A plea from librarians not to overreact to COVID is now included with Jefferson County library books. It seems some nervous bibliophiles are going to extreme measures to sanitize library books. Like Jay Inslee’s lockdown, their cure could be doing more damage than it is preventing.
With each book comes a slip of paper that reads, “There have been many reports of library patrons cleaning items with bleach or sanitizer, and even microwaving their checked out items in an effort to sanitize them. Please do not do any of this!”
Do these people wear masks and gloves while they’re reading library books? Do they “sanitize” each page before they sit down to read? Are they on edge because of the plot in that mystery in their hands, or because they are worried that they’ll be on a ventilator before they find out who done it?
The librarians’ plea continues: “Library materials have metal in the security tags that are located inside. Printing ink also has metal oxides that could burn and heat overall is extremely detrimental to paper’s lifespan. Bleach, alcohol-based sanitizers, and other cleaning agents are also very bad for paper.”
Yes, heat is very bad for books. Paper burns at Fahrenheit 451 (in the the Adult Fiction Section at F Bradbur).
Chill, librarians advise. Don’t cook the books! “The common solution is time in isolation. Don’t worry about cleaning or sanitizing library materials. The Washington State Library follows guidelines from U.S. Center for Disease Control and material-specific guidelines recommended by the American Library Association and Library of Congress to safeguard our collection materials before they are given to other customers. We are currently holding materials for seven full days before allowing new use.”
There’s science to back that up. Actually, our library holds books for twice as long as necessary to eliminate any risk of COVID transmission from library materials. I could not find any credible report of anyone contracting COVID from a library book.
So put down the alcohol and chlorine wipes and pick up that cup of chamomile tea or that glass of wine and enjoy a worry-free evening with the written word.
Library workers are not exactly wearing full hazmat bunny suits to hand out books, but there is a bit of the “put the book down and step away” routine at the Hadlock library. It’s all for the best, I suppose. Maybe the drama has zero impact on transmission of COVID. It probably doesn’t make a difference. But keeping up the dance deprives Jay Inslee of an excuse to shut down our libraries again.
A closing word from the CDC. Well, not exactly, but I’m sure the CDC would not disagree: If you feel you’ve been exposed to COVID, just like you shouldn’t nuke a library book, don’t stick in your head in the microwave, either.
Something was off. The email exchange, the tit-for-tat, was not what I would have expected from a man reported to have managed almost a quarter of a billion dollar budget and been a high level executive with a large staff. That’s what had been reported about John Mauro. But it’s not true.
Who is John Mauro? I began to wonder.
He is the city manager of Port Townsend, just about a year into the job. He came here from Auckland, New Zealand, one of the most desirable cities in the world, in one of the most desired countries in the world. New Zealand is a magical, beautiful, safe place. It has free health care and one of the world’s top educational systems. It is progressive and philosophically green. This is the place where billionaires have built their refuges for when the world falls apart.
Mauro left there to come back to the United States. For years, Americans have been applying to emigrate to New Zealand “at an astounding rate.” You could call Mauro’s journey reverse migration.
And he left an incredibly sweet job as Chief Sustainability Officer for the Auckland City Council, a job that enabled him to travel the globe and hang out with environmental activists. He arranged and attended conferences. He gave interviews and wrote climate action plans and plans for planting trees and adding bike paths and eliminating cars from Auckland streets. As described in a program for a presentation he gave in Australia, as CSO “John and his team provide thought leadership, drive strategic direction and champion change.”
Here’s what the Peninsula Daily News reported about the job Mauro left to come here. The report came out after Mauro had completed his interviews with city officials and panels of people who headed up services and organizations in Port Townsend. He had just finished a community meet-and-greet. The article, by managing editor Brian McLean, was dated June 21, 2019, with the headline, “Port Townsend City Council Picks Sustainability Officer as City Manager”:
That is a huge budget, almost seven times Port Townsend’s annual expenditures.
Mauro’s Twitter feed, thousands of tweets in a few years, shows him in constant motion, traveling far and wide. That Twitter feed also showed him taking a jab at Phil Goff, the Mayor of Auckland.
