Lincoln warned that a free people die by suicide, not by foreign armies. Shogren applies that to Clallam elections: a tabulation system she says an auditor once called “easily hackable,” a results page that opened with a password during testing, and a canvassing board that said refusing to certify is a crime. If the public cannot watch the count without a vendor password, she writes, the county cannot correct course at the polls.

If the United States is a tank, you do not destroy it from the outside. You disable it from the inside. On the Peninsula, that does not mean a foreign army. It means election software no one here can lawfully inspect.

Official channels tell us that ballots are “processed” or “accepted.” They rarely say, in plain language, that each vote was counted as cast. I think that gap in language matters. What I can show from this county is not a courtroom verdict that any race was switched. It is a pattern: vintage certification, early access to a results screen, a canvassing board told that refusal to certify is a crime, and officers who treat “we follow the law” as a reason not to look. That pattern is consistent with a system the public cannot independently verify. If the ballot box cannot be verified, the county cannot course-correct at the polls.

What I have documented in Clallam County

People reasonably ask what any of this has to do with this county. Below is what I have witnessed and put on the record.

Clallam County Auditor: “easily hackable,” and a vendor the auditor is not allowed to identify

In 2016, during the Democratic presidential primaries, I sat down with Auditor Shoona Riggs to raise election-integrity concerns. As I have stated publicly since that meeting, Auditor Riggs told me that the electronic system Clallam County uses to tabulate votes is “easily hackable.” She further said that a vendor representative comes to each machine before each election to “work” on it, and that she is not allowed to know that person’s identity.

That is my account of the conversation, not a recorded transcript. It is still the conversation I have carried for a decade. The auditor is statutorily charged with certifying the accuracy of our results. She has certified election after election with, on my account, actual knowledge that the machines were described to her as easily hackable and were serviced by people whose names she said she could not have.

On January 6, 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security designated election infrastructure — voter-registration systems, voting equipment, tabulation and reporting systems, storage facilities, and polling places — as a critical-infrastructure subsector of Government Facilities.

An auditor who has been told of serious vulnerabilities, and who certifies results anyway, is not handling a routine local paperwork issue. She is handling infrastructure the United States has already classified as critical.

Clallam County Elections Manager: password access to a results page during testing — now under Secretary of State review

On July 8, 2026, I publicly observed the officially noticed Logic and Accuracy (L&A) tests conducted by the Clallam County Elections Division. I was the sole observer at the 1:00 p.m. Accessible Voting Unit test and was joined by a Republican Party observer for the 2:00 p.m. tabulation-system test.

L&A is a test deck, not a live canvass of voted ballots. However, it does not answer what staff then demonstrated. During the tabulation-system test, Elections Manager Ian Hillway stated that he needed a password to access the results page. He also stated that, because the election was not yet final, he could bypass a pop-up warning that accessing the results page was “illegal,” but that he would do so for purposes of the testing.

Later in the same test, Secretary of State representative Les Bowen stated that there is “no tabulation before election day.” I pointed out that ballot scanning begins well before election day, and that Mr. Hillway had already indicated the results page was reachable with a password and a willingness to click past a warning labeled “illegal.”

The public position of the Secretary of State and of Washington counties has been that tabulation of voted ballots, and production of results, does not begin before election day. Password-protected access to a results page during official testing, plus the ability to dismiss a warning marked “illegal,” is hard to reconcile with that message. The question is not only whether the July 8 screen showed a test deck. The question is who else has that password, and when it can be used on a live election.

On July 14, 2026, I asked the Secretary of State in writing for a formal review. On September 10, 2026, the Secretary of State agreed to review Clallam County election procedure during the 2026 General Election under RCW 29A.04.570.

Because the same office certified the system it will now review, the review is not free of institutional conflict of interest. Time will tell whether a system that permits that kind of access meets the standards the State says it certified.

Clallam County Auditor: the SAVE Act — follow it, and lobby Congress not to adopt it

On August 25, 2026, at a Port Angeles Business Association forum, I asked Auditor Riggs whether Clallam County would follow the SAVE Act’s proof-of-citizenship and voter-ID provisions for federal elections if Congress adopted the Act. She said she would follow it. That is the correct answer for an election official. The livestream was posted on the Association’s Facebook page; Radio Pacific covered the debate the next day.

PABA videos: https://www.facebook.com/PortAngelesBusinessAssociation/videos

Radio Pacific, Aug. 26, 2026: https://www.myclallamcounty.com/2026/08/26/election-security-takes-center-stage-in-clallam-auditor-race/

Fourteen days later, on September 8, 2026, Auditor Riggs signed a letter to Senator Patty Murray asking Congress not to include the SAVE America Act in the FY 2027 National Defense Authorization Act or in any reconciliation package.

Auditor Riggs will follow the Act if it becomes law, and she has simultaneously asked Congress not to make it law — while she is a named candidate on the 2026 ballot and is therefore barred from sitting on the Canvassing Board this year.

Clallam County Elections Manager: “The legal ramification of refusing to certify is a crime”

On August 18, 2026, I attended the Canvassing Board meeting to certify the August primary. I submitted written and oral comment: that electronic tabulation can be altered (citing the September 18, 2025 examination under oath of a confidential witness in Case No. 1:25-cv-00425-STV, U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado); that I had watched pre-certification access to a results page at the July 8 L&A tests; that early scanning plus internal results access is its own vulnerability; and that DHS designated this infrastructure as critical in January 2017.

