Olympic Community of Health spent a year and a fortune “connecting people so they could thrive,” then published an annual report with almost no jobs, no cost per person, and no hard outcomes. Recompete was sold as a way to close the prime-age employment gap. The paperwork reads like a social-services slush fund on federal letterhead. Commissioner Mike French chairs the coalition, is running for reelection on the grant, and should start addressing legitimate concerns, not just accepting the applause.

A nonprofit, not a jobs creator

Olympic Community of Health is not a state agency. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (NGO)—an Accountable Community of Health—created to convene partners and “tackle health issues that no single sector or Tribe can tackle alone.”

Olympic Connect is not a separate agency. It is OCH’s program: the community care hub that OCH built, governs, and funds. Recompete’s barrier-removal award of about $9.8 million — over a quarter of the $35 million total — went to OCH. Olympic Connect is the storefront of that nearly $10 million.

OCH’s own About page is a stack of mission language: bridges, person-centered care, equity, determinants of health. It does not say how many people got jobs, how much it costs per client, or what “thrive” means in dollars.

French sold jobs. The hub sells wraparound.

Recompete is a U.S. Economic Development Administration program. Clallam County is the lead applicant. French chairs the North Olympic Peninsula Recompete Coalition and has made the award the centerpiece of his second-term pitch: tens of millions to create good jobs and connect residents to living-wage work.

The original sales number floated around 900 placements in five years. Recent reporting dropped the new target to 603. Two years in, the public story is still “implementation.” The fine print shows a bulk of the money going to NGOs, wraparound services, and administration.

The June 2025 scope of work is not a jobs plan. It is a contracting plan. Recruit and onboard staff. Note that other funding already covers an additional 7.0 full-time positions. Train current staff. Release funding opportunities. Monitor contracts. Execute more contracts. Build a subawardee management plan. Hire a data vendor. Hire a pre-marketing contractor. Plan sustainability in 2026–2027. Jobs are the pitch. Payroll at OCH is the product.

Och Scope Of Work June 2025

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Gas, car repairs, and “trauma-informed workplaces”

The partner scopes make the point. The Olympic Peninsula YMCA contract is supposed to help clients with childcare, basic needs, gas, and car repairs.

First Step gets more hours and pop-up sites.

Transit authorities get expanded rides and “alignment with hub technology.”

Discovery Behavioral Healthcare and Peninsula Behavioral Health get money to support clients and employers around behavioral health and “trauma-informed workplaces.”

Community-based workforce contractors will “remove barriers.”

Short-term training is a plan to create a system to create a plan. This is not a mill, a factory, or a plant hiring on Monday. It is a referral desk with a grant.

Then there is the pre-marketing contract. OCH will run focus groups so staff can understand why some people “will be hesitant to ask for help,” organized around “stages of change” theory, so marketing will “resonate and lead to action.”

Flyers and ads come from other funding. The federal grant pays for focus groups on why people don’t want jobs. That is research into reluctance—not a count of people hired.

The annual report: activity without a bottom line

Incoming funds: $7,664,699. Most of it from the Washington State Health Care Authority ($6,475,257) and the Department of Health ($975,000). U.S. EDA: $214,442 in the year they chose to display. Funds sent “directly to partners”: $2,417,545. Of that, $1,460,120 went to 12 Olympic Connect care-coordination partners so “trusted helpers” could connect people to resources. Another $819,400 went to seven partners for food, housing, and substance-use infrastructure. The board sent $138,025 to 11 food banks. Food banks here are open to everyone, regardless of income. That is a money transfer, not proof of job growth.

What did the public get as proof?

• Over 1,300 people “enrolled” and “got connected to resources and services so they could thrive.” Thrive is not a metric.

• Over 700 resources added to a directory. A list is not a paycheck.

• A “regional health needs assessment” that “synthesized the findings from recent partner-led community assessments and highlighted health needs.” That sentence is a report about other reports.

• A Google Search campaign: 35,507 impressions, 3,562 website visits. For a multi-million-dollar hub, that is a marketing footnote dressed as impact.

• 138 re-entry clients referred from Clallam and Kitsap jails. Referred is not housed, hired, or sober.

• 27 “learnings and convenings.” OCH’s own IRS language is that it hosts learnings and convenings to foster relationship building. Meetings about meetings.

• 1,959 “partner network relationships.”

• 95 percent satisfaction among Olympic Connect clients upon discharge. Satisfaction with a referral is not employment.

Word salad from the top

Miranda Burger, interim executive director: proud of growth, partners “leaned into innovation launching the hub,” “lessons learned,” “strong and positive path looking toward sustainability,” excited to develop the next strategic plan and “understand what is important to our partners.”

Heidi Anderson, board president: continued strengthening of partnerships, shared accountability, innovation, community-centered solutions, barriers to care, align resources. Paragraphs of verbs. No cost per placement. No jobs retained at 90 days. No comparison to the $26-an-hour wage talk French used when the grant was still a press release.

A private sector company’s annual report would show income quality, debts, and risks. OCH published kayaks, sunbursts, circular quotes, and a land acknowledgment: humility toward Coast Salish peoples on whose sacred land “we live, work, and play.”

The treasurer slot is tied to Jamestown Tribe / Jamestown Family Health Clinic.

None of that answers the only question Recompete was sold on: how many prime-age adults are on a payroll who were not before?

Credit and the record travel together

French does not run OCH day to day. He does chair the coalition that routes federal money into this model, claims the $35 million as leadership, and is asking Clallam County for another term. If the grant is his proof of economic development, the annual report and the scope of work are the audit. They show administration, trusted helpers, gas cards, trauma-informed workplaces, focus groups for the hesitant, and food-bank checks. They do not show a jobs machine.

What does OCH do? It convenes. It contracts. It refers. It writes “thrive.” Taxpayers fund the rest. Credit for the grant includes credit for what it actually bought. It’s time for Commissioner French to explain how Recompete is really performing.

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Candidate Conversation This Morning!

Port Angeles’ deputy mayor just told council that “respect and decorum” are artifacts of a white male heterosexual society. The commissioner whose campaign she runs says his most important job is building trust with tribes—then steers federal money toward an enterprise that already spends half a million a year on holiday lights. The guilt is the point. It never gets paid off. It only gets converted into the next grant.

Decorum, recoded

On September 15, Port Angeles Deputy Mayor Navarra Carr was not talking about potholes. She was talking about who is allowed to define manners.

Council was discussing respect and decorum. Carr said the city probably does not want people whose “backgrounds… would be not in line with city values.” Then she explained whose values she meant:

“A lot of times the words respect and decorum come at the expense of… cultural norms and a lot of times the people who are left out of those conversations about what constitutes respect and decorum are people of color, queer people, women… I want to make sure that when we’re talking about those things that we’re not unintentionally creating an environment that limits people’s freedom of speech… and ability to adequately serve based on sort of artificial norms that really come out of a very white male heterosexual centered society.”

She added that “disrespect” is subjective, that court cases protect the public’s right to curse at council, and that she is “concerned” about councilmembers “limiting our own ability to speak freely to one another.”

So: norms of courtesy are coded as white, male, and straight. Objecting to that framing is the problem. The solution is to treat those norms as optional “guidelines.”

The campaign manager is not a side character

Carr is not a random commenter. She is Mike French’s campaign manager. French is running for a second term as Clallam County commissioner. In 2022, his campaign’s largest expenditure was $3,000 to Carr for “management and consulting.” He later put her in charge of the reelection. He was one of the biggest donors to her city council run, donating $1,000. When Carr calls “respect and decorum” a product of a “white male heterosexual centered society,” she is not freelancing. She is French’s campaign manager, speaking from the deputy mayor’s chair.

Trust the tribes. Charge the taxpayer.

French’s own answer to that charge is not to reject racial scorekeeping. It is to keep the books.

At a Clallam County Democrats debate with Jake Seegers, French said elected officials must think about “the broad spectrum of our community,” and pointed to Recompete: a project “to serve our underserved regions… rural areas like tribal areas.” French added, “I’m a white man in modern America that has had a very blessed life.”

At the Calico Cat Club forum, he went further:

“The most important thing I think for the board of commissioners is for us to build trust with our tribes.”

Not the most important thing for public safety. Not roads, not the jail, not the budget. Trust with tribes. The vehicle to build that trust is Recompete, the $35.6 million federal grant whose coalition he chairs. One tangible way trust gets built is through purchasing machinery: a hydroseeder and a mini excavator for the Jamestown Tribe so it can expand enterprises that already run on more than $100 million a year.

That is the conversion. White privilege, once confessed, becomes a white savior. The term is not a slur invented on this site. It is the name for the move: the guilty party purchases moral credit by delivering other people’s money to the approved identity.

Half a million in lights, then a grant for a hydroseeder

The lights tell you the scale of the need.

Right now the Jamestown Corporation and 7 Cedars are hanging the annual display—three to four million LED lights across Blyn, the campus, the clinic, the golf course, the Railroad Bridge. Jerry Allen and local press have put the budget at about $400,000 to $500,000 a year. Crews start in the fall. Installation alone is thousands of man-hours.

An organization that can spend half a million dollars every winter wrapping birch trees in LEDs is not too poor to buy a hydroseeder. It is too well-positioned to let a commissioner who needs to “build trust” charge the federal taxpayer for the next piece of the white guilt starter kit. French does not have to write a personal check. He chairs the coalition. The guilt does the rest.

The local dialect

The supporting chorus is not subtle.

Rae Hesselbach, French’s appointee to the Developmental Disabilities Advisory Committee and an Indivisible regular, told the public that “we all need to be vigilant because the wealthiest white men are a greater threat to safety than the unhoused.”

Paula Allen, listed as Director of Leadership at 7 Cedars, posted that “white people are a problem” and that they think they are “superior to the bottom of my shoe.”

Former Sequim Councilmember and Jamestown descendant Vicki Lowe told colleagues that the phrase “high quality” is “a dog whistle for white people.”

Charter Review Commissioner Nina Sarmiento, wordsmithing a Water Steward problem statement, said the county had been managing water “ever since white people set foot on this land.”

A Jefferson County Conservation District interview asked a resident how she would “deal with privileged white males.”

None of that is hidden. It is the local dialect of a national script: one racial category is the original sin; every institution must perform repayment; the debt has no payoff date.

Wear orange. Don’t ask about the graves.

Wednesday, Peninsula College will host Orange Shirt Day on the Robins Green—remembrance of children taken to residential and boarding schools, co-sponsored by the First Nations Club and the House of Learning.

Wear orange if you want. The schools were real. The removals were real. The grief is real.

What is not proven is the 2021 Kamloops headline: 215 children in a secret mass grave. Radar found disturbed soil. No graves have been dug up to match the number.

The country still treated it as a closed case. Churches burned. Names came off buildings. Professors who asked for bones lost their jobs. The woman who inspired the orange shirt has told CBC that “denialism” should be written into the criminal code—so a T-shirt that says “dig deeper” is not an argument. It is a charge sheet.

The League already wrote the assignment

Washington’s League of Women Voters does not wait for a grave. Its land acknowledgment says the state sits on homelands of peoples who have “long resiliently resisted the ongoing harms of colonialism,” and that the League will “amplify the voices of Indigenous people,” partner with tribes on policy, and “respect the sovereignty of tribes.”

That is not a history footnote. It is a political instruction: one set of governments is owed perpetual deference; the rest of the public is the guest.

After the lights, the refuges

Where does it end?

It does not end at Christmas lights. It does not end at a hydroseeder. The Jamestown Corporation is now pursuing legislation to move Dungeness and Protection Island National Wildlife Refuges from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service management into tribal trust. Local and federal allies are working to make that transfer happen. After that there will be another one. There always is.

Ron Allen, longtime chair and CEO of the tribe, is three-quarters European by ancestry. The racial ledger still lists him on the creditor side. Carr still lists “white male heterosexual centered society” on the debtor side. French still lists Recompete as the payment plan.

A penance office with a till

Guilt works because it never closes. If “respect” is a white norm, then enforcing it is oppression. If a corporation can light half the highway and still qualify as underserved, then the grant is justice. If a county commissioner's most important job is tribal trust rather than the people who elect him, then the taxpayer is not a constituent. He is an ATM with a conscience.

The question is not whether history was ugly. It was. The question is whether Clallam County intends to run itself as a county—or as a penance office with a $35.6 million till and a $500,000 light bill.

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PABA Forum Tomorrow: District 24, Live at 7:30 a.m.

Port Angeles Business Association’s next meeting is tomorrow, September 29, 7:30–8:30 a.m. at Jazzy Joshua’s Restaurant & Lounge and is open to the public. The group is hosting a forum for 24th Legislative District candidates. Kaylee Kuehn and Marcia Kelbon will appear in person.

It contains explicit language. It also contains the kind of exchange that most campaigns never risk.

Jesse came with hard questions: the “skunk sermon,” an affirmative-action joke told in church, family-foundation donations to 4PA, appointing a young child as campaign manager, and ties to outspoken local activists. He pressed Seegers on tribal outreach, local service gaps, and whether a relative newcomer can represent a county with very different communities and perspectives.

Seegers answered. He discussed his family’s years in Mexico, why he is running as an independent, and what he meant by the skunk story. He explained his views on race, his conversations with Makah and Lower Elwha leadership, visits to Serenity House and the Olympic Peninsula Community Clinic (OPCC), and why he favors local detox, treatment paired with accountability, and greater budget discipline.

Seegers said that the conversation reaffirmed his belief that face-to-face conversations with people who disagree are always beneficial. He respects and appreciates Jesse’s willingness to meet in person and share his perspectives and experiences.

They did not leave agreeing on everything. They did not leave fully trusting each other. But they both left understanding more about the experiences and perspectives that shape their views — and recognizing that beneath significant disagreements are outcomes they both want for the community.

For Seegers, conversations like this offer reason to be optimistic about the future of Clallam County.

Those who only don’t listen will miss the most important part: two people who have publicly disagreed — sometimes sharply — sitting across from one another, asking difficult questions, listening to the answers, and finding some common ground.

Listen to the full conversation.

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This article was approved by Jake Seegers for Commissioner, 131 East First Street, Port Angeles, WA 98362.

Residents are showing up for a candidate on the River Road overpass while the same week shows open-air drug use a few blocks from the courthouse. Online, people are mapping who actually holds the seats, the boards, and the school curriculum — and who gets memorialized on a church sign. If you still think “compassion” is the only word that matters, this Social Media Saturday feed is a hard read.

Show Up on the Overpass

Today, Saturday, a rally for county commissioner candidate Jake Seegers runs from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the River Road Overpass in Sequim. Park across the street from Applebee’s. If you want a different direction for Clallam County, this is the simplest way to say so in public.

This Is the Fruit

Local League of Women Voters activists helped put a grades 3–5 textbook into schools that walks children toward protest — including joining a Black Lives Matter protest “which aims to prevent more police shootings of unarmed Black people and help our country overcome racism.”

Now look at the League’s harvest. A social-media photo showed Port Angeles High School students at a courthouse protest this year with signs that included “My future will not be dictated by Nazis,” “F**k ICE,” “one abortion could have saved democracy,” and “Nobody is illegal on stolen land.”

The League was founded to help voters understand government, not to draft third-graders into a faction. When a civic group becomes a pipeline for slogans, it stops being a league of voters and starts being a political machine that still gets to use the old stationery.

Who Is Actually Building Institutional Power?

A Facebook comment framed Seegers as part of a Christian Right plan to migrate into small towns, buy property, and build local theocracies.

The well-organized, well-funded operations that already dominate Clallam politics do not sound like Christian Nationalists. They sound like the Sequim Good Governance League, Indivisible, and the League of Women Voters.

How many people in those groups arrived from somewhere else, brought a ready-made ideology, and then ran for office? Look at the Sequim City Council. Count League members on the Sequim School Board. Count Indivisible members on the Charter Review Commission. Count how many Indivisible-aligned appointments Mike French has placed on advisory boards.

Seegers moved here, bought property, and put his name on a ballot. That is an election. The other side already holds the councils, the boards, the commissions, and the appointments. Don’t share the smear. Share the roster: who came from somewhere else, who ran, who got installed, and who already owns the seats that matter.

Remember What This Place Could Be

More people are posting that Clallam still has real potential. What they are tired of is this: question whether the current approach is working, and you are told you lack compassion.

Don’t give up. This county is worth saving.

Small Business Is Not a Prop

One owner said cleaning garbage left by trespassers off the storefront has become a daily chore.

If small businesses are the backbone of the local economy and the tax base for essential services, local government is not treating them like assets. It is treating them like janitors for a policy they did not vote for.

A Takedown on Peabody — and a Choice in November

People driving to Tuesday’s Board of Commissioners meeting watched a police takedown on Peabody Street, where an open-air drug encampment has spread across the sidewalk opposite the Salvation Army. Port Angeles police said a wanted fugitive fled on a bike with a dog in the trailer, crashed, injured the dog, and the dog bit an officer.

Unsanctioned camping on a sidewalk. Open-air drug use. Blocks from the courthouse and City Hall. A fugitive, an injured dog, and a bitten officer are not a surprise. They are the product.

In November, voters decide whether they want more of this.

Three Fingers Pointing Back

The county Health Department is back on the “myths and misinformation” circuit warning of cherry-picked data, emotional framing, and one study treated as scripture while a stack of other peer-reviewed work is ignored.

This is the same department whose health officer, Allison Berry, has called cleaning used needles from abandoned camps theft. It does not measure how many people actually leave addiction for recovery. And the harm-reduction model it sells still leans on a 26-year-old needle-exchange study that does not describe what Clallam is doing on the ground.

A reminder for Health and Human Services: every time you point at someone, three fingers point back at you.

PABA Forum: District 24, Live at 7:30 a.m.

Port Angeles Business Association’s next meeting is Tuesday, September 29, 7:30–8:30 a.m. at Jazzy Joshua’s Restaurant & Lounge and is open to the public. The group is hosting a forum for 24th Legislative District candidates. Kaylee Kuehn and Marcia Kelbon will appear in person.

Still Waiting on the Sign

It has been months. CC Watchdog is still looking for a straight answer to a simple question: What does this sign mean?