That’s January 16, 2020. He had been City Manager of Port Townsend for over 3 months and here he is poking an elected official, his former boss in another country. And what’s with that hashtag “#showmethebudget@AklCouncil”? Why does he care enough to have his challenge come to the attention of Auckland’s Mayor and City Council? Wasn’t all that behind him?
He’d made his decision to leave Auckland early in 2019, or earlier, and interviewed in Port Townsend and all the way across the North American continent in Windham, Maine, where he told the local paper he was homesick for the place where he’d grown up. He was offered a job as Windham’s city manager a couple days after being offered a job here. “It’s hard to take Maine out of me,” Mauro told a Windham town hall meeting. “It’s a great time to come home.”
He hadn’t been living at “home” for a very long time. In 2013 he’d followed his wife to Auckland from his job as a bicycle activist in Seattle. She’d been offered a “tenure track faculty position,” he said when announcing his resignation from Seattle’s Cascade Bicycle Club in July 2012. “We’re going to give it a go in a country we both love.”
Before that he’d spent under two years as a climate change analyst for Seattle, and before that about 3 years with small non-profits in the Greater Seattle area, including the Pilchuk Audubon Society.
Before that he worked in the Himalayas as a guide and instructor, preceded by a brief stint as an instructor in environmental studies at Middlebury College in Vermont (his alma mater) and 14 months with shamans, medicine men, and tribal chiefs in Ghana, Bhutan, Sikkim, Australia and Bolivia. He graduated from Middlebury College in 1999 with a degree in environmental studies/conservation biology.
Now he’s in charge of Port Townsend’s public safety, streets and sewers, utilities, union and business relations, payroll and everything that goes on in City Hall.
There was controversy about how much he demanded, and how much the City Council agreed to pay him. He got what he wanted: $156,000 starting salary, a $20,000 relocation allowance, an amount equal to 13% of his salary contributed toward his retirement, an annual vehicle allowance of $5,400 a year, a life insurance policy, and 120 days of vacation and sick leave starting his first day of the job.
He was sworn in on November 4, 2019. Three months later he’s jabbing the Mayor of Auckland and going on about “show me the budget, Auckland Council.” Something’s off.
He didn’t come to Port Townsend because he was homesick. This wasn’t his home. Maybe he came here to be the activist he couldn’t be in Auckland. Maybe it’s to build those cycle lanes and the “resiliency” he couldn’t get on the other side of the planet.
An interview he gave between resigning his post in Auckland and starting up here suggests he may not have left that primo job in New Zealand on happy terms. The threat of climate change to Auckland, “would scare the p–s out of you,” he said in a September 12, 2019 interview with a New Zealand media site. The Auckland City Council and community “needed courage and ambition to make better progress, but there was a trend towards ‘show-ponying.'” (Defined as “a person who appears to perform well, but has no real ability.”)
Mauro criticized Auckland for not accepting his ambitious plans to build a fleet of electric buses and not adding “cycleways” as fast as he wanted. “We go half way, we build some great projects and then we start hearing from people how crazy and radical we are….”
That explains Mauro taking a shot at the Mayor and City Council of Auckland from City Hall in Port Townsend. He’s still upset about the rejection of his ideas. He’s still stinging from being called “radical and crazy.” He’s going to show them by building more cycle lanes and resiliency in little Port Townsend than Auckland was willing to do when he was Chief Sustainability Officer reporting to Auckland’s CEO, supervising a staff of 20 people and having a budget of $211 million.
Except that last part’s not true.
$211 million would build an awful lot of bike lanes. That’s a pile of money but I couldn’t find that item anywhere in Auckland’s budgets. You’d think there’d be at least a mention of the Chief Sustainability Officer with that kind of money to spend on green projects. Except there isn’t.
I wrote the Mayor of Auckland for help. I also wrote Jim Stabback, CEO of the Auckland City Council. The Mayor referred my inquiry to the Auckland CEO, because Mauro’s old position was in Stabback’s chain of command, and I received a written response from his Chief of Strategy. Mauro did not report to the CEO of Auckland City Council. He was a mid-level bureaucrat in the planning department under a General Manager. He did not have a staff of 20 people. He was not in charge of building anything. Here are some photos of his “team” that I found on Mauro’s prolific Twitter feed:
His team was small enough that they could all go hiking together.
The City of Port Townsend employs more than 100 people.
