Jefferson County Public Health exposed sensitive patient data to worldwide view for three years due to accidental misconfiguration of its Tableau visual analytics platform hosted in the cloud and offered on its website.
This breach of confidential patient information offers lessons on the insecurity of cloud data storage, even as the City of Port Townsend just migrated its finances to a Tableau-integrated cloud system.
Perhaps more significantly, it also exposes some of the ways Public Health may be promoting false narratives by withholding, distorting, and cherry-picking its data disclosures.
Data Leak Raises Questions about Public Health Messaging
The data leak opened a revealing window into the questionable data sources that Public Health has used to justify its narrative that COVID-19 is “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Compare that CDC messaging, promoted by Public Health, to the reality of Jefferson County COVID-19 deaths age 65 or older revealed in this anonymized summary (from the leaked Tableau screenshot of county deaths as of April 19, 2023):
Jefferson County COVID-19 deaths age 65 or older. Exact ages have been redacted to preserve anonymity.
The Vaccination Status was “None” for only seven out of the 30 county COVID-19 deaths in this dataset. The other 77% were fully vaccinated or boosted or twice boosted, but hardly protected from infection, hospitalization, and death.
Note that two of the unvaccinated deaths were in 2020 before vaccines were available, while the other five “None” deaths might NOT actually have been unvaccinated, since Public Health may mark Vaccination Status as “None” if:
1. Vaccination took place in a pharmacy, supermarket, or other location not sharing records with Jefferson Healthcare;
These statistical shell games also apply to the seven county COVID-19 deaths aged 55 to 64, only one of whom had “Primary Series Completed,” since it is unknown how many of the other six deaths were vaccinated one or more times in ways that Public Health has chosen not to count.
Another point to note about the leaked age 65+ dataset is that 23 out of 29 (not counting one death marked “Unknown”) were known to have serious Health Conditions including cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, and diabetes.
That 23 includes two of the “Unvaccinated” misidentified as “Null” under Health Conditions, whereas one was chronically ill in hospice and the other was hospitalized for multiple serious comorbidities and surgical complications unrelated to COVID-19. The other six “Null” deaths also likely had various health conditions judging from their case notes.
Given their precarious conditions, an unknown number may not actually have died “from” COVID-19, instead merely “with” a COVID-19 diagnosis stemming from an unreliable PCR test result. For example, the case notes say one of these supposed COVID-19 deaths actually “died of cancer. Hx heart block, chronic resp. failure.”
So nearly all the county’s supposed COVID-19 deaths age 65+ were likely suffering from an average of four other serious health conditions that might really have killed them.
And at least 77% of them received multiple vaccine injections — increasingly a pandemic of the vaccinated as the last 8 deaths in the leaked data (from May 2022 to April 2023) were vaccinated, including one boosted and two boosted twice:
Leaked data reveals that May 2022 to April 2023, all supposed Covid-19 deaths recorded in Jefferson County were vaccinated individuals, contrary to Public Health disinformation.
That’s a very different picture than what Public Health messaging represented to the public, categorizing all but three of these 30 deaths simply as “Not up to date” or “Unvaccinated” to justify deadly lockdowns, mandates, endless boosters, and vaccine discrimination.
How County Patient Data Was Exposed in the Cloud
Throughout much of the lockdown era, Jefferson Public Health maintained COVID-19 Updates on its website:
The updates regularly posted charts showing county COVID-19 case rates, hospitalizations, and deaths, generated by Tableau software based on COVID-19 patient details uploaded to the cloud by Public Health:
These charts included a Tableau menu bar in the bottom-right corners. Hovering the cursor over the down-arrow-box icon offered a live option to “Download” the underlying patient data in various file formats:
This screen shot shows the live option to “Download” underlying patient data which should have been private.
Tableau offered access to confidential patient data and case information either using its web app or downloaded as a “Tableau Workbook” for later offline study using its free-trial Tableau Public desktop app:
Here is what one of these Public Health charts looked like when opened as a Workbook inside the Tableau app:
… along with an easier-to-read zoomed version:
Underlying each chart are tables filled with private patient data in dozens of categories including First/Last Name, Admit/Discharge/Death Date, Age Group, Health Conditions, Vaccination Status, and Case Notes, accessible simply by right-clicking on a chart and selecting “View Data”:
Finally, here is a Tableau table showing specific examples of the private patient data that Public Health exposed on the internet about county deaths involving COVID-19:
Blue areas have been redacted for this article to preserve anonymity.
Note that I redacted this screenshot to block out identifying information such as names to preserve anonymity, but other details are shown to allow verification and indicate the nature and scope of the data leak.
This table represents only a small part of the patient data that Public Health exposed to the web via multiple insecure Tableau charts uploaded throughout 2022. Such data is required to be kept private according to HIPAA Privacy Rules, but Public Health assumed was safe to store in the cloud.
None of this data was obtained by “hacking” or any nefarious activity. Instead, a sharp-eyed Port Townsend Free Press reader stumbled on the “Download” invitations beneath Jefferson Public Health web charts, followed the instructions provided by Tableau, and discovered the trove of patient data being freely offered to all comers.
This reader contacted me, then I verified the information and took the above screenshots back in 2022 for possible use in future stories.
Was Jefferson Public Health Alone in its Data Leak?
Tableau pioneered “visualizing a pandemic defined by data” so was adopted by many county and state Public Health websites to provide a scientific-seeming veneer for their propaganda messaging (as documented October 23 by Congress).