Jobs on the West End — Credit Fight Optional

Commissioner Mike French says the Riverside Mill is hiring because of Recompete. Mark Ozias’ NGO, the North Olympic Development Council, wants a piece of the credit too. The record shows the company moved from Canada to Forks because of tariffs. Either way, it is family-wage work for west-end locals. Show up Thursday for the hiring event.

Whose Names Go on the Board

A 2023 photo from Indivisible’s headquarters, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Sequim, shows the reader board memorializing George Floyd (Minneapolis), Breonna Taylor (Louisville), Ahmaud Arbery (Georgia), and Atatiana Jefferson (Fort Worth).

Did that readerboard carry the name of infant Otis — born with fentanyl in his system, then found dead in a car seat in the bushes at Kah Tai Park after his father hid the body? Did it name Ted Eastman of Port Angeles, found dead of a fentanyl overdose in his truck, two days after the family buried another brother lost to the same drug? Did it name Sequim artist Richard Madeo, fatally assaulted just blocks from that church by Aaron Fisher, later convicted of manslaughter?

Virtue signaling is easy when the names are national, and the cost is plastic letters. Local deaths require some uncomfortable accountability.

The Audit They Waited to Mention

A Facebook user asked why everyone has “conveniently forgotten” this: inadequate internal controls over financial and accounting reporting in 2022 and 2023; the public not told about the investigation until after the election; City Council members and commissioners, including Mike French, sat on that board knowing they themselves were under the auditor’s review; the matter still referred to a prosecutor and still unfinished.

The Peninsula Daily News story landed in November 2025, less than a week after voters had already been to the polls, and after a local blogger broke the story.

Pay attention to who sat on that board, who still sits there, and what they failed to fix for more than a decade to let this happen.

Read Clallamity Jen

Clallamity Jen’s latest on Substack, “Welcome to the Clallam Zone,” is worth a read. She takes the League of Women Voters apart on moral consistency — not as a civics club that stumbled, but as an ideological shop that will move the goalposts whenever the team needs a new position.

Read it, then ask whether “nonpartisan” still means anything in this county.

One Street, Two Rules

Rita on Facebook caught the Port Angeles split screen: on one side of Park Avenue, encampments along Peabody Creek are not allowed because the National Park Service owns the land. On the other side of Park Avenue, encampments spread because it is city property. The problem is not mysterious. It is unenforced. Port Angeles City Council: this is the part where you listen.

A Blast Near Tumwater Creek

A resident near the Tumwater Creek encampment heard something like a bomb. The explosion rolled across the city. Neighbors also report constant gunfire and fireworks.

Is this the “compassionate” model you are comfortable funding for “our most vulnerable”? Will it take a blast that takes out a council member’s windows? A firework that finds a commissioner’s roof? Until then, it is just another night in Port Angeles.

Help Wanted — Depending on Your Paperwork

The Jamestown Corporation is hiring. For the county’s second-largest employer, the posting is clear: “American Indian/Alaska Native preferences apply.”

That is not a level field. It is a racial screen for the county’s second-largest employer.

There are 17 openings: only seven full-time, five part-time, five per diem with no guaranteed hours. Transport driver (per diem) and peer support start at $20.91. Cedar Greens sales consultant starts at $17.50. The “living-wage jobs” that press releases advertise look a lot like this one: Addiction Medicine Executive Director at Jamestown Healing Clinic in Sequim, $239,937.50–$279,927.00.

“Lead with purpose. Make an impact. Enjoy balance.” That might be easy to do at a quarter million a year. The rest of the workforce is closer to minimum wage.

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Norma Turner wants Jake Seegers to settle 2020 before she will trust him with county roads, budgets, and parks. A longtime League of Women Voters leader spent her letter attacking a local challenger over a national question instead of defending Mike French’s record. If the League still claims to be nonpartisan, this is the moment members should ask whether the organization is serving voters or spreading misinformation.

A 50-year League résumé, and a letter that isn’t about Clallam

Norma Turner has spent more than five decades in the League of Women Voters, including multiple terms as president of a group that still markets itself as “nonpartisan.” Her Sept. 19 letter in the Peninsula Daily News is not an analysis of Clallam County government. It is a loyalty test.

She attended a candidate debate and faulted coverage for omitting answers to one question:

“Did Biden win the 2020 election?”

Mike French said yes. Jake Seegers called the question divisive and declined a yes-or-no answer. Turner’s letter then quoted Seegers’ written questionnaire answer: Candidates who give a simple yes or no risk alienating half the county when unity is needed to get things done.

She asked, “Unity around what? Misinformation?” and concluded that if he will not give “the actual answer,” voters cannot trust what he says is reality. She added that he declared nearly a year ago, yet when asked at a forum what his proposals would cost, he didn't even give a ballpark figure. “Is this a candidate who will be accountable?”

What Turner actually asked at the Calico Cat Club — and what both men said

That last charge is worth checking against the recording she was in the room for.

At the Calico Cat Club debate, Turner asked both men for dollar figures on “all the things you promise” — affordable housing for everyone who needs it, job training, immediate treatment, “all the stuff we’ve heard tonight.”

French spoke first. He called it a tough question, then described strategy rather than a total price tag: the county adopted a sales tax for affordable housing that brings in about $1.5 million a year as seed money for federal and state awards; 36 units coming online this month; 24 hoped for next year; a 60- or 70-unit senior project in a few years “if they can figure out that funding stack.” He said the local number does not have to be huge if the strategy multiplies it. Then he admitted, “I know it’s not exactly the answer, but that’s my attempt.”

Seegers answered next by saying he would “answer partially for my opponent.” His critique was not a spreadsheet of every wish list. It was a record:

• From 2018 to 2024, county revenues rose about 54%

• During that same time, the Bellevue Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 27.6%

• Grants jumped 125%

• Law enforcement lagged inflation

• The road fund declined

The pattern, he said, is always more — more grants, more tax, more government, more money to NGOs. He would not invent an exact number for an open-ended list of promises.

Jake Seegers’ ballpark figure was different:

• Do it inside the existing budget

• Stop raising taxes on people already carrying the load

• Treat public safety as the fiscal lever. Law and justice, he said, is about $33 million. Cut the costs tied to crime, homelessness, and substance abuse by 20 percent, and that is more than $6 million — enough, in his telling, to balance the budget and fund priorities without another tax hike.

Turner’s letter flattened that exchange into:

“He did not give even a ballpark figure.”

French also did not give a ballpark figure. He offered a housing tax stream and hoped grants would stack. Seegers offered growth-versus-inflation numbers and a 20 percent reduction target on a $33 million public-safety line. One answer assumes the solution is a larger funding stack. The other assumes the county already grew faster than inflation and still has a spending problem. Voters can prefer either theory. What they cannot honestly say is that only one man was asked for numbers and only one man failed.

Why 2020 is a screening device, not a job description

A county commissioner does not certify presidential elections or retry 2020 in the county’s district court. Asking every local candidate to relitigate a six-year-old national contest is not civic hygiene. It is a screening device. If the test is “will you say the sentence our side requires,” then the League is no longer measuring fitness for the Board of Commissioners. It is measuring membership in a political congregation.

Turner’s letter spends almost no space on why French deserves another term. It does not walk voters through the lagging Recompete grant’s results, multi-year budget strain, or the Shore Memorial Pool District — a board on which French serves while the State Auditor documented weak controls and a fraud investigation into credit-card and related spending.

Those are local files. They involve money, oversight, and public trust in this county. A 2020 talking point is easier to defend than them.

PDC filings show Turner putting $1,000 into French’s campaign. If the incumbent’s record is the argument, write that argument. Using a League elder’s byline to police a 2020 sound bite — and misrepresent the answer about costs that she herself asked for — is not accountability. It is a dodge.

Seegers declined the 2020 yes-or-no because a county race is not cable news. His voters want taxes, public-trust land, public safety, and whether spending works. Refusing the LWV ritual is not denying reality. It is refusing to be sorted.

The Rudersdorf video: a president, a lecture, and a one-way standard

The same pattern showed up in a recent video circulated under Erik Brihagen’s name but featuring Martha Rudersdorf — a prominent local League activist, Indivisible member, and retired Sequim teacher.

She opened with a “toxic president,” then said that same spirit of disrespect, lying, name-calling, and vitriol has reached Clallam elections. She treated Seegers’ recent apology as too little, too late, and praised French for saying leaders should calm rhetoric and bring people together.

Hold that standard up to the record the other side actually produced.

Lying. Rudersdorf’s Indivisible invited Seegers to answer its questionnaire, then published only French’s answers and presented Seegers’ responses as if they were the opposite of what he wrote. If “lying” is the charge, start with groups that solicit answers and then refuse to present them straight.

Name-calling. On the eve of Seegers’ first debate at Clallam County Democrats’ headquarters, the party’s official Facebook presence labeled him “Fake Jake.” That is not a voter in a comments section. That is an institutional tone-setter before the first joint appearance.

On the topic of name-calling, Rudersdorf’s husband, Dave LeRoux, just published a letter to the editor which insinuates Seegers is a Christian nationalist.

Vitriol. Replacing slashed, stolen, and spray-painted signs has cost the Seegers campaign about $1,000, plus boycott threats against businesses that host them. Slashed signs, blood-smeared anti-Seegers messages, and a Charlie Kirk comparison are not “robust debate.”

Recently, Seegers did something incumbents and activists in this race have not matched: he took the heat onto himself. He did not claim every ugly post came from the other side. He said the race turned toxic months ago, that both supporters and opponents had used name-calling, threats, and foul language — and that he had participated by staying silent until a friend called him on it. Then he asked the community to join him in setting a standard: attack policies, not people; don’t post anything you wouldn’t say to a friend; keep competing hard on public safety, affordability, and spending.

Rudersdorf treats the apology as a problem. It isn’t. Seegers drew a line between policy and personal attack, refused to smear French as a person, and asked the county to argue facts. That is adulthood. Calling it too late gives the LWV game away: French saying “rhetoric is bad” counts as leadership; Seegers asking people to stay on the issues does not. If that statement still isn’t good enough for the League, the standard was never civility. The only outcome that would have satisfied the lecture is Seegers losing.

Property destruction, missing local files, and the fading League brand

French’s own past comment on property destruction sits awkwardly next to lectures about civic tone. He has been quoted saying property destruction is “not only fine,” and is “usually the only way we’ve ever seen actual change happen.”

A commissioner who has normalized destruction as a tool of change is a weak messenger when the other campaign’s signs are being destroyed. Accountability, if it means anything, runs both directions.

The $118,000 safe-parking program is the kind of file a “nonpartisan” League should be worried about: county money sent by Commissioner French to a Sequim church, then paid out to OlyCAP, an NGO on whose board French serves. If League voices want to lecture about accountability, start there. A 2020 quiz is easier, but voters can tell the difference.

What has worn thin in Clallam County is the performance of neutrality. The League of Women Voters built a reputation on candidate forums, voter guides, and the idea that process matters more than team. A local chapter that treats a presidential-election catechism as the gateway to county office, while its most prominent members donate, endorse, and narrate for one Democrat-aligned incumbent, is not hiding its politics. It is advertising them.

Groupthink is comfortable. County government is not a congregation.

Groupthink never calls itself groupthink. It calls itself moral certainty: the answer is settled, and the offense is refusing to recite it. That may be comfortable, but it is a lousy way to choose a county commissioner.

Jake Seegers is running as an independent against an incumbent with a record voters can inspect without a 2020 decoder ring. At the forum that Turner attended, Seegers didn't price a wish list because he doesn't accept it. He said the county already outran inflation, backfilled with grants, and shorted core services — and that a 20 percent cut in the downstream cost of crime and addiction on a $33 million justice budget is the fiscal path that does not require another tax. French said strategy and seed money. Turner only heard what she wanted to.

If League members still believe their organization is for voters rather than for a faction, the respectful move is simple: drop the national litmus test, put French’s local file on the table next to Seegers’ budget argument, and let Clallam County decide which one is actually accountable.

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This Saturday, the Jamestown Tribe will collect a healthcare award at its own resort. The same week, a new Substack author — the Grim Reporter — published the Ketchikan years of Brent Simcosky, CEO of Jamestown Healthcare, who oversees the MAT clinic and Salish Seasons. Read that piece, subscribe, and ask why Sequim is handing out praise before anyone here has examined the file.

On Saturday, the Olympic Medical Center Foundation will present the Rick Kaps Award to the Jamestown Tribe at Club NOVA — inside 7 Cedars. The Sequim Gazette is promoting tickets to celebrate a story of partnership: money for cancer patients at Olympic Medical Center, praise for the tribe’s clinics, and language about being “inclusive” and choosing “collaboration with other institutions rather than competition.”

Chairman/CEO Ron Allen said the honor “really goes to the team.” On that list he named Brent Simcosky, CEO of Jamestown Healthcare.

The optics are already strange. The recipient of the award is also hosting the banquet on its own resort property. Jerry Allen, CEO of 7 Cedars Resort Properties, is part of the same “team” the chairman wants credited; the Gazette notes he deferred to Simcosky for the interview. That does not make the fundraising illegitimate. It does mean Saturday is not a neutral room. It is the tribe’s stage, the tribe’s honor, and the tribe’s vocabulary.

But a new independent writer just published the part of the story Saturday is not built to tell. Read What Happened Under Brent Simcosky’s Watch? on The Grim Reporter Substack. Subscribe for free. The work is theirs. This is somethig no other local news outlet has touched.

The man on the program

Few people outside the MAT clinic fight can pick Simcosky out of a lineup. People who sat across from him during conversations about the MAT clinic remember a different temperature than the upcoming awards ceremony.

In April 2024, at the People’s Forum, Simcosky was asked about federal reimbursement rates at the MAT clinic. On the recording, at 1:24:00, he tells the room it is “none of your business,” says “you want to know, go look it up,” storms away from the table, and returns after being asked to calm down. [Listen here.] That was not a one-off. He has spent years batting the money question away. In 2020 he told legislators that critics’ dollar figures were overstated and that “any excess revenue will go back into health care.”

Others remember a heartfelt Q13 appearance in which Simcosky wept, saying he could take social-media attacks because he was “a big boy,” but that it bothered his family.

That is the contrast. At the People’s Forum he shut the money question down. On television he asked for sympathy. But neither appearance produced what happened years ago in Ketchikan.

What Grim Reporter reported

On Sept. 22, Grim Reporter published a documented account of Simcosky’s years as medical administrator at the Ketchikan Indian Community clinic — before Jamestown hired him as health services director.

The reporting, built from Alaska outlets and from Phoenix Johnson’s on-the-record interviews, is this:

In 2012, Johnson, a Tlingit and Haida lab technician and Air Force veteran, reported that her supervisor, Dr. Richard McGrath, had repeatedly touched her at work and slapped her buttocks. KIC human resources dismissed the complaint in a letter Johnson says Simcosky initialed and hand-delivered. She filed a grievance. Days later she was fired.

Eleven years later, McGrath pleaded guilty in Sitka to third-degree sexual assault after originally facing 13 felony counts involving female patients. He was sentenced to two years in prison. Those later crimes were in Sitka, not Ketchikan. Johnson’s argument, which Grim Reporter quotes at length, is that the 2012 complaint was treated as a misunderstanding — and that McGrath kept working in healthcare.

That is Johnson’s account and Grim Reporter’s article. It is not a court finding against Simcosky. There is no public Washington investigation of the 2012 HR letter. As of Grim Reporter’s publication, Simcosky has not addressed those questions in this state. Do not take CC Watchdog’s word for the documents. Open the Substack. Look at what they published. And subscribe so they can keep asking.

Grim Reporter

Why his title matters

Simcosky is not the nurse at the dosing window. He is the system executive.

He is the tribe’s longtime health services director and, in 2026 coverage, CEO of Jamestown HealthCARE — the enterprise that includes the Healing Campus. He led planning, partnerships, construction, and public messaging for the two buildings on South Ninth behind Costco.

Day-to-day operations are split. The Healing Clinic (the MAT program) has its own executive director. Salish Seasons, the 16-bed psychiatric evaluation-and-treatment facility, has another. Simcosky sits above both as CEO of Jamestown Healthcare. He is the official who said the tribe decided to own and operate Salish Seasons after an earlier plan to let Olympic Medical Center run it. Ron Allen sits above that structure as tribal chairman/CEO.

Salish Seasons is now taking voluntary referrals. The Healing Clinic treats hundreds of people for opioid use disorder. Those are high-risk populations. Grim Reporter’s question is the one the award ceremony will not ask: if someone reports misconduct inside those walls, what happens next, who decides, and what should our community expect?

The language of Saturday

The Gazette piece is the official script for Saturday.

Allen called Jamestown “an inclusive tribe.” He said the goal is “collaboration with other institutions rather than competition.” He and Simcosky both said the tribe aims to provide services “without duplicating efforts of other institutions.” Simcosky added, “We want to be part of the solution. We are all going to be stronger if we work together.”

That is the language of the award dinner. It is not the only language on file.

In public-records, Chairman Ron Allen has referred to local residents who raise questions as “complainers” and “whiners.”

Those emails do not prove anything about Ketchikan. They do show that “inclusive” is a stage word. People who ask how the clinics are paid or who runs them have not always been treated as partners.

The same gap appears outside the clinics. Allen and Simcosky say the tribe does not want to duplicate work other institutions already do. Recompete — the federal grant Commissioner Mike French chairs — is paying Jamestown’s JKT Development to buy a hydroseeder and a mini excavator and start a hydro-seeding business. Local contractors already do that work, on their own dime. That is not Phoenix Johnson’s story, but it proves a split: collaboration and a statement to not duplicate services is just a performance.

What this is not

This is not a finding that Simcosky committed a crime. It is not a finding that a Jamestown patient was mishandled. It is not a claim that the Sequim clinics have an open assault case. It is merely a pointer.

A new writer did the work Alaska reporters started this spring and Washington reporters did not. Grim Reporter put Simcosky’s name, the 2012 complaint, Johnson’s voice, and the Jamestown title in one place. That is a public service.