As for that $211 million budget, it was more like $630,000US. It was approximately $1 million in New Zealand dollars, but at the rate of exchange at the time Mauro left, it was about $630,000 US.
That is less than 2% of the $35 million city budget Mauro now oversees as city manager.
Did anyone check with the Auckland Mayor and CEO before hiring Mr. Mauro?
Here is the written statement on behalf of the Auckland Council CEO received late on October 2. “Jim” is the Auckland Council CEO, Jim Stabback:
Over 95% of Michael Chapman’s campaign funds come from lobbyists and PACs representing groups and business from outside his district, according to his latest filings with the Public Disclosure Commission. Of his $103,000 campaign war chest for reelection to the House of Representatives for the the 24th Legislative District, only $2,703 comes from individuals who live in his district. Not a penny of Chapman’s campaign funds came from Brinnon, Quilcene, Port Ludlow, Forks, McCleary, Elma, or Hoquiam. Only 5 individuals from Port Townsend have contributed to his re-election.
Of his top 45 donors, only one, the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe, is in his district.
Over 23% of his funds came from out of state.
PDC breakdown of Chapman contributions. The blue represents business contributions. Individual contributions are shown in green.
61% of Chapman’s money came from Political Action Committees, 28% from businesses and 6.6% from unions.
Chevron, Microsoft, Enterprise, Weyerhaeuser, Boeing, Amazon, and BSNF Railways (Warren Buffett) gave the legal limit, as did PACs for alcohol interests, auto dealers, and casinos.
Seattle accounts for the largest number of donors and highest amount of donations to Chapman’s campaign, with Olympia coming next.
Chevron alone gave more money to Chapman than he has received combined from individuals in Port Angeles ($503), Sequim ($700) and Port Townsend ($700), the three largest communities on the north end of the Olympic Peninsula. Only two people in Aberdeen and Ocean Shores have given him anything.
As of his last filing, Chapman has spent only $6,000 on his re-election.
Sue Forde
Chapman’s opponent, Sue Forde, has raised just under half of Chapman’s total. According to her most recent PDC filings, of her $46,000, about $30,000 has come from individuals, $14,500 from Republican party groups, ($10,500 from the state organization and the balance from LD 24 GOP county and local groups) and $1,100 from businesses. She has reported expenditures of just under $12,000.
PDC breakdown of Forde contributions. Green for individuals, purple for PACs.
All her funds came from within the district except for six contributions totaling about $2,700, the reverse of Chapman’s campaign which has raised only $2,700 from within the district. Forde has only one donation from Seattle.
[Correction: As originally posted, the article stated that 97% of Rep. Chapman’s funds came from lobbyists and PACs outside his district. The precise figure is 95.44%. I had missed the address on one corporate donor and caught the error when I checked my figures again after publication.]
$2,329,961 to remodel and finish 8 modest, low rent apartments in an old building. So far.
At least another $1 million will be required before the first tenant moves into the Cherry Street Project that’s been sitting empty and decaying on a Port Townsend hillside since May 2017.
That’s more than $3.3 million for 5,000 square feet of living space, or $666 per square foot. And it is just a remodel upstairs and building out of small basement apartments. New construction costs half as much. Manufactured housing is far cheaper still.
This is City Council’s idea of “affordable” housing. I will explain these numbers in a bit. First a brief history lesson.
The original plan three years ago was to create a nonprofit organization to finish and lease the building. The new group was called Homeward Bound Community Land Trust. They got a $250,000 short term loan to purchase and bring the building from Victoria, B.C. They got an acre and a half of city owned land for $1. They couldn’t repay that loan, so the city gave them more money and more time.
On May 7, 2018, their existing indebtedness was rolled into a new $834,000 loan to be repaid over 40 years. The city floated a general obligation bond to raise the cash, and made the proceeds available to Homeward Bound. Their total debt, with interest included, came to $925,000. The city included a hidden subsidy. Taxpayers would have to repay the bond in 20 years, and would eat $451,115 in interest, for a total bond obligation of $1,367,355 to be split by Homeward Bound and taxpayers.
And Homeward Bound would get two years off the bat with no obligation to pay anything.