I asked the Board to amend its rules to keep electronic systems out of signature verification and vote tabulation and to return to paper processes the public can watch without proprietary software, passwords, or a results screen that can be opened before certification.

When the vote on certification came, there was a pause. Ian Hillway — sworn in to sit in Auditor Riggs’s seat — turned to the other designees (Commissioner Mark Ozias in place of Commissioner Mike French, and Dee Boughton in place of Prosecuting Attorney Mark Nichols) and told them that “the legal ramification of refusing to certify is a crime,” citing RCW 29A.60.200.

Failure to certify the returns, if they can be ascertained with reasonable certainty, is a crime under RCW 29A.84.720. That clause is the whole fight. I had just put on the record reasons to doubt that certainty. The response was not to examine those reasons. It was to recite the penalty. Certification followed.

Clallam County Commissioner: “We are going to follow the law”

The defense of the status quo has been offered from more than one direction. The argument is: we are following the law as written; our hands are tied. That was, in substance, Commissioner French’s response when I spoke with him on September 11, 2026, after a Soroptimist International forum.

A commissioner’s duties are not the auditor’s. The county auditor administers elections. The board’s tools are oversight, budget, inquiry, and referral. Once a commissioner is on actual notice of alleged defects in how the county conducts elections, the lawful response is not “we cannot look.” It is to put the allegations in front of the officers who do have statutory power: the auditor, the prosecuting attorney, the Secretary of State, and, where the facts warrant it, the Attorney General. The board can demand records, ask whether existing Title 29A and Secretary of State requirements are being met, and seek a charter or legislative change if the written law is the problem. What it cannot do is treat “following the law” as an answer to a claim that the law itself is not being followed.

A county officer who has been told of vulnerabilities in systems the United States has classified as critical infrastructure is on notice that the subject is not optional. The responsible next step under Washington law is to refer, to investigate through lawful channels, and to use the powers of the office.

“I was just following the law” is a complete answer only if the officer is performing every duty the law imposes and is not using the statute as a reason to decline inquiry and referral. If the claim is that Clallam’s system has known weaknesses, the question for Commissioner French is not whether he may invent a remedy the RCW does not authorize. It is whether, having been told, he used the authority he does have.

Certified — to 2005

At the August 18 certification meeting, Elections Manager Hillway said the tabulation system is state and federally “certified.” That sentence is true as far as it goes. What it leaves out is: certified to what standard?

Clallam County tabulates on ClearVote 2.3. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission certified ClearVote 2.3 to the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 1.0 — written in 2005.

EAC, ClearVote 2.3: https://www.eac.gov/voting-equipment/clearvote-23

VVSG 1.0 (2005): https://www.eac.gov/vvsg-10-2005

Nearly every Washington county still runs a system certified to that same 2005 baseline. The EAC has since adopted VVSG 2.0. Older certifications were not automatically withdrawn, so “certified” can mean “certified to a standard written when flip phones were new.”

Certification is not the same thing as a current security review.

First the algorithm, then the ballots

The reason officials talk about “processing” ballots more readily than “counting” votes is not explained by Clallam County alone. It is also the subject of sworn statements from people who say they worked these systems from the inside. One of those statements is the November 29, 2020 declaration of Terpsehore P. Maras, filed as Exhibit 13 in Bowyer v. Ducey, No. 2:20-cv-02321 (D. Ariz.). Maras describes herself in that declaration as a private contractor and “LOCALIZER” with operational experience in election sources and methods in the United States and overseas. She has separately stated in public that the work spanned 45 countries.

Maras declaration (PDF): https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/5955d0ae-e3e2-44d0-b692-fd5157ddcf32/downloads/TORE_MARAS_Unredacted_Declaration.pdf

I offer the declaration as corroboration of a method, not as a substitute for Clallam County facts. In it, Maras describes a “trapdoor” in the mixing and encryption step. Anyone who knows the commitment parameters, she writes, can “take all the votes and give them to any one they want.” She says election result spikes are not paper or thumb drives first: the algorithm allocates a block, and “the PEOPLE . . . creat[e] the evidence to BACK UP the block allocation.” That last sentence is the inside of the tank — software sets the result; paper is arranged to match it.

Maras’s declaration is one sworn account of a tabulation design in which the algorithm can be manipulated to set a block of predetermined results and people then create the paper to back up that block. Clallam County still has to answer for Clallam County.

The grievance over an election-integrity writ

In 2022, the Attorney General’s Office, then led by Bob Ferguson, filed a Washington State Bar Association grievance over my work on a constitutional writ involving noncitizen voter registrations. That grievance went to a hearing in March 2025, then to the Disciplinary Board and the Washington Supreme Court. Oral argument was on September 15, 2026, at the Temple of Justice. The Court has not ruled. My license remains active and eligible to practice.

TVW oral argument, Sept. 15, 2026: https://tvw.org/video/washington-state-supreme-court-2026091075/

As discussed at oral argument, the grievance by the Attorney General raises important questions: can the State Bar pursue discipline against lawyers primarily over perceived controversial or unpopular subject matter, including election integrity matters? Are lawyers entitled to a jury in order to defend themselves as against quasi-criminal counts asserted by the State?

A return to constitutional elections

Article I, Section 1 of the Washington Constitution says the quiet thing out loud: “All political power is inherent in the people, and governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and are established to protect and maintain individual rights.”