In late 2022 when I surveyed various northwest health department Tableau-based websites, I noticed that some — like Oregon Health Authority — excluded access to underlying chart data, instead just allowing the charts themselves to be downloaded in various formats such as an “Image” or “PDF”:
Others were similar to Jefferson County Public Health in that they enabled “Download” access to their underlying data. For example, Clark County Public Health likewise allowed anyone in the world to dive deeply into its COVID-19 case and death numbers:
Similarly, Washington State Department of Health webpages continue to this day to enable free access to underlying “Data” via the “Download” icon on its Tableau menu bars:
Where Washington State, Clark County, and other Public Health departments differ from Jefferson County is that they were prudent enough to upload only anonymous general statistical data to the cloud.
By contrast, Jefferson County Public Health was the only one I found shoveling easily-identifiable confidential patient data to the cloud — complete with names, dates, health conditions, case notes, pretty much everything. By doing so, it is potentially subject to HIPAA penalties for its negligent practices and risk assessment failures.
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Along these lines, when Jefferson Healthcare received a Public Records Request (PRR) about the vaccination status of a county COVID-19 death, it refused the request on April 27, 2021 “because the individual could be identified from the information and is protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) patient privacy laws.”
Then when a follow-up PRR asked for unidentifiable death statistics instead, Jefferson Healthcare pivoted on May 6, 2021 replying: “We have checked with our data analyst team and they report that we do not have reports or documents/records that would address the information you have requested above.” That claim is disingenuous given there were then only three such deaths, so it would have taken their “data analyst team” just a few minutes to provide the requested information.
Public Health proceeded to keep unidentifiable data about COVID-19 cases under wraps on privacy pretexts, even while negligently spilling identifiable data to the cloud and cherry-picking data in media and meeting statements to spin prejudicial vaccination narratives.
For example, at a County Commissioners meeting on December 13, 2021, Public Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry had it both ways saying she “can’t confirm or deny any individual patient’s experience” due to “very stringent rules around patient privacy,” but went on to claim “what we do know” is that the “long-term disability” experienced by an individual patient is “truly false” — gaslighting a 27-year-old Port Townsend resident who had gone on record with documentary evidence from Virginia Mason that she had two heart attacks and 70% loss of function caused by COVID-19 vaccination.
Jefferson Data Continued to Leak for Three Years Until Today
When public health departments around the country stopped updating their data dashboards in early 2023, Jefferson County likewise stopped updating its COVID-19 data charts, then removed them from county webpages soon afterwards. So I assumed its year of spilling patient data was a thing of the past and water under the bridge, no longer an ongoing HIPAA violation of patient privacy.
But while wrapping up this story, I was surprised to learn at least ten of Jefferson Public Health’s Tableau charts were still live and leaking until the present day on the county’s cloud repository at public.tableau.com for anybody to “download or make a copy for inspiration”:
Patient data updated April 19, 2023 was still offered for download as a “Tableau Workbook” for offline study using the free Tableau Public trial app. My app from 2022 opened the data immediately despite being unused for over two years and its trial period long expired:
Example of Tableau charts still offering data in November 2024 before article publication (now visualizing arbitrary “up to date” distinction instead of booster status)
Moreover, patient data was still exposed to viewing on the web even without the Tableau Public app, just by clicking the upper-right “Make a copy” icon, signing into a free Tableau account, and right-clicking “View Data” on any chart:
“View Data” option allowed confidential information to be exposed on any chart.
Same as in 2022, Tableau’s county cloud repository offered a choice of what personal patient data fields to show, including “Sex at birth,” “ZIP code or Tribe,” and a new category “Vaccination status simple” introduced by Public Health to obscure the large number of so-called breakthrough infections by reclassifying vaccinated and boosted individuals as “Not up to date”:
Jefferson County Public Health was informed about its data-leaking web charts so they could be removed from Tableau’s cloud repository prior to this article’s publication. Now that future risk has been removed, hopefully the above historical explanations will serve as a salutary warning for Tableau webmasters about what not to do.
Public Health Responses
Regarding the finding “that all 8 county COVID-19 deaths from May 2022 until data was last updated April 19, 2023 were vaccinated,” I asked Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry:
1. Can you confirm this information?
2. When did Public Health realize that only the vaccinated were dying of COVID-19 in this county since May 2022 until April 2023, and was this fact ever reported to the Board of Health, County Commissioners, and the public?
3. How many unvaccinated and how many vaccinated have died of COVID-19 in this county since April 19, 2023?
Berry replied to these questions as follows:
Thank you for your question. Here is the breakdown of deaths in Jefferson County by vaccination status in recent years. … Since the time when vaccinations were widely available, 48 people have died of COVID-19 in Jefferson County. From May of 2021-the end of that year, we lost 17 people to COVID-19. Of those, 12% were up-to-date on their vaccination, 59% were not up-to-date, and 29% were unvaccinated. In 2022, we lost 14 people to COVID-19. Of those, 14% were up-to-date on their vaccination, 50% were not up-to-date, and 36% were unvaccinated. In 2023, we lost 9 people to COVID-19. Of those, none were up-to-date, 56% were not up-to-date and 44% were unvaccinated. In 2024, so far we have lost 8 people to COVID-19. Of those, 25% were up-to-date, 50% were not up-to-date, and 25% were unvaccinated.
Berry’s figures for 2021 and 2022 match the Tableau numbers precisely, but do not include 3 earlier deaths from 2020 through April 2022 (which may have been reclassified or ignored because they preceded the vaccination program). Her figures also enable calculating there have been 6 unvaccinated and 9 vaccinated deaths since Public Health stopped updating Tableau on April 19, 2023, answering my first and third questions.