Homeward Bound, and particularly County Commissioner Kate Dean who has been on the Homeward Bound board from the beginning of this misadventure, knew that the estimate used to justify the amount of the loan from the city was “completely bogus.” They would have to come back for more money. They also did not disclose to the city an inspection report showing the building contained asbestos and that its walls had been painted with lead paint.
In November 2019, after nothing more had happened than getting the building off blocks onto a foundation, Homeward Bound told City Council they needed at least another million bucks.
Homeward Bound never made a payment on its loan from taxpayers and was never going to make a payment. We wrote 2.5 years ago that their default was foreseeable and inevitable.
The Carmel House as it appeared in May 2018. It remained on blocks until June 2019.
Our reports starting in 2018 explaining why this scheme was bound to fail, and bound to burn taxpayers without producing anything, are linked below. The articles provide links to city records and other supporting documentation. The reports detail massive incompetence and misfeasance, starting with City Council’s decision to approve acquisition of the building without having it first inspected.
At its September 28 Special Business Meeting, City Council faced the fact that its Homeward Bound dream was a bust. It was going to have to take the project back. Now, what to do with a decaying building that is blighting the neighborhood and had already attracted at least one homeless camp? The city’s pretty much broke. It doesn’t have money to fix its streets, let alone come up with another $1 million to fix a building that needs asbestos and lead removal. It’s also a political headache for city leaders who know taxpayers are fuming.
Tearing it down will be a huge embarrassment and admission of failure. So would selling it for whatever price it could bring and using the proceeds to pay down the bond debt. City Council needed a white knight to get them out of this mess.
Enter Bayside Housing & Services, a nonprofit that has been renting one of the buildings of the Old Alcohol Plant in Port Hadlock to provide transitional housing for people who might otherwise be homeless.
City Council in a 6-to-1 vote rejected the idea of selling the property and cutting its losses. It authorized the City Manager to negotiate a transfer to Bayside of the entire Cherry Street project. That includes the old Carmel House and approximately 1.5 acres of land with utilities mostly in place. Gary J. Keister, who has been representing Bayside in the preliminary negotiations, insisted upon the property being transferred clear of debt, and it looks like City Council will give him what he wants. Taxpayers, who were to be repaid by Homeward Bound for $925,000 of the debt, will now shoulder the entire $1,367.355 million expense.
Plus, City Council wants to give Bayside $307,606 cash as an additional incentive and boost to getting the project restarted. That is the amount of the bond proceeds that have not been spent by Homeward Bound. Instead of paying that back to lenders, taxpayers will have to come up with another $307,606 to replace the funds given to Bayside.
All Bayside will be required to do is to complete the remodel of the Carmel House building, add 4 small one bedroom apartments on the ground floor, and rent them as affordable housing units.
Once that it is done, they are free to use the rest of the 1.5 acres however they want, including developing it for market rate housing and turning a profit on those units.
You can watch the September 28 City Council meeting by clicking this link.
Not everyone jumped at this idea. City Councilor Monica MickHagar, the lone “no” vote, had some questions.
She wanted to know how much the city might make by selling the land instead of giving it away a second time. The proceeds could be used to pay down the bond, which requires an annual payment of $65,000 for 20 years. The funds saved could be used for public services.
The City Manager would not tell her how much the land could be sold for. In so doing, he was also withholding this information from taxpayers. Only in executive session would he disclose that information.
We have previously reported that, according to documents in city files, the land was valued at $600,000 at the time it was sold in April 2017 to Homeward Bound for one dollar. Mayor Michelle Sandoval, a real estate broker, has described this land as “valuable” land.
Now that we have a value for the land we can calculate what the cost is to taxpayers of the proposed transfer to Bayside Housing:
Bond debt: $1,367,355
Land: 600,000
Cash: 307,606
Subtotal: $2,274,961
In addition, the city gave Homeward Bound a $30,000 “organizational grant, $25,000 in project management services, free utility work (replacing and laying water lines), payments to PUD to lower and raise power lines as the building was moved through the city, and waiver of permit fees. In all the public records I have reviewed, I have not been able to ascertain the dollar value of the last three items. But, just with the $55,000 in miscellaneous costs we can determine, the total expense to be incurred by taxpayers in the proposed transfer to Bayside Housing would amount to at least $2,329,961.
