“I wouldn’t change a thing about what we did.” Mayor David Faber said that about the Cherry Street Project at a December city council meeting. The topic of that meeting was whether Port Townsend should purchase 14.4 acres on the edge of town, the Evans Vista project, to build the equivalent of a separate village of affordable and low-income housing. It would be a massive project that Michelle Sandoval, mayor at the time, predicted would be “incredibly expensive.”
The Cherry Street Project will be five years old on May 10, 2022, yet remains unfinished. Windows facing the street are boarded up; windows at the rear are broken out, the result of vandalism. The city is paying off a 20-year bond with a principal and interest obligation of around $1.4 million. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent. Valuable land is tied up with a derelict building. The last estimate was that another $1.8 million would be required to rehab the old building.
In preparation for an article on the Cherry Street Project’s fifth anniversary, I emailed Mayor Faber regarding his “I wouldn’t change a thing about what we did” assessment of the Cherry Street Project. I asked him,
“What would you say was done correctly in the inception and execution of the Cherry Street Project? Were no mistakes made, since you “wouldn’t change a single thing” in retrospect?”
A fair question, particularly since the Mayor has insisted that he and others have learned from the Cherry Street Project and the Evans Vista Project won’t be a repeat. It is our policy to print in full and verbatim all written responses and statements we receive to our inquiries.
Mayor Faber did respond. But he had conditions. He first wanted an off-the-record “chat” to “set some ground rules.” Here is his complete and verbatim response:
Hi Jim,
I’m happy to have a conversation with you, provided we first have an off-the-record chat to set some ground rules. If you can’t agree to do that, then please, by all means, continue misconstruing my comments without my involvement as is your right, even if you are needlessly creating division for clicks.
Give me a call whenever you want: (360) 821-9374.
Best,
David J. Faber
At first I thought this would be a great idea and agreed. (Golly, a chat with the mayor!). But then I realized that agreeing to an “off-the-record chat” to “set some ground rules” was problematic. Why should anything the Mayor has to say about a housing project be off the record? Why did we need ground rules for a Q&A on the Cherry Street Project? I had never had a request like this in fifteen years of writing for a major newspaper or my own investigative news sites.
Mayor Faber,
Upon further reflection, it would be better if you wrote out the ground rules you want for an interview. If they are to govern any future exchange and what goes into a published article, it does no good to have them “off the record.” So, please just send the ground rules you want and we can proceed from there if they are agreeable. I can’t remember any public official ever insisting on an off the record conversation to set ground rules. I don’t seek a free running conversation, just answer to a question but I will fairly consider your proposed ground rules.
I send out written questions and publish the entire answers so that nothing gets misquoted or left out. My written question to you is still open and your response will be published verbatim and in full. A written exchange requires no ground rules. And, if you would like to say more on the Cherry Street Project than my question covers, please add that to your response and it will also be published verbatim and in full.
Awaiting your proposed ground rules and written answer and expanded statement, if you choose to respond. I think this is the best way to proceed to avoid any misunderstanding or accusations following publication.
I am keeping my editors informed of this exchange, by the way.
Sincerely,
Jim Scarantino
Mayor Faber responded the next morning:
No, I think it would be best for us to have a conversation. If you disagree, then fine, enjoy writing half-truths without my further involvement.
Best,
David J. Faber
I let Mayor Faber know that I was awaiting instructions from my editors and would get back to him. We talked about it and jointly made a decision to reject his pre-condition of an “off-the-record chat” to “set some ground rules.” Here’s the response of Port Townsend Free Press to Mayor Faber’s unusual request:
Mayor Faber,
My editors and I appreciate your invitation to have a conversation with you on the Cherry Street Project. We cannot, however, agree to keeping from the public any statements made by the Mayor of the City of Port Townsend, and, therefore, do not agree to any off-the-record preconditions. (That is why I have not called you, because you seem to have set the condition that that conversation would be off-the-record). Everything said in the interview or any telephone calls is public information and subject to publication.
To ensure there are no misquotes or misinterpretations in any article resulting from the conversation, I will tape our exchange and you are certainly welcome to do the same.
Our invitation to you to publish on our site any statement you wish to make on the Cherry Street Project remains open.This gives you the opportunity to put your best case to the readers directly, without going through a reporter relating what you have to say or not putting it as you would want. As I have stated several times in our exchanges, any written responses to our questions or submitted statements are published verbatim and in full. We recently did this with County Prosecutor Kennedy, by way of example. And we still invite you, if you choose, to provide a written answer to the questions that initiated this back-and-forth: What would you say was done correctly in the inception and execution of the Cherry Street Project? Were no mistakes made, since you “wouldn’t change a single thing” in retrospect?
Lastly, in your emails you have implied that I have been “misconstruing [your] comments without [your] involvement” and that I have been publishing “half-truths without [your] involvement.” You are invited to include in a statement to be published your explanation of what has been reported at the Port Townsend Free Press that misconstrued your comments or constituted half-truths regarding the Cherry Street Project. Of course, I would hope that in our conversation you will also explain those statements further.
Please let me know how you wish to proceed.
Jim Scarantino, Contributor, Port Townsend Free Press
Mayor Faber has not responded.