Abraham Lincoln was right about the physical exterior strength of the US to fight off foreign adversaries – which I have compared here to a tank. But in order to take out that tank, no foreign army has to take a drink from the Dungeness. If we lose the ballot box, the tank will be destroyed from the inside — by software we cannot inspect, by officers who will not inquire, and by a certification statute recited as a threat instead of as a duty to ascertain the returns with reasonable certainty.

If I am elected Auditor, I will work to return Clallam County to elections that put that power back where the Constitution left it: with the people. Paper that can be watched. Procedures that can be audited without a vendor password. Certification that follows examination, not the other way around. That is the job. That is the promise.

Virginia Shogren
Candidate for Clallam County Auditor
961 W. Oak Court, Sequim, WA 98382

Credit for tank analogy: Terpsehore P. Maras

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Virginia Shogren wrote this article, with research and editing assistance from an AI tool. She is a candidate for Clallam County Auditor. Neither the candidate nor her campaign paid Clallam County Watchdog for publication, and Watchdog paid nothing to the author.

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Tonight

The Calico Cat Club of Clallam County is hosting a Candidate Conversation for the 24th Legislative District (both positions):

Thursday, October 15, 2026
6:30–8:30 p.m.
Fairview Grange Hall, 161 Lake Farm Road, Port Angeles

Confirmed: Kaylee Kuehn, Marcia Kelbon, and Eric W. Pratt.
Incumbent Adam Bernbaum has been invited.

Each candidate will give a brief opening statement, followed by audience Q&A. Priority for questions goes to Calico Cat Club members, but the event is open. Questions go to the panel as a whole; discussion among candidates is encouraged. No “gotcha” questions.

This is much better than a voters’ pamphlet, show up.

Ballots are in the mail today. After serving as a Charter Review Commissioner last year and closely following Clallam County politics for the past three years, I’m sharing exactly how I’ll vote—if you’re curious. These choices prioritize spending restraint, parental rights, fairness, accountability, and constitutional governance over ideology or special interests. Please join the discussion in the comments and tell us how you will be voting.

Initiatives

IP26-645: Yes — Repeal the Income Tax

Former governors Gary Locke and Christine Gregoire put it succinctly: Washington doesn’t have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem. This unconstitutional income tax applies to every earner and currently includes a $1 million exemption that history shows will be lowered over time. Vote “yes” to repeal it and stop the income tax.

IL26-001: Yes — Restore Parental Rights in Education

The Sequim School District shows why we must restore parental rights. It has a long history of scandals and cover-ups, as detailed in this Olympic Herald article:

Read SSD Cover Ups

Jim Stoffer remains in a leadership position representing us on the Olympic Educational Service District. Leaders like him make the case for restoring parental rights.

IL26-638: Yes — Protect Fairness in Girls’ Sports

Our young women are losing scholarships and first-place trophies to biological males. Transgender students should be allowed to participate in the sport that matches their biological sex. It’s that simple.

U.S. Representative

Teresa Fox

This is a one-issue race for me. Emily Randall wants to transfer two of our national wildlife refuges to a for-profit commercial seafood harvesting corporation. Jamestown tribal members already own these refuges as Americans—we all own them, and they need to stay that way. Once we lose them, the refuges will be gone forever. I’ve seen too many “Tribal members only” signs to believe the wildlife refuges would be treated any differently. Teresa Fox will fight to keep our national wildlife refuges; Emily Randall will fight to give them away.

State Representative, Position 1

Eric Pratt

Incumbent Adam Bernbaum is pushing for more taxation without addressing out-of-control spending in Olympia. Two years ago he was a no-show for debates, and this year appears no different—he has not responded to an invitation to participate in this Thursday’s Calico Cat Club candidate conversation. It’s time for balance and representation. For me, that’s Eric Pratt.

State Representative, Position 2

Marcia Kelbon

I’m impressed by every stance Marcia takes. She’s a moderate driven by data and metrics—exactly what Olympia needs more of right now. Her opponent, Kaylee Kuehn, supports the Climate Commitment Act and calls it “something we need to continue to invest in.” That single act added a hidden gas tax to every gallon of fuel you buy and largely benefits special interests. In a remote portion of Washington, hours from the I-5 corridor, that means virtually everything transported by truck costs more—for negligible climate results. You cannot champion housing affordability and a lower cost of living while supporting the CCA. Marcia acknowledges it is a regressive tax and prefers effective approaches.

Supreme Court Justices

For all Supreme Court seats, I’m looking for a return to constitutional rulings rather than ideological ones. I’ve met Dave Larson once, heard him speak twice, and I’m impressed. These are my votes:

• Scott Edwards

• David Stevens

• Dave Larson

• Todd Bloom

• Sean O’Donnell

Charter Amendments

Amendment 1: Approve

When the public uses the charter review process to mandate that commissioners hold town halls on a schedule, it directly reflects our current county commissioners' disengagement from residents. It is sad that engagement isn’t already baked into their character and that we must rewrite our county charter to force it—but these three commissioners clearly show why they should face the public every other month. Jim Stoffer’s opposition is another strong reason to approve it.

Amendment 2: Approve

A county with an ethics code but no way to enforce it is like highways with speed limits and no officers writing tickets. Commissioner Mark Ozias used his position to shut down a family-owned gravel pit across from his driveway because it would disrupt his sleep and raise his blood pressure—bypassing the hearing examiner process. It may not have been illegal, but it was unethical. Commissioner Mike French directed $118,000 to the Trinity United Methodist Church in Sequim for a three-space safe parking program, and the church then paid OlyCAP, the NGO on whose board he sits. Again, not illegal, but unethical. This county loses jobs, economic growth, and money because leaders behave unethically. It’s time to have someone writing tickets.