If the Rick Kaps Award is going to mean “part of the solution,” the health CEO’s unanswered Ketchikan file belongs in the same conversation as the wine dinner. Saturday is not built for that conversation. The Grim Reporter Substack is.

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Mike French’s camp has a talking skunk. A county-funded drop-in center has taken sides. A wildlife meeting is tonight, a Seegers rally is Saturday, and Tumwater Creek is still flushing tents, needles, and propane tanks into the harbor. This week’s potpourri is about who gets your money, who gets a pass, and who suddenly hates the idea of opening the books.

When the Skunk Becomes Official Opposition

Mike French supporters released a video urging voters to stick with the incumbent commissioner. The narrator is a skunk — the unofficial anti-Jake Seegers mascot.

They are not the only ones wearing the stripe. The Answer For Youth (TAFY), a Port Angeles NGO, has put skunk imagery on its official vehicle.

That is not a joke sticker on a private bumper. That is an organization that takes public homelessness money announcing which candidate it does not want.

TAFY is a drop-in center for homeless and at-risk people and their families. It defines “youth” as anyone under 35. It hands out food, hygiene items, clothing, tents, sleeping bags, and other survival gear — and does not hide it.

In January 2026, the Peninsula Daily News quoted executive director Susan Hillgren saying TAFY “provided 43 tents, supplied propane to 33 clients.” TAFY’s donation list asks for sleeping bags, tents, blankets, tarps, and gas/propane vouchers.

That is the record. The question is whether issuing camping gear and propane, then acting shocked when Tumwater Creek fills with abandoned bags, canisters, and fire risk, is charity — or a subsidy for the mess the rest of the county lives with.

Hillgren recently posted a Facebook photo of a skunk sticker defacing a local business, captioned “someone is spreading good thoughts!”

The sticker carried a QR code to a transcript of Jake Seegers’ 2024 church speech. So the director of a county-funded agency is amplifying vandalism aimed at a candidate who wants NGOs that take public money to show their books.

Why the heat? Because Clallam County awards public homelessness funds to TAFY. In 2025, the Homelessness Task Force recommended, and Mike French approved, awards that included $60,000 in operational funding for TAFY and $24,000 for TAFY’s STAR program — six-month housing for men coming from treatment or jail/prison. Later 2026 budget coverage listed the same two TAFY requests at the same recommended amounts.

Clallam County has become a gravy train for NGOs. Money goes out with thin metrics and thinner accountability. Seegers is running on a platform that would demand to see the books of organizations that take county funds. That threatens people who prefer the current arrangement, and an incumbent board that rubber-stamps requests and then acts surprised when another deficit year arrives.

Seegers is not running against a cartoon skunk. He is not even running against Mike French. He is running against a system that treats taxpayer money as a revolving donation plate with no receipt required.

Tonight: Dungeness and Protection Island

Wednesday, September 23, 2:45–4:00 p.m.
Cape George Clubhouse
44 Marina Drive, Cape George (Port Townsend)

6th District congressional staff will meet the public to discuss the future of Dungeness Wildlife Refuge and Protection Island National Wildlife Refuge, and plans to transfer them to the Jamestown Corporation. Show up, ask questions, and say whether these refuges should remain public wildlife land or slide into a transfer the public did not vote on.

Questions: Lorna Smith, 425-879-9708.

Saturday: Seegers Sign-Wave at River Road

Saturday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., River Road overpass. Bring a sign. Stand for accountability and transparency. Tell the county it is not too late to demand change.

StreamFest by the Hall, Catastrophe by the Creek

Forever StreamFest drew a crowd in Port Angeles. The Peninsula Daily News ran a photo of Clallam Conservation District Supervisor WendyRae Johnson in an orca costume in front of Field Hall. The event’s mission is to connect families with groups working to preserve, protect, and restore North Olympic Peninsula resources.

The irony writes itself. Roughly a half mile away, salmon-bearing Tumwater Creek is an open-air dump: needles, human waste, tents, mylar blankets, and garbage flushing toward Port Angeles Harbor from homeless encampments. Volunteers try to keep up. County, city, and Conservation District leadership ignore it.

You can dress as an orca for a festival. The creek still has to carry what the camps leave behind.

The Pool Is Not a Harm-Reduction Annex

After a push by Commissioner Mike French and the Shore Pool board, people picking up free paraphernalia at the county’s Harm Reduction Health Center are again allowed to shower at the pool beside children and families.

Not everyone is charmed. One Yelp review described being “appalled at the fully dressed person in the hot tub picking and cleaning their feet for over a half hour.”

There are showers at sites that exist to serve unsheltered people. A public pool is a pool. If you want it to stay a family facility, say so and sign the petition.

Sign the Petition!

The Health Officer Who Called the Cops on Criticism

County Health Officer Allison Berry attended the last Board of Health meeting remotely after filing a police report because she felt threatened by criticism — speech that is First Amendment protected. During the meeting, her online profile listed her pronouns as “she/they.”

Clallam and Jefferson counties should expect a health officer who can tell criticism from a crime. Instead, they have a doctor running the show who apparently cannot decide what gender she is, or how many of her there are — then calls the police when someone uses their First Amendment rights.

Aloha Smoothies Still Pays for Supporting Seegers

Aloha Smoothies and Sweets keeps getting vandalized for backing Jake Seegers. That is the political climate: support the wrong candidate, get targeted.

Reward the business instead. The weather is cooling, and the menu is still built for year-round traffic: real-fruit smoothies (dairy- and gluten-free options), milkshakes, shave ice, boba, BBQ chicken, mac salad, Spam musubi, loco moco, Umami Ramen. Taste the islands in Port Angeles. Support local.

Aloha Smoothies is at 412 S Lincoln St in Port Angeles.

Comment Section: Dale vs. the Climate Veto

CCWD’s comment threads keep doing the work elected bodies will not. Dale answered MRC Chair LaTrisha Suggs’ claim that climate change should be a deciding factor in stripping property rights and making housing even less affordable. Read the thread. The people paying for it are done being lectured by the people designing the shortage.

Shoona Riggs and the SAVE Act Two-Step

County Auditor Shoona Riggs told the Port Angeles Business Association she would follow the SAVE Act if it became law. Then, after pressure from county commissioners, she signed a letter to Sen. Patty Murray asking her to oppose it.

So the official position is: fight it in Washington, obey it if it wins, and hope nobody notices the pivot.

Timothy Weller’s Memory of a County That Built Things

Longtime local Timothy Weller took CCWD readers back to a Clallam County where small businesses were numerous, celebrated, and central to prosperity — before grants, NGOs, and special interests ate local politics. That is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is a baseline. Measure today’s “partners” against a Main Street that used to stand on customers, not contracts.

East Sequim Reality Check

If you shop the east end — QFC and the businesses around it — look at the broken-down RV surrounded by garbage and ask whether that tableau would have been tolerated four years ago.

Decline has a look. It is sitting in the parking-lot ecosystem.

Peninsula College Cuts the Useful Classes, Keeps the Political Ones

The Peninsula Daily News reported Peninsula College beginning a term already carved up by budget cuts. The college removed 44 arts and science courses: 13 in communication studies, 11 in natural sciences, eight each in humanities and social sciences, two in math, and two elective health courses.

It kept 12 Klallam and Makah language courses, then moved them off the instructional budget and onto the Peninsula College Foundation.

President Suzy Ames said the college is “committed to offering the Native American languages that are represented on the Peninsula,” and that “you can’t substitute a Makah class for an English class and offer the same education.”

Then stop pretending a foundation slush fund for language courses is a substitute for the science, math, and communications seats students actually need. If those language classes are a tribal priority, the tribes can fund them. A college in financial trouble should not gut transferable academics to protect a political exhibit.

Sabor Opened. The Dignitaries Stayed Home.

The Sequim Gazette celebrated the opening of Sabor, a new juice bar. Look at the ribbon-cutting photo. Where is the city council? The mayor? The county commissioners?

If the tribe had cut a ribbon on another expansion, they would be there. If Habitat for Humanity were soaking up more public money, they would be there. They nearly trampled each other when Peninsula Behavioral Health used $4 million in county funds to open its new luxury homeless housing complex in Port Angeles.

A small business that will actually generate taxes? Crickets. Give it time. Recompete will fund a subsidized competitor and call it economic development. Then the dignitaries will be in the photo.

Don’t Miss Seegers at Deer Park

Been to Deer Park Cinema lately? Jake Seegers has an ad running before the feature.

Awards season is coming. If they handed out Oscars for “Best Candidate to Demand the Receipts,” he’d be in the envelope.

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This is no longer a debate about dignity. It is a debate about where Clallam County is taking people. One camp wants to keep expanding a two-decade harm-reduction project: sterile kits, pipes, test strips, naloxone kiosks, and a “non-judgmental” front door that treats continued use as an acceptable long-term condition. The other camp wants people out of tents, out of active addiction, into detox and recovery, and back into ordinary life. Last month’s Board of Health meeting put that fight on the record.

The official story arrives first

At last month's county Board of Health meeting, the first public-comment block was almost entirely about the 2025 harm-reduction presentation on the agenda. Supporters arrived with the same script: the program is “evidence-based,” critics are spreading “misinformation,” and questioning Health Officer Allison Berry is an attack on science itself.

Bonnie Bless-Boenish, a League of Women Voters activist, opened (00:03:03). She said she had read the packet and learned the program “does much more than handing out supplies.” She asked the board to “develop a plan” to take the day’s presentation into the community—libraries, nonprofits, medical offices—so the official story would travel faster than dissent.

League of Women Voters activist Stephanie Sherman of Port Angeles followed (00:03:41). Public health, she said, is usually uncontroversial: vaccines, WIC, food inspections. Harm reduction is the exception. Locking people up “doesn’t really solve the problem.” The humane path is “life-saving support,” relationships, and encouragement toward treatment. Dr. Allison Berry and her staff, she said, were implementing “research-based programs.”

Joyce Stewart of Carlsborg—a Homelessness Task Force member who has harm-reduction supplies shipped to her home for distribution at Jesse Webster Park— drew a sharper line (00:07:13). The Harm Reduction Health Center is not a treatment provider. No paid full-time SUD professionals are on staff. Medicaid covers 28 days of inpatient care and then, she said, people return to the street because housing and wraparound care do not exist.

Stuart explained that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took 12 years to leave heroin “with all the resources in the world.” Expecting homeless addicts in Clallam County to “get it together” on a shorter clock, she argued, is fantasy. Sweeping camps and “pitting capital expenditures against people who are homeless” would only exhaust the workers who still talk to them.

Indivisible member and former Charter Review Commissioner Paul Pickett (00:18:32) told the board to keep the categories separate: disease control is not the same as ending addiction.

Democratic Socialist Bradley “Nemo” Callaway (00:21:06) thanked staff “in the face of all of the hate and vitriol and misinformation” and pivoted to Medicare for All and the Washington Health Trust.

Tracy Abell (00:23:14) said public safety is not “more cops”; it is neighbors not overdosing.

Brenda McEllis (sp?) of Sequim (00:25:09) went further: “We do not have room in this county to question science. This is not a MAGA county. It never will be.”

That last line is the tell. The defense is no longer “here are the local outcomes.” The argument has morphed into identitarianism. Critics are not neighbors with a different point of view. They are MAGA people who are not welcome to live in this county.

Seegers puts the citation on the table

Then Jake Seegers took his three minutes (11:23).

He did not ask the board to feel more compassion. He asked it to stop repeating a statistic it cannot defend locally. Staff and commissioners have said participants in syringe programs are “five times more likely to seek treatment” and “three times as likely to stop using drugs.”

Board of Health Chair, Commissioner Mike French, laughed openly at Seegers.

Seegers named the source: a 2000 Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment paper by Holly Hagan and colleagues about Seattle injection drug users.

Read the paper itself. Do not take the slogan.

The “five times more likely” line is narrow. It compared people who just started using Seattle’s needle exchange with people who never used it. The “treatment” those new users entered was methadone, not a 28-day detox bed and a clean break from drugs.

The “stopped using” language is narrower still. Researchers asked former exchange users whether they had cut down on injecting or stopped injecting. That is not the same as “they got sober.” Someone can stop using needles and still smoke fentanyl.

None of that is a study of Clallam County. It is not a study of handing out boxes of syringes, foil, pipes, and boofing kits without a one-for-one swap. It was written in 2000, before fentanyl took over the street supply. It cannot tell this county whether today’s program is moving people into recovery.

The local funnel does not look like recovery

Seegers then put the local numbers on the table:

• About 1,000 participants a month last year

• 12,000 annual visits to the Harm Reduction Health Center

• 27 inpatient treatment assessments

• 48 warm handoffs

“That’s a terrible conversion rate,” Seegers said. “We are not actually pushing people to the treatment and the help that they need at harm reduction. We’re giving them drug use supplies.”

Staff later confirmed the shape of that funnel.

• July alone: 486 encounters

• 11 participant-reported overdose reversals

• 38 connections with partner services on site

• 22 wound-care visits

Dr. Berry’s reply was that the known handoffs are only “a subset,” because people who get sober often disappear without circling back. That may be true. It is also unmeasured. A program that cannot count its own recoveries should not lecture the public about “the science.”

Berry’s other move was to divert attention.

When the local numbers look bad, the argument leaves town. Staff stop talking about Clallam’s 12,000 visits and 27 inpatient assessments and start talking about “the literature”: paper after paper, they say, shows syringe programs do not raise crime or drug use and do send people into treatment. That may be a debate worth having in a journal. It is not an answer to Clallam County.

Seegers’ point stands on its own. A 26-year-old Seattle methadone study cannot stand in for Clallam’s own ledger right now—how many encounters, how many kits, how many reversals, how much litter, and how few documented inpatient assessments. If the program works here, show it here.

Recovery versus a comfortable street

Teresa Miller of Sequim, 17 years sober, also spoke. (00:25:50 and again at 02:38:34). She did not deny suffering. She denied the strategy. “We can’t keep enabling people. We can’t keep coddling people.” She asked why the county outfits active users with kits while her son, after a DUI, lost his license with no comparable “wraparound.” Miller said, “Don’t create the problem just to create the solution.” In the later comment period, she put it more bluntly: “Why would anybody want to get sober in Clallam County?” Free supplies, test strips, wound care, food, a place to sleep—then surprise when the street still looks like the street.

Stacey (00:28:18) said the opposite from lived experience: inhalers and the center kept her alive; she is 10 months sober. That testimony matters. It does not answer Seegers’ ratio. Saving a life in crisis and building a system whose main output is supply volume are not the same policy.

Denise Lapio (00:15:59) asked a question the health department punted: the packet dates a “fentanyl explosion” around 2023. Who brought it, and how? Berry said that is “law enforcement space,” then noted Clallam was late to a national wave that displaced heroin. Fair enough as epidemiology. It is not an answer about local enforcement, trafficking, or whether a high-volume supply program is the right county response once the drug is already here.

The second hour: litter, curves, and definitions

In the second comment period, Seegers came back (02:30:12) with numbers the Board of Health does not like to claim. He dated the clock to 2018—the year Allison Berry became Clallam County’s health officer—and said overdose deaths here rose 538% to the local peak. Washington rose 207%. The nation rose 64%. Fentanyl hit everywhere. Clallam’s curve was worse. He described cleanup at Tumwater Creek: hundreds of syringes, unused bubble pipes, and Narcan. He estimated thousands of naloxone kits against a small number of reported reversals and called needs-based distribution a break from one-for-one exchange.

Staff later gave the standard literature claim: one-for-one may cut needle litter, but it still raises reuse and disease risk. That is a disease-control argument. It is not a recovery argument.

Berry, to her credit, said harm reduction is “one piece of the puzzle,” not the whole solution, and that housing, treatment, and interdiction all matter (00:30:33). She also said she does not control the budget. Both are convenient answers. The presentation still defined recovery as whatever the participant says it is—abstinence, “managed use,” or “positive health changes”—and stated that some people “may never stop using substances.” That is a moral framework wearing a lab coat. It tells a county it can keep people comfortable in addiction and call the result public health.

What the room actually revealed

The supporters in the room spoke the language of a political network that has treated harm reduction as settled doctrine: misinformation, MAGA, Medicare for All, “questioning science.” Whether each speaker carries a membership card to the Democratic Socialists, the League of Women Voters, or Indivisible matters less than the alignment. The same talking points show up whenever the program is threatened. The other side—Seegers, Miller, Lapio, and residents who clean the encampments—keeps asking for the thing the presentation never quite produces: how many people left the street, quit shooting up, and stayed off drugs.

That is the fracture. One Clallam County wants a permanent low-barrier station for active use, justified by 26-year-old studies and national talking points, with Health Officer Berry as the interpreter of which studies count and which to ignore. The other Clallam County wants the hard work of detox, recovery, housing with rules, and an end to the idea that dignity is a clean pipe and a creekside tent. Last month’s meeting did not resolve it. It made the choice impossible to miss.

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The Marine Resources Committee just told Commissioner Mark Ozias how to write Clallam County’s next 20 years: replace “should” with “shall,” treat climate forecasts as binding, and put a biologist on every Critical Areas and shoreline file. Chair LaTrisha Suggs signed the letter. Commissioners sell housing affordability while this blueprint makes property parcels, wells, and bulkheads cost more in consutlants and time — and leaves trust land, including the Tribe’s 122-acre golf course, off the same rulebook.

On September 17, 2026, the Clallam County Marine Resources Committee sent Commissioner Mark Ozias Recommended policy improvements for the Comprehensive Plan Update to inform updates to Critical Areas Code and Shoreline Master Program. The letter is not a mild suggestion. The intent is to hard-wire the 2026 Comp Plan so later codes have no room to dodge.

What the letter actually says

Suggs writes that the most important Comp Plan language is the recognition that climate change is creating “increasing risks to ecosystems, critical areas, salmon and shellfish habitat, water quality, and water availability,” including “reduced snowpack, drought, increased flooding, rising temperatures, sea-level rise, and saltwater intrusion.”

That language, the MRC says, “should provide a strong foundation for updating the Critical Areas Code.”