Mayor David Faber presiding at the April 4 meeting
There has been no substantive discussion in City Council of the reasons for the abject failure of the Cherry Street Project… ever. It would be useful on the fifth anniversary of the Cherry Street Project for the mayor to offer a few words on why he insists he would do things the same again. Insiders have known, as we have reported previously, that this thing was headed for a train wreck from the beginning. None of our reporting, based on what we have learned from public records requests and documented with photographs, has ever been disputed by Mayor Faber or any other city official. Keeping taxpayers in the dark is not why we publish the Port Townsend Free Press and we won’t participate with Mayor Faber in holding anything back from the people who are footing the bill for City Hall’s mistakes.
Our offer to Mayor Faber to publish his answer to our questions and any other statement his wishes to make about the Cherry Street Project remains open.
A community divided by class and social status. In the 19th century there were two distinct Port Townsends. In Uptown and Morgan Hill, the prim and proper wives of captains, bankers and customs officers never had to rub elbows with the roughnecks and Chinese along the waterfront.
Crime was confined to the lower reaches of the city, where prostitution, drugs, alcohol, violence and shanghaiing were not only common, but economic pillars. Looking down from the widow’s walks on their Victorian mansions, captains could see their ships at anchor, accompanied sometimes by rowboats ferrying landlubbers pressed into virtual slavery as involuntary crew for voyages that might last years.
“Bloody Townsend,” our fair Victorian seaport and arts community was known up and down the west coast. But that moniker did not apply to the genteel, refined, abstemious upper class on top of the hill and bluffs.
Stairs to Port Townsend’s Victorian Uptown
Maybe for a period of time the city escaped its segregationist past. People who have been here for decades talk wistfully of a less stratified Port Townsend. But in recent years, Port Townsend has returned to being a segregated city, and it is getting worse. How we got here will be the subject of future articles on why Port Townsend is far from being a “strong town.”
Not really a “progressive” city
Port Townsend has undergone economic class cleansing, reestablishing the higher elevation areas of the city as the very exclusive domain of the well-to-do. Now even downtown has been swept of lower-economic status residents. Workers have been driven to the city’s edges or to the Tri-Area or even further away. A growing number of Port Townsend workers commute from homes in other counties because they cannot afford to live here.
The policies of “progressive” city councilors and county commissioners are only making the segregation worse. For the past twenty years the city has accomplished economic segregation by exclusionary zoning and building codes.
The prized Victorian neighborhoods were not planned. Those mansions were not built after waiting endlessly on building permits or having to pay city employees a high hourly rate to explain codes and regulations. But now they and the entire city are subject to a straitjacket of codes, regulations, and ordinances that stifle the more intensive and dense development of PT’s urban center.
Social policies have exploded building codes and made every type of construction more expensive. It is not all about safety and structural integrity. There are aesthetic elements in those thick codes, as well as the products of lobbying and policy aspirations.
“Snob” zoning hit Port Townsend about the same time real estate interests gained control over local government. Preserving or enhancing real estate values was a goal of these exclusionary and barrier-raising regulations. Real estate appreciation has been pushed as a major economic engine in and of itself. Planners suddenly had much more power.
The burdensome regulations had the effect of making new construction and remodels more expensive, or prohibiting up-zoning so that old buildings could not be repurposed for multi-family units. Manufactured housing, the portal to affordable housing for tens of millions of Americans, was excluded from most areas of the city. Regulations that sounded innocuous, such as requiring so much off-street parking per unit, drove up prices and restricted supply.
In the face of a housing emergency declared five years ago, only now, at its March 24, 2022 meeting has the city Planning Commission done its “first touch” on considering loosening the off-street parking requirements for ADUs. It is worth noting that prior to 2007, city codes did not require an off-street parking space for an ADU. That requirement was added in 2007. Fifteen years later, city government is only now “considering” revising that habitation-killing requirement.
Historic building designations are perhaps the most exclusionary regulation — only those with the resources to meet the astounding costs and legal requirements (and legal fees) for maintaining a historically-designated, preserved property can get in. If you want to avoid having poor, even middle-class people for neighbors, move into a historically designated neighborhood.
The regulatory framework leveraged more power over development by allowing homeowners to impose their will on other property owners and get in the way of building affordable housing. Page back through The Leader’s archives and you will find incidents where proposals to provide more affordable housing have been stopped by opposition from private citizens who already “had theirs.”
Snob Zoning on Steroids
City councilors, joined by county commissioners, are now concentrating the poor people and working families on the south side of the city, away from the moneyed hoods on the hills and up around North Beach and Fort Worden.
Lower income housing is already heavily concentrated near the QFC and blocks to the south. That’s where you will find the mobile homes and most apartment buildings. That’s where the county gave land to OlyCap to build its multi-story affordable/low income apartment building.
Olycap’s low-income housing project under construction across the street from mobile home park
Not far away, the city approved the “wooden tent” encampment called Pat’s Place. This love-driven project was built by volunteers and private donations. They had to creatively shoehorn the project into a narrow slot in city codes. There is no “tiny homes” zoning allowed in Port Townsend, but there is an emergency tent encampment exception to the strict prohibitions against camping anywhere beyond a few select locations (e.g., the Fairgrounds). Hence, “wooden tents” appeared instead of “tiny homes.