Bayside will get all this for maybe $1.00.
Council member MickHagar had some questions about Bayside and their ability to get this job done. Those were questions deserving answers. After all, a lot more money was going to be required. Did Bayside have the resources to get the job done? Would this project again come back to the city as it had with Homeward Bound?
Her questions were blocked by other members of City Council. Such information was “confidential,” she was told.
In our next installment, we will attempt to answer those questions.
Related Articles
These reports, based on documentation from city files, provide a compete behind-the-scenes picture of this debacle.
A school shooting might have occurred at Port Townsend High School if it weren’t for the school’s police officer.
That was one of the reasons why PTHS principal Carrie Ehrhardt urged City Council to keep a School Resource Officer stationed with her students and teachers. In a letter to be considered at tonight’s meeting of Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Public Safety and Law Enforcement, Ehrhardt pushed back on suggestions to end the SRO program. Sharp questioning of the Police Chief by members of the committee at an earlier meeting, and the removal of police from other school districts as a “reform” or “reimagining” of law enforcement have prompted fears that Port Townsend may end its successful police in schools program that has been in place, except for 4 years during the last recession, since Ehrhardt arrived as a teacher in 2001.
“There is a natural link between safer schools and safer communities,” Erhardt told council. When the SRO program was discontinued from 2006 to 2010, “our community saw a significant increase in crimes being committed by teenagers.”
In 2015, the current SRO, Officer Jeremy Vergin, was able to obtain the police records of a student who had enrolled in PTHS. They showed he had such a violent history that the school put him on a home based program and did not permit him on campus. Unhappy with this arrangement, the family moved. This student committed the North Thurston High School shooting a month later. It took an extremely brave and fast thinking teacher to tackle the student as he was firing a .357 pistol.
A year later, a teacher with severe mental health issues returned to school and his former classroom filled with students. Officer Vergin was able to diffuse the situation quickly because he was on campus. “If not for Officer Vergin,” Erhardt asks, “what would have happened during the additional minutes waiting for law enforcement to arrive?”
“In closing,” wrote Ehrhardt, “my hope of the committee is that you make decisions based on the community we live in, and want we want for the citizens and youth of Port Townsend, instead of reacting to emotions based on circumstances in other cities, that do not represent PT.”
Confess that you are racists. Take out a newspaper ad to proclaim your guilt, demanded Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County of the Sheriff and Port Townsend Police Chief.
Port Townsend Free Press has obtained emails between Cameron Jones, who has identified himself as an organizer of Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County, and Jefferson County Sheriff Joe Nole and Port Townsend Acting Police Chief Troy Surber. Purporting to represent BLM Jeffco, Jones made these demands in a July 10, 2020 email. In addition to a public confession of racism, he demanded that the public statement from the Sheriff and Police Chief “acknowledges BLMJC’s intentions” and “pledged to work with the community and BLMJC on realizing the intentions stated in our letter.”
One of those “intentions” was disarming police officers and deputies.
Much of the list of “Intentions” was vaporous stuff like agreeing that “Black lives matter.” Nobody disagrees with that unassailable statement, but then you get pulled into endorsing the political agenda of Black Lives Matter, Inc. and all that entails.
Sheriff Nole responded in general terms. “I am in total agreement with the Values of BLMJC,” he wrote to Jones on July 17. He was also in agreement with most of the items on their “Current List of Intentions, i.e., Invest in Community, Economic Justice, Protection of the First Amendment Rights and Protesters, and End White Supremacy and the War on Black People.” Who is not for investing in our community and protecting First Amendment rights? Who’s not against a war on Black people–if it exists? Who’s not against White supremacy–the dumb idea that White people are superior to everyone else by virtue of nothing more than skin color?
Sheriff Nole drew the line at agreeing with the demand to disarm the police and other matters controlled by union contracts and civil service rules.
And he did not agree to publicly flagellate himself and his deputies by confessing the sin of personal and institutional racism in a newspaper ad.
The demand for public humiliation was an escalation in Jones’ demands. Writing on behalf of himself, fellow BLM Jeffco organizer Sean Vinson and the group as a whole, Jones had cancelled a conciliatory Zoom meeting between BLM Jeffco and the Sheriff, Police Chief, County Commissioners Greg Brotherton and Kate Dean, Port Townsend City Councilor Ariel Speser and others and upped his demands.