Amendment 3: Approve

I wasn’t sure during the Charter Review Process, but Charter Review Commissioner Ron Richards eventually explained it in a way that made sense: it gives Clallam County voters more information and transparency. That’s hard to argue with—though Jim Stoffer found a way to write the “oppose” statement anyway.

County Assessor

I greatly admire aspects of both Lee Hancock and Antonio Price. I’m conflicted. It comes down to experience in one of the few county departments that brings in revenue, versus a staunch believer in private property rights. Please join the conversation in the comments and tell us who you’re voting for and why.

County Auditor

Virginia Shogren

Two things about Virginia’s campaign stand out. First, she wants to create a Public Integrity Officer or department. Yes, there are upfront costs, but someone would start auditing the hundreds of thousands of dollars that flow through the county every week. Look at Health and Human Services: how much is spent weekly on Amazon trinkets and pizza? NGOs are absorbing taxpayer funds faster than we can refill the coffers. An upfront investment could deliver substantial savings immediately. Second, Shoona Riggs treats the League of Women Voters as a nonpartisan group allowed to participate in the election process. They are not nonpartisan; they are highly partisan and ideological, and they cannot be trusted—especially after their involvement in the Conservation District election that a judge threw out. Virginia recognizes the LWV for what they are, and I want them out of the election process until they prove they are what they claim.

County Commissioner

Jake Seegers

This recommendation comes from more than three years of watching Mike French. One of the many things that has impressed me about Jake Seegers is his ability and eagerness to sit down and engage in civil dialogue with people who may disagree with him—they almost always find substantial common ground. This was illustrated when Jesse Charles, one of Jake’s biggest critics, interviewed him. Who is Mike’s biggest critic? It might be me. He won’t sit down with me. He won’t answer emails. He’ll only shake my hand if I put it right in front of him. I’m tired of paying the salary of someone who only represents special interests. Jake Seegers is a leader, and it’s time for change.

District Court 1

Patrick Murphy

I heard Patrick speak once. He works in the prosecuting attorney’s office, and I got the sense he was frustrated. He works hard, builds cases, tries to prosecute, and then sees people get off easy. So many “Social Media Saturdays” articles document the revolving door of catch-and-release in District Court. Opponent Alex Schodowski has experience—she serves as judge pro tem when other judges aren’t available, and Patrick often appears before her. I don’t want someone to rule with an iron fist, but I do want more accountability in our court system. I want a risk-taker, not the status quo. I’m very frustrated with the broken cycle. I’ll be voting for Patrick. I’ve spoken with both Patrick and Alex; they are both very nice and approachable, and I’d encourage anyone to reach out to either of them without hesitation.

PUD District 1

Rick Paschall

At a recent PABA candidate conversation, Randy Brackett seemed too focused on climate change, removing the Snake River dams, implementing solar, and expanding social programs for low-income residents. That equates to higher and higher costs.

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Stay Engaged Tomorrow

Thursday

The Calico Cat Club of Clallam County is hosting a Candidate Conversation for the 24th Legislative District (both positions):

Thursday, October 15, 2026
6:30–8:30 p.m.
Fairview Grange Hall, 161 Lake Farm Road, Port Angeles

Confirmed: Kaylee Kuehn, Marcia Kelbon, and Eric W. Pratt.
Incumbent Adam Bernbaum has been invited.

Each candidate will give a brief opening statement, followed by audience Q&A. Priority for questions goes to Calico Cat Club members, but the event is open. Questions go to the panel as a whole; discussion among candidates is encouraged. No “gotcha” questions.

This is much better than a voters’ pamphlet, show up.

Reminder: Today, October 13, 10:30 a.m. — pack the room. The comprehensive plan public hearing is open for comment in person or virtually; if the next 20 years in Clallam County matter to you, show up and tell the commissioners and DCD Director Bruce Emery that Futurewise gets no veto, that the Climate Vulnerability Assessment was never required (only a climate resilience element under HB 1181), and that locking a 9°F projection into the plan is not the same as the 1.4°F of actual warming since 1895. Email all three commissioners via Clerk Loni Gores at loni.gores@clallamcountywa.gov and Bruce.Emery@clallamcountywa.gov, then be there so they have to face the people who will live with the result.

The Animal Shelter Question and the Predictable Answer

At a recent Clallam County Democratic headquarters Q&A, French was asked whether he would support an operational levy for animal shelters. The question noted that animal health and control affect public safety and that existing buildings could potentially be repurposed instead of bonding for new ones.

French said an operational levy “is not the first thing that I would step to.” He walked through the Olympic Peninsula Humane Society’s reduced role, the county’s former funding of that work, and the reconvened Animal Solutions Committee. He mentioned current spay-and-neuter support and deferred: “It would be difficult for me to say yes right now… I would want to take the Animal Solutions Committee’s lead, Commissioner Ozias’s lead, and Sheriff King’s lead… I want to let the experts speak first.”

The problem is who sits among those “experts.” The advisory board includes organizations that already receive county funding. When groups that depend on the money recommend a dedicated levy, the outcome is easy to predict. French’s deference is not neutrality. It invites the same solution the county has used before: more dedicated taxes rather than tighter management of existing resources.

Separating Veterans and Developmental Disability Levies: A One-Time General-Fund Boost

The Washington State Association of Counties actively supported ESHB 2442, the “local government tax resources and fund flexibility” package. WSAC’s 2026 end-of-session report and legislative one-pagers highlighted the “bifurcation of the veterans’ and mental health/developmental disabilities levies from the general fund levy.”

