal:
- March 21, 2022 Survey noted above distributed by Port Townsend Main Street
- March 29, 2022 Open House at 4:30 at the Cotton Building
- March 31, 2022 Survey closes
- April 4, 2022, City Council Meeting reviews public feedback
- April 18, 2022, City Council Meeting – Council will be presented with proposed code and receives public feedback
- May 2, 2022, City Council Meeting presents any revisions of ordinance for the proposed code
Where was the public notice?
The public was never notified of this significant proposed change to city code in the newsletter that is included in all city utility bills each month. It was not mentioned in reports from either the mayor or the city manager. Will next month’s newsletter announce this plan, after the survey has closed and the City Council has already reviewed public feedback?
A press release is linked on the city’s page noted above, but we can find no mention in the Leader of this proposal or process. Nor did Main Street’s Word on the Street publicize it, though the timeline above states that Main Street distributed a survey.
That survey is also on the city’s website, here. It consists of 13 questions. Question 5 is “Do you support the establishment of a long-term program for streateries and parklets?” Free Press editor Stephen Schumacher responded:
“This feels like a theft of public streets by converting ‘temporary emergency’ outdoor dining into permanent space for preferred businesses at the expense of others, who may not have been given legally required public notice. These outdoor street structures are ugly and unnecessary and impinge on parking and reinforce the false narrative that some kind of ongoing ‘emergency’ is going on or may soon be resumed.”
Additionally he wrote, “I reject the premises of questions 6-11 because these illegal takings of public properties for private insider benefits need to be terminated not perpetuated.”
The only public notice of this proposal we were able to find other than the page on the city’s website was a March 16 article in the Peninsula Daily News (PDN), Port Townsend to consider permanent ‘streatery’ program. It notes that a Main Street survey conducted last year found that business owners complained about the loss of parking spaces “and about the way some of the streateries look.”
Unless a resident regularly reads the PDN or frequents the city’s website, one wouldn’t know this giveaway was in process.
The issues with parking, to which the city has turned a blind eye for years, have been an ongoing nightmare for some Port Townsend businesses. Harvey Windle, owner of Forest Gems, anchoring the busy downtown intersection of Washington and Adams, has been a vocal critic of the parking morass for eight years and has written the city multiple times about this proposed commandeering of public property.
His most recent letter, emailed today to Port Townsend’s city attorney, city council and mayor, and City Manager Mauro, questions not only the fairness of serving special interests in this city street giveaway, but the public process itself.
“Besides the negative proposed removal of even more parking spaces for insider special interests, the process looks to be extremely flawed.
My manager knew of the proposal only because she signed up on a mailing list.
Monday with only a few days before input cut off on the 31st I took what little time I could spare and spoke with 2 neighboring businesses. Bergstroms and the new owner of the Antique Mall.
Neither were aware of the proposed unknown final number (problem there as well) Streaterie and Parklet conversions and were shocked at the proposal.
Claims were made that businesses were given information. Where is the checklist of businesses contacted?
Why was this not in the local paper weeks in advance with both sides of the issue covered?
Robin Bergstrom asked me if there was something he could sign in protest. A class action lawsuit is where this is headed.
I contacted the City Attorney then and am now.
I believe most do not know of what is going on. Especially after speaking with other business owners.”
Today Windle spoke with even more downtown business folks.
“Stopped into Gooding O’Hara Mackey. Receptionist knew nothing about plans. Was disgusted that the streatery across the way has not been removed. Never used, she said. Also commented that she has to find parking daily.”
He also visited another business on Taylor “which was bustling.” The owner told him she went to last night’s meeting and “expressed that she did not want the streateries to continue or grow in numbers.”
There is also a safety issue. These are not quaint sidewalk cafes, they are in the roadway. Until (if) all vehicle access is eliminated, diners are literally feet from traffic negotiating the often busy uptown and downtown business districts. A side order of gas and diesel fumes with your meal, anyone? There isn’t even a curb providing a few inches of elevation to deflect a wayward car from careening into unprotected diners.
“Streatery” below the curb, in the street. Grills on the table tops and propane tanks at your feet. Puddles. Cars driving just inches away, some trying to park at the edge of the picket fence. A safe and pleasant dining experience?
The PDN states “streateries are taking about 10 parking spaces out of the downtown-Uptown equation.” Windle conducted his own survey and estimates that about a dozen spaces are being lost to these “temporary” outdoor dining spaces at present. But there are only three streateries currently installed — one outside of Alchemy on Washington at the end of Taylor Street, two along Water Street (photos at top and above). You can bet that with official city code inviting eateries to annex the street parking outside their properties, there will be many more to come.