The city charged the group $52,000 in permit fees for a settlement that under current regulations is limited to 180 days plus one 60-day extension. The good people behind the project raised the funds and built the project on faith that the city would relax that time provision. It has still not been relaxed, though City Council is supposed to take this issue up at future meeting, after it has worked its way through a thicket of other procedural steps. This critical correction was only at the “first touch” stage for the Planning Commission at its March 24, 2022 meeting. City Council has to wait for the Planning Commission to make its recommendation on what to do with this ludicrous obstacle to providing emergency shelter for people who otherwise would be living under tarps in the wet woods or in their cars.
Pat’s Place
The city did waive the outrageous mountain of fees. This was a project sponsored by a nonprofit dedicated to providing low income and transitional housing. The city can get around the state-law prohibition on gifts to private entities under an escape hatch for charitable works. Private individuals seeking to build an affordable home or an ADU don’t get this gracious treatment from the city. Their effort at building something affordable runs head on into the city’s crushing building fee demands.
A little further southeast, at Mill Road and just outside city limits, the county bought about 30 acres in order to relocate the open air drug market and homeless/transient camp that had taken over the Fairgrounds inside the city. Plans are in place to expand the Mill Road development to be a “housing hub” for services and accommodations for the unhoused and those seeking transitional housing.
Mill Road encampment
The Mill Road camp also allows city law enforcement to remove the homeless from downtown PT and transport them to the city’s edge, or send them packing in that direction. The drugs that plagued the Fairgrounds (now mainly Fentanyl) are still prevalent in the county-sponsored camp to a shocking and depressing degree.
People surviving out there are not getting better. Many, maybe most, are enslaved by their addictions and killing themselves slowly or dramatically (the young man who hung himself outside Manresa Castle) or harming, even killing others (the young man who murdered two of his family members earlier this year).
For the rich and privileged of Port Townsend, the problems are out of sight, out of mind, handled more neatly and cleanly than when the Victorians could not avoid seeing Bloody Townsend at the bottom of their hill. Very, very few of PT’s upper crust will ever see the Mill Road camp or even be aware of its existence.
In November 2021, the city bought 14.4 acres directly across Mill Road from the OlyCap development. The city hopes to build its own low-income planned community. This concept is currently known as the Evans Vista Project. Upon completion, it will go a long way toward finalizing the concentration and segregation of the city’s remaining indigent, working poor and low to lower-middle class households in an out-of-the-way location removed from the city’s elites.
The city has land in the affluent areas of town. It could be driving a bulldozer through the morass of codes, regulations, permit fee schedules and time consuming procedures to clear a path for a radical change in the city’s housing and demographic landscape. It could be doing something other than resurrecting the segregated Port Townsend of the 19th century.
Anti-Police Politicians Now Desperate for More Law Enforcement. Realizing that a shrunken Port Townsend Police Department can’t protect the city, City Council approved an agreement with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office to rent deputies and their equipment. The city will pay significantly more than it would for a fully staffed police department. The annualized cost of a rented deputy and his equipment comes to around $200,000. But, according to the mayor — who spearheaded recent anti-police actions of council — this is “the reality of a tough situation. We’ve gotta do what we’ve gotta do.” Even if it means breaking the city’s budget.
In the past eighteen months or so, the city has lost more than half its police department to transfers to other agencies, resignations, and opting for retirement. It lost another officer just last week. How did Port Townsend so quickly lose so many valuable, highly trained personnel? Not one of the City Councilors bothered to ask.
A Grim Assessment
At its March 21, 2022, business meeting council heard from Chief Tom Olson that the skeleton crew of officers are being forced to work overtime in order to maintain at least one officer on duty 24/7. City Manager John Mauro stated that having just one officer on duty is “becoming very, very challenging.” In order to maintain minimal yet admittedly inadequate and unsafe coverage, the department has “greatly reduced,” as Mauro put it, services the police department normally provides. Chief Olson anticipates that it will take 12-18 months to get to “where our staffing levels are much closer to where they need to be.”
The Sheriff has in the past helped fill occasional gaps in PT’s patrols but has not been called upon to make up for anything like a greater than 50% shortfall in PTPD’s roster. The agreement approved by council is a renewal, but more costly renewal of the pre-existing arrangement. Neither the city manager nor the finance director was able to answer questions from council members on how much more this pricey arrangement will cost than had been budgeted for a police department staffed with 15 regularly employed officers in city vehicles.
Port Townsend Police Chief Tom Olson
Chief Olson could only predict that it was going to cost “a lot more.” This means the city will exceed its 2022 budget for law enforcement and will have to take the money from elsewhere. City Councilor Libby Urner Wennstrom called this “going into debt.” (To her credit, she recently did a ride-along and found she was patrolling the city with the only officer on duty that night.)
The $200,000 annualized figure was calculated by Mayor David Faber using the $93.34/hour “fully loaded” rate the city will pay for use of county deputies. “Fully loaded” includes the deputies’ rate of pay under their most recent union contract, and also the cost of their equipment, including their vehicle, and county overhead. On holidays, the “fully loaded” rate jumps to $121.63/hr. The figures Faber used are available in this staff briefing for council.