The association listed it under fiscal-sustainability priorities and supported it. The bill passed and takes effect in 2026. It lets counties keep funding those services inside the general levy or pull them out as separate independent levies (veterans up to $0.27 per $1,000 assessed value; developmental disabilities/mental health at a required $0.025).

Mike French sits on WSAC’s Legislative Steering Committee. The association’s consistent product is more revenue tools for commissioners, not tools that force efficiency. Clallam staff have already told the board that separating the levies is “appropriate.” County CFO Mark Lane said doing so would cost about $19 more per year on a $500,000 home and that, without the separation, the general fund would have to subsidize those services more heavily. In other words, the dedicated pots stay funded (or grow), while the general levy is no longer required to carry them—freeing capacity for other spending. On your property-tax statement, the items that were previously buried inside the county’s regular levy can now appear as their own line items or rates. You still pay; the accounting simply makes the general fund look healthier while the total bill rises.

This is a one-time structural shift. Once the levies are separated, the county cannot keep “finding” the same relief next year. It is the same pattern as last year’s deficit theater: a historic shortfall produced a levy lid-lift request that voters rejected. Shortly afterward, millions suddenly appeared from previously un-revisited criminal-justice contracts with Sequim and Port Angeles. That too was one-time. The recurring answer remains higher taxes.

The Councilmanic Criminal-Justice Sales Tax

French is on record supporting the 0.1 percent criminal-justice sales tax authorized by House Bill 2015 (RCW 82.14.345). Through June 30, 2028, a county legislative body can impose it by ordinance or resolution—no public vote required—for “criminal justice purposes.” Staff have already modeled it as a way to close the general-fund gap and described it as adoptable without voters. An April 2027 start would bring an estimated $1.487 million in the first seven months of that year, according to the finance presentation. Annually, it’s estimated to add $2.1 million in taxes.

This is the same authority State Representative Natasha Hill (a progressive Democrat, like French) discussed. She called it a vote she did not want to take, then said Democrats put “guardrails” on it: locals must raise the tax themselves, spending is steered toward public defense, diversion, reentry, domestic-violence services, behavioral health, and crisis response, and jurisdictions must meet Criminal Justice Training Commission policy, training, and reporting rules or the state can withhold money.

In a widely circulated “chicken wing” video reported by Brandi Kruse, Hill went further, linking the strings to law-enforcement history, “slave patrols,” and immigration enforcement rhetoric.

The tax still stacks on top of Clallam’s existing 1994 0.1 percent criminal-justice sales tax (which is shared with the cities).

The 0.1% Housing Sales Tax He Put on the Ballot—and the North View Complex It Helped Build

At the same Democratic headquarters Q&A, French took credit for the 0.1% affordable-housing sales tax that began in Port Angeles and spread countywide. He told the audience that local developers “really had very little local match” for state and federal housing grants, so applications “were just scored terribly.” He continued:

“We investigated that and brought to bear local funding. We, the voters at the city of Port Angeles, were the first to vote on a one-tenth 1% sales tax that supports affordable housing. I was the person that proposed that we put it on the ballot. I was the person that appeared at a League of Women Voters forum endorsing that ballot measure… And when we as a local community use sales tax, we’re leveraging all of the tourism that happens to support this. Anyway, so this the voters at the city of Port Angeles adopted that local sales tax that led to the county commissioners adopting it countywide. And so now we have… over $2 million or around that amount annually that we can apply to the local match for these housing developments… We’ve been successful almost every year at getting a multi-million dollar award… That started with this building that’s up on the top of the bluff. It’s a 36 unit apartment building that Peninsula Behavioral Health opened last month.”

That building is North View, Peninsula Behavioral Health’s new complex. According to Peninsula Behavioral Health, the project prioritizes individuals with criminal records and active substance-use issues—exactly the population the county’s harm-reduction and behavioral-health programs already serve. French’s sales tax supplied the local match that unlocked the larger awards. The same commissioner who now defers to “experts” on animal control and supports new criminal-justice and levy-separation tools was the one who first put a 0.1% sales tax on the Port Angeles ballot so housing for the existing system's priority populations could move forward. The county simply followed.

The Cultural Access Tax That Never Really Left

French also pushed a 0.1 percent cultural-access sales tax to fund things like art therapy in jails, heritage, and related programs—also by commissioner-only vote rather than a public ballot. After leaked emails surfaced on CCwatchdog.com, the immediate push cooled.

With Ozias’s support still on record and French still on the board, the same idea is likely to return next year if he is reelected. The estimated revenue is roughly $1.8–2 million annually. The pattern is consistent: when voters or scrutiny intervene, the proposal is paused, not abandoned.

The Choice Is Clear

Every tool French and the WSAC network reach for expands the tax base or rearranges existing levies so the general fund has more room. None of them require the county to live within the revenue voters have already approved. The animal-shelter answer defers to nonprofits that are already funded. Separating veterans and developmental disability raises your property-tax bill while protecting dedicated spending and easing general-fund pressure. The criminal-justice sales tax can be imposed without a vote and is already modeled as gap-closing revenue. The 0.1% housing sales tax he personally put on the Port Angeles ballot supplied the match money that helped build luxury homeless housing. The cultural-access tax remains on the shelf, ready for another attempt.

If Mike French is reelected, the answer will continue to be more taxes. Not tighter contracts, not lower overhead, not living with the “no” that the voters already delivered. There will always be another way to go behind the voters’ backs, and it will be with another levy, another sales tax, or another separation that shows up on your statement.