She did not take the opportunity to address my second question about Public Health’s failure to tell people the counter-narrative fact that only vaccinated county residents were dying of COVID-19 throughout the 12 months between May 2022 through April 2023, while always being quick to point out whenever someone unvaccinated or “not up to date” dies.
Berry included lengthy context on how she interprets these numbers, making several notable points that are off topic for this article but may be taken up in a future one (her full response can be read here).
Regarding closure of the data breach, Public Health Director Apple Martine reported that as of November 21, 10am:
Our JCPH technician worked with Tableau engineers yesterday afternoon, evening, and this morning to resolve the problem. There is no longer the possibility of accessing PHI from public.tableau.com now; these data have been removed. We expect to receive a formal accounting of how this happened from Tableau now that our incident ticket is being closed with their engineers. We will also be doing an internal after-action-review so that breach of PHI does not happen again. … The data should no longer be visible, and thank you for bringing it to our attention. We definitely want to make sure that we’re never exposing private health information, and breaches do happen.
Tableau charts that were leaking data have been replaced by a “404 Not Found” message.
City Financial Records Are Now Also Stored in the Cloud
Joining county Public Health in the cloud, the City of Port Townsend just shut down its local on-site server-based financial system Friday, July 19, 2024 and migrated to a Tableau-integrated cloud version on Monday, July 22.
The transition had “no hiccups… so far, so good,” according to Jodi Adams, new Director of Finance and Technology Services. Long-term plans are for Tableau to visualize data on the city website, but staff is currently learning to use it to make graphs for in-house reports.
City financial records are now stored in the cloud and managed via web browsers, including Accounts Payable & Receivable, Bank Reconciliation, Payroll, Human Resources, Employee Self Services, Utility Billing, and Project Management. Not yet included is the CivicPay option, enabling citizens to see and pay utility bills online.
Cloud migration was proposed by former Finance Director Connie Anderson and approved unanimously by city council at their February 21, 2023 meeting, but implementation took a year longer than projected.
The city had little choice — its vendor Springbrook had discontinued updates in favor of the company’s more expensive cloud version back in 2017, with support for the city’s on-site system fading and no better alternative offered by competing vendors, in line with the industry-wide push toward subscription-only cloud software replacing ownership with a rental model.
Anderson’s proposal identified a number of advantages of the cloud approach, including:
Eliminating cost of expensive on-site equipment;
Reducing the carbon footprint;
Tableau integration — visual analytics platform;
Enhanced data security protected by highest level of security available.
But any such “enhanced data security” is at best a trade-off, given that moving data to the cloud surrenders the natural physical security provided by restricting access to on-site users and those connected to the local area network. By contrast, cloud hosting exposes city finances to worldwide security risks either via web access, hackers, “careless computing”, or insider attacks at the cloud host.
A textbook example of these risks is Jefferson County Public Health’s data breach, from which the city can hopefully learn to take care not to likewise expose its own confidential financial records to the web via the Tableau cloud platform they both share.
Welcome to The Jefferson County Beacon, which describes itself as “a worker-directed nonprofit news outlet managed by a board of your friends and neighbors.”
But who has actually financed this new “local” initiative? A little digging reveals that it is part of a national news network being built and funded by billionaire globalists.
Clicking the “Support Local News” link beneath the Beacon directs to where folks can donate “$5,000+” or other amounts to this 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose Donor Transparency Policy pledges to “make public all revenue sources and donors who give $5,000 or more per year.”
Clicking the Beacon‘s “About” menu “Fiscal Sponsor” link points to the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), whose mission is “to build a nonprofit news network that ensures all people in every community have access to trusted news.”
INN’s mission is part of the Trusted News Initiative, described by Influence Watch as “a coalition of left-of-center media, social media, and technology companies created by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 2019 with the ‘specific aims of flagging disinformation during elections,’ and to also censor what the initiative deems is misinformation… Organizations that are partners of the initiative include the Associated Press, BBC, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Google, Twitter, and The Washington Post.”
This alliance’s collusion currently faces antitrust challenges because while it “publicly purports to be a self-appointed ‘truth police’ extirpating online ‘misinformation,’ in fact it has suppressed wholly accurate and legitimate reporting in furtherance of the economic self-interest of its members.”
Clicking its “Network” link brings up the INN Network Directory where you are encouraged to Find Your News. It lists “more than 425 independent news organizations in a new kind of news network” that the Beacon has now joined, which “the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) strengthens and supports.”
Examples of other INN Network community news sites using similar design templates, donation links, and policy language.
Browsing through several of these INN Network Directory news sites, they all appear to be cookie-cutter websites based on similar design templates, similar donation links, and similar boilerplate policy language as The Jefferson County Beacon, despite each purporting to be “local”, “independent”, and “community-supported.”
Follow The Money
Who actually bankrolls the INN and its network of news sites like the Beacon? According to its Supporters & Financials page, the Democracy Fund and Google News Initiative and several left-leaning foundations contribute more than $500,000 each, along with lesser donations from Microsoft and many others.
What is the Democracy Fund? According to its Financials page, it was “established and solely funded by philanthropist and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar” then spun off to the billionaire’s Omidyar Network, which describes itself as “a social change venture that reimagines critical systems, and the ideas that govern them, to build more inclusive and equitable societies … across the globe.”
“Unbiased” Reporting?
The Beaconsays it wants to hire local reporters with “a passion for independent news” to “tell the Local story with an unbiased approach.”