Why Has the City Lost More Than Half Its Police Department?
City councilors did not ask this question. The answer points at them.
In the summer of 2020, City Council launched what many members of the police department and surrounding law enforcement agencies viewed as a hostile and unfair “review”. It was clearly a pretext for anti-law enforcement measures council members openly discussed. The former mayor hoped — it was that obvious — for evidence that she thought would show bias by law enforcement against minorities. (The evidence was not there, though she kept seeking it.) The current mayor Faber, then a member of council, proposed disarming police by requiring them to lock their weapons in the trunks of their patrol vehicles. The current mayor initially sought to strip officers of their qualified immunity, meaning they would lose insurance coverage for even good faith mistakes made in a high-stress, high-risk situation, thus exposing themselves and their families to the ruinous costs of litigation and possible judgments. Other officials, like city councilors, would retain their qualified immunity and insurance coverage, even for acts of gross negligence, such as approving the Cherry Street Project. See “City Council Threatens Port Townsend’s Public Safety,” PTFP 7/29/20. (Former Chief Surber and his staff did a brilliant job fending off this attack on the department by convincing council that PTPD was already the most “progressive” department around.)
During 2020 elected officials in the city and county enabled and encouraged efforts to humiliate and disparage local law enforcement personnel. See “Reckoning with ‘The Reckoning,‘” PTFP 8/3/20 and “Black Lives Matter Sought to Humiliate Sheriff, Police Chief,” PTFP, 9/25/20. Anti-police protestors requested a police escort for their march down Sims Way and Water Street. Was this to humiliate police? Their motives were unclear and contradictory. The city gave them preferential treatment and police stood guard as marchers with “ACAB” (All cops are bastards) placards passed by. The leader of the event, a man known to law enforcement because of his long police record (including stealing a truck followed by a high-speed chase, followed by hitting a horse) was the keynote speaker. He was applauded by city leaders. That speech repeated numerous lies and baseless attacks on police in general. Ironically, this man’s life was saved by one of the law enforcement personnel he attacked in statements to The Leader. Unfortunately, due to threats and harassment of herself and her employer, a member of this law enforcement officer’s family was driven out the city where she had grown up.
The city’s anti-police animus continued through 2020. The city broke its own laws to rush through painting of “Black Lives Matter” on Water Street but rebuffed a request to honor law enforcement with a similar street painting.
In the face of this official hostility towards their husbands, fathers and sons, wives and mothers of local law enforcement officers organized what proved to be a massive “Back the Blue Rally” that attracted around 400 cars, truck and motorcycles. Instead of offering support, city officials and leaders (including the current mayor) were furious. It was reported to this author that the city manager was overheard yelling at the former police chief and demanding that charges be filed against the organizers — the wives, mothers and daughters of officers and deputies. As reported to me, the former chief stood his ground because the rally organizers and participants had broken no laws. (Laws were broken by anti-police protestors who blocked Water Street to interrupt the rally, but no charges against them were ever lodged.)
City council in their anti-police fervor was bent on eliminating the school resource officer. Why? Because they objected on ideological grounds to police in schools. The Port Townsend High School principal had to plead with them to keep the valued and beloved officer in her hallways. “PTHS Principal Tells City Council to Keep Police in Her School,“ PTFP, 9/28/20. (That particular officer has since left the Port Townsend Police Department.)
In September 2020 first responders had to fight the city to commemorate the sacrifice of firemen and police officers who died rushing into the Twin Towers on 9/11. Since 2002, they had been ringing the old fire bell at the hour when the planes hit the Twin Towers. This was the first time they had ever been denied permission to hold their modest ceremony.
In 2020, Officer Mark DuMond sustained such severe head injuries in the course of protecting a nurse at the hospital he was incapable of continuing to work as a police officer. While he was honored by the department and awarded two rare departmental Purple Hearts for lives he saved, city council telegraphed its hostility toward law enforcement, or at least its indifference to DuMond’s sacrifice, by doing nothing to recognize his suffering and service to the city. See “The Violence that Cost Port Townsend a Man Who Saves Lives,” PTFP, 12/6/20.
But now city leaders are concerned they don’t have enough police on the streets and are so desperate they will break the city’s budget to rent law enforcement services from the Sheriff.
Mayor David Faber blamed the alarming contraction of the police force on difficulties for new hires finding housing. Chief Olsen said nothing about qualified officers turning down job offers due to housing concerns; Faber resorted to what is becoming the go-to cause of every problem in the city, true or not. In this case it is not true. It does not explain why so many good officers — who already had housing — left the force in such a relatively short period of time.
Faber failed to acknowledge his own contribution to the city’s dilemma. Who wants to work for a city that treats police so badly? That city will likely hang you out to dry when it suits them. Chief Olson said he has not been able to hire the kind of people who meet his standards. Other communities are also looking for men and women who can fill the holes in their police rosters. Officers can choose a community that appreciates their professionalism and sacrifice, or they can work for a city administration that recently talked about disarming them and exposing them to personal ruin.