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Stay Engaged This Week

Today

The Board of Commissioners will hold a Budget Town Hall this evening, October 13, 2026 at 5 p.m. in the Commissioner’s Board Room 160, 223 East 4th Street, Port Angeles (or virtually on Zoom). The meeting will cover the Administrator Recommended Budget, the 6-Year Transportation Improvement Program (TIP), and a public question-and-answer session on both. Attend if you want a direct look at next year’s spending priorities and your rising taxes.

Thursday

The Calico Cat Club of Clallam County is hosting a Candidate Conversation for the 24th Legislative District (both positions):

Thursday, October 15, 2026
6:30–8:30 p.m.
Fairview Grange Hall, 161 Lake Farm Road, Port Angeles

Confirmed: Kaylee Kuehn, Marcia Kelbon, and Eric W. Pratt.
Incumbent Adam Bernbaum has been invited.

Each candidate will give a brief opening statement, followed by audience Q&A. Priority for questions goes to Calico Cat Club members, but the event is open. Questions go to the panel as a whole; discussion among candidates is encouraged. No “gotcha” questions.

This is much better than a voters’ pamphlet, show up.

Read Futurewise’s own website. Futurewise was founded as the watchdog of the Growth Management Act. In a normal year, it runs 15 to 20 active legal appeals. During this statewide Comp Plan cycle, it expects its work to triple.

It advertises that it wins about 70 percent of the appeals it brings. Brooke Frickleton, who spoke at the first hearing on the county’s comprehensive plan, is a staff attorney. They comment early. Then they sue. Counties know the pattern. County staff is pressured to write extra language “just in case.” Commissioners adopt it so they will not spend two years in front of the Hearings Board. That is how activist policy becomes local law without anyone voting on it.

Thurston County is the example that Frickleton presented to the commissioners. Futurewise challenged Thurston’s new climate element. The Hearings Board found the County’s action “clearly erroneous.” Futurewise’s own write-up calls it the first real test of House Bill 1181 and “the clearest guidance yet on what compliance looks like.” Frickleton told Clallam the same: soft words aren't enough. As they read it, the statute wants timelines, named responsibility, measures of progress, and priority for “overburdened communities.” Translation: if you put a fat vulnerability study in the record and then write “encourage,” they will come back demanding “shall.”

Clallam County produced the Climate Vulnerability Assessment, loaded it with the highest-end projections, and placed it in the official Comp Plan record — giving Futurewise ready-made evidence it can quote in a future appeal to demand stricter, action-forcing policies.

Futurewise’s 2024 impact report says it is partnering “from Tribal governments on the Olympic Peninsula” and that it received a Commerce grant “to support tribal participation in the Clallam and Jefferson County comprehensive plan updates.”

Futurewise has a Port Angeles office. It has spent years on GreenLink and pushing to daylight Lower Valley Creek. When Frickleton says “action,” she means the Comp Plan language Futurewise can later quote in a Hearings Board petition to force stricter county rules — not help for any individual property owner.

Jake Seegers already told the commissioners and Director Emery the quiet part: building the CVA around extreme assumptions and letting activists already committed to one climate-policy outcome run the process was a mistake.

The commissioners and DCD have now given Futurewise ammunition to demand more restrictions on Clallam County property owners for an entire generation.

The numbers Jake flagged are still in the document

Open the Climate Vulnerability Assessment the county paid for. NOAA: since 1895, Clallam’s average annual temperature is up 1.4°F. That is more than 130 years of actual record.

Then the next sentence: by the end of the century, average summer maximum temperatures are projected to rise 9°F from a historical baseline of 68.4°F.

The source is a 2012 downscaling method. The CVA primarily uses RCP 8.5 — the highest-emissions, “business-as-usual” pathway that assumes emissions keep rising as if nothing changes. Under that scenario, the document projects roughly 6°F mid-century and 9°F by 2100 for Clallam. The period from today to the end of the century is about 74 years.

One-point-four degrees in 130 years of real measurements. Nine degrees in the next 74 years under the hottest scenario the consultants chose and then treated as the working forecast. That is the record Futurewise can quote. That is what “best available science” looked like once the consultants and the process participants locked it in.

Mike French continues to insist the Climate Vulnerability Assessment was required by state law. It was not.

On October 6, at the Port Angeles Business Association candidate forum, Commissioner French said of the Climate Vulnerability Assessment: “This is something that is a state requirement, and it should be led by best available science, not by ideology.” (Timestamp 18:54)

Later the same day, at a Clallam County Democrats Q&A, he again treated the Assessment as a legal obligation. He called it a necessary “data collection exercise” required once the legislature mandated climate planning, and he insisted it was driven by best available science rather than ideology.

Mike French is mistaken.

House Bill 1181 requires fully planning counties, including Clallam, to add a climate element to the comprehensive plan. For Clallam, that means only a resilience sub-element. A greenhouse-gas reduction sub-element is mandatory solely for 11 larger counties; Clallam is not one of them. Clallam’s own draft Climate Element says this in plain language: the county “is required to satisfy a climate resilience sub-element” and “is not required to address” the greenhouse-gas section. The same draft notes that staff exceeded HB 1181's minimum requirements.

Washington Department of Commerce guidance treats a climate vulnerability and risk assessment as optional. Jurisdictions can meet the resilience requirements by adapting existing policies, adopting a conforming hazard mitigation plan by reference, or other pathways. The guidance explicitly says a vulnerability assessment “may not be necessary for every county or city.”