This “unbiased” start-up seeks local hires funded by international moneyed interests with a plan to change society in ways that arguably eliminate freedoms and diversity and tighten top-down controls. It comes at a time when a majority of networked media outlets purporting to be local and independent actually adhere to the same copycat globalist-directed scripts.
Remember the viral video exposing nearly 200 “local” CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox affiliate anchors reciting an identical message about fake news?
Click to watch 1 minute-36 second viral video, exposing the script from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which controls news stations nationwide.
Each of the affiliates first explained that their greatest responsibility was to serve their (fill-in-the-blank) communities, and then went on in scripted unison to decry other news sources as biased and irresponsible. The eerie compilation of voices, all stressing the same words, warned “This is extremelydangerous to our democracy.”
The expanding INN news initiative, already comprising more than 425 “independent” publications that the Beacon is now allied with, also coincides with a parallel effort by Soros Fund Management to embark on a “large audio-buying spree,” adding to the hundreds of US radio stations the George Soros group currently owns.
Consolidation of messaging to support a global agenda continues apace.
Given its origin as “a social change venture” funded by tech-giant billionaires, the Beacon should be mindful and honest about its own dependencies and biases… especially compared to the Port Townsend Leader, which (whatever its shortcomings) remains one of the last local independent papers in the country.
The Beaconsays it “was born when it became clear that Jefferson County needed a community-focused newspaper,” pretending the Leader does not focus on the county community. But what “community” does the Beacon feel the need to focus on?
Our politically-diverse county at large?
Or some like-minded coterie seeking an echo chamber free from viewpoints it blames the Leader — which for years has heavily censored local voices like those represented in the Port Townsend Free Press (see articles here, here, and here) — for not censoring enough?
May these qualms prove unfounded and the Beacon live up to its name, shining the light of truth as a vibrant part of our local media ecosystem.
Public Health said they knew the world needed to be locked down. But now Francis Collins, NIH Director at the time, regrets “we weren’t really thinking about what that would mean … we weren’t considering the consequences … the public health people have a very narrow view of what the right decision is … You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from. So, yeah, collateral damage.”
Public Health said they knew everybody had to stay 6 feet apart to be safe, but last week Dr. Fauci admitted before Congress that was just made up, “not based on scientific data“.
When the warp speed mRNA jabs were rushed through testing and the controls were injected just weeks later so no longterm safety data was possible, Public Health nevertheless proclaimed they knew that jabs were “safe and effective”, even though they could not possibly know that at the time.
After all, the trials never even tested for protection against transmission; as covid coordinator Deborah Birx later admitted, such promises were just based on “hope that the vaccine would work in that way“, not knowledge.
Another thing Public Health didn’t know was recent revelations that the trials were a bait-and-switch, because vaccine manufacturers couldn’t produce to scale so used different methodology to make the jabs everybody took than what was tested in the trials.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed…
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died …
Everybody knows it’s now or never …
Everybody knows the plague is coming
Everybody knows that it’s moving fast…
Everybody knows, everybody knows.
Everybody knows — except Public Health and those they’ve bamboozled.
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Following my public comment, Dr. Allison Berry responded with the kind of disinformation that has consistently characterized her tenure as county health officer. Among her most egregious statements at the January 18 meeting were continuing to urge mRNA and other respiratory virus shots on infants and pregnant women, and suggesting permanent masking to prevent flu despite proven ineffectiveness.
Berry’s dangerous narrative was roundly discredited years ago, as reported in past Free Press articles. The evidence of deaths and injuries from the shots, as well as their negative efficacy, has only increased since those reports.
Previous articles detailing local Public Health disinformation include:
Like many, I was surprised to learn on July 26 from a brief front-page Leaderblurb that city council was stepping up to fix Port Townsend’s crumbling roads by forming its own Transportation Benefit District (TBD) and meeting August 1 to fast-track funding by placing a new 0.3% sales tax on the ballot.
I was further surprised to receive a considerate email the next day from public works director Steve King letting me know “there is an opening for a committee that would be against the ballot measure. Alternatively, if you are supportive, I can also connect you with the committee for the ballot measure. Either way, we wanted to reach out to you and see if this sparks an interest one way or the other.”
Though I’d written and commented to council about transportation issues in the past, TBD was new to me, so I emailed this back per King’s gracious offer “if you have questions or want to discuss”:
Without knowing any of the details yet, my hot take is I’m glad council is stepping up to accelerate much need-needed road repair. Perhaps this funding step is the way forward given declining state funding and the first “real chance” per your Leader statement.
On the other hand, I do have some concerns:
This could be taken as putting the cart before the horse in terms of priorities, given council’s consideration of wildly expensive projects like the aquatic center. Ideally core services like road repair should be paid by our existing taxes instead of depending on special assessments or other funding mechanisms, which might be more appropriate for the optional projects.
I’m a little leery that the “future street system” and “street projects” might include a lot of expensive and possibly controversial road speed deterrents, landscaping, under-used over-separated bike lanes, etc. (as seen in the Howard St. project) rather than the less-glamorous job of simply repairing roads and ensuring sufficient shoulders for bicyclists (dangerously absent along the Cherry St. arterial). But I realize I’m old-school about this and not necessarily on board with current street engineering best-practice opinions!
Despite the worthiness of the TBD cause, ever-growing “tax creep” is creeping me out! Rather than live within its means and prioritize as the private sector has to do, many in the public sector look to tax its way out of fiscal constraints, even while imposing new taxes for pet projects like Paid Family Leave and the half-baked WA Cares Fund. This is an increasing burden on working families and the retired.