Alchemy “streatery”, eliminating 5 or 6 parking spaces
If this proposed plan is codified, these three would likely be the tip of the iceberg. Taylor Street alone could have several streateries. Windle noted that until recently, there were “many others”, outside Sirens and Elevated Ice Cream among them. His letter to the city continues:
“In this case restaurants will think they benefit but where do their customers park?… Where are my special woodworkers spaces? And auto shops? And antiques? When restaurant owner Kristin buys a 6 million dollar parking-not-enforced building I think her losses are manageable without taking from me and others…
Several restaurants are owned by the President of Main Street, run under already compromised Mari Mullen under the influence of Mr. Mauro.
Mauro has a widely known lack of qualifications and has ignored parking issues from his beginning here. It is hard to claim that was not pre-arranged…
Mr. Mauro has no business further damaging limited parking. The City Council is responsible to keep him in his place and doing his actual job.
I am attaching 2 photos for the record of Mr Mauro and Mari along with restaurant owner Kristin’s attempt to close Taylor…
Even restaurant customers need parking. This is insanity. Helter Skelter Insanity against all visitors and business…”
Windle’s comment about “Kristin’s attempt to close Taylor” is in reference to the owner of Alchemy.* These are the photos he provided:
“Open Streets Initiative” on Taylor Street.
All photos: Harvey Windle
If this “Open Streets Initiative” is the direction this current proposal is headed, there will be far more than a dozen parking spaces lost on Taylor Street alone.
The survey on “Long-term Proposals for Port Townsend Streateries and Parklets” — which the city didn’t announce in its newsletter and the Leader never reported on — closes Thursday, March 31.
*Correction: Past owner
by Ana Wolpin | Mar 27, 2022 | General
“i get to have a face.
you do not.”
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Spring of 2020. Mere months before the Leader began censoring all perspectives that did not align with health department messaging, I wrote a concerned, fact-based letter to the editor challenging the mask campaign we were being bombarded with daily. Along with everything else Covid, I had been researching the effectiveness and dangers of masks intensively, and offered a counterpoint to the dominant narrative which was being parroted by neighbors and friends.
By that point, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the public was being lied to. Anthony Fauci, along with the CDC, had flip-flopped so often — and so much fear and anxiety had been generated around the “killer virus” — people were already falling into the mass delusional psychosis that we did not yet have a name for. (See my two prior articles here and here for an overview of the delusional state psychiatrists and psychologists have also called “mass formation”.)
The coordinated campaign being broadcast à la Orwell’s 1984 was already talking its toll, creating a level of hysteria resulting in the shattering of community bonds. “Generating fear that unmasked people are now a threat is one of the many ways communities are being fractured,” I wrote.
More and more letters were being published engaging in a new phenomenon: mask shaming. All of the letter writers echoed memes being promoted in the mainstream press. There was a carrot-and-stick combination of bogus feel-good soundbites like Your mask protects me, my mask protects you, alongside charges that anyone who didn’t comply was a potential murderer, not doing their part to help save lives.
The finger wagging ratcheted up over the months, with one writer opining that “to not wear [a mask] is selfish, irresponsible and sometimes deadly behavior.” The letter exemplified the kind of blaming and shaming that growing numbers of terrified residents were repeating to vilify those who challenged the narrative.
I had already experienced the schism developing in our community after writing privately to a few friends in an effort to initiate a conversation about the propaganda that was circulating. In response I received… nothing. No interest in discussing the issues, no debates, no response at all. Soon the mass psychosis would sanction removing discussion of any conflicting information from the public square entirely.
My letter to the editor, which focused on actual science, resulted in responses attacking my position for weeks afterwards. Some letters simply repeated media slogans. Some were outraged and angry assaults. One old friend (and a current Board of Health member) tersely dismissed my reference to harms from masks well-established in the medical literature as “ludicrous”. People I didn’t know, as well as decades-old friends, called my perspective “dangerous”.
In nearly half a century here, I’d never been so harshly attacked in this community. The certitude and righteousness were off the charts.
Not a single response addressed the substance of my letter — meta-analysis reviews of research showing that masks do not stop the transmission of viruses, and evidence that, in fact, masks themselves create health risks. Those two aspects of this most fractious divide are incontrovertible and will be examined in future parts of this series.
But this first part is an exploration of an element not addressed in my letter two years ago: the devastating mental, emotional and psychological repercussions of a masked populace.
Not protective, but a good reminder to be afraid of human contact
Concurrent with my letter, a May 2020 perspective published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) regarding universal masking in the Covid-19 era acknowledged: “We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection.” A month earlier, a meta-analysis review of the most relevant studies of laboratory and real-world performance of masks by the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health had come to the same conclusion:
“We do not recommend requiring the general public who do not have symptoms of COVID-19-like illness to routinely wear cloth or surgical masks… There is no scientific evidence they are effective in reducing the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.”