Then come the demands:

The Code should “Address cumulative impacts to wetlands, streams, riparian areas, marine shorelines, floodplains, and other critical areas—not just the impacts of an individual development proposal.” It should “Protect and maintain connected habitat corridors” from upland through marine environments. It should “Incorporate current climate information and best available science into critical-area designations, buffers, mitigation, and long-term management.”

And it should “Require consideration of both immediate and long-term impacts, including how development may affect ecological functions under future climate conditions.”

The MRC also wants the County to “use qualified biological expertise during implementation” and to put in the Critical Areas Code a requirement that “County planners coordinate with the County biologist or other qualified biological staff during permitting and development review when critical areas, habitat, or other environmental resources may be affected.”

For the Shoreline Master Program, the letter wants the SMP to “Address shoreline development in the context of cumulative impacts, rather than evaluating each proposal in isolation,” and to “Incorporate projected sea-level rise, coastal flooding, erosion, saltwater intrusion, and changing streamflows into shoreline planning and development standards.”

Six asks that turn guidance into code

The policy punch list is even plainer:

A. Use clear, enforceable policy language.

“Where protection is intended, the Plan should use direct language such as ‘shall’ rather than vague terms such as ‘should,’ ‘where feasible,’ or ‘where possible.’ The Plan should firmly establish no net loss of ecological functions as a minimum standard and identify opportunities for long-term ecological improvement.”

B. Add an explicit cumulative-impact policy covering development, infrastructure, shoreline modification, water withdrawals, habitat loss, and climate change “across watersheds and over time.”

C. Require biological coordination during permitting with the County biologist whenever critical areas, habitat, or water resources “may be affected.”

D. Strengthen water-resource planning and raise water supply from “moderate-to-high” to “high” climate risk. Distinguish existing water-system and water-right capacity from long-term surface and groundwater availability, aquifer recharge, future demand, instream needs, and “Climate-related changes in the timing and availability of water.”

E. Make the Climate Vulnerability Assessment “an implementation tool—not simply background information.”

F. Push hazards disclosure so real estate agents tell shoreline owners about sea-level rise and storm surge.

A footnote: “The MRC recommends that the County also recognize the changing role of the Olympic Mountains’ glaciers and perennial snowfields in the regional water cycle.” A 2022 JGR Earth Surface study is attached: Olympic glaciers lost about 45 percent of their area between 1980 and 2015 and “will largely disappear by 2070.”

The closer: “Overall, the MRC supports the direction of the draft 2026 Plan because its policies better incorporate the impacts of climate change. Our principal recommendation is that the Plan provide stronger, more specific direction so that the subsequent Critical Areas Code and SMP updates result in consistent, science-based protection of marine and freshwater resources.”

Signed, LaTrisha Suggs, Chair. Cc: DCD Director Bruce Emery.

Affordability speeches, consultant invoices

A Comp Plan is the 20-year constitution of county land use. “Should” is guidance. “Shall,” “no net loss,” mandatory climate projections, countywide cumulative-impact review, and a biologist on every file that “may” touch habitat are instructions to planners and hearing examiners.

That is not free housing policy. It is staff time, third-party biologists, hydrology memos, climate addenda, mitigation plans, and appeal insurance. Every extra sign-off is months and thousands of dollars on a house, a shop, a well, or a shoreline repair. County commissioners run the campaigns on “housing affordability,” but this letter is how you price the next generation out of the lot they already own.

Who is exempt

Land held in federal trust is not Clallam County’s Critical Areas Code and not the Shoreline Master Program in the same way your tax parcel is. Sovereign land does not sit in the same permit line. The letter never says that. It never has to. The two-tier system is already the law.

The Jamestown Tribe bought the 122-acre Dungeness Golf Course in 2007, renamed it Cedars at Dungeness, and placed the course in trust in 2012. It is a water-intensive 18-hole operation in the same Dungeness basin where private wells get mitigation fees, metering lectures, and drought sermons.

The MRC letter raises water supply to “high” climate risk and wants the County to plan around glaciers, seasonal availability, and instream needs. It does not mention the golf course. It does not ask whether a 122-acre irrigated landscape should face the same “shall” standard as a family well.

That is not science. That is favortism.

How the land moves

Make private property expensive to use. Layer “shall,” no-net-loss, future-climate findings, and paid experts onto every permit. People leave, downsize, or sell. A well-capitalized buyer with federal acquisition dollars and a published Land Consolidation Area can purchase fee land and petition to convert it to trust. Once it is trust land, the new owner does not live under the same county codes imposed on the seller. That is an economic advantage over every other resident and enterprise that still pays property tax and still needs a county permit.

The Jamestown Tribe has already mapped a Land Consolidation Area across portions of Clallam and Jefferson — described in its own planning documents as spanning tens of miles and hundreds of square miles, with a Service Area matching those boundaries, from the Port Angeles / Morse Creek side of the map toward Hood Canal and Brinnon. Comp Plan language does not have to say “land back.” It only has to make private parcels harder to keep and easier to acquire.

The 3 Crabs precedent they already set

This is the same MRC that previously urged commissioners to consider “retreat or removal” of roads and homes along Three Crabs Road. That letter blamed climate and sea-level rise. It did not mention that the County and the Tribe removed an armored dike that the project’s own materials described as the barrier separating the estuary from the neighborhood.

Residents documented worse flooding after that restoration. The MRC’s answer was not to restore the protection. It was to move the people.

Who is writing this

Suggs chairs the MRC. She is a Jamestown S’Klallam tribal member, a Port Angeles councilmember, and a public supporter of inserting U.N.-style Free, Prior and Informed Consent into the city’s 20-year plan.

The Jamestown Tribe funded more than half of Ozias’s last campaign.

Ann Soule serves on the MRC and is a prominent Clallam County League of Women Voters activist.

The state League’s land acknowledgment states that Washington “is on the homelands of Native peoples who have lived here from time immemorial,” pledges to “amplify the voices of Indigenous people,” “partner with tribes,” and “respect the sovereignty of tribes and their rights to self-determination.”

The creeks they are not “shall-ing”

Tumwater and Peabody are salmon-bearing streams that have already undergone expensive restoration. They are now choked with garbage, needles, Mylar blankets, tents, human waste, and supplies from the County’s harm-reduction health center.

Encampments on city and county land sit in the same salmon streams the MRC wants fenced with “shall,” buffers, and paid biologists — for taxpayers, not for the tents. The letter has no comparable emergency for those streams. The enforcement energy runs toward shoreline owners, water rights, and future climate maps — not toward the open-air landfills on restored habitat a stone’s throw from the courthouse.

Tonight

Clallam Marine Resources Committee
Monday, September 21, 2026
5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Hybrid: Board of County Commissioners Meeting Room, Clallam County Courthouse (after-hours entrance on 4th Street, left of the main doors). Click here for details.
Zoom Meeting ID: 837 6963 9254

Public comment is allowed.

Tell them “shall” is a cost.
Tell them a biologist on every file is not affordable housing.
Tell them trust land and a 122-acre irrigated golf course are the exemption that makes the rest of the letter a two-tier code.
Tell them 3 Crabs residents were told to retreat after a dike came out.
Tell them Tumwater and Peabody are still full of tents.

If you cannot be there, send it in writing to the county commissioners. All three can be reached by emailing the Clerk of the Board at loni.gores@clallamcountywa.gov. Include the Director of the Department of Community Development Bruce.Emery@clallamcountywa.gov.

The Plan sets the course for twenty years. The verbs decide who can still afford to stay.

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Last week in Excelsior, Minnesota, County Commissioner Candidate Jake Seegers found a waterfront town that looks a lot like Port Angeles—except the storefronts were full, the trails were spotless, and no one was camping, dealing, or using drugs in public. The difference wasn’t luck or isolation. It was rules that get enforced, services that aren’t concentrated in one small city, and residents who still expect parks to be parks. If Excelsior can sit 20 miles from Minneapolis and refuse to surrender its downtown, Sundays With Seegers argues Port Angeles can stop treating outdoor living and open addiction as the only compassionate option.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending my youngest brother’s wedding in Minnesota.

My entire family made it—my parents, my sister, my six brothers, their spouses, and my nephews and niece. For a few days, we all stayed together in an old guest house in downtown Excelsior, Minnesota.

It was a wonderful week.

But as I walked, ran, ate, and shopped my way around Excelsior, I couldn’t stop thinking about home. In many ways, Excelsior reminded me of Port Angeles.

Two Waterfront Towns

Excelsior sits on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, less than half an hour from Minneapolis.

It is small—only about one square mile with roughly 2,300 residents—but its historic downtown serves as a commercial and recreational hub for the surrounding area. Its main commercial corridor is appropriately named Water Street.

Walk down Water Street toward the lake, and you find many of the same ingredients that should make Port Angeles thrive.

A boutique grocery store and small-business shopping center welcome shoppers downtown.

This reminded me of Country Aire and Armory Square.

There are local restaurants.

And coffee shops.

A brewery.

A pizza shop.

A little shop to grab charcuterie.

Specialty apparel stores.

Art galleries.

A toy and candy shop.

A bookstore.

A bike shop

The Lake Minnetonka Regional Trail, which runs directly through downtown, along the lake, through forests and across scenic bridges.

And, when you reach the waterfront, ice cream and kayak rentals.

Then there is The Commons—a beautiful waterfront park with a swimming beach, playground, a baseball field, picnic areas, and gathering spaces.

Excelsior is beautiful. It is walkable. It is surrounded by incredible nature. It attracts visitors who want to experience the waterfront and spend money at local businesses.

Sound familiar?

But there were also differences.

Empty storefronts - I didn’t see them.

Excelsior’s main commercial corridor appeared packed with attractive, thriving local businesses.

But that wasn’t the biggest difference.

Where were the encampments and open substance abuse?

What struck me most was what I didn’t see.

I didn’t see open drug use.
I didn’t see encampments.
I didn’t see people screaming obscenities at pedestrians.
I didn’t see piles of garbage accumulating along the waterfront.
I didn’t see syringes, foil, or human waste.
I didn’t see stolen shopping carts piled high with locally distributed freebies.
I didn’t see people openly dealing drugs.

Not once did I see a business owner who would need to remove a sleeping bag, trash, or an intoxicated individual from the doorstep of their storefront.

The early mornings were calm, peaceful, perfect.

For several mornings, I ran along the regional trail before sunrise. I would stop periodically in the dark for a set of burpees.

And I realized something that shouldn’t have been remarkable:

I wasn’t worried about what I might put my hands in.

The trail was spotless. That shouldn’t be shocking. But coming from Clallam County, it was.

So I started asking people a simple question:

Where is the homelessness and open drug use?

The answer I repeatedly received was essentially:

“That’s a Minneapolis problem. Not here.”

That made me even more curious. Excelsior isn’t some isolated rural town hundreds of miles from an urban center. Downtown Minneapolis is only 20 miles away.

So how does a beautiful waterfront community sitting on the doorstep of a major metropolitan area avoid many of the problems we have increasingly accepted as inevitable in Port Angeles?

Maybe Public Policy Matters

Excelsior has rules governing public spaces — rules that are enforced.

Excelsior’s city code generally prohibits drinking alcohol in its parks without a permit. Alcohol consumption on public sidewalks, streets, and parking lots is also prohibited without a permit.

Its public parks are closed between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. The ordinance specifically prohibits remaining in a park—or remaining in a vehicle on public park grounds—during those hours, with limited exceptions.

The city also prohibits overnight parking on Water Street from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m.

In other words, Excelsior has established an expectation that public spaces remain public spaces.

Several residents told me that outdoor camping simply isn’t tolerated. One woman put it this way:

“The police would have a dozen calls within the hour and would take care of it.”

That’s anecdotal, not a statistical study. But it speaks to something government policy can never completely manufacture:

Community expectations.

Residents expect their parks to remain parks.

Businesses expect sidewalks to remain sidewalks.

Families expect trails to remain trails.

And when something threatens those expectations, residents expect government to respond.

Then I Noticed Something Else

Another major difference existed between Excelsior and Port Angeles.

The service infrastructure.

I started looking.

Where was Excelsior’s equivalent of the Harm Reduction Health Center?
Where was its syringe exchange?
Where was its methadone clinic?
Where was its dedicated opioid treatment center?
Where was its crisis stabilization facility?
Where was the large behavioral-health infrastructure?
Where were the homelessness outreach programs?

I couldn’t find comparable facilities located in Excelsior.

That doesn’t mean Excelsior residents are denied treatment.

Far from it.

Excelsior is in Hennepin County, which has an extensive behavioral-health, addiction-treatment, and harm-reduction system. Residents have access to those services throughout the metropolitan area.

But much of the high-intensity infrastructure is located elsewhere—particularly Minneapolis and other larger population centers.

That’s very different from Port Angeles.

Here, an enormous amount of behavioral-health, homelessness, and addiction infrastructure is concentrated in one relatively small city.

We have methadone treatment.
Medication-assisted treatment.
Syringe and drug use supply distribution.
Homeless outreach.
Multi-million dollar behavioral-health enterprises.
Permanent supportive housing.
An inpatient treatment center with a Department of Corrections contract.
And millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars flowing through the system.

Some of these services undoubtedly help people.

But when a small community concentrates an extraordinary number of services for homelessness and active addiction while simultaneously tolerating outdoor living, open drug use, and the degradation of public spaces, it inadvertently creates a destination for the very problems it is trying to solve.

Compassion Without Accountability Isn’t Working

For years we have been told that enforcing laws against public camping is cruel. That removing encampments is criminalizing homelessness. That requiring accountability is stigmatizing addiction. That distributing more supplies for drug use is harm reduction. That permanent housing must come before expectations of sobriety or self-sufficiency.

Meanwhile, residents have watched public spaces deteriorate, and businesses have borne the consequences.

Taxpayers have spent more. And people struggling with addiction continue dying.

At some point, compassion has to be measured by results.

Are people graduating from addiction into recovery?
Are they moving from homelessness into self-sufficiency?
Are our public spaces getting safer?
Is our environment more protected?

If not, spending more money doing the same things isn’t a solution.

It’s a failure to change course.

Washington Cities Are Beginning to Change Course

Clallam County wouldn’t be alone if it chose to pivot.

Communities elsewhere in Washington are reconsidering policies that effectively surrendered public spaces to outdoor living.

In July, the Tukwila City Council voted to prohibit camping on city-owned property, including parks, sidewalks, rights-of-way, and environmentally sensitive areas. The ordinance gives police an enforcement mechanism, while city officials have described enforcement as a last resort.

Spokane has gone further.

In 2025, Spokane adopted a citywide ban on unauthorized camping as part of a broader strategy that combines engagement with enforcement. The city’s stated approach is to connect people to services first while maintaining a clear enforcement mechanism when people refuse to comply.

And Renton is considering a similar direction.

As of this writing, Renton’s proposed ordinance would prohibit camping and unauthorized storage of property on city property and establish stronger trespass provisions. The City Council considered the proposal on September 14 but sent it back to committee for further deliberation.

A community can offer compassion without surrendering its public spaces.

Treatment and accountability are not opposites.
Shelter and enforcement are not opposites.
Compassion and expectations are not opposites.

We can help someone while still telling them that living indefinitely in a park, using fentanyl on a sidewalk, or destroying a critical area isn’t acceptable.

Could Excelsior’s Story Be Ours?

I don’t pretend that Excelsior and Port Angeles are identical.

Excelsior is much smaller. It sits within a wealthy metropolitan region. Port Angeles is the governmental, medical, and commercial center of a huge rural county. We face geographic, economic, and social challenges that Excelsior doesn’t.

But dismissing the comparison because the communities aren’t identical would miss the point.

Excelsior reminded me what a waterfront town can feel like.

Safe.
Clean.
Active.
Beautiful.
Full of families.
Full of locally owned businesses.
Full of people enjoying public spaces for their intended purpose.

Port Angeles has every ingredient necessary to be that kind of community. Arguably, we have even more.

The Olympic Mountains rise behind us.
The Strait stretches out in front of us.
Olympic National Park brings the world to our doorstep.

We have incredible entrepreneurs, tradespeople, restaurant owners, artists, and small-business owners willing to risk their own money, time, and livelihoods to build something here.

What they need from government isn’t another strategic plan. They need a partner.

They need a local government that protects their investment by keeping public spaces safe and clean, removing unnecessary barriers to growth, and creating confidence that taking a risk in Clallam County is worth it.

Government should partner in their success—not stand in their way.

A Better Path

We can start with eight changes:

1. End outdoor living on public land by consistently enforcing existing laws.

2. Prioritize local housing resources for individuals currently residing in Clallam County.

3. Strengthen shelter policies so services are supportive, accountable, and attractive for those leaving outdoor living and pursuing recovery.

4. Expand transitional housing instead of relying primarily on costly permanent supportive housing that has run over $500,000/unit.

5. Reduce the cash flow that fuels addiction through clear anti-panhandling signage and public education.

6. Redirect funding from drug-use supplies to treatment programs with measurable outcomes. Re-establish local detox services.

7. Push back on laws that keep Law Enforcement from doing their job. Expand OPNET and programs like the community paramedics of Operation Shielding Hope.

8. Measure success by outcomes, not inputs—tracking how many individuals move from addiction to sobriety and from homelessness to self-sufficiency.

The choice should be simple: Shelter, treatment, and work training—or move along.

For those willing to participate, we should offer transitional housing with both support and accountability. To receive shelter, participants should commit to treatment, demonstrate progress toward sobriety, and engage in work training.

Living outside and using drugs in public spaces can no longer be treated as an acceptable option.

These aren’t radical ideas.
They are expectations most communities once considered normal.

There Is Always a Solution

Walking through Excelsior reminded me of something I believe deeply: There is always a solution.

Government doesn’t have to solve every human problem.

But it does have a responsibility to provide essential services, protect public spaces, enforce reasonable laws, and create an environment where communities and individuals can succeed.

• We don’t have to choose between helping people struggling with addiction and protecting families.

• We don’t have to choose between shelter and accountability.

• We don’t have to choose between compassion and public safety.

• And we certainly don’t have to accept the degradation of our parks, trails, waterways, and business districts as an inevitable consequence of homelessness.

Excelsior isn’t perfect. Neither will Port Angeles ever be. But for a few days in Minnesota, I was reminded of what a thriving waterfront community looks and feels like.