King responded by phoning July 28 to educate me with a cornucopia of details and background about the city’s road morass and TBD tax plans. I jotted down this summary (as corrected and approved by King):
Steve King said city streets haven’t had any real regular chip seal or pavement repair efforts for 20 years (!), instead just patchwork since state funding dried up in the late 90s, so public works crews are looking forward to starting on that. A lot of other cities started passing TBDs around 2010-2015 so aren’t in as bad shape as P.T.
Increased funds would mostly pay for materials, but also restore a missing repair staff position, buy small paving, compacting, and other equipment (some of which they’d earlier begun acquiring), hiring out for the big paving jobs.
In the past, street projects would be paid by three grant dollars per city dollar, often (unfortunately) borrowing money for leveraging grants. If the TBD goes through, maybe $200,000 to $300,000 of its $800,000 per year total could be leveraged with grants.
About 80% of funds would go to essential street repair, and maybe 20% to ADA upgrades, sidewalks, and speed-calming type improvement projects. King admitted there’s no way to tie the hands of future TBD councils to focus on repair, but he says current city council is totally committed to that, with Thomas and MickHager in particular trying to ensure funds are used for road repair.
He said the city is hampered by over $600,000 per year loan payments from the old days, which would have been $600,000 per year higher if Finance Director Connie Anderson hadn’t used some reserves bucks to pay off one of the loans. Otherwise the city mostly did reinvestment and repair projects with the ARPA money for sustainability.
The seven-member council would constitute the TBD board, and they’ll decide whether to put it on the ballot at a special meeting tentatively scheduled August 1 at 9am.
I’m really glad that the council is addressing these essential road repairs and making that such a high priority. And I super appreciate the thinking behind and staff’s work on it.
So that’s all good. And I understand that the problem originally arose with changes 20 years ago.
But in other ways, we’ve had almost a 20-year bender of not having the actual real road repairs that should have been paid for by basic taxes. Instead we’ve shipped tenements from Canada and we’ve paid consultants a lot for big projects and all sorts of things. Maybe those are good ideas, but the roads should have been fixed first.
I appreciate that we’re now waking up and actually addressing this thing that should have been done back then. But the real question for me is this:
Would this tax be part of an overall austerity perspective, or would it be enabling the problems that got us into this in the first place?
I also wonder specifically about the the usage of the funds. Looking at the proposal it’s road repair, pavement repair, gravel repair, all that stuff — essentials.
Then we have stuff like ADA and upgrades and traffic calming. And to me those all feel kind of discretionary.
Those are things that might be good ideas, but traffic calming in particular is a pet peeve of mine, because you might have neighborhoods where you want to have some traffic calming and that’s one thing.
And then you have arterials in which traffic calming is just basically a crypto way to reduce the speed limit without reducing the speed limit, which I’m not even sure is a good idea.
I really appreciate that only $50,000 out of $800,000 at this point looks to be used for these purposes. But you know this could be shifted in years after. …
As a parting shot, I heard that it would cost $750,000 just to keep things going as it is now, and maybe $1.5 million a year to really turn things around. And this tax is only raising 800,000.
So I’m wondering to what extent this is going to be enough to turn things around.
Curiously, when I asked my core question “Would this tax be part of an overall austerity perspective, or would it be enabling the problems that got us into this in the first place?” — I felt the vibe that council was visibly recoiling at my word “austerity” as a vampire would to garlic or holy water.
Perhaps I was imagining things, but three subsequent council responses picked up on the “austerity” word, starting with Mayor David Faber making the point that:
And as to whether or not this is going to be part of an austerity mindset, or that this is brought about by city deciding to do things differently than pay for road repairs — sure, there have been steps that the city has taken historically that each of us on council wishes we hadn’t, including myself, including some of the decisions we made, such as the Cherry Street building. But that’s in the past.
Through the Financial Sustainability Task Force and our budgeting process for years, I think we have a budget that’s pretty lean overall. There really just isn’t resources to pay for road repair and maintenance.
The city has a bunch of different priorities as well, things that we have to do as a city.
So suggesting that there is at all money to be moved from elsewhere to pay for road repair and maintenance is just completely out of step with reality.
Councilor Libby Wennstrom expanded on how the city found itself without resources to maintain roads:
One of the things to understand about street funding and why things fell apart so badly is that more or less simultaneously as part of a series of statewide ballots, state funding for municipal street repair went away with the car tabs, but at the same time, city governments also got restricted to a 1% annual cap.
And if you’re running inflation (right now we’re running about 5%), and if you have a 1% raise every year, the question doesn’t become, what new projects can we do? It’s like, what do we cut this year?
And over a 20 year period, that’s a 20% shortfall, 25% shortfall, 27% shortfall, etc., so you’re getting farther and farther and farther behind. And the net result of that is having to use debt, just to do grant match to meet those basic needs.
So this is an attempt to kind of re-balance that and I get, “Oh, it would be great if we could actually have a tax base that met our basic requirement needs.” But the reality is that the tax base doesn’t literally meet some of the needs for state mandated things that we have to do. And so street funding keeps coming on to “Oh, we wanna do this, but this has to be on the back burner.”
And over a 20 year period, that gap between that 1% raise, if inflation’s running 3%, 4%, 5% — you’re just gonna keep getting farther and farther and farther behind.
These are all good points, and I appreciate how council is trying to do better and finally take seriously the critical road repair that has been put on the back burner for 20 years. So if Faber and Wennstrom are right that “there really just isn’t resources to pay for road repair,” then that’s a compelling argument for a TBD tax to finally repair roads, because the city is financially strapped and poised to “fall off a cliff.”