Masks, however, were proving to be a great tool for prompting people to be anxious and fearful. The NEJM authors suggested that even though they didn’t stop the spread of Covid, there was ancillary value in public masking:
“Masks are visible reminders of an otherwise invisible yet widely prevalent pathogen and may remind people of the importance of social distancing and other infection-control measures.”
So masking was really a visual cue to keep the public in a state of anxiety over the invisible virus. Masks reminded us that fellow humans were not safe to be around, that we needed to remember at all times that a deadly virus was in our midst and to fear any contact with one another. While the NEJM authors opined, “one might argue that fear and anxiety are better countered with data and education than with a marginally beneficial mask,” that sensible voice was drowned out by more powerful forces driving the narrative.
The greater the fear and anxiety generated, the more demoralized a population, and the more easily the masses can be manipulated and controlled. For the global “leaders” and institutions calling the shots, the opportunity to further enhance their power was too good to pass up.
Dehumanizing society
The masking of our faces was arguably the most dehumanizing aspect of the Covid mass hypnosis.
Mental, emotional and psychic damage, especially to our children, has been incalculable. In addition to generating fear of invisible pathogens and fellow humans, masking is known historically to be an effective element of torture programs.
Prisoners at U.S. facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
It’s long been recognized that both isolation and masking are tools of sensory deprivation. For decades, CIA “enhanced interrogation” experts have employed the forced wearing of surgical masks to increase discomfort while undergoing torture, to break a prisoner’s will.
The military has learned that if an enemy combatant looks different than a soldier, it’s 40% easier for the soldier not to feel things like fear, compassion, empathy and other human emotions. If the combatant has a face covering, it’s 60% more difficult to connect with that person. That’s just how we are wired.
Long before it was marketed as a talisman of safety and virtue, the mask was a symbol of subservience. It removes individuality, depersonalizes, and denotes submission.
The photo at the top of this article and the quote below it — I get to have a face. You do not. — comes from the piercing, insightful Bad Cattitude post Your Mask Ennobles Me / public health as a pretext for hierarchical validation. While the delighted adults all beam for the camera, you tell me if a single one of those children’s eyes are smiling.
“Masks are signs of subjugation. They dehumanize. They alienate.”
Bad Cattitude examines the hypocrisy we have seen repeatedly throughout this pandemic response. As universal masking was implanted into the mass psyche, a component of class privilege began to emerge.
Rules for thee, not for me: political theater
The ruling class demanded the plebes comply with a set of rules that did not apply to them. We saw politicians, corporate bigwigs and celebrities—thought leaders—put on a show of covering their faces for public displays while gathering in their private enclaves without masks or social distancing. There were the hot mic gaffes of public figures when they thought the cameras weren’t rolling, chuckling about how masking is just “political theater”.
When she thinks she is not being recorded, Pennsylvania state rep. Wendy Ullman tells Gov. Tom Wolf that her mask is just for show: “I’m waiting [to take it off] so we can do a little political theater (laughs)…
So, that it’s on camera.”
“City Council Mask Rituals. Before city council meetings begin, people mingle without masks. When the meeting is called to order, all city councilors… and staff put on masks. But people who testify and attend don’t wear masks. Sometimes the masks come off when staff talks, then go back on. City Councilor Amy Howard wears a mask when alone during Zoom meetings. These are the people in charge of Port Townsend.”
Masks Off / Masks On – Port Townsend City Council Meeting, 3-21-22
Top: City Manager John Mauro chats with attendees just a few feet away, bare-faced, before the meeting starts.
Middle: The meeting officially begins; Mauro (seated at left, now distanced) puts on his mask and joins the theater.
Bottom: City Councillors protecting the public or virtue signalling?
Bad Cattitude calls this “performative virtue signaling.” And he points out the even more blatant hypocrisy of elites openly dispensing with their own face coverings in staged photo ops while requiring the workers around them, the lower class, to be masked for the camera. He says:
“Masks are not about public health.
Masks are about hierarchy.
They not only represent a high visibility in-group/out-group tribal marker, but they have wonderous potential as a form of separating the powerful from the powerless, the nobles from the commoners, the dictators from the dictated to.
It has become the opiate of the classes.”
This class stratification appears to be in full display in Jefferson County. A friend having dinner at a popular local cafe following the lifting of the mask directive was disturbed to see that while diners had faces, all the staff remained masked. She asked the owner Why?
“It makes the customers more comfortable,” was the reply.