Clean public spaces. Thriving small businesses. Families enjoying parks. Tourists walking downtown. Residents who expect their community to remain safe and beautiful.

We already have the mountains.
We already have the waterfront.
We already have the entrepreneurs.
We already have the people.

Now we need the courage to change the policies that aren’t working.

Excelsior’s story can be our story.

This article was approved by Jake Seegers for Commissioner, 131 East First Street, Port Angeles, WA, 98362.

Indivisible and the League of Women Voters are grading commissioner candidates by vocabulary. Meanwhile taxpayers are being asked to fund $842,105 “homes,” a hospital under another audit warning, and a youth center with no price tag from a CEO who already out-earns the governor. Here’s the week’s receipts on Social Media Saturday.

“Complex” Is the Tell

With backing from the League of Women Voters, Indivisible has been posting side-by-side stances of County Commissioner candidates Mike French and Jake Seegers.

After reading their climate positions, Janine Blaeloch took issue with Seegers calling climate change a “complex issue.” She warned that when a politician says something is a “complex issue,” it’s usually a tell.

Fair enough. Let’s apply the same test to the incumbent.

French has used that language more than once.

• In a written reply to a constituent about public safety, homelessness, and related policy, he closed by saying he wanted to “move us toward solutions on these complex issues.”

• At a Port Angeles Business Association meeting, after a question about camping and downtown conditions, he answered, “It’s a complex issue,” then turned to legislative limits, jurisdiction, resources, and new revenue.

• The electmikefrench.com Issues page says the issues “are complex and interconnected.”

If Indivisible wants to start policing candidate language, they may be developing a complex of their own.

Clallamity Jen Solves a Mystery

Clallamity Jen started with a scathing Facebook post about a commissioner candidate and followed the trail until it stopped looking like grassroots outrage and started looking like an inside job.

Read “Cozy Connections & The Anatomy of an Inside Job” to find out which county employee the trail leads to. This is what Jake Seegers is up against: a county culture so used to protecting itself that it treats a candidate who might do things differently as a threat. The people who collect the salaries do not like being questioned by the people who actually pay them.

The Hospital Gets Another Warning

Anthony Tomashefsky at the Olympic Herald reports that the Washington State Auditor has again warned of financial risks at Olympic Medical Center. Declining condition, liquidity pressure, and the same pattern of “we’ll fix it later” that never quite arrives. Subscribe and read the article and audit here. Independent coverage of the county’s largest public employer should not be optional reading.

$842,105 for an Apartment in Sequim

When Mike French says he is bringing affordable housing to Sequim, this is what he means: bulldoze 17 apartment units, build 36, spend $16 million—mostly taxpayer money—and call it progress. Net gain: 19 units. Average cost: $842,105 per apartment. Permanent supportive housing for the homeless.

That number is not theoretical. Right now in Sequim, about $842,000 buys a comfortable, above-median single-family house: typically 3–5 bedrooms, 2,100–3,200 square feet, often single-level living, 3–4 baths, half an acre to an acre, frequently with mountain or water views.

Median sold prices in Sequim sit roughly in the $500k–$550k range. Zillow’s typical home value is around $563,000. So $842k is a nicer custom or well-updated house—not a studio with a case manager down the hall.

Nineteen net units. Sixteen million dollars. One house’s worth of public money, per door. Ridiculous is the polite word.

Read the article by Radio Pacific here.

Has Sequim Changed in the Past Four Years?

Dear League of Women Voters: Don’t Disenfranchise Me

Drop Box, Still “Too Late”

Mary Lewis posted the letter. Clallam County Auditor Shoona Riggs: ballot received too late for the April 2026 special and the August primary—either postmarked after Election Day or dropped after 8 p.m.

Lewis’s reply: she put it in the official box in the old JCPenney lot in Sequim well before the 8 p.m. cutoff. “Someone is messing up and it’s not me.”

The same letter admits the system is sloppy. USPS may haul ballots to a regional center outside the county before they are postmarked, so the stamp can land days after you mailed it. The Auditor’s fix is: use a drop box, or mail a week early, or beg a clerk to hand-stamp it.

That only works if a ballot in an official box before 8 p.m. is actually logged that way. Lewis says hers was. The county says it wasn’t counted. Voters are being told the law is simple and the failure is theirs. The letter on the kitchen table says the opposite.

Patrick Murphy: Port Angeles Is Not Safer

District Court judge candidate Patrick Murphy posted the numbers and then the view from the prosecutor’s table. Crimebycity.com, using FBI data through 2024, gives Port Angeles a safety score of 19/100. Total crime above the national average. Ranked 2,417 of 2,974 nationally. 19th percentile for safety—higher crime than 81% of U.S. cities. Rape at 2.6 times the national average. Property crime listed below the state average; murder and violent crime above it.

Murphy’s firsthand point matters more than the ranking fight: as a deputy prosecuting attorney, he says theft, trespass, and controlled-substance possession have skyrocketed, and violent crime is still trending up. Citizens of Clallam County are not safer than they were four years ago. Accountability is the campaign, not a slogan.

Closed for Thee, Open for Who?

A new video from Badger Fishing, posted yesterday, makes you wonder who “saving the salmon” is actually for.

Shot on the Quilcene River, it shows a tribal fishery in progress. The caption is blunt: this river was supposed to be closed for recreational and treaty fisheries.

Ballots That “Shouldn’t Have Been Late”

A couple received letters from the Clallam County Auditor: their April 2026 special-election ballot and 2026 primary ballots arrived late and were not counted. They say they fill out ballots within days of receiving them and drop them in official boxes or USPS immediately.

The Auditor’s office told them USPS sends ballots to Tacoma to be postmarked before they return to Clallam. County rules say a ballot counts if it is postmarked by Election Day 8 p.m. or in an official drop box. That is not what happened for them. A supervisor suggested signing up for the tracker at vote.wa.gov—text when the ballot is received; if no text within two days of dropping it, call.

They were also told late ballots in the August election jumped from a “normal” 60 to about 200. They had never had a late ballot before. Every vote is supposed to count. Check registration and turn on the tracker: vote.wa.gov. Then vote like the county has to prove that they received it.

PBH’s Next Feel-Good Project Has No Price

Peninsula Behavioral Health’s last big project—housing billed as help for the homeless and addicted—ran more than $12 million. Now comes a Youth and Family Services Center: 22 clinical offices, four group rooms, play, sensory, and art therapy, a family room, gathering space, outdoor rec. The pitch is healing and hope. The invoice is missing.

Remind yourself who is selling it. PBH CEO Wendy Sisk’s reported compensation has been in the high $200,000s—more than the governor of Washington. The last project was expensive. This one will be too. Ask what it costs before the ribbon-cutting language hardens into another taxpayer obligation.

Welcome to Port Angeles

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District 3 voted no. The rest of the county voted yes. That is how Mike French became commissioner, and that is how he is trying to keep the job. The League of Women Voters helped write the rules, Norma Turner helped bankroll the candidate, and the West End is still waiting for its own vote to count.

In July 2025, this site asked a simple question: Who speaks for the West End? The answer, a year later, is still not District 3.

A Charter Review survey that year found 74 percent of 1,457 respondents wanted to return to district-only voting for county commissioners. That would have meant the people who live in a district nominate and elect the person who represents them — the system Clallam used before a 2020 charter amendment.

Instead, the current hybrid lets District 3 pick two finalists in August, then hands the November decision to Sequim and the east side of Port Angeles.

The Commission asked the public. Then it sat on the results for nine days and released them hours before a meeting. That delay made it nearly impossible to move an amendment through the required steps in time for the November ballot. A majority-Democrat Charter Review Commission, 12 of 15 members endorsed by the Clallam County Democrats, never put restoration of district-only voting in front of voters. So why did they even ask the public to take the survey? They asked the public, then ran the year as if the answers didn’t matter.

Last year’s Commission was chaired by Susan Fisch, then secretary of the League of Women Voters of Clallam County. She received the most votes of any Charter Review commissioner and ran the process. Fisch ran the calendar like a private club. Items she opposed never got a meeting and objections to that practice became bylaw fights.

The League has had a grip on Charter Review for years. Last year was not an exception. It was the tradition.

The 2022 race was the proof of concept

In the August 2022 primary, only District 3 voted. Incumbent Bill Peach beat Mike French 53.34 percent to 46.44 percent.

In the general, the whole county voted. French won 51.52 percent to 48.32 percent.

If only District 3 had voted in November, Peach still would have won: 53.8 percent to 46.2 percent, even after a late DUI charge against Peach. District 3 preferred Peach in the primary and preferred Peach in the general. Voters in Districts 1 and 2 flipped the seat. That is not a theory. That is the certified count.

The amendment that made that possible was proposed by Norma Turner, former president of the League of Women Voters of Clallam County and a 50-year member.

It passed countywide 54.21 percent to 45.79 percent. Turner’s amendment gave Mike French his commissioner seat.

She did not stop at rewriting the rules. PDC records show Turner gave French $1,000 last month.

That is not the “nonpartisan” League writing a check. It is the person most identified with the local League writing the check after rewriting the map.

August 2026: District 3 spoke again

This August, District 3 voters chose Jake Seegers over French, 3,675 to 3,288 — 52.66 percent to 47.11 percent. Both names advance because the general is countywide. The district that has to live with the commissioner picked Seegers. The east end gets the last word. Again.

Imagine Washington’s 6th Congressional District narrowed the field to two people — say Emily Randall (D) and a local independent — and then the entire country picked the winner because “Congress votes on things that affect all Americans.” No one in this county would call that local control. County commissioners vote on roads, fees, health policy, and land use that hit Forks and Clallam Bay differently than they hit Sequim. The principle is the same. The people who live with the office should determine the election.

District 3 is the most rural, the poorest, and the most dependent on timber, trades, and distance. French’s record doesn't reflect that district. As chair of the Board of Health, he backs harm-reduction ideology. He has supported tighter rural burning rules through ORCAA. He supported the Cultural Access Tax, which commissioners could impose without a public vote. Four years ago, at a League forum against Peach, he asked why the county wasn't permanently funding the Conservation District. That idea later showed up as a parcel fee on property.

Why keep commissioners partisan — and only commissioners?

The local League has stated that all county elected officials should be nonpartisan except the commissioners. Not the auditor. Not the assessor. Not the sheriff. Not the prosecutor. Only the three people who set policy and pass budgets keep party labels.

That is not a small carve-out. Keep the party label on the commissioner and a local campaign becomes tied to the White House. The League never has to say this aloud, because it has Indivisible to do that.

The League’s own site still recites that it does not endorse candidates or parties. Its calendar and its company tell another story. It promotes and appears with Indivisible Sequim and Indivisible Port Angeles — groups that endorse candidates and publish partisan guides. League members have helped staff Conservation District elections in a race Indivisible had already picked a side in. The League has paid for newspaper ads attacking a sitting president.

Tomorrow the LWV Civics Education Committee is slated to staff a table and give a voting presentation at the Election Protection Fair — an RSVP-only Indivisible event at St. Luke’s in Sequim.

The same network put out an invitation with a skunk at the bottom, the image that has become shorthand for anti-Seegers messaging. That is not a League endorsement on letterhead. It is a platform, a table, and a brand loaned to a group that does the endorsing. Nonpartisan is the title. Indivisible is the hands.

National League materials are not written in Clallam County. They are written in the orbit of D.C.: democracy “under siege,” a DEI lens on every process, immigration, abortion access, climate, guns. Local chapters are mandated to follow. Clallam’s LWV chapter talks like a civic club but votes like a progressive ideological sect. Calling that nonpartisan does not make it so. It just keeps access to the forums, the ballots, and the Charter Review gavel.

Respect the neighbors

Four years ago District 3 rejected French when only District 3 voted, and it still preferred Peach when you isolate the general-election precincts. This August it chose Seegers. The League’s most prominent local figure helped change the rules so the east end could overrule the west. She helped fund the man who benefited. The Commission she and her network have shaped refused to let the public vote on putting the old rule back — after asking the public and getting a 74 percent answer.

Forks, Clallam Bay, Joyce, Beaver, Neah Bay, and La Push are not suburbs of Sequim. They are a third of the county with a different economy and a different vote. Countywide general elections for a “district” seat are how you keep that vote from mattering.

District 3 has said who it wants. The honest thing is to let that stand.

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At last month’s Calico Cat Club forum, resident Karen Parker asked what non-tribal taxpayers gain when public money subsidizes jobs and business growth for sovereign nations that don’t carry the same tax load—and how that stacks against lost local revenue. Mike French called the benefit “easy and obvious”: Jamestown Healthcare filled the hole Virginia Mason left, then added a healing center and a 16-bed psychiatric facility. Gaps filled, trust built, a rising tide. That’s one way to tell things, but it isn’t the whole story.

The clinic campus started with the public hospital

The Fifth Avenue clinic French treats as proof of rescue did not appear from nowhere. In 2007, Olympic Medical Center—the taxpayer-owned hospital district—announced the new Jamestown medical center would sit on 2.5 acres donated by OMC. The public hospital gave up the land. The tribe built a clinic open to the general public and grew it into a regional operation.

French is not wrong that access improved. He is incomplete when he stops there. The county’s largest employer helped plant a competitor that is now the county’s second-largest employer, while OMC spent the following years fighting for cash.

This is no longer a small tribal clinic

Jamestown’s own reports treat the clinics as enterprises, not a last-resort charity shop. The tribe has said for years that the Family Health and Dental clinics run on a business model: income has to cover costs.

By the 2024 report, that business was regional—about 18,000 Family Health Clinic patients, more than 65,000 visits, 131 employees, plus dental volume and more than 290 Healing Clinic patients, most of them Clallam residents. Those are the same people still underwriting OMC.

The payment rules are not the same. Jamestown has publicized Medicaid encounter rates in the mid-$600s and participates in the federal 340B drug program.

In the 2024 Report to Tribal Citizens, as reported by Clallam County Watchdog, the tribe listed $85.9 million in total revenue. A commenter itemizing that same report’s revenue table put “Charges for Services/340B” at $47.2 million—the largest line on that list. The published description does not split that amount among primary care, MAT, dental, and 340B pharmacy. Even without that breakout, health billing and 340B sit at the center of the year the tribe put on paper.

Same community. Different rulebook.

Salish Seasons: public dollars, tribal ribbon

French’s ribbon-cutting line skips the invoice. Jamestown Salish Seasons, the 16-bed psychiatric facility next to the Healing Clinic, is a needed service. It is also a publicly financed building the tribe will own and run.

Reported cost: about $31.25 million. State capital budgets put $13 million, then $15 million, toward the project—$28 million before other grants. Jamestown’s 2023 citizen report said the quiet part: the tribe was “in a unique position to manage the facility but is not funding it with Tribal dollars.”

A separate Commerce behavioral-health grant of about $3.2 million sits beside those appropriations. If it landed on the same project, the taxpayer contribution nearly equals the full construction cost.

The original plan was that the tribe would own the site and OMC would operate the unit. After the hospital’s finances collapsed, Jamestown took the operating role too.

French presents that as the tribe filling a gap. It is also a public hospital too weak to run a service it was supposed to run, while a state-built facility opened under a different set of reimbursement rules.

The hospital is not a side note

OMC remains the county’s largest employer. It has posted years of operating losses, watched reserves collapse, drawn auditor “going concern” warnings, and lost providers.

Jamestown did not single-handedly break a rural hospital. Medicare mix, labor, and management all matter. What French’s answer omits is the competitive reality that Karen Parker asked him to weigh: a large non-tribal patient base, encounter-rate Medicaid, 340B, grants, tax-exempt status, and a shared labor pool—on land the public hospital once donated.

“Build trust” is not an accounting entry

French said the commissioners’ most important job is to build trust with the tribes and let them fill gaps. Trust is a real governing task. It is not an answer to the tax question.

Jamestown already employs at scale, runs clinics as businesses, takes state capital money, and bids against local firms. Recompete has been used to buy the tribe a hydroseeder and excavator for a new commercial line. Contractors who paid for their own equipment get to watch “workforce” funds capitalize a competitor that does not sit on the same tax footing.

Parker asked about subsidy and lost revenue. French answered with a clinic tour.

The clinics are real. The access is real. So are the donated acres, the millions in taxpayer-funded state grants, the health-business surplus, and the hospital still asking this county to keep it alive. A rising tide is a nice phrase. It is not a ledger.

Tonight

Clallam County Watchdog’s Jeff Tozzer is the guest speaker at this month’s Republican Women of Clallam County meeting. Anyone is welcome — including non-Republicans (like me) and non-women (like me). If transparency in local government is important to you, come. I look forward to answering your questions.

Potluck tonight (Thursday) at 5:30. I speak at 6:00. It’s in Happy Valley, a few minutes south of downtown Sequim. For the address and to RSVP, email Tanya Unruh at tanyanewdesign@gmail.com.

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Mike French wants a public apology for a two-year-old church announcement. His supporters then book a private “election protection” workshop in a Sequim church, reserve the right to refuse anyone at the door, and keep a skunk on the invite. Meanwhile, deputies hunt a 120-mph suspect who first showed up on a 2020 prison-release list; a familiar name from Jefferson County is back in the Clallam jail, and 500 locals have already put their names behind Jake Seegers. The CCWD comments section is livelier than the official articles; you should read them.

When “separation of church and state” only runs one way

The standout moment from last month’s candidate conversation was not policy. It was Commissioner Mike French demanding that Jake Seegers apologize for remarks Seegers made to his own congregation two years ago.

French said he believes in the separation of church and state. He described a childhood of Sunday school, Sunday night services, and Bible study. If someone had stood in his church and told the congregation to vote for a specific candidate or party, he said, they would have been shouted out of the room.

Naming a party or a candidate, French said, was crossing the line. “With respect, Jake, you could have just said vote.” Then: “I think you should apologize.”

Seegers’ actual remarks, now endlessly recut as the “shotgun sermon,” were a 2024 church announcement asking people to vote. He has said the shotgun story was a metaphor for using the tools already in your hands—not a call to violence. French, who has branded himself a free-speech absolutist, treated a church announcement as a hanging offense and spent precious debate time on it instead of the county’s current issues.