The statute requires goals, policies, and programs consistent with best available science and credible projections that address climate-exacerbated hazards and prioritize overburdened communities. It does not require a standalone Climate Vulnerability Assessment document of the kind Clallam commissioned, filled with the highest-end RCP 8.5 projections, and placed in the record. That was a local choice. French’s continued insistence that the CVA itself was required by state law is simply incorrect.

How French and Ozias Fast-Tracked the Study They Now Call “Required”

On February 5, 2024, the Clallam County Board of Commissioners approved a professional services contract with Cascadia Consulting Group for $369,535. The scope was to “update the Hazard Mitigation Plan alongside the development of the Comprehensive Plan Climate Element.” That work included the Climate Vulnerability Assessment.

Commissioner Mike French moved to approve the contract; Commissioner Mark Ozias seconded. The process was accelerated — the usual eight-day review was shortened to about 24 hours while Commissioner Randy Johnson was absent.

A later amendment extending the Cascadia contract (covering the same hazard-mitigation and climate-element work) was approved unanimously on February 25, 2025. The finished Climate Vulnerability Assessment report itself was adopted by the Board around September 2025.

When resident John Worthington later raised the Cascadia contract and the spending during a budget meeting, Commissioner Mike French told him he was wrong—that no such contract existed or had not come before the Board. Public records showed otherwise. The episode is documented in the Clallam County Watchdog piece “There’s a hole in the budget, dear Liza.”

With Commissioner Randy Johnson out of town, Mike French moved the contract and Mark Ozias seconded. That is how the Climate Vulnerability Assessment — the document the county was never required to produce — was put in motion and later fed to the North Olympic Development Council (the nonprofit Ozias leads) to help shape the Comp Plan behind closed doors alongside tribal governments. The result is a plan that will make the next 20 years in Clallam County less affordable and more regulated, while giving tribal enterprises and governments the advantages they need to continue acquiring property. As the Watchdog reported in “Climate Change of Address,” that is exactly what they said they would do with the Comp Plans in 2021—and that’s exactly what they are doing.

French’s answer at the Clallam County Democrats event, October 6

Four days after the first comprehensive plan hearing, at a Clallam County Democrats Q&A, French was asked about his opponent’s comments that the county used extreme assumptions from the Climate Vulnerability Assessment. His reply:

“So the question was about this morning at a debate there was a question that my opponent stated something about the climate vulnerability assessment in our comprehensive plan update and he made some what I think are pretty outlandish claims about it. … [HB 1181] requires us to plan for climate change… climate change is a reality and it absolutely impacts development… Water being by far the most… in 100 years we can see how glaciers have basically disappeared in the Olympic Mountains or shrunk considerably and many of our water sources are largely glacier fed including the Dungeness and Elwha rivers.

So that requirement to plan for climate change… we then had to do some data collection… that’s what that climate vulnerability assessment is — basically a data collection exercise to know what are we planning for, what is the worst case scenario, what is the best case scenario, what’s an average scenario. And I think that everything that you heard from my opponent is just rhetoric and it is just ideological opposition to climate change interventions. I certainly don’t share his opinions. … [A Planning Commission member] said what drove that process was best available science. That’s what drove the process, not ideology, not some extreme assumptions. … I trust the process that we went through. I know the county staff… They’re not scheming around their personal ideological positions. They’re professionals… this is an obvious case of my opponent has very strong ideological positions and he’s accusing… Anyway, I don’t think that’s what happened with this climate vulnerability assessment. I think it was driven by best available science.”

That is Mike French’s defense: the 9°F summer projection under RCP 8.5 isn't extreme; calling it extreme is “ideology.” The same document that records 1.4°F of observed warming since 1895 is now the “best available science” that must govern Critical Areas, shorelines, wells, and housing for the next 20 years. French treats choosing the hottest pathway and the leap from observed history to that projection as unremarkable data collection. The Planning Commission member he cites is defending the process he helped run. The public is told the alternative is mere “rhetoric.” And he continues to claim the study itself was required by law when it was not.

WSAC could have been the shield. Clallam turned it into a tax lobby

The Washington State Association of Counties (WSAC) exists to be “a voice for Washington State’s 39 counties.” Its job is to advocate for counties. Its president is currently Clallam County Commissioner Mark Ozias. Mike French sits on the legislative steering side that decides what WSAC pushes in Olympia. Randy Johnson is a member.

If any county in the state had the muscle to tell Futurewise to back off, it is the association whose president represents Clallam. WSAC could stand in Olympia and at the Hearings Board and say: counties will meet the statute — but they will not be bullied past it.

WSAC does not do that. Instead, they push for taxes voters haven't approved.

Its statewide habit is consistent: raise the maximum amount commissioners can levy without a public vote (from 1 percent to 3 percent) and support a pay-per-mile tax. More board-only taxing power. More “flexibility” for the dais while cutting constituents out.

Fighting a Seattle land-use litigator who openly advertises 15–20 appeals a year and a 70 percent win rate would have defended every rural county in the association. Instead, the president of WSAC is the same commissioner whose nonprofit circuit (the NODC) helped write the climate mandate that Futurewise is now holding. You can't fix that with a mission statement. You fix that conflict by showing up for the people who still pay the dues.

A Comp Plan is not a brochure. It is the 20-year instruction book for Critical Areas, shoreline rules, housing, wells, rentals, and what “climate risk” means when a planner is considering issuing you a permit. Extreme assumptions in, extreme code out. Futurewise does not need to invent a record. Clallam County, under the leadership of Board Chair Mike French, already typed it up for them under the false claim that it was “required.”

