Your Friend, the Food Co-op:
Getting Back to its Roots

by Stephen Schumacher | Mar 11, 2025 | General

[Author’s 2025 update: The following article is a snapshot in time reporting what I learned and loved about the Port Townsend Food Co-op after a decade of intense involvement. It was originally published nationally in the 1994 Loompanics book catalog, but never appeared locally until now.

The concluding section makes clear how reality doesn’t always live up to ideals, noting the dual dangers that growing co-ops face of either imploding due to misguided idealism or getting “co-opted” into becoming a corporate supermarket clone. So it’s interesting looking at how today’s Co-op compares to this view forward from 30 years in the past.

This historical perspective might be especially timely as our Co-op has been targeted for half a year by a politically-motivated smear campaign, which amid personal attacks has also raised claims about management style, workplace safety, wage inequality, microaggressions, need for unionization, etc. These claims are hard to sort out given their weaponization by the ongoing pressure campaign.

Whatever legitimate issues remain may be illumined by this article’s exploration of the unique mission of food co-ops, what makes them special, and how ours has changed over the years, for better or worse. What qualities are vital for our Co-op to preserve, and is anything that’s been lost worth restoring?]

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Do you know anything about food co-ops? I love food co-ops! Holdovers from the 60s and 70s, these hippie-born hangouts have grown up a bit over the years but still retain much of their savor. When I visit a new city I always try to check out the local co-ops.

Food co-ops are practical, too. They started from the practical reality that the pure, simple bulk foods the hippies wanted weren’t for sale anywhere on the market. So the hippies became grocers, and eventually business people, of sorts. Not because they wanted to be, but because they had to be, or go hungry for basic foods.

But because they were hippies and were idealistic, they didn’t set up run-of-the-mill capitalist businesses. They had ideals about cooperation and consensus and egalitarianism and lack of hierarchy and workplace democracy and not being focused on profits. Heads stuffed with ideals, they also valued hands-on work and invited as many people as possible to share the work of running the store.

Did I say work? More like productive play, when it comes down to you as a co-op member taking a break from the work-a-day world to bag raisins or run the register for a few hours a week as your friends and neighbors stream through. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came … more like checking in at Cheers than punching in at the assembly line!

It’s also a bit like joining a fraternal society, because co-ops do their best to cooperate with other co-ops around the world. Though separate legally, most food co-ops welcome visiting members from other co-ops and let them shop at reduced member prices. Your home-away-from-home in your community extends to connect you to home bases throughout North America and the world.

The Big News

So that’s the big news: the 60s aren’t dead, for co-ops are still alive and they’re even growing. Their doors are open and you can come in and get great food and save money and have fun and maybe even get involved in something radical!

I’m going to go into some more detail about the points I’ve breezed through above. I’ve been ardently involved with co-ops heavily for the past decade, and I’m still trying to figure out what it is about them that so attracts me. The word “cooperative” is awfully vague — at their core, what exactly are food co-ops?

It’s the Food!

First of all, there’s what food co-ops sell, which is food. Not just any kind of food, but high-quality, lightly-processed, low-pesticide, nutritious food. ”Natural” food. Most of this food isn’t exotic — it’s just the kind of basic food your grandparents enjoyed. Back in those days, before DDT, preservatives, bovine growth hormones, chlorination, fluoridation, irradiation, etc., etc., nobody made a big deal about natural, whole, unadulterated food, because that’s all there was.

There was also a lot less chronic disease; for instance, heart attacks and clogged arteries were rare until the turn of the century. Cancer rates remain much lower in countries with less meat and more fiber in their diets. The low-fat, low-salt, low-sugar, low-processing, low-poison food for sale in food co-ops is the model of good nutrition.

Co-ops Are Selective

It’s true, you can’t find everything in a co-op. Coca Cola pretends to “add life” and be “the real thing,” but since these claims are hogwash, co-ops don’t carry Coke. Co-ops have product selection guidelines, supplying goods that are whole, organic, fresh, local, low-cost, earth-friendly, politically-correct, and/or hard to find. Glop like Coke doesn’t make the grade.