And I don’t see how council has fundamentally changed its tune so long as it continues to prioritize pet projects over road repair. All that’s really changed is that outcry over roads has gotten so bad that council is proposing a new tax to pay for repairs, without tamping down on its current and future pet projects — that is, without “austerity.”
The Long Road to Catching up on Neglected Repairs
Even worse, the TBD tax risks enabling future councils to reduce even its current patchwork spending on road repair from general funds, because that could now be sloughed off onto the TBD to pay. Councilor Ben Thomas spoke out at the August 1 meeting asking council to commit to doing the opposite:
I just want to reiterate what I said the last time we talked about this topic. I do think that austerity (I’d rather not word it that way, but I think it’s kind of what’s going on here) as much as we can from the rest of the budget to hopefully match this or something like that is very much in my interest.
I know that it’s a lot of numbers to crunch and they don’t seem to add up, but it does seem like just doing this alone would not be enough to satisfy us. I know we talked about trying to commit something, it’s hard to commit a certain number, but I still have an interest in that.
Mayor Faber disagreed, saying:
We cannot bind future councils. There’s no commitment to doing anything in the future beyond what funds are specifically directed, certain specific buckets. This pot of money is going to be dedicated to these specific purposes listed in the ballot measure and we wouldn’t be able to change what those funds are spent on. General funds are spent at the discretion of the council as a whole. We can decide where those funds are spent.
And to argue for austerity or committing certain dollars in the future to certain specific goals or projects — I think it’s dangerous, selling the future short.
We don’t know what the future priorities of the community are going to be. If the community come demanding certain things, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to necessarily just say we’re going to ignore them.
So I think it’s important to note that while this Council as a whole — all seven of us and the staff have evidenced an intent to do exactly as you’re stating — we’ve all been pushing for repairing our roads. And this very vote that we’re putting on the ballot here is clear evidence of that, along with what we’ve dedicated our banked capacity revenues to.
What the future holds is an open question. I hate the idea of constraining future action based on future need. We don’t know what those needs are going to be.
So even if we could dedicate and guarantee that we’re going to continue putting all the banked capacity funds towards road repair and maintenance, I would be an adamant no on that.
I appreciate where both of these councilors are coming from on this arguable point, as well as the evidenced intent “pushing for repairing our roads” that Mayor Faber speaks of.
But how long can an uncommitted and unconstrained council be counted on to continue this intent? For 20 years past councils put road repair “on the back burner” while prioritizing everything else. And now a new tax-funded TBD might just make it even easier for future councils to deprioritize road spending completely out of the general fund.
And without general fund contributions, the idea that passing the 0.3% TBD tax would repair all the city’s dangerously defective roads any time soon is illusory, since (according to King) it would still take about 40 years to catch up on all the neglected road repairs!
Since it costs $750,000 just to keep things going as they are now, the $800,000 raised by the TBD tax would mostly just stop the bleeding if not further supplemented.
Fortunately King hopes “maybe $200,000 to $300,000 of its $800,000 per year total could be leveraged with grants,” but even so, we’re still talking maybe 30 years to catch up on repairs — hence Thomas’ misgivings that “just doing this alone would not be enough to satisfy us.”
Concern about TBD Tax Short-Changing Road Repair
Even such slow progress assumes that most all of the TBD tax funds would be used for road repairs, but that’s just a hope which Mayor Faber is “adamant” not to “guarantee.”
My earlier quoted public comment expressed appreciation that “only $50,000 out of $800,000 at this point looks to be used” for purposes other than road repair, but I’m not sure where I got that figure, since King told me “about 80% of funds would go to essential street repair, and maybe 20% to ADA upgrades, sidewalks, and speed-calming type improvement projects” with “no way to tie the hands of future TBD councils to focus on repair.” So that leaves only $640,000 from the tax for roads, less than the $750,000 needed just to keep all the potholes from getting worse.
The Summary Statement for Ordinance 3319 establishing the TBD outlines $100,000 per year needed for “citywide sidewalk/ADA construction, upgrades, and repairs” plus $30,000 for “citywide traffic calming” totaling $130,000, which is in line with King’s 20% estimate.
But it also includes “$300,000 per year investment leverages approximately $1.5 million in grant funds for streets” to pay for projects listed in the current Six-Year Transportation Improvement Plan. Such leverage is great, but how much of these funds would come back to be used for repairing roads, since that’s the focus of only 12 of these 54 listed projects?
Only 12 of 54 projects in the city’s Six Year Transportation Improvement Plan involve repairing roads. Of the top five priorities shown here, only one includes road repair.
Despite some overlap, the primary focus of the city’s 54 transportation priorities may be categorized as follows:
Road repair (12 projects);
Sidewalks and pavement preservation (11 projects);
Intersection improvements (6 projects);
New trails (5 projects);
Shoulder improvements (5 projects);
ADA improvements (4 projects);
Non-motorized improvements for pedestrians and bikes (4 projects);
Traffic calming (4 projects);
Boatyard expansion and tree replacement (1 project);
Downtown parking plan (1 project);
New street extension through water treatment facility (1 project).
This priority list contains a lot of very worthy projects, but prioritizing them all together and paying for them out of the same “pot of money” with “no commitment” risks putting road repair on the back burner again — even when it comes to the 0.3% TBD tax for which road repair is the poster child!
Among these very worthy projects are other projects that are less worthy and even controversial, but would get smuggled in and subsidized by the new TBD tax instead of paying for road repairs.