Do some of those customers feel elevated by this “opiate of the classes” as the post suggests? The mass psychosis persists and some folks genuinely remain petrified that an unmasked person can kill them… but then why are all the bare-faced diners around them not dangerous? Is the working class whose livelihoods depend on their patronage the new unclean caste?
Teaching compliance
Most chilling is the imposition of this madness on our children. Bad Cattitude believes it to be another power play by those in control, contending that the subjugation, dehumanizing and alienation caused by masks are “WHY they are so attractive to so many.”
“This is why forcing them on kids to dominate them and force them into compliance with state over self or even parents is such a high priority goal for those that have collectivist plans for their futures. It establishes precisely who is in charge.”
Masks exemplify the number one demand of the Covid era: COMPLIANCE. The plebes have been divided into the compliant (good) and the non-compliant (bad). Children have little choice in the matter.
Kids in Head Start, for example. While authoritarian rulemakers are free to enjoy unmasked lives, the federal government mandates that millions of 2- to 5-year-old children in Head Start programs wear masks. As in the featured photo at top, the privileged think nothing of shamelessly flaunting that they “get to have a face” while the children they tower over do not.
Bad Cattitude unpacks this staged photo op with Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams at an elementary school in Atlanta. Again, how many smiling children’s eyes do you see in this picture?
“Stacey Abrams is pro mask and pro vaxx mandate. And yet here she sits, the only one in the photo with a face… She does not believe a word of her own rules. It did not even occur to her how this might look…
Imagine what these experiences are teaching children about their place in the world and their relationship to authority figures.”
Then there are those situations with children where adults are also masked. That, too, is highly damaging, especially for our youngest in the critical early stages of development. It’s taken two years for the fallout to be so blatantly obvious that even the mainstream press is asking “How long will we continue to torture kids?” In the NY Post’s opinion piece, Making kids wear masks in school is torture, not safety, their Editorial Board writes:
“Doctors and psychologists are just beginning to study the effects of mask-wearing on kids, but the early signs aren’t good. Younger children in particular are missing facial cues and social development…
Democrats have tried to gaslight Americans by saying that masks are not an inconvenience, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a murderer…
Panic has replaced common sense.”
Damaging a generation of kids
Beyond terrorizing kids with fear that if they don’t mask they might kill Grandma, cognitive decline caused by masks has led to normalizing lowered standards for development. Autism specialist and certified speech-language pathologist Maija C. Hahn writes, Instead of Admitting Mask Mandates Harm Kids, CDC Lowers Expectations for Speech Development. Whereas children over the age of two typically have mastered significant vocabularies, she says, the updated CDC guidance states that a two-and-a-half-year-old child is now expected to say only 50 words.
“I am appalled the CDC would quietly lower long-held pediatric language expectations by normalizing significant language delays as “the new normal.”
Hahn says that special needs kids have been so severely impeded by mask mandates that they could be set back “for a lifetime of therapy.” But all children are suffering from the damage:
“The CDC’s mask mandates have severely affected an entire generation of American children and we are just now beginning to see the long-term consequences. Kids who were born in the era of COVID-19, have no idea what a world without masks is — we should expect to see even greater speech and language deficits in these children in the coming months and years.”
In October of 2020, a German university set up an online registry for parents, doctors, teachers and others to record the side effects of masking children that they observed. In less than a week, data on nearly 26,000 children had been recorded. From the article First results of a Germany-wide registry on mouth and nose covering (mask) in children:
“The average wearing time of the mask was 270 minutes per day. Impairments caused by wearing the mask were reported by 68% of the parents. These included irritability (60%), headache (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), less happiness (49%), reluctance to go to school/kindergarten (44%), malaise (42%) impaired learning (38%) and drowsiness or fatigue (37%).”
Psychiatrist Mark McDonald, M.D., author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, sent a letter to his patients in February banning child masking in his practice. Forcing kids to mask, he says, is child abuse.
“My first ethical responsibility as a physician is to do no harm to my patients, and allowing children to mask their faces has caused and continues to cause tremendous harm to them physically, emotionally, psychologically and developmentally. Any argument to the contrary is naive and irrational.”
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“Masks… may not leave physical scars (although they often result in painful skin infections that can lead to permanent facial disfigurement),” says Dr. McDonald, “but they do cause significant and possibly permanent damage to a child’s brain, retarding speech and language development, crippling social skills, and inciting a vicious cycle of emotional dysregulation leading to major depression, self-harm, and substance abuse. We would never allow someone to do this to our children directly, so why do we condone it through the vehicle of a facemask?”