But that doesn’t mean co-ops sell only brown rice and tofu! It’s amazing the variety of natural foods available nowadays, many of them healthier alternatives for standard American favorites. Natural sodas, turkey dogs, veggie burgers, wheat-meat sausages, soy-cheese pizzas, etc. make upgrading one’s diet pretty painless

You can also get cookies, chips, frozen dinners, bagels, ice cream, corn flakes, and most other popular foods at co-ops. The difference is in the ingredients: whole-wheat flour, low or no salt, or maybe fruit-juice sweetening instead of refined sugar. They’re more nutritious than the famous name brands and usually taste at least as good.

Of course, no matter how many times the word “natural” appears on the label, I doubt the nutritional value of most of the sweets and frozen treats co-ops carry. Members (and their kids) want these sweets, and they’re better than the standard “unnatural” versions, so co-ops provide them. Sometimes I hear members say things like, “If the co-op carries it, it must be OK,” as they stock up on natural junk food!

Be Smart – Bulk Up

Quaker Oats sells for about two and a half bucks for 18 ounces of rolled oats. I’m used to paying $.49/pound for organically-grown oats at my co-op, which also sells non-organic oats as good as Quaker’s for $.25/pound. It’s amazing how much money consumers waste paying for packaging, advertising, shelf-space kickbacks, and corporate profits.

You can save a lot of money buying cereal, flour, rice, nuts, beans, chips, oil, mustard, maple syrup, pasta, herbs, salsa, honey, raisins, olives, dog food, soap, etc., etc. out of bulk bins at food co-ops. All that’s missing is mountains of landfill-bound packaging, the brand name, and most of the price.

Bulk is the smart way to shop. You can buy as much or as little as you want, so you can sample without committing to a boxful. You’re getting whole foods without the frills. And you can save even more money at co-ops by placing bulk orders in advance — just be sure you like wild rice before you order 25 pounds of it!

Only at Co-ops

There’s an entire world of products you can’t find in supermarkets, only in food co-ops and other natural foods stores: organically grown produce, exotic cheeses, therapeutic herbs, sea vegetables, macrobiotic foods, special diet supplements, natural body care products, and the list goes on.

Organic produce is grown without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides using sustainable agriculture which builds up rather than depletes the soil. Farm workers aren’t being poisoned in the growing, and you won’t be poisoned in the eating. Richer soil can also mean more minerals in your produce, as well as better taste.

Many co-ops cultivate relations with local farmers so they can offer produce that’s extra fresh. Vegetables like broccoli are sometimes trucked from coast to coast before they appear on supermarket shelves, wasting both fuel and nutrition. It’s better to have a strong sustainable agriculture base in one’s community.

Be Your Own Doctor

A real showpiece of my co-op is our great herb section. We have hundreds of hard-to-find botanicals alphabetically arranged in air-tight bottles. Prices like $17.06/pound may seem forbidding, until you get to the counter and find your pouch of fluffy powder costs only 23 cents!

Many knowledgeable people prefer to treat themselves with time-tested herbs, which are usually gentler and less expensive than the latest patent drugs from the chemical/vivisection/medical fraternity. Few have ever been harmed by misusing herbs, while untold thousands die each year from the side effects of FDA-approved drugs (even aspirin kills hundreds a year).

Nevertheless, the FDA is continually trying to get the power to classify traditional herbs as drugs or “untested food additives,” in order to get them off the market or into the exclusive control of “approved” multinational corporations. Who benefits? Certainly not the consumer. The extensive herb sections in food co-ops are treasure troves of self-care options.

The Same Old Story

It’s hilarious and sobering checking out an old book like Omar Garrison’s The Dictocrats from 1970 to see how off-base the FDA has been through the years. During the ’60s the FDA seized yeast and honey off the shelves of health food stores — the agency preferred sugar and cyclamates.

They derided as false advertising and prosecuted discussions of the connection between dietary fat and heart disease, or between Vitamin C and healing. The FDA banned books on alternative medicine (literally burned Wilhelm Reich’s) under the pretext of being “an extension of the label” of unidentified food supplements.