The hypocrisy did not stay on stage.

French’s campaign has tapped Indivisible for canvassing and sticker production. Indivisible Sequim is hosting an “Election Protection Workshop” this Saturday at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Sequim.

The event is advertised on their website, but listed as private on Facebook. Guest speaker: Ellen Menshew, chair of the Clallam County Democrats. The invite carries the skunk graphic that has become shorthand for the anti-Seegers campaign. It also says, “We’d love to see you”—and, in the next breath, “this is a private event and we reserve the right to refuse entry to anyone.”

Congressional candidate Teresa Fox put it bluntly: they reserve the right to refuse anyone at a how-to-get-candidates-elected session. Why?

Now pull their own website. Indivisible Sequim’s About page says the goal is a government that is “inclusive, responsive, open, and respectful,” where “individual liberties and rights are protected,” and where “caring, compassion, and common decency guide” officials. Their primary objective is to “support and elect people.” Their committees include a 2026 Election Taskforce that “concentrates efforts on assessing, endorsing, and supporting.”

So: inclusive—except at the church door. Open—except when the guest list is curated. Separation of church and state—except when the church hosts the slate. Free speech absolutism—except when a businessman talks to his own congregation.

French can demand an apology for a church announcement. His affiliated activists can hold a closed political workshop in a church and post a skunk on the flyer. That is not principle. That is a one-way rule.

Still looking for the 120-mph driver

Deputies are still searching for Port Angeles resident Brian J. Arnold after a vehicle pursuit that hit about 120 mph.

On September 11, deputies contacted him at the Jamestown S’Klallam Longhouse on Highway 101 on a suspected drug-use call. When they tried to detain him, he fled westbound, driving into oncoming lanes. A supervisor ended the chase at Blue Mountain Road. Minutes later came a two-vehicle hit-and-run at Deer Park Loop. Arnold’s vehicle was found abandoned in Port Angeles. He was not.

This was not his first pursuit. In September 2024 he led deputies through Sequim at more than 85 mph, tossed items from the car, and was arrested on felony elude, DUI suspicion, and drug charges.

It was not his first appearance in official papers, either. In May 2020, Sheriff Bill Benedict warned residents about early prison releases under Governor Inslee’s emergency commutation, DOC’s Rapid Reentry program, and emergency furloughs. Among those released to Clallam County was Brian J. Arnold, listed for possession of a controlled substance via rapid re-entry—on the same roster as burglars, firearm cases, and a hit-and-run injury conviction. Benedict asked people to lock doors, watch mailboxes, and call if they saw something. The warning was not abstract. It had names.

The 2020 list was sold as public-health emergency. Six years later, the same name is attached to 120 mph on Highway 101. That is the policy, not a coincidence.

The paper used to have standards

Sequim’s David LeRoux told the Peninsula Daily News that Jake Seegers “finished his political sermon with a prayer like a Christian nationalist would do”—politics stuffed in a Bible, wrapped in a flag, no separation of church and state. The paper published the letter.

Define the term: Christian nationalism is not private faith in public life. It is the claim that the United States should be reconstituted as a Christian state, and that civil law should enforce one creed on everyone else. A man asking his own church to vote, then praying, is not Christian nationalism. It was church announcements, not a commissioner meeting. Prayer in church is not a political coup.

If the PDN will print a smear over a prayer in church, the standard has to run both ways.

The same paper would almost certainly refuse a letter calling French an anarchist because he promotes property destruction.

It would also refuse a letter calling him a money launderer because thousands of county dollars move through a Sequim church to the NGO he sits on. A serious newspaper does not print labels it cannot prove.

That is the rule. If the paper will not print crime labels it cannot prove, it should not print “Christian nationalist” for a man talking to his church and closing in prayer.

No one should be surprised by David LeRoux. He is an Indivisible protester and a reliable straight-ticket Democrat. An independent running against a Democrat will never get his vote. That is his right.

However, it is not a license for the newspaper. The letters page does not have to launder a faction’s nickname for the other candidate. Seegers spoke in church. French wants an apology—while his allies hold a closed political meeting in another church, play gatekeepers at the door, and stamp a skunk on the invite. Voters can see the double standard. If the PDN is going to publish name-calling, it should have standards.

Five hundred names—and they can’t boycott all of them

The first batch of endorsements is up on Jake Seegers’ campaign page. If a name is missing, the next batch is coming. If a name was never sent, there is still time.

Five hundred residents, businesses, and elected officials have already put their names on the line. That is a lot of people for the League of Women Voters and Indivisible to boycott and excommunicate.

Endorsing is not joining a secret society. It is saying, in public, that the current results are not good enough. They cannot shame half the county into silence, but they can try. The list keeps growing.

Endorse Jake!

Remember Mohabo Boughton?

Last December, Clallam County Watchdog reported that 32-year-old Mohabo Aliyu Boughton had been booked into the Clallam County Jail for first-degree criminal trespass—and, given local catch-and-release habits, was out in record time.

A single trespass charge would be noise. The record is the story. In March 2018, Peninsula Daily News reported an attempted assault on Jefferson County’s Larry Scott Memorial Trail: a woman on a bicycle confronted by a man with an orange baseball bat. Deputies found Boughton with the bat and an 8-inch fixed-blade knife. He told officers they were arresting him “because I’m a black man.” The arrest was for the bat, the knife, and the trail.

Boughton is back. He was arrested in Clallam County earlier this month for criminal trespass and released the next day.

Clallam is not a wealthy dumping ground for criminals. Free transit, free meals, free paraphernalia, low-barrier housing, and thin enforcement are a magnet. Residents pay it in 911 calls, jail bookings, and the next trespass.

Doorbells, not press releases

The Seegers campaign is building its doorbelling and canvassing team now. The work is neighbors talking to neighbors.

People willing to knock should email volunteer@jakeseegers.com with a phone number, the general neighborhood, and whether they can travel a bit. First-timers count. Every porch conversation is one more place the official narrative does not get the last word.

Clallam is not won from a library meeting that reserves the right to refuse entry. It is won on the front stoop.

Burien tried the thing Port Angeles will not say out loud

John Curley at MyNorthwest sat down with former Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling after Burien’s camping ban and tighter policing. Reported crime in Burien fell more than 20 percent from 2024 to 2025. Robbery dropped about 43 percent, burglary about 49 percent, auto theft about 38 percent. Schilling’s line was blunt: this is not a housing shortage first. It is drugs and mental illness, and word of mouth that “you can get help here” is how tents migrate. Tukwila followed. Renton is next. Federal Way already moved. Schilling is leaving office anyway. “You can’t fight crazy with crazy,” he said. “The antidote to craziness is normalcy.”

Port Angeles and Clallam have been running the opposite experiment: services first, enforcement last, and surprise when the waterfront looks like a third-world country. Burien’s numbers are not ideology. They are a before-and-after.

Protection Island is not a corporate farm

Mark the calendar for the upcoming meeting on the future of Protection Island. The fight is whether a national wildlife refuge stays in public trust or gets transferred toward tribal commercial control—the Jamestown Corporation already co-manages the refuge and has pushed legislation to move ownership into trust, with critics warning about commercial shellfish and the loss of public land. Details about a September 23rd meeting at Cape George are here: Good News for Protection Island.

An island set aside for birds should not become an asset for a commercial shellfish harvesting corporation. Show up before the transfer language hardens.

Bison, NGOs, and the model that never has to earn a return

Cowboy State Daily’s piece on the American bison rebound is worth the click. The herds came back because ranchers turned conservation into commerce. Ken Klemm, past president of the National Bison Association, said non-profit conservation tends to stall: “It requires someone to tax somebody. Or somebody to donate money with no return on investment. It’s not a very good model for growth, that’s the bottom line.”

That sentence describes half the Olympic Peninsula’s industry. Conservation nonprofits, harm-reduction shops, and housing NGOs live on grants and levies. They do not need a customer who can walk away. They need a commissioner who will not. When the bison model works, the animal multiplies because someone has to sell the meat. When the NGO model works, the client list multiplies because someone else pays the invoice.

What a no-camping rule would actually do here

FOX 13 reports Renton is voting on a public camping ban: no camping or stored belongings on city property, leave when ordered, no abandoned carts. Misdemeanor penalties up to 90 days and $1,000. The Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision gave cities the tool. Critics say it only moves people. Supporters say parks and sidewalks are not housing.

Ask the obvious question in Port Angeles: what would a real no-camping rule do to the waterfront, the trailheads, and the courthouse lawn? If the answer is “we don’t have the political will,” that is the admission. The ordinance is not the mystery. The vote is.

River Road, signs in the air

Mark your calendar. There is a rally for Jake Seegers with sign-waving on the River Road overpass in a week and a half.

Parking is at 111 River Road. This is as grassroots as politics gets. The change in the air is not a metaphor if people show up.

The article is half the story. The comments are the other half.

Only half of any Watchdog piece lives in the article. The rest is in the comments—the place where a former elected official can compare Jake Seegers to the KKK and get answered by people who actually live here.

Read the thread. That is the county talking without a moderator from Nextdoor.com.

Chickens on the waterfront

A photo taken recently along the Port Angeles waterfront shows not just another encampment. It shows chickens kept alive in a portable pen.

That is not a housing emergency. That is a settlement. When will the City Council and the Board of County Commissioners say out loud that they let it go too far? The chickens are waiting for North View to open at the end of this month.

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Mike French entered Port Angeles politics in 2017 talking jobs, roads, housing, and common sense. The voters’ pamphlets show how the pitch evolved—and how little the results matched it. After nine years, Clallam is still being sold the same lines while the books, the roads, and the downtown tell a different story.

Mike French’s first printed promise was simple. Port Angeles was his lifelong home. He would work “tirelessly” for a robust economy, job opportunities, good roads, affordable housing, and a thriving business community. He would use common sense. He would be a voice of reason. He would respect the community and the Council.

That was 2017. He had never held office. He owned the First Street Haven restaurant. He listed the Hamilton PTO, the symphony, Light Opera, the Chamber, and the Downtown Association.

He did not glide in unopposed. In the August primary, he beat incumbent Lee Whetham and finished ahead of Jacob Oppelt, 1,449 to 1,281 to 1,003. That part he earned. Oppelt then moved outside city limits, checked the RCW with the auditor, and suspended the campaign too late to remove his name from the ballot. The November result—70.3% to 29.7%—was the score of a race that had already ended. Oppelt quitting did not put French in the general or remove Whetham. French had already done both. The blowout was what a withdrawn name looks like on Election Day.

Two years later he filed for Charter Review Commission in District 3—eleven names, vote for five, no primary. The pamphlet was a stub: one term on council, restaurant owner, school lines, PTO and clinic board, and no statement. He reported nothing raised and nothing spent. Voters ranked him 10th of 11 named candidates, 1,835 votes, 7.97 percent.

When the office was city council, he wrote a statement. When the office was a low-effort multi-winner commission, he filed and left the statement blank. He was already on council. He did not treat CRC as a job he meant to win.

The second council race, and the housing-first turn

In 2021, he ran again for Position 2. The pamphlet now listed four years on council and a record: Chamber partnership on a downtown plan, zoning reforms and tax incentives for housing, work with Peninsula Housing Authority and the Olympic Peninsula Community Clinic to move “our unhoused population into secure permanent housing,” and social workers paired with police.

The election was real this time. John Madden took him to November. French won 3,665 to 2,539 (58.92%–40.82%). Samantha Rodahl was out after the primary.

By then, “affordable housing” in his materials meant the housing-first model that has since been tested in public. The Tempest, a Serenity House project, did not age into a success story. It closed after a short, ugly run—fire, flooding, explosives, and the kind of street-level chaos residents do not need a consultant to describe.

Current units billed as “solutions” have landed in the $350,000 to $500,000 range. That is subsidized housing with a luxury price tag, as Clallamity Jen has said, not a ladder for working families. The people being prioritized are not the same people French’s 2017 pamphlet implied.

Countywide, on a changed map

In 2022 he ran for county commissioner against Bill Peach. There were only two names. After a charter change, that seat was decided countywide for that cycle. French lost District 3—the district he would represent—and won the county. The east end carried him. Peach still won the district after a DUI weeks before the general.

The 2022 pamphlet added homelessness, public safety, climate change, and a promise that has since become a punchline: “I will prioritize robust public engagement.”

Anyone who sits through a commissioner meeting knows what that phrase has meant in practice. Questions get parked. Emails go unanswered. Public comment is a three-minute timer, not a conversation.

• He worked behind the scenes with arts interests on a Cultural Access Tax the commissioners could impose without a public vote.

• He has not explained, in any satisfactory way, how $118,000 in county money contracted to Trinity United Methodist Church in Sequim then flows into OlyCAP—an NGO on whose board he sits.

• He chairs Recompete and is buying a hydroseeder and excavator for Jamestown Corporation, a sovereign government with a nine-figure budget, while local contractors who paid for their own equipment watch a tax-funded competitor roll onto the same jobs.

That is not “outreach to the business community.” That is picking winners.

Public safety, in this record, includes giving shower vouchers to active drug users at the Shore Aquatic Center, a family pool.

Common sense, in this record, includes letting Towne Road stay closed for two years while he tried to appease activists who wanted a trail. Meanwhile, a house burned. The fire engine could not take the direct route due to Towne Road’s unnecessary closure, and a family became homeless. Dungeness lost its direct route to Sequim. County staff had said to finish the road before the grants died, and then the grants died. The extra cost to the Clallam County Taxpayer was $1.5 million.

None of that is “common sense.”

Civil dialogue is not a Facebook post calling speakers “unhinged conspiracy theorists” or wondering why listening to public comment would have changed a Board of Health vote.

Respect is not laughing at citizens who give public comment. Property and protest are not the same thing; French has argued that property destruction is “usually the only way we’ve ever seen actual change happen.”

He can explain the Boston Tea Party. He has a harder time explaining why the same standard never applies to the people he governs.

The economy French keeps promising

Steve Pelayo’s charts on Facebook are not campaign literature. Real GDP in Clallam lagged the state and the country for a lost decade.

Property- and sales-tax growth put the county and Port Angeles near the bottom of their peer sets.

“Job opportunities” in the current pitch often means grant machinery: dollars in, two hires to run a program, hopes for a third. Recompete is the exhibit, not the exception.

Mike French’s 2026 pamphlet drops the “robust community engagement” language and reaches for something softer: he wants his own story to be possible for every resident. Then it claims conservative budgeting—maintain services, avoid debt, protect reserves—while the board has stared at a growing deficit every cycle he has been on it. A poet laureate on county payroll is not “conservative budgeting.”

Peninsula Behavioral Health’s North View is the physical punchline: permanent supportive housing dressed as luxury condos with a view, built at a cost working families will never see, reserved for the housing-first caseload—homeless residents, many with active addiction and criminal records—and sold as how you “get ahead” in Clallam County.

The case after nine years

French did not stumble into every office. He beat an incumbent in a three-way primary in 2017. He won a contested council race in 2021. He won a countywide commissioner race in 2022 after the rules changed. Those are facts.

The other facts are the ones the pamphlets cannot outrun.

• The robust economy did not arrive.

• The roads project that became a two-year closure cost a family a house and the county a million and a half dollars.

• Affordable housing became high-cost supportive units.

• Public engagement became a process when it suited him and silence when it didn't.

• Common sense became overriding the people who told him the grants would expire.

• Civil dialogue became an arrogant verdict on the public—speakers tagged as unhinged, hearings treated as theater—from the same official who once wrote that property destruction is “not only fine,” and “usually the only way we’ve ever seen actual change happen.”

Nine years is enough time to test a slogan. The slogans are still on the page. The outcomes are on Towne Road, at The Tempest, in the Recompete equipment list, in the Board of Health comment queue, and in Pelayo’s charts.

New outcomes require different people. The old promises have had their election seasons.

Stay Engaged This Week

Today, 7:30 a.m. — PABA breakfast

Port Angeles Business Association, Jazzy Joshua’s (113 Del Guzzi Drive, east Port Angeles). PUD District 2 candidates Rick Paschall and Randy Brackett speak.

Breakfast meeting runs until 8:30. Livestream is on PABA’s Facebook page. Joshua’s charges $5 if you don’t order food. This is open to the public, but PABA members get to ask questions first.

Today, 10:00 a.m. — County commissioners

Regular weekly meeting, including the monthly Commissioners’ Forum — the only two-way session where residents can question the board and get answers on the record.

Thursday, 5:30 p.m. — I’ll be speaking in Happy Valley

Clallam County Watchdog’s Jeff Tozzer is the guest speaker at this month’s Republican Women of Clallam County meeting. Anyone is welcome — including non-Republicans (like me) and non-women (like me). If transparency in local government is important to you, come. I look forward to answering your questions.

Potluck at 5:30. I speak at 6:00, followed by my personalized hair care tips. It’s in Happy Valley, a few minutes south of downtown Sequim. For the address and to RSVP, email Tanya Unruh at tanyanewdesign@gmail.com.

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ORCAA spent $345,000 last year on outdoor burning and recovered $27,400 in fines. Clallam County Commissioner Mike French voted to expand the agency’s tracking system anyway. Rural board members from Grays Harbor and Mason Counties called it a first step toward more rules and fees. Property owners who clear land now pay more than double. A local shipyard that wanted to add jobs paid a six-figure penalty and waited years for approval. Voters should ask who that record serves.

ORCAA (Olympic Region Clean Air Agency) is the regional air agency for six counties, including Clallam. It enforces rules on outdoor burning, land-clearing fires, industrial air permits, asbestos, and wood-stove smoke. It also runs state-funded programs that pay homeowners to remove uncertified wood stoves and replace them with heat pumps, gas, pellet, or electric units — or remove the stove altogether. The agency is dedicated to creating more process around burning and building, and it’s one of more than 20 boards, liasonships, and committees that Clallam County Commissioner Mike French sits on.

On November 12, 2025, that board voted 5-2 to direct staff to implement a “regionwide voluntary educational outdoor burning notification system” in time for the fall 2026 burn season. French voted yes. Grays Harbor County’s Georgia Miller and Mason County’s Randy Neatherlin voted no.