In his post, Masking Children is Child Abuse, psychiatrist McDonald adds:
“Since children began wearing masks at school, on the athletic field, in airplanes—essentially everywhere outside the home—I have seen a significant decline in their ability to make eye contact, speak clearly, and initiate face-to-face communication with other human beings. Emotional resilience has dramatically declined. Children have become dull and slow in their thinking.”
In Port Townsend, the irrational masking of children continues in our schools. The lifting of mandates created a mix of the masked and unmasked, leading to teachers at the high school talking of segregating the two groups and even of arbitrarily forcing students to remain masked. On March 11th, a group of Port Townsend parents wrote an urgent letter to the district’s superintendent, principal and board after learning about this from their kids.
“Many students said their teachers stated they ‘can make students wear masks if they choose to.’ Also stated was if there was a shortage of desks [unmasked] kids would be forced to sit on the floor.” (Parents Appeal to PT Schools: Are Students Facing Mask Segregation?, PTPF 3-12-22)
The mask theater, penalizing those who do not comply, also extends to school staff. There is pressure being applied to require unvaxxed teachers to continue masking, a source told us: “Despite the mandate being lifted, the PT School District is trying to bully non-vaxxed teachers into wearing masks still.” It is undisputed that the shots are a dismal failure in stopping Covid’s transmission, yet we see another message to students (and teachers) that the non-compliant will be persecuted.
Mask measures are not and have never been about public health. This is an exercise in social engineering — rewarding compliance, punishing outliers, and conditioning the masses to obey authority.
And “with the advent of the mask craze, mental illness is no longer invisible in the public space,” says Dr. McDonald. “What was once reserved for only a psychiatrist’s ears is now on flagrant display to any citizen with eyes to see it.”
Dealing with No-Mask Anxiety
After two years of this insanity, we are really in a bind. Not only has the disastrous global response to Covid traumatized a generation of children, but now a significant portion of the public have anxiety about being UNmasked.
The mental health team at Good Therapy tells us this psyop has been so successful that according to the American Psychological Association, “nearly half of Americans admit they have concerns about resuming in-person interactions.” They are afraid to bare their faces again. They have a newly-coined mental issue, “no-mask anxiety”:
“No-mask anxiety is a condition where people are scared about the prospect of taking off their masks in public.”
They “feel uneasy when they themselves don’t wear a face covering, and they can also be uncomfortable around others who are not wearing masks.” These are the folks who were so successfully brainwashed by the narrative, the mask is now their security blanket. Believing that masks protect against viruses, they remain in a state of fear and anxiety over the invisible threat.
Dr. McDonald notes that many adults in his psychiatric practice are beyond anxious, they are literally addicted to hiding behind face coverings:
“In my adult patient population, many have developed a fear addiction. I strongly encourage them to remove facemasks whenever possible, including when visiting my office, as a necessary first step in overcoming this fear addiction.”
In a post just this week — Masking the problem / once the needle goes in, it never comes out — Bad Cattitude discusses a segment of maskers so dependent on this fetish, they are equivalent to alcoholics or drug addicts. Those with untreated “social anxiety disorder” have gotten hooked on covering their faces.
“The anxious, agoraphobic, neurotic, and OCD have always been with us and always been among us… They hate being out in public and interacting with people.” Or they fear “disease or dirt” to such an extent, they engage in “extreme hygiene.”
Conditioning the public to believe masks represent safety, virtue, and societal duty provided a socially sanctioned way to alleviate some of that anxiety. “They could do what they wanted but had always feared to do because what had been low status behavior was suddenly elevated to high status.” Continuing the drug addiction analogy Bad Cattitude warns, “The needle went in. Getting it back out will not be easy for these folks.”
He addresses the current conversation about how to respond to people who demand that for their peace of mind others around them also wear masks. Is perpetuating paranoia or mental instability a kindness? Some provocative thoughts regarding the mask addicted:
“No one would feel like they were being respectful if an alcoholic asked them to ‘just get drunk with me, it makes me feel comfortable.’
Doing so would have bad outcomes.
Well, so does ‘just mask up with me, it makes me feel comfortable.’
People try to spin this as ‘being respectful of the needs of others’ and ‘just be considerate, just be kind’ but it’s not. It’s giving tequila to a drunk…
Imposing peer pressure to drink upon an alcoholic is abhorrent. But that is exactly what the mask enablers and alleged allies here are doing to the mask addicted.
I know it sounds cruel, but really, the best thing you can do for these people is to help them keep their sobriety.”
Are local businesses who require their staff to remain faceless because it makes even unmasked customers “more comfortable” sanctioning abuse and discrimination of the working class? Does indulging irrational patrons’ fears help them… or just reinforce the mass psychosis?
Whether out of fear of lost business or out of perceived kindness, those enabling this madness are giving power to a perverse lie.