With the perspective of years we can see that the FDA was on the wrong side of almost every one of its disputes with the health food industry. What was persecuted as “food faddism” is now reported as fact by Time magazine. The lighter, fresher diet advanced by old-time “health nuts” is now the common wisdom, while the heavy, fatty, sugary slop the FDA promoted is only defended anymore by vested interests like the beef industry.

More Monopoly Medicine

Unchastened, the FDA is at it again with another assault. Calcium’s role in preventing osteoporosis is the only supplement health claim the FDA presently accepts, and it’s trying to ban everything else, the first amendment be damned. The FDA is threatening to keep stores from selling therapeutic herbs, amino acids, bee products, and all vitamins and minerals more nutritious than the Recommended Daily Allowances!

The health food industry and its customers are not rolling over and playing dead — instead, Congress received more letters in 1992 demanding health freedom than about any other issue besides the economy. The result was a one-year moratorium on the FDA’s oppressive new regulations.

A year later, on Friday, August 13, 1993, my co-op draped itself black as part of a nationwide Blackout Day, a wake-up call to political action. Threatened products were marked with black dots for the duration to warn customers these products may disappear if the FDA isn’t stopped. Action booths were set up with full information and pre-addressed postcards to encourage grass-roots support for passing protective Dietary Supplement Health and Education Acts (S. 784 in the Senate and H.R. 1709 in the House).

As of this writing, the outcome is still in doubt. This is a crucial fight, for the FDA’s new rules are a prescription for disaster. The health care crisis in this country is caused by monopoly medicine and won’t be solved by more of it!

The Co-op Difference

Most everything said above applies equally to privately-owned natural food stores and to co-ops. They carry the same great products and are equally protective of your right to make your own health choices. Some natural food stores look almost indistinguishable from co-ops.

But there are differences, mainly of culture and orientation. Food co-ops came out of the hippie culture, so their staples are back-to-basics natural foods like fresh fruits and vegetables along with bulk grains, beans, nuts, and herbs. Private stores tend to emphasize “nutritious” over “natural,” with shelves full of megavitamins, pump-you-up bodybuilding supplements, and alternative health books.

Co-ops have a special kind of internal structure, neither socialist nor capitalist, that was pioneered in 1844 by a 28-member weavers’ co-op in Rochdale, England. “Capital is necessary for any enterprise, but while capitalists rent labor and earn profits, cooperatives rent capital and the members earn profits through their participation” (Kaswan, Whole Earth Review, Spring 1989). Important co-op decisions are made by members actively involved in and affected by co-op operations, not by investors or speculators.

Each co-op is organized to fulfill a specific need of its voluntary members, so it has a mission in life beyond the standard corporate imperatives to maximize growth, profits, and executive pay. Because a food co-op is a consumer cooperative, its owner/members are food consumers. Providing them with the best deal on the best whole foods is a food co-op’s bottom line.

The International Co-op Conspiracy

100,000,000 Americans are members of over 45,000 cooperatives, including credit union, group health care, agriculture, rural electric, housing, insurance, and worker co-ops. When the state capitalist economy leaves some people out in the cold, when consumerism built on invented demand doesn’t supply everyone’s desires, mutual-aid co-ops can be a satisfying solution.

In Central America, India, Indonesia, Eastern Europe, and around the world, co-ops are one of the few means available for people to help themselves out of oppressive circumstances. The outstanding example is the Mondragon system of cooperatives tucked away in the Basque region of northwestern Spain — probably the most successful social experiment in the history of the planet!

The Mondragon Miracle

Can you believe it? Founded in 1956 by the passionate Padre Arizmendi after 15 years of solitary spadework, his 5 member stove co-op has grown into a multi-billion-dollar network of 173 cooperatives employing 20,000 people. Mondragon co-ops include Spain’s fastest growing bank, hundreds of K-Mart style consumer stores, health care, insurance companies, pension management, entrepreneur development, robotics research, heavy equipment manufacture, and just about everything else under the sun.

And all this was accomplished through a sophisticated, self-adjusting system emphasizing workplace democracy, ownership gained by participation, self-financing from the local co-op bank, continuous cultivation of new co-ops, and a cultural commitment to solidarity: *all acts must, at the same time, benefit and respect the needs and concerns of everyone affected — individuals, their cooperative, other cooperatives in the system, and the larger community” (Jaques and Ruth Kaswan, “The Mondragon Cooperatives,” Whole Earth Review, Spring 1989, pp. 8-17).