Staff framed the system as education, not a new permit. Thurston County already requires it. The motion was not a formal rule change. Board members who opposed it said the writing was on the wall: once the list of burners exists, the next board can make it mandatory and attach a fee.

That is not a conspiracy theory. It is what the meeting itself recorded.

The $345,000 program taxpayers already fund

Outdoor burning is ORCAA’s largest enforcement workload. Staff said 73 percent of all complaints are outdoor burns. Thurston County alone generated 459 of 668 complaints.

The agency spent about $345,000 on the program in the last fiscal year — money it described as unfunded.

Fine revenue collected was $27,400. Average cost per complaint, including enforcement, ran a little over $500.

Those dollars do not come from a dedicated burn tax. They come from the core grant (already under pressure) and from assessments every resident in the six-county region pays, including people who live in cities where residential burning is already illegal.

French compared the problem to county code enforcement: expensive, politically unpopular, and never enough. His solution was to give staff a database of who plans to burn so inspectors in Olympia can call instead of driving to Forks or Elma. That is an agency efficiency argument. It is not a taxpayer-relief argument.

Miller pointed out the outreach itself costs money the agency does not have. She also noted the idea had already been discussed at the finance committee as a possible future revenue source. French liked “reframing” the program as a notification rather than a permit. He also liked that Thurston’s system allows 10-foot piles instead of the four-foot default in state rules. Most rural landowners do not burn four-foot piles.

Neatherlin was blunt: he would support building a tool counties could choose to use. He would not support ORCAA implementing it over county authority, because “if this is implemented, it will become an enforcement action on the counties down the road.” The chair pushed for a vote that night. The motion carried.

Fees that already went up

Separate from the notification debate, ORCAA raised the land-clearing burn permit fee from $131 to $275 per acre in the FY2026 budget — more than a 100 percent increase — to move the program toward “full cost recovery.” Staff said it costs about $275 per permit to run. Most permits are for one acre. The agency issues roughly 225 a year.

That fee hits people clearing land for houses, businesses, or pasture. Staff said the increase is not “overly burdensome” relative to development costs. People who actually pay it may disagree.

The same budget draws $446,518 from unreserved fund balance, leaves a financial specialist position vacant, and flags outdoor burning and parts of new-source review as unfunded or underfunded.

Federal core grant revenue was reduced 20 percent in the projection because of uncertainty in Washington, D.C. Assessments and fees already make up 59 percent of revenue. When grants shrink, the pressure moves to fees and assessments.

French sits on that board. He also campaigns on economic development and housing affordability.

The Platypus file

Platypus Marine wanted to put a new building on Marine Drive to work on boats — including spray finishing and crew-transport vessels. Company president Chris Feffer told the Port Angeles Business Association the first phase would take about 35 full-time workers, with more if the building grew.

ORCAA’s own notices tell the air-permit story. Platypus filed Notice of Construction 23NOC1612 on Aug. 31, 2023, for expansion and an “after-the-fact” review of a three-sided booth. In the July 10, 2024 board packet, that file was still marked “draft in progress.” A later order, 25NOC1730, covering stack changes at 535 Marine Drive, was approved Jan. 26, 2026.

Rule 6.1 requires that you get that approval before you build or modify. ORCAA putting “after-the-fact” on the first notice means the booth was not lined up as a clean, before-construction permit.

Separately, Platypus and the City of Port Angeles fought in court over whether Building 535 counted as part of a “marina” and whether spray work could go forward. In August 2025, Judge Brent Basden sent the land-use question back to the city.

French is a former Port Angeles councilmember, an ORCAA board member, and a candidate who runs on jobs. The ORCAA file and the city lawsuit are public. Neither shows French using that seat to get a Port Angeles employer through the agency he helps govern.

That is the pattern, not a one-off: more process for the agency, more cost and delay for people who build, and a commissioner who sided with the majority while the rural counties on the board said no. French’s jobs pitch is a federal Recompete grant he chairs — money that buys things like a hydroseeder and excavator for the Jamestown Corporation — not a record of cutting tape so an existing Port Angeles boatyard can hire. Grant equipment is easier to announce than getting a local employer through ORCAA and City Hall.

Who he represents

French is running for a second term. His campaign emphasizes Recompete grants, housing, and infrastructure. Those are real projects. They do not cancel the ORCAA record.

The November vote did not ban burning. It did not instantly impose a new fee on backyard piles. It did create a region-wide list of burners, staff access to their emails, and a template already used in Thurston County. Opponents on the board said they did not trust the next step. The budget already shows the agency seeking cost recovery for land-clearing burns and warning that outdoor burning is an unfunded drain.

Clallam residents pay assessments into that system. They pay higher land-clearing fees. They wait on permits while the agency talks about “substantial benefits to the agency.” French voted to keep moving in that direction.

That is a fair question for November: does District 3 want another four years of a commissioner who treats ORCAA as an agency to be accommodated, or as a body that should be forced to justify every new list, fee, and delay to the people who actually live here?

Stay Engaged This Week

Tuesday, 7:30 a.m. — PABA breakfast

Port Angeles Business Association, Jazzy Joshua’s (113 Del Guzzi Drive, east Port Angeles). PUD District 2 candidates Rick Paschall and Randy Brackett speak.

Breakfast meeting runs until 8:30. Livestream is on PABA’s Facebook page. Joshua’s charges $5 if you don’t order food. This is open to the public, but PABA members get to ask questions first.

Tuesday, 10:00 a.m. — County commissioners

Regular weekly meeting, including the monthly Commissioners’ Forum — the only two-way session where residents can question the board and get answers on the record.

Thursday, 5:30 p.m. — I’ll be speaking in Happy Valley

Clallam County Watchdog’s Jeff Tozzer is the guest speaker at this month’s Republican Women of Clallam County meeting. Anyone is welcome — including non-Republicans (like me) and non-women (like me). If transparency in local government is important to you, come. I look forward to answering your questions.

Potluck at 5:30. I speak at 6:00, followed by the swimsuit and talent portions of my presentation. It’s in Happy Valley, a few minutes south of downtown Sequim. For the address and to RSVP, email Tanya Unruh at tanyanewdesign@gmail.com.

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In this podcast-only episode of Sundays With Seegers, County Commissioner candidate Jake Seegers sits down with Hans Bailey — the former Sequim pastor who went from no real retirement plan to a family business built on a 120-square-foot treehouse. What began as a kids’ hideaway now draws guests from around the world, employs eight people, and puts hundreds of thousands of dollars in local wages and taxes back into Clallam County. Listen to how one couple used their property to write their own next chapter — and why that kind of opportunity is on the line in the county’s Comprehensive Plan.

Hans Bailey spent 25 years as pastor of Calvary Chapel Sequim. When he and his wife looked at retirement, they realized they could not afford to stop working. Their greatest asset was already under their feet: property on a high-bank bluff in Agnew, with open views of the Strait.

They had built a 120-square-foot treehouse so their kids would have a place to stay while finishing college. Around 2017 they listed it on Airbnb. It took off. Guests came from around the world. Then the county red-tagged it. There were no codes for a house attached to trees.

For more than a year the answer was tear it down. They spent about $20,000 on arborists, geotechs, and surveyors before they could even begin coming into compliance. They lived out of suitcases in the unfinished treehouse — no indoor bathroom, a wood-fired hot tub that took hours to heat, and one family packed into 120 square feet as COVID arrived. They bought an adjoining parcel to solve a setback problem. They hired an engineer and architect and expanded the structure to about 600 square feet so it would meet existing code. No bank would finance it.

They kept going because they believed the treehouse could become the engine of their later years.

It did.

They renovated other properties, including Sequim’s “castle house.” Their sons came home from California. What started as one small rental is now a family business employing eight people and paying nearly $300,000 in wages last year. The treehouse alone can generate well over $100,000 gross. They pay about $20,000 in payroll taxes, $37,000 in property taxes, and $77,000 in sales tax. The money stays here. The treehouse is a destination. People come to Clallam County because of it.

That is the power of this place. In many parts of the county, property is still within reach. Land is often a family’s largest asset. Short-term rentals let ordinary people put that asset to work, stay self-reliant, hire neighbors, and keep visitor dollars in local restaurants, shops, and trades instead of sending them to distant hotel owners. It is not easy. It is self-policing. A dirty or unsafe listing does not last.

The full conversation with Hans is worth hearing. He is honest about the year of “no,” the risk, the cramped living, and the moment his sons decided to come home. He is just as clear about what the county could do instead of adding another layer of tracking and enforcement.

Fire-life-safety inspections for vacation rentals are already required. Many operators have not obtained them. The Department of Community Development wants a tool — including a registry in the Comprehensive Plan — to make people comply. A registry is not a small thing. It creates another county database, another program to run, and another step between owners and the lawful use of their land. Many residents also worry it becomes the on-ramp to caps, the path Port Angeles already took with Type II short-term rentals.

There is a better use of this Comprehensive Plan update: give people more legal options with property they already own.

• Allow two vacation rentals per parcel.

• If a property can legally hold more than one dwelling, the county should not decide that only one may serve visitors.

• Allow appropriately sited RVs as vacation rentals. An RV is built for temporary stays. Using it for tourists can take pressure off the permanent housing stock and give owners a lower-cost way to start.

• Allow satellite bedrooms — detached habitable space associated with a house — to be rented short-term. Under the proposed approach they are prohibited as vacation rentals. That does not create housing. It just closes an option. A satellite bedroom is not a family home being pulled off the long-term market. If it is safe, permitted, and served by adequate sanitation, owners should be able to use it.

More flexibility can actually help housing. Today’s small visitor unit can become tomorrow’s place for a parent, adult child, caregiver, or long-term tenant. An owner who can earn income from an RV or satellite bedroom may be more willing to put the actual house into the long-term market. Restricting vacation rentals and hoping houses magically become rentals is not a plan. Giving people choices is.

Hans did not set out to build a company. He refused to accept “tear it down” as the last word and treated his property as the resource it is. Listen to the podcast. Then ask whether Clallam County’s next 20-year plan will make more of those stories possible — or make the next family stop at the first “no.”

See the Treehouse

Editor’s note: This blog is published by Jeff Tozzer, the former campaign manager of Jake Seegers. Several opinion pieces appearing on this website have been authored by Jake Seegers. In keeping with normal editorial practices, op-eds written by Seegers have been edited for grammar, clarity, length, and style by Jeff Tozzer before publication, with the consent of Jake Seegers.

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A former Sequim school board member and current French endorser just compared the Calico Cat Club, Jake Seegers, and Clallam County Watchdog to the Ku Klux Klan. French was given a deadline to say whether he stands by that endorsement. He stayed silent — while the same relationship helps move more than $118,000 in county money through Stoffers church and into French’s NGO. That, and more, this Social Media Saturday.

History Isn’t Repeating. A Smear Is.

Last weekend the Peninsula Daily News published a “Back When” column on the rise and fall of the Klan on the North Olympic Peninsula. Sequim resident and Indivisible activist Jim Stoffer commented: “Looks like History is repeating itself via the Calico Cat Club, Jake Seegers, and CCWD.”

The Calico Cat Club holds public candidate forums. Jake Seegers is running against Commissioner Mike French. CCWD is this publication. Stoffer compared all three to the Klan.

Stoffer was twice elected to the Sequim School Board and twice elected to the charter review commission. His endorsement is featured on Mike French’s campaign website.

On September 8, Clallam County Watchdog emailed Commissioner Mike French seeking comment about Stoffer’s post, but French did not respond.

French needs Stoffer, who is Safety Chair at Trinity United Methodist Church. As commissioner, French approved more than $118,000 in payments to TUMC for the county’s safe-parking program, which has struggled with enrollment. The church then pays French’s NGO, OlyCAP, to manage the program.

Once the money leaves the county, public transparency disappears. French is not answering questions about where the $118,000 went. Neither is the church. Neither is OlyCAP.

Stoffer’s church is the pass-through from the county to French’s NGO. It is a closed loop. It still does not justify labeling a political opponent, a public candidate forum, and a local blogger as heirs to a history of racial terror. Stoffer is also a leader in the local Clallam County Democrats. French still features the endorsement.

Voters can decide what that silence means.

Kids Watch the Adults

On the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death, Port Angeles High School made regional news after students were photographed in blood-stained shirts and fake neck wounds.

Kids learn from adults. When a former school board member treats disagreement as a license to tie people to the Klan, do not act shocked when teenagers treat political violence as costume theater.

According to Brandi Kruse, the Port Angeles School District said clothing that “depicts, promotes, or celebrates violence is not permitted or tolerated,” but would not say what discipline, if any, followed.

Adults do not have to act like children. Especially school-board veterans.

Same Name. Same Highway. Two Years Later.

The Olympic Herald reported that officials were asking for the public’s help finding a Port Angeles man after a Friday morning chase on Highway 101.

According to the Sheriff’s Office, 42-year-old Brian J. Arnold drove away from deputies near the Jamestown Longhouse Gas Station in Blyn after they suspected drug use and told him he was detained. The pursuit headed west on Highway 101 at speeds near 120 mph, including travel into oncoming lanes. A supervisor ended the chase at Blue Mountain Road. About two minutes later came a two-vehicle hit-and-run at Deer Park Loop. The other driver was not injured. Arnold’s vehicle was found abandoned at Deer Park Road and Wall Street. A search warrant turned up suspected methamphetamine, digital scales, and drug paraphernalia. Deputies said they had probable cause for attempting to elude, hit-and-run, possession of methamphetamine, and obstructing.

He was not in custody. The public was asked to help find him.

Now look at the Peninsula Daily News from almost exactly two years earlier. On a Friday night in September 2024, Brian Joseph Arnold — then 40 — led deputies on a chase that topped 85 mph from Old Olympic Highway to Barr Road, U.S. 101, Taylor Cutoff, and Lost Mountain Road. A passenger tossed items from the window. He was booked on investigation of driving under the influence of drugs, eluding, driving with a suspended license, and possession of a controlled substance. Methamphetamine and paraphernalia were found.

Same man. Same drugs. Same highway. Higher speed the second time.

This was not a surprise. It was a sequel. When the system treats a high-speed, drug-fueled eluding case as a booking instead of a turning point, the next chapter is a 120 mph run, a canceled pursuit, a hit-and-run, and a wanted flyer. Soft-on-crime policy does not stay in the courtroom. It shows up on Highway 101.

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The Olympic Herald

Jefferson County Is Looking at the Exit

The Port Townsend Leader reports that Mike French’s NGO, OlyCAP, is preparing to step away as lead agency for roughly $2.2 million in state homelessness funding. Jefferson County may take over the role in 2027.

Executive Director Holly Morgan told the Jefferson County Housing Fund Board on September 3 that after months of discussion, “maybe it’s time for that.”

OlyCAP is the lead grantee for the Consolidated Homeless Grant. Jefferson County can decide in early 2027 whether to take the next two-year cycle.

Maybe Jefferson County is noticing what Clallam County is starting to notice: an organization that can move more than $118,000 through a church for a handful of safe-parking spaces may not be the most efficient use of public money.

“Permanent” Is the Word They Hope You Skip

Peninsula Behavioral Health is selling Permanent Supportive Housing as “a foundation for recovery, stability, and hope.” Housing First in nicer language.

Permanent Supportive Housing is… permanent. The public obligation does not sunset. The client does not age out of the subsidy. The model assumes ongoing taxpayer support for housing plus voluntary services, indefinitely.

The claims are familiar: less homelessness, better health, fewer ER visits, more stability. The part that rarely makes the flyer is the dependency. “Everyone deserves the opportunity to thrive” is not a budget, a performance metric, or an exit plan.

Change Is Only Good When Hope Williams Wants It

Indivisible activist Hope Williams is warning voters not to support Jake Seegers because he represents “change,” and that is supposedly why people voted for Trump.

Linking a Clallam County independent to Washington, D.C. is lazy politics. Six years ago, Williams was telling people to “vote for change” to replace Trump.

The rule is simple: change is virtuous when it delivers her outcome. Otherwise it is dangerous.

Indivisible Polls the Megaphone, Not the Neighborhood

Indivisible activists are surveying members on whether to keep using the megaphone at weekly protests.

Some want the bullhorn while they “save the world” and defend the “rule of law” — a rule that apparently did not apply to Indivisible activist Tim Wheeler, filmed causing thousands of dollars in damage to public DNR land and walking away.

Much of the fight is over Lewis Bennett’s bullhorn.

Bennett is the same activist with a blood-streaked yard sign about Jake Seegers.

While Indivisible argues about megaphone volume and national talking points 3,000 miles away, downtown businesses live with hours of bucket-banging, blocked sidewalks, and protest signs driving customers away.

Indivisible: Poll the shop owners. Read the room.

Want to Hear What Dispatch Hears?

Clallam and Jefferson County scanner traffic is now live — police, sheriff, State Patrol, and EMS — with timestamps and transcripts, not just raw audio. Pursuits, welfare checks, overdoses, and the calls that never make the next day’s brief.

Check out the Clallam and Jefferson Scanner here.

Kissing the Ring

State House hopeful Kaylee Kuehn was photographed at a local coffee shop with three-term Commissioner Mark Ozias.

If you have ever wanted Ozias’ ear and gotten silence, the shortcut appears to be running for office with a “D” next to your name. What a candidate learns from a commissioner with nearly 11 years of special-interest politics and collapsing public trust is anyone’s guess. The photo suggests she intends to find out.

PBH “By the Numbers” Does Not Add Up

Peninsula Behavioral Health posted a “by the numbers” graphic. The timeframe is unclear.

If the agency served 4,000 people, the slide implies:

• 23.7 services per person

• 4.2 therapy sessions per person

• 4.2 telehealth sessions per person

• 1.9 crisis services per person

• 34 total services per person

• and 0.3 appointments per person

The last line breaks the rest. Either the categories overlap, the population is wrong, or the graphic is a decoration. An agency that lives on public money should be able to publish math that survives a first pass.

If San Francisco Can Drop the Ideology, Can Clallam?

Former Seattle Councilmember and interim Mayor Tim Burgess asks whether “the San Francisco miracle” could work in Seattle. San Francisco hit bottom, then Mayor Daniel Lurie traded slogans for results.