At what cost, kindness? Architects of this insanity like Fauci and Gates promise us the next virus is just around the corner. By indulging paranoia, mask anxiety/dependence/addiction, or any other form of mask-related mental illness today, the pump is primed for even greater mania the next go-round.
This has been a psyop—”a psychological operation,” in military parlance, “designed to influence the perceptions and attitudes of individuals, groups, and foreign governments.” In this case, the psyop has been worldwide, using relentless information warfare to undermine the morale and will of humanity, local to global.
by Ana Wolpin | Feb 16, 2022 | General
“I’m going to continue to mask,
I’m going to continue to distance.
It’s just not safe out there.”
Public Comment, 2-14-22 BOCC meeting
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What will it take to break the mass delusional psychosis perpetrated on the public? For thousands of years humans have known safety and comfort in sharing smiles and facial expressions, handshakes and hugs. We are wired to find pleasure in open faces and physical closeness, to depend on visual cues and nurturing touch for critical social and emotional development… and to be afraid of dehumanized faces that are masked and expressionless.
Two solid years of a relentless fear campaign has worked on rewiring those innate responses. A devastatingly effective crusade by pharma-captured regulatory agencies, legacy media, increasingly totalitarian government and the healthcare industry has stripped humanity of these basic human needs, substituting shock and awe in a new medical tyranny that has turned our world upside down. In its wake is a collective brainwashing that will not be easily undone.
Draconian measures are lifting around the world as increasing numbers of U.S. states and nations recognize that masks are useless, that social distancing made no difference in viral spread, that the vaxxed are actually more vulnerable to Omicron than the unvaxxed, and that Omicron poses less risk of death than the flu. However despite the Covid narrative continuing to crumble, what psychologists liken to a hypnotic spell keeps the traumatized masses still living in terror of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate. Fear of human contact, of the air we breathe, and of other life is normalized in this spell.
Jefferson County looks to be among the last holdouts for the mass delusion.
On Monday, February 14, a Port Townsend resident demonstrated this psychosis in a public comment to county commissioners at their weekly board meeting:
“We need to do more. We need to do better. We need to bring this thing under control and take stronger measures, not loosen restrictions that are gonna just make more people sick…
“I’m going to continue to mask, I’m going to continue to distance and stay away from any kind of gathering and concentrated groups. It’s just not safe out there, and anything you do that makes it less safe, is not okay.”
Our frightened neighbor might benefit from reading the January 2022 Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality published by Johns Hopkins University. “Lockdowns are defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention,” like masking, physical distancing, bans on public gatherings, and school closures. In a systematic, thorough review of 18,590 studies looking at Covid restrictions across the globe over the last two years, 24 qualified as meeting stringent eligibility requirements for inclusion. An analysis of each of those 24 studies concluded that “lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.” The review confirms that all the measures inflicted on global populations have been for naught:
“Lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.”
A finding of 0.2% is statistically insignificant. And the many studies demonstrating the medical, psychological, social, and economic harms from these measures turn that minuscule fraction of a positive percentage point into a colossal negative. Not only have restrictions been for naught, they have caused far more harm than good. As the Johns Hopkins review notes:
“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Nonetheless, those under the spell may never feel safe again unless these damaging policies—even “stronger”—are continued in perpetuity.
Dr. Byram Bridle, PhD, a Canadian professor of viral immunology, recently spoke to this phenomenon at a press conference in Ottawa:
“Once you have everybody so scared—we’ve seen the fear of Omicron, which is no worse for the vast majority of people than a bad cold… adults here in Ottawa, they’re actually scared of the snow in Ottawa. Do you know why? Because there are so many unvaccinated people that surely we must be contaminating the snow with massive quantities of SARS-CoV-2 and the snow is going to kill them. And I’m serious, they are requesting that government officials start testing the snowbanks in Ottawa.”
Sound crazy? That same irrationality is evident in our community. A Port Townsend NextDoor post worried that deer are spreading Covid. Fifteen states had documented Omicron infections in whitetail deer. There is no evidence that the animals can spread it to humans. But the brainwashed fearful sound the watch-out-for-deer! alarm, much as they demonize healthy people as super-spreaders when all evidence shows asymptomatic transmission is a myth.
Epidemiologist Dr. Paul Alexander, PhD, also spoke at the Ottawa press conference. Former Covid pandemic advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO), Alexander and a team of global scientists have published over 500 scientific papers on these policies. The WHO conducted a focused study on asymptomatic transmission. Alexander called out the disinformation that healthy people spread the virus, used to justify lockdowns:
“This issue about asymptomatic transmission—that was rare. That was a lie. We studied it, we looked at it… We knew the study out of China published in Lancet very early in 2020 that showed us that out of a 10 million sample they found that of all of the [Covid] positive persons that moved around—and they looked at all of the contacts—that there was NO asymptomatic transmission. So we understood this virus very clearly, very early on… This asymptomatic transmission was bogus.”