A central co-op principle is cooperation among co-ops; Mondragon does it in spades! No other co-ops have ever come close to its interlocking, diversified system, but all cooperatives aspire to this ideal and have a conscious commitment to mutual support. Taken together the world’s co-ops are a global conspiracy — an open conspiracy with 700 million members at large.

The Great Good Place

Getting back to home. I’ve got to admit that such world-girdling considerations are only a very small part of why I love co-ops. Mostly it’s the day-to-day joy I experience walking into my own local co-op and immersing myself into its soul-soothing ambiance.

Today my fingers played over the keys of a musical cash register while I enjoyed the vista of chatting member-workers bustling backstock to the retail shelves amidst chatting member-shoppers carelessly selecting groceries. The business at hand seemed to be conversation first, food second. One shopper confided to me, “I have to come here to get some social interaction. I work at home and don’t even get to talk to people. I come to the Co-op to catch up.”

Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place rhapsodizes about “third places [that] exist on neutral ground and serve to level their guests to a condition of social equality [that’s] remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends. … a source of news along with the opportunity to question, protest, sound out, supplement, and form opinion locally and collectively. …

“The activity that goes on in third places is largely unplanned, unscheduled, unorganized, and unstructured. Here, however, is the charm. It is just these deviations from the middle-class penchant for organization that give the third place much of its character and allure and that allow it to offer a radical departure from the routines of home and work.”

Co-ops are great good places. They are Temporary Autonomous Zones. They are community crossroads, counterculture cynosures, neighborhood news services. They are R & R for overworked psyches, refuges from dog-eat-dog reality, and perhaps the seeds of deeper and more sustaining realities.

The Abolition of Work

Food co-ops have this feel of the “third place,” while trying to integrate it with the business of providing good food and service. At their best, they seem like real-world exercises of the vision that Bob Black broadcasts in his essay, “The Abolition of Work“:

“A ‘job’ that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. …

“Such is ‘work’. Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. …The player gets something out of playing; that’s why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself …some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed.”

Much of the work at many co-ops is done by members part-time in exchange for food discounts or other benefits — not as a requirement of membership but as a welcome option that satisfies Black’s standards for play. In a convivial, ego-free environment, professionals and working stiffs and assorted unemployables can break up their lives with some hands-on cheese cutting or clerking or cleaning — as one CPA/discount worker remarked, “I can do anything for 4 hours a week!”

Whither Food Co-ops?

I have been describing the ideal situation; co-ops often find themselves stretched between apparently opposite commitments to cooperative purism and efficient operations. The Consumers Cooperative of Berkeley, at one time America’s largest food co-op with 12 stores and 100,000 members and $83.6 million in annual sales, failed in 1988 partly due to this conflict. The board factionalized into progressive versus economic camps, the staff collected inflated paychecks while co-op assets were sold off, and the membership defected in dismay over infighting and the disappearance of politically-taboo products from the shelves.

Berkeley is an extreme case, and remember that for 50 years it was a pioneering and successful co-op. Did cooperativism fail at Berkeley, or is this an example of what can happen when co-ops neglect their underlying principles? Many employees hadn’t been educated about co-ops, didn’t bother to become members, and felt alienated from their co-op bosses. A weak board literally gave away the store in contract negotiations, putting reflexive sympathy for union causes ahead of the membership’s interests (source: “What Happened to the Berkeley Co-op?”, excerpted in Cooperative Grocer, January, 1992).

As food co-ops grow and find themselves directly competing with huge corporate supermarket chains, they start discovering every incentive to become more like supermarkets and less like co-ops. Member involvement in store operations gets phased out, replacing the energy of enthusiastic part-timers with the professionalism of stressed-out staff. Whether at McDonald’s or Mondragon, full-time service work within a power structure can be a stupefying experience that makes cooperative ideals seem pretty hollow. When a co-op looks like Safeway and works like Safeway, why should its shoppers and workers care that it isn’t Safeway?