In particular, quite a few of these priority projects are dedicated to so-called “traffic calming” — especially when considered together with “pavement preservation” projects involving Edge Lane Roads (ELRs), which force down speed limits to accommodate dangerously combining two-way traffic into a single lane. This is especially unfortunate when speeds are reduced on previously safe arterials like Fir Street.
Recently striped Edge Lane Road on Fir Street, with vehicles now directed to reduce speed on the arterial to 20 mph. Two-way traffic is supposed to use a single center lane but not all do, dangerously risking collisions with oncoming traffic at blind hills or curves.
Additionally, the TBD ordinance earmarks about $30,000 per year for this traffic calming, claiming it is “one of the most highly requested items for improving roadway safety for bicyclists and motorists.”
Rather than improving roadway safety, many traffic calming initiatives paradoxically do precisely the opposite — planting hazards in the middle of roads, forcing traffic to swerve around “mini-roundabouts” and other obstacles, making vehicles drive too close to each other or in the same lane as oncoming traffic, creating confusion with poorly-understood symbolic street signs explained in tiny print on placards by the side of the road.
The theory seems to be that if you make conditions dangerous enough, maybe drivers will slow down!
The most infamous of these are the much-derided “traffic calming island” hazards in the middle of Washington Street, which Councilor Thomas ruefully called “one of those gifts we’ve given to the public to unite everybody, unfortunately, against us.” The one saving grace of these monstrosities is that they were funded by neighborhood nimbies, but taxpayers are still on the hook for ongoing maintenance.
As I said at a second Public Comment on August 1st:
There are these crying needs for substantial road repairs that should have been done by just regular taxes over the years. And they weren’t because there wasn’t enough money or other priorities were chosen. And so I feel like that is the emergent and essential thing that needs to be done.
Then you have other projects like road calming that may be good ideas but to some extent are optional … they’re good but they’re not necessarily essential.
Here we’re talking about a 0.3% tax increase to deal with a crying unmet need, so I wish it could have been tied to just that, and let other stuff continue to be funded outside of this tax.
My concern with the way the 0.3% TBD tax was structured is that it lumps everything transportation-related into one big “pot of money … spent at the discretion of the council.”
That allows future bad ideas like the Washington Street hazards and other discretionary or controversial projects to be paid for by this new tax money — instead of funding the long-neglected road repairs that everyone agrees must be done and were the advertised justification for the tax.
Port Townsend’s TBD should not stand for “To Be Determined,” risking road repairs returning to the back burner.
Recently uncovered public records include a draft September 2022 City of Port Townsend Newsletter article, where Mayor David Faber wrote about his emotions while hearing elder people at the August 1 city council meeting “repeatedly call trans persons ‘pedophiles’ and ‘rapists’.”
Mayor David Faber’s draft article for the city newsletter following the August 1, 2022 City Council meeting, disclosed through a public records request.
City staff prudently advised Faber to scuttle his article, concerned that “it might do more harm than help” as part of “a shame spiral.” Police Chief Thomas Olson admirably expressed that “Everyone should be encouraged to engage with city council without getting ridiculed, no matter what their opinion is on a specific topic.”
A review of the August 1 meeting video and transcript remarkably reveals that Faber’s accusation was provably untrue: NO public commenter at the meeting ever called “trans persons ‘pedophiles’ and ‘rapists’.” So how did this false and prejudicial narrative arise and continue to haunt the mindscape of our town?
Public Comments to Protect Vulnerable People
Julie Jaman started her August 1, 2022 public comment by summarizing her July 26 “experience while showering after my swim was hearing a man’s voice in the women’s dressing area and seeing a man in a women’s swimsuit watching little girls pull down their bathing suits in order to use the toilets in the dressing room. I reacted by telling him to leave, and the consequence is that I had been banned from the pool.”
She warned council that “women and children are being put at risk” and YMCA “staff seems to have received little professional training on how to handle reactions to such a radical cultural change, particularly for the most vulnerable, older female patrons and children who may be exposed to inappropriate behavior, the dignity and safety of unsuspecting women who have trusted to use these facilities for many years.”
Contrary to Faber’s claim, Jaman maligned no trans person in her comment to council, instead recounted her personal experience of YMCA management neglecting to protect vulnerable people (including herself). YMCA staff are supposed to enforce strict Child Protection Policies and Procedures, but no such policies appear among the Olympic Peninsula YMCA Pool Rules nor were in evidence during Jaman’s experience.
Searching the meeting transcript finds just this one use by any Jaman supporter of the words “pedophiles” and “rapists” quoted by Faber:
We have seen what can happen when pedophiles and rapists can and do populate careers and locations where they have easy access to women and children.
This was in the context of a nuanced, well-articulated call for protection from predators, which was NOT saying that trans people are predators as Faber claimed. Instead, it said the opposite: that predators can pretend to be trans just like they can lie in other ways, so vulnerable people (including trans) need protection:
Do men transitioning to be women understand that discrimination and violence are part of being a woman, and that we do need protection from predators? Do women transitioning to being men understand that they are also vulnerable to male harassment and violence?
All that this commenter urged were common-sense protections against predators and that “women’s concerns about our safety and privacy are and always have been legitimate.” The meeting video and transcript show that neither this commenter nor any other Jaman supporter called trans persons predators as Faber claimed to hear “repeatedly.”