Dr. Bridle agreed:
“We have drilled into peoples’ heads that somehow healthy people are carriers of these deadly pathogens, they’re going to kill other people. If that’s what you believe, we are never going to be able to de-mask or stop the physical distancing ever again for the rest of our lives. And I’m afraid people are actually wanting to take us there.”
Masking is perhaps the most overt example of the psychosis that has gripped so much of our populace. Not only is our fearful neighbor at the beginning of this article “going to continue to mask… continue to distance,” he admonishes the commissioners that if they allow masking and other restrictions to be lifted for the rest of us, that “is not okay,”
Epidemiology advisor Paul Alexander expounded on masks, referring back to his experience working for the WHO:
“We looked at masking… I am considered an expert on these Covid masks. Blue surgical masks and white masks, they are utter garbage. They have always been ineffective… they have never worked. Never. And they are actually very toxic; they have toxic particles in them. Toxic to our children… I looked at 150 studies that show the masks are ineffective. They just do not work. Period.”
Corroborating assertions by Alexander and other doctors and scientists that facemasks provide no benefit, a comprehensive examination of data has resulted in the just-published “UNMASKED: the Global Failure of Covid Mask Mandates.”
From the book jacket:
Since early 2020, masks have been promoted by experts and implemented as mandates by politicians in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19…but a thorough examination of the data shows they’ve failed.
Looking “at data from all over the world, from the granular county level to entire countries,” author Ian Miller concludes: “Despite extraordinary worldwide compliance, the mask experiment resulted in an unequivocal failure.”
New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz writes: “Ian’s work has been essential throughout the pandemic. His charts have provided the kind of clarity sorely lacking in dissecting the COVID-19 data. Unmasked will elevate the conversation and hopefully, make sure we don’t make any of the same mistakes ever again.”
But at the February 14 BOCC meeting Commissioner Greg Brotherton demonstrated his brainwashing:
“Masks are effective… Are we going to incorporate them in the way that Asia has before this?… Masks are never completely going away, I don’t think.”
Brotherton parrots Jefferson/Clallam County Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry’s disinformation that masking is keeping us safe. In the Feb. 10 Peninsula Daily News (PDN) article “Region’s health officer warns of lifting mask mandates too soon,” Berry contends state mandates should not be lifted in early April: “If we revoke our mitigation measures too soon as a community and as a state, we will prolong this surge.” Her arbitrary pronouncements continue. We will be unsafe if we lift mandates over the next couple of months, but if we wait until her predicted time it will be “very safe:”
“If we kept masking through May for June, I think it would be very safe to revoke the mandate then.”
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The third medical expert at the table in Ottawa, Cambridge-trained pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson, MD, expanded on masking and the other measures imposed on a fearful public:
“Masks – to put it in the vernacular, you cannot stop a mosquito with a chain link fence. It’s absurd.
“Social distancing – this condition is spread by aerosols, not by droplets, so it can be in the aisle at Walmart that no one else is in and you’re still going to get it. Social distancing makes no sense whatsoever…
“But more than anything, lockdowns… it has created the most incredible carnage around the world… it’s physical, it’s mental, it’s psychological, and it’s also economic. It’s affected every single person on earth for a situation basically no worse than a bad seasonal flu. Yes, some variations, obviously. But if this problem had been handled in the usual way, as we’ve done with other viral pandemics, and simply done nothing but accommodate to it in practical ways, common sense… this would have all been over within six months….”
In addition to advising WHO during the early stages of the pandemic, epidemiologist Alexander was a senior advisor to the White House at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He was an insider witness to horrifying data withheld from the public:
“I was in the administration… You saw Trump fighting daily with his own task force because he tried to open the society and open schools. Because we were getting the data to show that the lockdowns were killing people. The school closures were killing children, they were causing children to commit suicide. We saw the failures…. lockdowns have killed thousands of people beyond the virus.
“We were getting reports on a daily basis from the states and winding it up to the Oval [office]… that little children 8, 9, 10 years old were found hung in their bedrooms. They committed suicide because of the school closures and lockdowns… the legacy media decided that they would hide that information from the public.”