Communities across Washington state are finding it difficult to hire police due to the “police reforms” passed by the Legislature, measures that amount to little more than handcuffing police and giving criminals “drive away free cards.” Men and women who want to protect and serve can find better places to risk their lives.
Not long ago, PT City Council and its current mayor were talking about a smaller police force. They thought that turning against law enforcement was the smart political move. It certainly played well to the angry mob. Now taxpayers must pick up the tab, yet again, for the costs of council’s irresponsibility and ideological foolishness.
Lipstick on a pig. The side of the Carmel House the public sees from Cherry Street shows new plywood sheeting where windows were broken out during the extensive vandalism on January 3, 2022. It looks like maybe the city is somewhat taking care of its largest, most costly housing project. To deter further vandalism, city crews also posted warnings that the building is under video surveillance. And, wonder of wonders, after years of swinging open to the wind (and me calling out this negligence), the front doors have finally been closed.
It’s all for show. Get a little closer and you’ll see shards of glass everywhere in the weeds. The refrigerator teenagers launched through a picture window is still where it landed.
Walk around back and you’ll see the city has done nothing to protect the building from the elements. All the broken windows are still broken and uncovered. My favorite is the one that looks like a cat in the window (featured at top).
The rest are just ugly, and admit snow and rain, dirt, insects, birds and bats. The place already was overrun with rats and home to raccoons. And, once again, it appears the grounds have a homeless camp.
Those surveillance cameras that are supposed to be watching and recording are nowhere to be seen. It’s the same cheap trick homeowners play when they think they can scare off burglars with fake “Protected by ADT” signs.
The city is jumping into a huge development project with its acquisition of the Evans Vista property at the first traffic circle coming into town. City leaders contemplate building hundreds of units and possible commercial spaces — an entirely new village at the entrance to the city. Yet, it can’t even take care of this single dilapidated, fantastically expensive derelict of a building.
Why be so confrontational by calling it “Faber’s Folly?” David Faber, our current mayor, like the two mayors before him — Deborah Stinson and Michelle Sandoval — has been a vocal supporter of the project, from his years on Council to his current position. He pushed the financing through over pleas of caution and requests for due diligence from former councilor Bob Gray. The financial documents in front of Faber at the time showed the project was doomed to default. Despite the abject failure of this boondoggle, Faber recently boasted “I wouldn’t change a single thing about what we did.”
Faber owns this, as does City Councilor Amy Howard, who also overrode Gray’s calls for caution and due diligence to protect taxpayers. During the discussion on going huge with the Evans Vista village, and with the failure of the Cherry Street Project hanging over council, Howard, now our Deputy Mayor, echoed Faber’s delusional braggadocio and declared she, too, had no regrets.
What this means is that our Mayor and Deputy Mayor have no regrets about saddling taxpayers with the tab for their gross negligence — a nearly $1.4 million debt, highly valuable land rendered unavailable to provide housing for people instead of vermin, and the cost of tearing this thing down and cleaning up the site, an inevitability the politicians think they can ignore. As I have written elsewhere, the costs sunk into this project already exceed $2.2 million and the last cost estimate predicted at least another million would be needed before the first of eight modest apartments would be ready. That was before construction costs began soaring.
While the city suffers under the affordable housing emergency that is depriving businesses of workers, and workers of a place other than a car to call home, the city-owned lot occupied by the rotting Carmel House is unavailable for any kind of sensible housing project, public or private.
The housing crisis is so bad a downtown business owner, who moved here from Asia and invested his savings to pursue a dream in a new country, is on the verge of moving out because he can’t find a home for his family when he loses his lease in less than a month.
Our city leaders have been dithering around since they joined the county’s declaration of a housing emergency… in 2017. We fought and won a World War in less time. It will be many more years before the “incredibly expensive” Evans Vista project (to quote former Mayor Michelle Sandoval) provides a single room of human habitation. I will be writing about this project in my next article.
The only Cherry Street Project related work in the 2022 city budget is simply paying the monthly principal and interest on the bond, with a decade-and-a-half of debt service still to go. Nailing up some plywood boards to partially mask vandalism damage and buying the false surveillance camera signs was presumably off-budget.
To “Faber’s Folly,” let’s add “Howard’s Hovel.” Faber and Howard earned the honors. They were on council when the city approved the Cherry Street boondoogle and when it thumbed its nose at a $1 million offer from Keith and Jean Marzan to take the project off their hands and actually get some affordable housing built. No one else who dumped this wasteful lemon on taxpayers is left in city government. Let’s hope the new council has functioning brains and enough backbone to cut the city’s losses, bulldoze the decaying hulk and put the land to better use.
By the way, Howard’s Hovel/Faber’s Folly turns 5 years old in a few weeks. Somebody, bake a cake.
Public radio compromised by government money. Wanting more news coverage from what they perceive as a non-threatening, if not friendly media outlet, Jefferson County Commissioners gave $10,000 to KPTZ to hire a producer/reporter to cover county business. You read that right, politicians bought themselves a reporter to write about the things they do.