I have not found any response from PT Acting Police Chief Troy Surber to Jones’ demand in the documents made available to me by the City of Port Townsend and Jefferson County. The cancelled Zoom meeting was not rescheduled. Neither the Sheriff nor Police Chief have issued the public confession demanded by Jones.
Who is Cameron Jones? Who is Black Lives Matter of Jefferson County?
Jones fired back at Sheriff Nole in a condescending and accusatory email a week after Nole did not accede to all of Jones’ demands. He rejected every effort at conciliation unless Nole issued “a direct and PUBLIC apology.” He accused Nole’s deputies of having within them “insidious behavioral mechanisms” acquired during prior military service. (Jones says he served in the military at Guantanamo Bay.) No matter what Nole did, Jones wrote, nothing mattered until Nole published an apology for his own and his department’s racism.
“Right now, since this basic first step seems so problematic, how can you ever imagine we’d have any confidence in your ability as a leader to create a culture within law enforcement that leads to substantial and meaningful policy and doctrinal change?” were Jone’s parting words.
Nole had agreed as part of his conciliatory efforts to participate in the KPTZ radio program, “The Reckoning,” that was broadcast a few weeks later. We wrote about that travesty in “Reckoning with the Reckoning.” Nole endured Jones throwing at him wild, unsupported accusations such as Nole permitting White supremacy and vigilante groups to operate in the county, five Black men being lynched, and Nole imprisoning 30% of Jefferson County’s Black residents. Nole handled the attacks with his usual courteous aplomb. Anyone who has interacted with him knows he is a patient, kind man. He was being humiliated, but he did not respond in kind, a code of conduct his own deputies have demonstrated to the people of this county over the years.
Nole could have, but did not object to being beseiged by a man who was arrested in March for trying to break into an occupied home in Port Townsend, and has had frequent problems resulting from substance abuse that have led to police involvement. We wrote about those incidents in our August 25 report, “Black Lives Matter Leaders Generated Police Calls for Help, Investigations and Arrests.” That report was limited to incidents within the boundaries of Port Townsend. Cameron Jones is the individual in that report who was arrested for attempted burglary, who did not understand it was wrong to break into someone else’s home, who lied to and verbally assaulted police officers and who insisted he could not be questioned unless police his brought parents to the police station (Mr. Jones is more than 30 years old). Mr. Jones is the individual in that report who was stopped repeatedly, but not arrested, for a variety of traffic violations that placed his own safety at risk. He was the individual whose conduct outside the Bishop Hotel led to an employee calling police. He was the individual who crashed head first into the closed Fort Worden gate, lied about his identity and was obviously biking while intoxicated.
We have just received records from Jefferson County about contacts between leaders of BLM Jeffco and law enforcement occurring outside Port Townsend. Our request to Clallam County is still pending.
Jefferson County records reveal numerous contacts going back years. They document an automobile theft followed by a high speed chase where the fleeing felon hit a horse, threats and assault, malicious mischief, driving multiple times on a suspended license, warnings about dangerous driving, arrest on warrants, and other matters.
But not one complaint that law enforcement conduct had anything to do with race. We asked for all complaints for anything close to racist conduct going back a decade. There are none, particularly none from any of the current Black Lives Matter leadership that has had many interactions with deputies.
Why no complaints of deputies mistreating anyone because of their race? Because it appears that, while doing their job to enforce the law, deputies also genuinely cared about people struggling with considerable problems and challenges. They searched for a BLM Jeffco leader who went missing after an anger management session. They made a mental health welfare check and searched for troubled runaway teen who later became a BLM leader. They cared when they found someone who became a BLM Jeffco leader unresponsive under the guard rail of the Highway 104 overpass above Center Road.
In a story published by the Leader, the BLM Jeffco leader found under that guard rail said he would not want to encounter Deputy Sheriff Andy Pernsteiner out of fear that he would be mistreated because of his race. It was Deputy Sheriff Andy Pernsteiner who saved that BLM leader from possibly dying of exposure on a cold, wet February night.
Sheriff Nole has declined a personal and departmental public confession of racism with good reason. It would not be true.