One answer is that supermarket co-ops remain excellent natural food stores with top-quality products and a benign corporate outlook which plows profits back into the co-op and its community. But those who prefer small-fry co-ops do feel that something intangible gets lost as co-ops grow into increased hierarchy and organization. As a co-op gets less fun to work in, it gets less fun to shop in and less like a great good place to hang out in. Play time is over — it’s back to work. Where’s the co-op difference?

Original article sources from 1994

I hope that food co-ops will someday crack the nut of how to grow without losing what makes them great. I wonder whether co-ops will prove to be just the wave of the past, or whether the Mondragon model will eventually take over the earth. What I do know is that right now many magic co-ops survive and thrive for you to enjoy — there may be one in your home town. Check it out!

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Illustrations by Barbara Williams and Shaun Hayes-Holgate

Public Health’s 3-Year Patient Data Breach Exposes Cloud Risks and Questionable Narratives

by Stephen Schumacher | Nov 21, 2024 | General

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;

2. Death took place during the typical 3 to 8 week wait between first and second vaccinations before “Primary Series Completed”;

3. Death took place within 2 weeks after the second vaccination to give “the body time to establish a strong immune response after the second dose.”

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.”

According to the CDC, 95% of COVID-19 deaths involve an average of four other serious comorbidities.

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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.

Jefferson County Beacon Launches Local News, Globally Funded

by Stephen Schumacher | Apr 21, 2024 | General

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 Beacon says 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 extremely dangerous 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 Beacon says 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.

Everybody Knows
Except Public Health

by Stephen Schumacher | Jan 21, 2024 | General

Public comment to Jefferson County Board of Health at their January 18, 2024 meeting (slightly expanded for publication):

What do you know?

When covid hit, Public Health said they knew it was caused by wet market bats, and censored anyone who disagreed. But now the FBI, Department of Energy, etc. consensus is that covid came out of Wuhan labs secretly funded by Dr. Fauci and the Department of Defense via the EcoHealth Alliance to circumvent laws prohibiting such dangerous bioweapon research from taking place in the United States.

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 needed to wear masks, but Cochrane Reviews then and now show no good evidence masking has any viral effectiveness.

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.

This second-rate methodology neglected to clean up all the DNA making the mRNA, so independent researchers around the world discovered that the mRNA shots people got are contaminated with random DNA.

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo asked the FDA about this contamination, and in response the FDA confirmed it but said they did not know how bad the health consequences could be and would take no steps to find out.

This know-nothing/do-nothing FDA response prompted Florida to no longer recommend the mRNA injections for ANYBODY, since the FDA does not know they are safe.

Quoting Leonard Cohen’s famous song:

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.

Despite Public Health messaging, most everybody knows people seriously injured or killed by the mRNA jabs, which is part of why “uptake rates on the new boosters are in the low single digits. Nobody’s taking it.”

Everybody knows — except Public Health and those they’ve bamboozled.

——————————————————

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:

TOP TEN 2021 Spin Doctor Disinformation Statements

Disinformation Trick-or-Treats: Be Afraid, Be Berry Afraid! — Part One —

Vax Trial Fraud Disinfo: Another Berry Trick-or-Treat — Part Two —

Bats in the Berry Belfry: Vax Efficacy Disinformation — Part Three —

Berry’s VAERS Conspiracy Theory:Bloody Lies with a Hateful Twist — Part Four —

Health Enforcers Catch Misinformation Fever

Would 0.3% TBD Tax Be Used Just to Fix Roads?
To Be Determined

by Stephen Schumacher | Oct 28, 2023 | General

Like many, I was surprised to learn on July 26 from a brief front-page Leader blurb 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”:

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):

Concern about Austerity versus Enabling

So I attended council’s inaugural TBD board meeting on August 1 to learn more and offer up my concerns in this Public Comment:

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.”

But I find that hard to square with council’s longstanding and current practice of always finding money or borrowing against the future for discretionary projects and pricey consultants — from Cherry Street ($2-3 million) to Evans Vista ($10-15 million) to Hybrid Golf Course ($4.4 million) to Aquatic Center ($109 million) — always prioritizing these and other things over basic road maintenance for 20 years.

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:

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.