KPTZ can no longer be considered an independent news source. It was never an unbiased, objective news source. It definitely has its left-ward tilt, and that’s okay. There is no such thing anywhere as a totally unbiased news source. But now KPTZ is not only biased, it is also dependent on money from the very government it covers in its news broadcasts.
Commissioner Heidi Eisenhour started the process of compromising KPTZ’s integrity. She approached KPTZ to persuade them to provide more news coverage of what commissioners were doing. As she explained at the February 28, 2022, Board of County Commissioners meeting, she wanted KPTZ to do more to get the word out about “a lot of things going on on behalf of the community by the county right now.” She wanted them to do what she called “county works spotlights.”
KPTZ was ready to take county money to hire a producer/reporter. Their own fundraising was not going that well. Government money would fill the hole in their budget.
On February 28, 2022, as an item on their consent agenda, the commissioners approved a $10,000 gift of taxpayer money to KPTZ.
Placing the grant’s approval on the consent agenda meant it was not an item up for discussion or debate. Despite a public comment preceding the consent agenda expressing concerns that this was a “gift of public funds” to a media outlet, the grant was given an automatic pass as one of fourteen perfunctory items “enacted in one motion.”
Imagine if Donald Trump had given thousands of dollars to Right Side Broadcasting to hire a reporter to cover what he was doing “on behalf” of the American people. Politicians buying journalists is politicians buying journalists is politicians buying journalists. And journalists taking money from the government and politicians they cover is unethical. Period.
The wording of the grant does not explicitly require KPTZ to cover anything the commissioners do. But that is being disingenuous. The expressed intent of the commissioners during their public meeting, echoed by the county manager, is for KPTZ to hire a reporter to cover the stuff they do. They now have someone on KPTZ’s payroll. There is no longer any boundary between KPTZ’s local news and county government.
This article is difficult for me to write. I appreciate KPTZ’s musical and community events programming. But they want to be a lot more. They want to be a news station. That subjects them to the same scrutiny and standards as journalists who write and broadcast reports about government, politics and public affairs. KPTZ General Manager Kate Ingram, who sees no problem at all with taking government money, says the station wants to do “high quality journalism” and this money will help them do that. “High quality journalism” requires high quality ethics. You can have your viewpoint and push it as hard as you want. But if you’re being paid by the people you’re covering you’re just being corrupt. Instead of being a journalist, you’re a shill.
KPTZ is Not Unbiased.
The resolution giving ten grand to the radio station stated:
“The Jefferson County Board of County Commissioners values an electorate informed by unbiased news sources, of which KPTZ is one. Their expanded news coverage will help inform our citizens and residents about the work the county is doing on their behalf.”
Politicians first declare which media is unbiased, then grace their “unbiased” journalists with public largesse. Let’s unpack that.
Unbiased? Immediately before its local news casts, KPTZ broadcasts Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! That program is decidedly, unapologetically left wing. Several organizations that rate media bias, such as allsides.com, also place the “left wing” label on the outlet’s reporting. But to its credit, unlike KPTZ, Democracy Now! does not accept any corporate or government funding. It is openly biased, and proudly independent.
Several years ago, Scott Hogenson, who was then a contributor to the Port Townsend Free Press and who has an extensive career in journalism, from being a university professor to serving on an NPR board to co-founding CNSnews, approached KPTZ to see if they were interested in programming that would add diversity to the left wing viewpoints they broadcast. He was informed the station was not interested.
The “unbiased” KPTZ has repeatedly shown its bias in covering local events, such as the arrest last year of Rachelle Merle for protesting Governor Inslee’s masking mandate, and the Back the Blue motorcade in August 2020. Their news reporter described that event as “polarizing.” The same label was not applied to the blockades of Water Street and Center Road by anti-law enforcement protestors doing the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” antic (never mind this never happened in the Michael Brown case, as the grand jury testimony of mostly Black witnesses revealed).
“We’re not here to foment controversy,” KPTZ General Manager Kate Ingram told me in a telephone interview. They’re just out, she said, “to tell people what is going on, not to comment or be editorial.”
That is demonstrably false. KPTZ regularly “foments controversy” to further progressive, left-wing objectives. Take, for example, it’s shameful, highly controversial broadcast, “The Reckoning,” from July 2020. This program gave airtime to people to throw wild, racist accusations against our local law enforcement, which has never had a single case of racially motivated misconduct. A man who had been facing charges for trying to break into a house (with the owner on the other side of a glass door and holding a gun) and who had a considerable record of other encounters with police due to his substance abuse, was given use of KPTZ’s airwaves to viciously and falsely attack law enforcement.
As I wrote on August 3, 2020 in covering this detestable, unjustified smear job on our local law enforcement, “The moderators were far from impartial. One of them, KPTZ radio show host Paul Rice, has encouraged activists to pursue and harass a local law enforcement family and in the past has himself attempted to injure the reputation of at least one other law enforcement official. This program was created and sold as a kind of set-up of our Sheriff.”
How could this program have gotten aired? Perhaps because one of those biased moderators, the person who arranged the confrontation, was Kate Dean, one of the Jefferson County Commissioners who later approved giving KPTZ ten grand. KPTZ gave its airwaves to a politician wishing to push her ideological agenda on the station’s listeners.