Clallam County is not San Francisco. It is watching the same Housing First, harm-reduction, and NGO pipeline produce full jails, unmanaged encampments, and disappearing accountability. Ideology is optional. Outcomes are not.

Read Tim Burgess’ article here.

Attract the Chaos, Pay for the Beds

Sheriff Brian King says the Clallam County Jail hit 100 inmates over the holiday weekend, up from an average daily population near 80. The jail has 120 beds, but behavioral-health cases force separations, so capacity tightens before the building is full.

King says the care load is “like operating an ER.” The jail books about five people a day. Officials discussed booking restrictions but did not impose them. Planning continues for a possible new jail west of Port Angeles.

When policy draws in addiction, repeat crime, and untreated illness, the bill arrives as overtime, medical staff, and a bigger jail.

Read the article here.

No Money for Hatcheries. $4.75 Million for Electric Tribal Boats.

From Badger Fishing: the state cannot fund hatcheries or fishery monitoring, but it can find about $4.75 million for electric tribal monitoring and fishing boats.

Reported examples include:

• Quinault Indian Nation: $352,000 for an all-electric test-fishery boat in waters where recreational anglers cannot fish without a tribal guide

• Samish Indian Nation: $886,000 for a 26-foot all-electric landing craft

• Lummi Nation: $1.18 million to convert a commercial fishing vessel to electric

• Colville Tribes: $1.13 million for a community tour boat

• Swinomish Tribe: $1.18 million to convert a commercial fishing boat to electric

Taxpayers fund the boats. The tribes get the assets. The recreational public gets the lecture.

Filing Week Is Coming

After Port Angeles Deputy Mayor and French campaign manager Navarra Carr pushed sweeping critical-areas expansion that would choke development, residents are already looking to next year, when Carr’s term ends.

Filing week is this spring. If you want a different Port Angeles, run.

TAFY Is Not Just Serving Youth

TAFY — The Answer For Youth — boasts 294 sleeping bags, 206 tents, and 727 bottles of propane distributed in a one-year window.

TAFY is no longer just a youth agency. It supplies homeless adults. The tents on Peabody Street, the sleeping bags in Tumwater Creek, and the unsanctioned camp stoves did not appear from nowhere. Propane in illegal camps is not compassion. It is fuel. A neighborhood fire is not a hypothetical.

Habitat Has a Native Liaison. Where Are the Others?

Habitat for Humanity’s Native American Housing Liaison, now going by Sylvan instead of Rick, met with the Quileute Housing Authority. A commenter hopes to “see cedar bark lodges” again.

Habitat takes county taxpayer dollars. If the organization needs ethnic liaisons, where is the White liaison, the Latino liaison, the Asian liaison? Public money, private books: that is the local NGO model. Habitat is not the exception.

Narcan for Everybody, Profit for the Same Companies

Narcan is no longer marketed as an emergency tool for overdoses. It is now for toddlers, teenagers, tired parents, grandparents, and strangers.

The same industry that flooded the country with opioids is now flooding every demographic with the antidote. That is not a public-health victory. It is a second product line.

They “Raised” $37 Million. You Paid It.

Native Peoples Network says the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe “raised” $37 million to restore the Lower Big Quilcene River.

Not from the casino, the golf course, or the cannabis shop. From taxpayer-funded grants drawn from tax systems many tribal enterprises do not pay into. You raised the money. They got to cut the ribbon.

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On September 11th, 2001, I was a 22-year-old American Airlines flight attendant based in Washington, D.C., dreaming of a life above the clouds. Three years ago, another September 11th sent me walking a river trail in Clallam County and quietly changed the rest of my life. This is the story of how both days stripped away easy assumptions and left something stronger in their place: a belief that this country, and this county, are still worth the work.

Above the Clouds

I graduated from the American Airlines flight attendant academy in July 2001 and was assigned to the Washington, D.C., crew base covering Reagan National, Dulles, and Baltimore. I was twenty-two and certain I had landed the best possible. American had just acquired TWA and was the largest airline in the world. My office rose above the weather every day. No matter how gray things were on earth, I always saw the sun at 35,000 feet.

I was reminded of rising above the clouds on September 9th when I flew from Reagan into JFK. New York sat under a thick blanket of fog. The only landmarks that broke the cloud layer were the twin towers of the World Trade Center. That was the last time I saw them.

The Day the Phones Wouldn’t Work

I was off duty on September 11th. Five of my classmates shared a house with me in Alexandria, Virginia. Two American jets were involved in the attacks; one of them, Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, belonged to our crew base. I remember the phone lines were jammed that day as I tried to track down roommates and friends based in D.C. and Boston. Eventually every roommate and close friend was accounted for.

Flight 77 was the morning transcon flight to Los Angeles. It was a high-seniority trip none of us with two months on the job could hold. We flew reserve—filling in when others called out or were on vacation. Many of us had worked that flight before 9/11 and would work it again. None of us worked it that morning.

The regular crew on Flight 77 knew their business passengers the way a family knows one another: who took coffee with cream, which newspaper they preferred, who wanted to be woken for the meal and who wanted to sleep. American’s D.C. base was small, and the sudden absence of six colleagues left a hole you could feel.

I also thought of one Boston-based crew member. Our paths had crossed a few months earlier. His last name was so close to my mother’s maiden name that we joked we were probably related. He was not a close friend—just a colleague I hoped to fly with again. He was on American Flight 11. That crew, based in Boston, was on the first plane to strike the towers. He did not come home that day.

We barely had time to feel any of it. Within days, the airline announced a 20 percent workforce reduction. Twenty-five thousand flight attendants would become twenty thousand by month’s end. Those of us at the bottom of the seniority list turned in our badges on September 30th.

A Walk Along the River

My second September 11th arrived three years ago. My cousin was visiting. It was a beautiful late-summer day, and Doug and I decided to walk with her along the Dungeness River. This time we would walk the soon-to-open roadbed of Towne Road.

On the way, we passed a notice stapled to a stake that was fluttering in the breeze. I walked past it. Doug photographed it.

At home, he read the picture aloud. The county was considering several designs for Towne Road—or possibly never reopening it at all. There were officials to contact: the Board of Commissioners and DCD Director Bruce Emery. I wrote to both. I asked a simple question: why wouldn’t the road open?

Commissioner Ozias replied promptly and courteously. Contaminated soil had been found; the unexpected cleanup cost had left the project without money to finish.

Emery sent a link to a recorded meeting. I had not known county meetings were filmed. In the video, staff told the commissioners that a grant had already covered the entire cost of removing the contaminated soil. The county engineer added that Towne Road could be completed without using a single dollar of county funds. Commissioner Ozias pushed back, saying he had received hundreds of signatures asking that the road stay closed, and the commissioners pulled the plug on finishing Towne Road.

I asked Director Emery about the petitions. He said he didn’t know the details and suggested a public-records request—my first. The records showed not “hundreds,” but just 98 signatures opposing reopening Towne Road. There were 122 supporting it.

That discrepancy was the first small crack. I began posting the correspondence with Commissioner Ozias on Nextdoor.com. The posts did not stay quiet for long. Moderators objected. One of them, Jim Stoffer, took particular issue with my sharing correspondence from his friend, Commissioner Ozias. The conversation grew sharper, then it ended. I received a lifetime ban from Nextdoor, and I decided to create my own website about Towne Road.

When I asked Doug whether the site should be TowneRoad.com or ReopenTowneRoad.com, he suggested something broader. I thought the idea was unnecessary.

I am glad I listened.

What Came After the Road

The work widened. Public records showed Commissioner Ozias using his office to oppose a family business that wanted to reopen a dormant gravel pit across from his driveway—while the county hauled gravel from Jefferson County and struggled to create local jobs.

Other stories followed.

• Olympic Medical Center, our largest employer, dropped to only five days of cash on hand before most residents heard a word about it.

• Quiet emails showed talks with a major campaign donor about “taking over” the Dungeness Recreation Area, the beloved county park above the spit.

• Public money moved toward projects that raised fair questions about priorities and fairness, including $118,000 sent through a church to Mike French’s NGO to create three safe-parking spaces.

• And when Sequim artist Richard Madeo was fatally assaulted, the legacy media had nothing to say while a neighbor’s life and work slipped by in silence.

Some of those stories sound sensational because the facts themselves are striking.

In 2022, a section of the old Dungeness levee was opened before the county’s new setback levee was finished. Public records show the county then declared an emergency so work could be rushed ahead of flood season. The Tribe warned of a mass casualty event. The first draft of that emergency resolution placed responsibility for the early breach on project partner Jamestown, which had removed the dike. After Jamestown offered $500,000 tied to new wording that would clear the Tribe of blame, the adopted resolution shifted responsibility to the Army Corps of Engineers, and the County covered it up.

All of this is documented in public records. Reporting these nearly unbelievable stories is not a smear. It is an invitation to look at the same documents anyone else can request.

I have been called many names along the way: a MAGA extremist, a Trumper, a racist, a bigot, a member of the KKK, a transphobe, a Republican. Doug and I have been accused of bringing Latino prostitutes into our open marriage. I was even written into a local play as a dog who eats human feces.

Labels and rumors travel faster than reading public records.

I do not expect every reader to track three years of detail. I ask only that newcomers judge the work by the documents—not by how loudly, or how inventively, some people react to them.

Two Worlds

Flight crews still talk about life before 9/11 and after. Before: shoes stayed on, visitors walked to the gate, a 90-minute flight from Seattle to San Francisco still came with a real meal. After 9/11: plastic utensils, longer lines, and a new watchfulness.

Clallam County has its own before-and-after story. Before Towne Road, many of us assumed that when a road was designed, engineered, funded, and promised, it would be a road. We assumed public comments mattered and that public servants were, at the very least, serving the public. After Towne Road came a harder, more necessary question: what else have we taken on faith?

Vigilance can become a habit. A watchdog can bark at shadows. Three years in, it is possible to live in a place where even well-intentioned leaders are met with suspicion. That is a real loss. It is also a reminder of what we let grow thin: the everyday trust that makes a place feel like home has been broken.

America let its guard down in the years before 2001. Clallam County let its guard down in the years before a simple road project refused to stay simple. In both cases, the answer is not bitterness. It is the decision to stay engaged.

A Place Worth the Work

The first September 11th ended my career and pointed me toward another. After a few detours, I found myself trading planes for trains.

September 11th taught me that freedom is not a finished gift. The work that began 250 years ago has to be taken up again by every generation.

The second September 11th taught the same lesson closer to home. This county—its rivers, its roads, its hospitals, its small businesses, its people who still believe public records belong to the public—is worth the effort. Watchfulness does not have to be angry. It can be an act of hope: the belief that sunlight still matters, that neighbors still deserve straight answers, and that a place this beautiful is worth protecting for the people who will walk its trails long after we are gone.

That is the story I bring to newcomers. Two September days, twenty-two years apart. Both asked the same question, and both received the same answer:

Keep going.

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Two years into a $35.6 million federal “jobs” program, the public scoreboard is 21 people who finished training and later reported work or higher pay. The sales pitch was 900. The new official target is 603. The money did not shrink with the goal. Commissioner Mike French still wants another term on the strength of a grant that is better at funding government than at putting workers on payrolls.

The campaign is built on Recompete

Mike French’s reelection pitch is not public safety, government efficiency, or more community engagement. It is Recompete.

He chairs the North Olympic Peninsula Recompete Coalition. He told voters the coalition brought $35.6 million in federal money to “create good jobs and train and connect our residents to living-wage jobs.” His own issue paper said the point was to “transition 900 North Olympic Peninsula residents into full-time family wage jobs in a 5-year period.”

When he announced he was seeking a second term, he called it one of the county’s “best chances to really change the story of the North Olympic Peninsula.”

That is his cornerstone. Check the foundation.

The goal shrank. The check did not.

Last week the story changed.

According to Radio Pacific, Recompete Plan Coordinator Molly Pringle told the Clallam Economic Development Council the program’s five-year workforce goal is now 603 people who go through training and then land a job or raise their income. Through March, that number was 21.

“So, our five-year goal for that is 603 individuals, and that’s very ambitious,” Pringle said. “Reporting only 21 in our last day to report that went through March, we understand that we’re lagging there.”

She blamed a three-month federal shutdown that became a nine-month wait for mobile training units, then a delay in curriculum. The units are finally running, she said. The 603 target stays. The early years were “getting the programs in place.”

Separately, partners reported 45 jobs created through March. That total includes jobs created to run Recompete. The grant is counting some of its own payroll as success.

Do the math the way a voter would. Two years into a five-year clock, the public-facing placement number is 21 against a goal already cut from 900 to 603. That is a one-third reduction in promised workers. The award was not cut by a third. Equipment, like the hydroseeder and excavator, will still be purchased with grant dollars for the Jamestown Corporation. The county will still get campaign speeches touting Recompete's success.

Year-one county reporting was no better: 208 enrolled, 31 job placements, only 21 of them prime-age. French sold us 900. The jobs pipeline is barely dribbling.

Follow the SOW, not the slogan

The gap between “900 family-wage jobs” and “21 people reported an outcome” is not a mystery. It is written into the scopes of work (SOW).

Take the subaward that moved from the North Olympic Development Council — the NGO where Commissioner Mark Ozias sits as vice president — to the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. Ozias is also a sitting Clallam County commissioner. French chairs Recompete. Two of three county commissioners are inside the same federal pipeline, one as coalition chair, one on the pass-through board. That is not an independent audit. That is a family photo.

Exhibit B, “Approved Services,” is the Tribe’s own statement of what the money will do.

The executive summary promises jobs and training for unemployed tribal members ages 25–54. Then the table tells you how.

First, hire the grant admins

The Tribe will “build capacity” by creating two new government jobs:

1. Economic Development Project Manager

2. Workforce Development Coordinator

The first “jobs” this program creates are salaried positions inside the Planning Department and Social Services—people whose work product includes comprehensive plans, grant management, coalition meetings, surveys, and outreach publications.

Then train almost no one

The Workforce Training Program, run through the Lower Elwha Heritage Center, sets:

• Estimated enrollment: 3–5 people from the prime-age gap

• Completion goal: 60%

• Employment outcome: 50% of completers get a “good job in a relevant field”

Did you catch that?

If five are enrolled × 60% = three finish.
Three × 50% = one or two people get the “good job.”

If three are enrolled × 60% = two finish.
Half of two is one.

So the federal investment, on the Tribe’s own numbers, funds two new tribal-government jobs with benefits in order to put one or two unemployed 25-to-54-year-olds into work. That is not a workforce strategy. That is not a jobs program with two staff. It is two staff with a jobs program stapled on.

The other “outputs” are paperwork

Other deliverables in the same document are not jobs:

• planning reports

• five project phases (Health & Wellness Center campus design, water comprehensive plan, wastewater / Highway 101 infrastructure design, construction funds “secured”)

• a 10% increase in grant proposals

• “10 of jobs created” as a line item with no industry, wage, or employer

• community surveys

• outreach materials

• attendance at NOPRC coalition meetings and quarterly NODC sub-recipient meetings

• “resource-sharing agreements” and “joint progress reports”

A jobs program that measures success in more grant applications is a jobs program for grant writers and that’s what Mike French said his vision was in early 2024 — grants that could be given to local tribes to train and hire grant writers. A jobs program that budgets staff time for coalition meetings is a jobs program for the coalition.

The SOW even blurs the titles. One line hires a “Workforce Development Coordinator (EDC)” — mixing the coordinator with the Economic Development Council brand.

But the first row already created an EDPM and a WDC.

The document reads like capacity-building first, employment second, and accountability last.

The hypocrisy fits in one paragraph: taxpayers were told Recompete would pull hundreds of prime-age adults off the sidelines. This approved scope treats those same adults as a reason to expand tribal government—then concedes that the trainees and administrators together would fit on the bench seat of one pickup.

The political map is not subtle

French is not a distant observer of these tribes. The county directory lists him as Tribal Liaison for Lower Elwha Klallam, Quileute, and Makah. Those are the same governments in the Recompete west-end subawardee list. NODC’s published purpose is to send Recompete sub-grants and technical assistance to Hoh, Quileute, Makah, Lower Elwha, Jamestown, and the City of Forks. Prior reporting put NODC’s slice near $8.27 million. Coalition presentations have put Makah around $2 million and Quileute around $1.25 million. The Lower Elwha SOW is one more pipe off that same main that funnels money to District 3 voters.

District 3 is French’s seat, and it is the west end: Forks, Clallam Bay, Beaver, Joyce, Neah Bay, and La Push. He is the liaison to the tribes that live there, the chair of the grant sending them money, and the incumbent asking those same communities for another four years.

The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe has endorsed Mike French.

That is not a coincidence sitting off to the side of the grant. French’s camp treats tribal partnership as proof of leadership. The liaison title, the Recompete chair, the subawards, and the endorsement travel together. Follow the money and you are already looking at the campaign.

The certified District 3 primary was close — Jake Seegers 3,675 (52.66%), Mike French 3,288 (47.11%). Both advance to November’s county-wide vote. Seegers still has an uphill battle. His opponent is not just an incumbent with a familiar name. French chairs a $35.6 million federal pipeline. It buys hydroseeders. It pays tribal governments and NGOs to hire coordinators, managers, and “capacity” staff. Those payrolls run three more years if the grant stays on track — and if the commissioner who sold it keeps his seat.

Call it what it looks like from the cheap seats: public money used as political sway. Recompete is federal cash, but the decisions, the liaison meetings, the subawards, and the endorsements are local. Hundreds of people on coalition, nonprofit, and government payrolls have a reason to prefer the man who keeps the faucet open. A challenger with no grant to pass around is not competing on equal ground.

You do not need a precinct spreadsheet to see the conflict. A commissioner who chairs the grant, sits as tribal liaison to the subawardees, collects the endorsement, and runs for reelection in the district that contains those reservations is asking voters to believe the money and the politics never touch.

The record, not the slogan

The Scope of Work says the first hires are inside government. The scoreboard says 21 people. The campaign says 900.

That is not a jobs miracle. That is a poor reason to keep the man who sold it.

Nodc Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe Sow

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