Viral immunologist Bridle worried that the fear narrative and brainwashing over the last two years has set us up for a short hop to accepting these destructive policies as necessary for other common viruses in our midst:
“The flu can actually kill our children in much greater numbers than SARS-CoV-2 ever will. I was using that argument to try and put SARS-CoV-2 into a relevant clinical context. I actually stopped that because I started getting quite scared that I could see what’s going to happen — they’re going to start flipping the narrative. They’re gonna start using the flu to institute all of this stuff. It’s a very small step to take in that direction… when you understand the depth of the fear that people have had drilled into their head about Omicron, it is a small step to start convincing them ‘You know what? Whoops. We never saw how deadly dangerous the flu actually was.’
“We lived with the flu. There was a certain quality of life that we accepted despite the fact that some people die with it. But now we’ve had this attitude that we can’t have any infectious disease that we don’t want to have deaths with. People can die from cancers and all kinds of other things that we’re not going to pay proper attention to right now. But all they have to do is start turning the focus on the flu…
Dr. Bridle offered a useful illustration of how we are being played:
“If we put the spotlight on the flu, it would begin to look very scary. Put on the ticker tape over the news all the time — Here’s another case. Here’s another case. Think about it. When your kids are in school, it starts out with one kid. Next day it’s three kids. Next day there’s ten. And then it’s infiltrated ten homes. And then it’s in the surrounding classrooms. It spreads like wildfire.
“Being contagious is not necessarily a problem. That’s what they’ve tried to scare us with. Omicron definitely is contagious. But it is not particularly dangerous. And this is typical of these kinds of viruses. If a virus wants to live with us for a long period of time, it doesn’t want to kill its host. It wants to infect as many of us as possible and keep us alive. Ideally the situation for a virus is that it causes no harm whatsoever; we happily co-exist. And Omicron is taking us in that direction.”
In a PDN poll, readers were asked “Will you feel safe enough to go indoors without a mask if/when the state removes its mandate?” At the time of this screen shot on February 15th, 934 readers had responded. If the poll results accurately reflect our communities, nearly half have bought into the madness, fearful that taking off the masks will be unsafe.
Will you feel safe enough to go indoors without a mask if/when the state removes its mandate?
Why do so many still buy into the narrative?
Crediting Belgian Professor of Clinical Psychology Mattias Desmet and American medical doctor and psychiatrist Mark McDonald, renowned cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough describes the genesis of the mass psychosis that continues to persist:
“A mass psychosis is when there is a group think that develops that’s so strong that it leads to something horrific—examples are these mass suicides that occur in religious cults… Nazi Germany when people walked into gas chambers and were gassed…”
Four conditions must be met:
- “There must be a period of prolonged isolation. Lockdowns.”
- “There must be a withdrawal of things taken away from people that they used to enjoy. That’s happened.”
- “There must be constant, free-floating anxiety.”
- “There must be a single solution, offered by an entity in authority.”
Psychology professor Mattias Desmet elaborates:
“For instance, a narrative is distributed which says there is a very dangerous virus and that we should go into lockdown. If these four conditions are met then there might be an extremely extraordinary willingness to participate in the strategy of the lockdowns even when the narrative in itself is absolutely absurd. When people start to participate all together in the strategy to deal with the object of anxiety, a new kind of social bond, and a new meaning-making emerges.”
Psychiatrist Mark McDonald, MD, author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, explains further:
“The fuel is fear. We cannot become mass delusionally psychotic without first being scared. The fear has been the driver behind this pandemic from the very beginning. Without fear, it all falls apart… An entire group, an entire population which is the American people, all at the same time, losing their rational faculties. Being unable to think, acting as a herd…
“It’s been the fear driven by government, corporations and the media all colluding together to perpetuate the mass delusional psychosis… The endpoint of this is the same as for every totalitarian regime throughout the 20th century—dependency on government. Once people depend on government, then they don’t depend on their families, they don’t depend on their churches, they don’t depend on their communities.”
Dr. Hodkinson describes the techniques “by which you can break even the most hardened terrorist in Guantanamo Bay”:
“You drive fear. And you keep it on. Fear, driven by the morning graph in the paper. The PCR graph with so-called cases… the vast percentage, 97% or so, were false positives. And that’s what drove fear. That’s what drove contact tracing. That’s what destroyed restaurants…
“And then isolation, otherwise known as quarantine. Keep people separated. Don’t let them talk to each other.
“You break anyone with those methods.”
Now those in our midst who are driven by fear cannot let down their guard. For them, humanity has become the virus: “It’s just not safe out there.”
They will mask and distance and insist that we need more restrictions that do not make a whit of difference against these viruses.
Directives that only serve to make us afraid of human contact, of pets and wildlife—even snow. Policies designed to create anxiety, discord and alienation. Mandates that ultimately divide us into believers versus non-believers of a false narrative.
The mass delusional psychosis demands it.