Other KPTZ programming has also fed into a left-wing narrative and at times sought to energize and rally the troops for local protests. It happens so often it is a regular feature of KPTZ programming. And, of course, there is the totally noncontroversial daily Democracy Now! show.
Just one more example: In a December 9, 2021 news broadcast the KPTZ reporter described wins by climate activists as “encouraging” and pondered, “what might be the results of another lost decade on climate action in this region?” This is not unbiased reporting. It is cheerleading.
Such programming is not improper. KPTZ can choose sides in this community, which it has done for years. But KPTZ is not unbiased. That’s okay. Just don’t lie about it.
Sycophants or Journalists?
KPTZ’s other bias — being a team player with the local political establishment and government leaders — shows in what they do not cover in their news reports.
In democracies, a free press, including radio and television journalism, is expected to maintain an “adversarial” relationship with government, and serve as a watchdog, a deterrent against corruption, waste, abuse of power and incompetence. That is why we have protections for the press written into our constitution. The Fourth Branch of government is supposed to be a counterweight to government, not one of the gang.
I asked KPTZ General Manager Kate Ingram if KPTZ has ever engaged in any critical reporting of local government. Has it ever performed this important, foundational function of journalism? That’s when I got the answer about them just “telling people what’s going on” and not engaging in any sort of editorial commenting.
Opinion can be expressed in what reporters say (and opinion regularly enters the reporting on KPTZ). It is also expressed in what they cover, and avoid covering. I think it is a fair statement that KPTZ never reports on anything that causes difficulties for the local political establishment or challenges the ideological monoculture of Port Townsend. I cannot recall a single story where they have called out any of our local officials for their failures or sought to hold them accountable for decisions that have caused problems in our community.
For instance, did they cover local governments’ failures, negligence and indifference to human suffering in permitting the chaos and tragedy of the homeless encampment and open-air drug market at the Fairgrounds for over a year? Have they ever covered the abject failure of the Cherry Street Project, Port Townsend’s largest public housing project? Have they covered the drug overdoses and suicides among the county’s growing addicted population? Have they covered any story of local government waste, incompetence or corruption? (The answer to these questions is uniformly in the negative.)
The county commissioners just raised commissioners’ salaries to over $100,000 (plus benefits and other freebees).* That puts their income at twice the median income for a family of four in Jefferson County. Few people in this county have seen their incomes rise as fast as the compensation packages the commissioners enjoy. On the very same day commissioners feathered their own nest, they also (again) raised taxes. Did KPTZ mention this even in passing in its local news coverage? Nope. In light of KPTZ now taking money from these same politicians, one is entitled to ask: Were they then in discussion to receive a gift of county funds? Were they hoping to get county money? Is that why they avoid news that could stir up criticism of the commissioners? What other stories has KPTZ avoided broadcasting so as not to jeopardize its chances of getting county money, or to maintain friendly relations with local leaders? What stories will it avoid reporting in the future out of gratitude for the large gift of public funds, or in the hope more public money could be coming their way?
Biased Is Okay. Unethical Is Not.
Unless KPTZ never again reports on anything involving county government, it is engaging in unethical behavior. As I mentioned above, to their credit Democracy Now! refuses to accept government money because it will compromise the integrity of their reporting, either directly or indirectly, or by way of creating both an actual and apparent conflict of interest.
The folks behind Port Townsend Free Press joked about requesting our own $10,000 grant of county funds to hire a reporter to cover county government. We could guarantee satisfying Commissioner Eisenhour’s wish for more news reporting on the actions of county government. We were only joking, because taking money from the government and politicians we write about is straight-up unethical.
The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics states that a journalist’s duty to act independently is one of the four basic principles of ethical journalism. To act ethically a journalist should “Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived” and “Refuse gifts, favors…and special treatment…that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.”
Taking money from someone you are going to cover is unethical. What KPTZ is doing is unethical. As for the county giving KPTZ a gift of money, it may be illegal.
Illegal Gift of Public Funds to a Private Entity?
The $10,000 “grant” is an outright gift of public funds to a private entity that does not serve a fundamental purpose of government. To the contrary, it is corrosive of the independence of the press, which is a fundamental value of our society.
There is no explicit quid pro quo stated in the “grant.” Indeed, it was described during the Commissioner’s meeting as a “no strings attached” grant, but in the next breath, they talked about how this would get them more news coverage. In terms of what was actually written into the grant, the only clear limitation on how the money is spent is that it must be spent on paying a “producer/reporter.”
Commissioner Dean described this as “capacity building.” Under her approach, the county could subsidize any media the commissioners liked or considered “unbiased” because it did not cause them any difficulties. They could give more and more money to local media they liked, every year. Why, this could spread to other small counties, allowing politicians to use public funds to prop up newspapers and radio stations they like, and withhold subsidies from journalists who cause them headaches — a monetary carrot and stick approach to dealing with journalists.
The Washington State Constitution should stand in the way. Article 8, Section 7, in short, prohibits any local government from bestowing a gift on a private party. Washington courts have developed a two-part test to ascertain whether a transfer of public funds to a private party is an illegal gift. First, are the funds being expended to carry out a fundamental government purpose? If the answer is no, the gift is illegal. But, if the answer is not clearly in the negative, courts then ask whether the governmental entity had a “donative intent” or whether it was receiving an adequate return for the transfer.