Public Comments Hallucinating Words Never Said
In fact, the only people at the August 1, 2022 council meeting repeatedly talking about trans persons being “pedophiles” and “rapists” were Jaman opponents — falsely putting those words in the mouths of Jaman supporters while stirring up hatred against them:
“When they label trans people as pedophiles and predators, that’s a problem. Thank you. I think you all should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Comparing transgender people to pedophiles is absolutely disgusting. As somebody who has been a victim of sexual abuse myself, it is horrible to go that low to call a group of people who are just trying to live their lives these horrible things that aren’t even true. Pedophiles exist in the world and not every transgender person is a pedophile.”
From a former mayor: “The people who are standing at the podium this evening expressing fear need to really think about the terminology and get ‘pedophiles’ out of their language.”
“Do you know what trans people are? They are not pedophiles. They are teachers and they are leaders and they are the bravest people I know. And so I just encourage all of you who have such a short-sighted vision as to what trans people are and have the absolute hurtful audacity to call them these terrible names: Please stop.”
“But I would just like to reiterate the fact that a lot of people have also been calling trans people pedophiles, which is also a statement of calling people things that they aren’t. … As has been stated many times today, trans people are not pedophiles.”
Major Faber’s response to comments: “LGBTQ people, trans people in particular in this case are entitled to basic respect and they have not been receiving that in much of the commentary tonight on the pedophiles and rapists and predators.”
These speakers fell into a feeding frenzy of confabulations and repeated self-reinforcing misstatements, confusing primary evidence with one’s own side’s overheated false claims about words never said just minutes earlier. The end result was group hypnosis leading to the hallucination expressed in Mayor Faber’s draft city newsletter article about being “appalled and disgusted to hear people — all of them my elders, to shame — repeatedly call trans people ‘pedophiles’ and ‘rapists’ … with utter contempt.”
Nothing of that kind took place.
The Psychology of Totalitarianism
It’s hard to understand how this could have happened in less than an hour of real time, but some insight may perhaps be gleaned from clinical psychology professor Mattias Desmet’s 2022 book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, whose thesis is summarized in a physician’s review as follows:
Desmet’s central thesis is that when the correct conditions are present within society, a collective or crowd consciousness emerges which causes unspeakable atrocities to be permitted by, and in many cases directly conducted by large masses of the population (this process is termed “mass formation”).
This is a critical point because the majority of the individuals who commit the worst crimes of totalitarian regimes are not evil or psychopathic, but rather simply had a level of consciousness that allowed them to be swept into a mass formation. Similarly, this provides an explanation of why so many political zealots throughout the ages will feel it is justified to distort the facts in whatever way is necessary to promote their ideology. …
The final component necessary for mass formation is to have an “enemy“ to attach all of these negative feelings (that largely arise from disconnection) onto.
It is very disturbing and dangerous for Mayor Faber and others in Port Townsend’s power structure to mishear the words of vulnerable elder women asking for protection, dehumanize these women as appalling/disgusting/shameful/horrible/hurtful/etc., and project their own negative feelings onto these women as if they were an enemy. The end result was the city’s incitement and collaboration with the hooligans who physically assaulted vulnerable elder women outside city hall just two weeks later.
Such demonization continues to be leveled against vulnerable people in our community. By falsely accusing them of attacking trans people with “utter contempt,” labeling them “transphobes” and “bigots,” valid concerns are dismissed and hatred is fomented towards them.
And the hits just keep on coming. Continuing its run of censorship and tendentious misreporting about these events, The Leader‘s lead op-ed for October 4, 2023 was ironically titled “A Golf Course For All Must Transcend Division” by new columnist Jason Victor Serinus, which trotted out these false narratives to smear and demonize:
…championship of Julie Jaman, whose outrage at a trans employee of the Port Townsend YMCA made it all the way to Fox News, attracted Proud Boys to our community, and got her permanently banned from the pool.
Talk about blaming the victim for how mismanagement of a whistleblower situation blew up into a nationwide disgrace! First zealots beat up on Jaman and those who championed her verbally in the council chambers. Then they beat up on these women physically in the streets. Now they continue to beat up on them in the press and social media.
Stop the madness! If ever there can be accountability and reconciliation to transcend division, maybe it can begin by understanding the truth of this pivotal meeting where council listened but did not hear, decided to protect only selected vulnerable persons, and enabled events to spiral out of control.
Can YMCA Be Trusted to Protect the Vulnerable in a New Aquatic Center?
The proposed new Aquatic Center is planned to be managed by the same YMCA that mismanaged the Jaman incident and never resolved questions raised at the August 1, 2022 council meeting. This effectively excludes not only Jaman but also other potential pool users who no longer trust nor feel welcomed by YMCA management, raising another major red flag (alongside financial red ink) for the Aquatic Center.
Circling back to Jaman’s original concern about protection of vulnerable children, the Silicon Valley YMCA’s restroom policy requires that “Children must always be sent in threes (known as the rule of three) with a staff member.” Accounts differ about how many little girls were present during the July 26, 2022 incident, so it’s unclear whether Olympic YMCA violated the rule of three that day, or bothers to honor it on days when only one or two children are present.
But local staff seems to have been violating other YMCA rules such as “staff will stand in the open doorway of the restroom while children are using the restroom.” Much of the uncertainty about local YMCA child protection policies and procedures is because there is nothing on their website or Pool Rules about them.
Given Olympic Peninsula YMCA’s stonewalling, duplicity, and “attack the messenger” behavior in the Jaman case, there is lack of trust that vulnerable people would be protected under its management.
The Aquatic Center project should not ignore the elephant in the pool: its non-inclusive, untrustworthy YMCA management who responded to earnest child protection concerns by banning and bullying a vulnerable whistleblower with no due process.
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