Compromising the independence of the media: Is that a fundamental governmental purpose? I recognize that is a loaded question, but it is precisely what is accomplished by the county paying for a KPTZ reporter. The commissioners’ action is directly contrary to the concept of an independent press–it makes the press dependent on government. This, in turn, undermines the intent in both the Washington and United States Constitutions behind freedom of the press.
The county resolution authorizing the grant makes an attempt to meet the “fundamental governmental purpose” standard, but falls short. The resolution states that KPTZ was already in the process of raising funds to expand its coverage “of all things Jefferson County,” but needed help. “The Jefferson County Board of County Commissioners values an electorate informed by unbiased news sources, of which KPTZ is one. Their expanded news coverage will help inform our citizens and residents about the work the county is doing on their behalf.”
Is promoting a certain slant of news coverage a “fundamental purpose of government?” The Commissioners value an electorate informed by news sources they consider “unbiased,” of which there is really not a single example in broadcast or print news. Maybe they value an electorate that does not get news from news sources that might look at their actions with a bias against governmental corruption, waste, abuse and incompetence. Maybe they only want an electorate lulled into complacency by indifferent and pollyannish reporting.
Their statement also suggests the kind of spin they want to see in the reporting they will subsidize: they want the stories written to tell citizens about the work the county is doing “on their behalf,” implying positive coverage for the actions of county government. Information about what county government is doing that may not be in taxpayers’ best interests — wasting money, feathering their own nest, pursuing policies that hurt the working poor, raising taxes, making it hard to do business in Jefferson County — is not what the commissioners want reported.
Is giving money to a radio station in the hope of favorable news coverage a fundamental purpose of government? To ask that question is to answer it.
Even if the inquiry gets past the first test, it fails the second: the intent of the commissioners is donative only. The county gets no direct benefit from giving a “no strings attached” grant to KPTZ. There is no “scope of work” except hiring a reporter. That grant does not require the reporter to do anything. It is not a violation of the scope of work for KPTZ to hire a reporter who, for ten grand, broadcasts only a single story on the sexual behavior of the sea otters under the city’s piers. KPTZ needed a “no strings attached” statement (however disingenuous) to avoid endangering its FCC license, which prohibits it from accepting money in exchange for broadcasting specified content. Sure, the money was given to buy news coverage of all the “good stuff” the county is doing, but that was only an unwritten understanding. There is nothing enforceable in the language of the scope of work by which the county can demand any kind of value in return for the money it gave away. On its face, hoist on their own petard, the grant to KPTZ appears to be an illegal gift to a private entity.
This issue is so potentially damaging to the independence of media, and so unethical, I will be filing complaints with the State Attorney General and State Auditor to examine whether this “grant” is an illegal gift of public funds. This action by commissioners is also damaging to our democracy. The corrective action for that is up to voters.
Advancing Left-Wing Fascism
Fascism couples government and the ruling party with businesses, industry and institutions, particularly the press and broadcast media. It seeks to control people’s beliefs, using government or ruling party controlled media to push out stories to agitate or placate the populace, shape their beliefs and motivate them to act the way the ruling clique wants them to act. Fascism always seeks to control speech and expression and suppress, exclude or marginalize dissent and contrary information. The goal post is conformity of thought and behavior. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth is the ultimate target.
Fascism was always a left-wing ideology, borne of socialist manifestos. Mussolini used the phrase to describe a society where everything — education, religion, media, business, industry, science — were bundled and dominated by the ruling party. He was a socialist. Lenin, another left-wing fascist, was a communist. The Nazi platform was always socialist; they even used the word in their name.
You can argue about this take on left wing fascism. I’m not sure how much it matters whether the fascism is “left” or “right.” What is not arguable is that our local radio station is now an organ of the left-wing ruling party. The news coverage of that station is dependent on government funding. It has received funds because it is viewed as a friendly media outlet by those in control of government. Those political leaders have declared it “unbiased” because it has abandoned the fundamental role of media in a democratic society, that of being an adversary to government in order to serve as a watchdog against corruption, waste, abuse and incompetence. KPTZ willingly allows itself to be used to reinforce government’s efforts to influence and control the population and obtain compliance with the ruling party’s goals and policies.
KPTZ is not “community” radio. It is government and ruling clique radio. Its ready acceptance of government money only confirms the conclusion many of us, sadly, had already reached.
*The commissioners unanimously approved pay increases for all county elected officials beginning in 2022, with commisioner increases delayed until their next election as required by the Washington State Constitution. Commissioners were paid $93,847 plus benefits as of their meeting vote on December 6, 2021. Their salary was automatically tied to 47% of the $199,676 paid to superior court judges, but since that rises to $203,169 in July, commissioners will automatically receive a proportionate increase to $95,429. Because commissioners voted to increase their percentage to 50.78%, their salary will further rise to $103,169 with the 2022 election for the council position currently held by Greg Brotherton, and then for the other positions when they are up for election. The original version of this article incorrectly described the timing of the raise in commissioners’ salaries.