Tomorrow, Tuesday, October 13, 10:30 a.m. — pack the room

If the next 20 years in Clallam County matter to you, sit where they have to see you. Do not send one polite email and stay home.

Tell the commissioners and DCD Director that Futurewise does not get a veto. Tell them the Climate Vulnerability Assessment wasn't required by state law—only a climate resilience element was. Tell them to meet HB 1181 only — not the extra vulnerability study, not the hottest forecasts, not the activist rewrite. Tell them the 1.4°F of real warming since 1895 is not the same thing as locking a 9°F summer projection under RCP 8.5 into the plan that governs your property for two decades. Tell them you do not want that extreme set of assumptions turned into the instruction book for the next generation of permits, buffers, and restrictions.

Write all three commissioners through Clerk Loni Gores at loni.gores@clallamcountywa.gov and write DCD Director Bruce Emery at Bruce.Emery@clallamcountywa.gov.

If they will not serve the people in the room, those people will stop treating the dais — and WSAC — as anything but another nonprofit that answers to someone else.

Read Part I if you have not already. Then show up Tuesday.

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Bonus: From Citizens to Residents: Who Gets a Say?

In the draft Comp Plan, the county is quietly replacing the word “citizens” with “residents” in the public-participation section (31.01.500). The original text described how the County reached out to “citizens and landowners.” The new language says “residents and landowners.”

“Citizen” has a legal meaning. “Resident” does not. The change is small, but it broadens who the county is inviting into the process that will set the rules for Critical Areas, shorelines, wells, and housing for the next 20 years. The draft does not explain the switch or limit the new language to people who are lawfully present. If the next 20 years of Clallam County land-use policy matter, that is a change worth asking about.

Stay Engaged This Week

The Calico Cat Club of Clallam County is hosting a Candidate Conversation for the 24th Legislative District (both positions):

Thursday, October 15, 2026
6:30–8:30 p.m.
Fairview Grange Hall, 161 Lake Farm Road, Port Angeles

Confirmed: Kaylee Kuehn, Marcia Kelbon, and Eric W. Pratt.
Incumbent Adam Bernbaum has been invited.

Each candidate will give a brief opening statement, followed by audience Q&A. Priority for questions goes to Calico Cat Club members, but the event is open. Questions go to the panel as a whole; discussion among candidates is encouraged. No “gotcha” questions.

This is much better than a voters’ pamphlet, show up.

Warning: This article contains graphic images of human waste.

Every morning before the doors open at Van Dyke Hardwoods on First Street, someone has to walk the alley. Trash gets scattered. Sleeping bags pile up and get abandoned. Needles turn up. There have been fires started at the back door, break-ins, and, more than once, human waste left right outside the shop.

Randy Van Dyke’s crew often cleans it up before he arrives so customers never see it. His wife’s gift-and-plant shop next door deals with the same reality, including safety concerns for female employees closing after dark. They’ve had people with machetes behind the building and have had to call police or issue trespass notices. Vehicles can’t safely stay at the shop overnight.

Van Dyke, who moved here from Montana in 2009 and has run his flooring business since then, says the pattern has grown more frequent since they opened their current location around the start of COVID. Encampments appear, drug activity shows up on cameras, and the cleanup falls on the business. He notes that people in the area often have access to food, sleeping bags, and other supplies, yet the mess and the safety issues remain. Other nearby businesses face similar break-ins and problems. For a small operator who also employs people and invests in making the building look better, these are not abstract policy debates—they are time, liability, and morale costs that arrive before the first customer.

Seegers and Van Dyke also talk about larger challenges for Clallam businesses: the gap between ordinances on the books and what gets enforced, the difficulty of investing in a nicer storefront when vandalism and disorder can erase the effort, and the sense that other places (from Bozeman to smaller towns elsewhere in Washington) maintain cleaner, safer commercial areas with different approaches to the same problems. Van Dyke has hired people working through homelessness and addiction in the past and sees potential in apprenticeship-style pathways into work, but he also sees policies that sometimes treat employment as secondary to treatment. He and Seegers discuss the value of measuring local outcomes rather than relying on approaches that have not improved conditions on the ground here.

The interview is part of a pattern that has become clearer over the past year. Businesses that host Seegers signs, donate to his campaign, or simply operate in the same environment as Van Dyke Hardwoods have been visible in ways that differ sharply from the support for his opponent. Seegers has drawn contributions and backing from a wide cross-section of local operators: foresters, a smoothie shop, a tire shop, a thrift store, a car wash, short-term rental operators, construction companies, realtors, septic companies, general contractors, restaurant owners, an auto-body repair shop, a powersports retailer, loggers, long-term rental landlords, a coffee roaster, a quarry operator, a sling manufacturer, a goldsmith, and property managers, among others.

Public Disclosure Commission filings show business contributions such as those from Bruch & Bruch Construction and OSP Sling, alongside a broad individual donor base. By contrast, filings for Mike French’s campaign list no comparable roster of business-owner donors or endorsements of that type; larger reported contributions have come primarily from activists and special interests.

After years in which Clallam’s private-sector job growth has lagged the nation, the state, and even neighboring Jefferson County on several measures—while government employment has expanded—the local employers who take the risk of providing services, hiring people, and paying taxes appear to have identified a candidate focused on public safety and conditions that let small businesses succeed. When those businesses do well, the broader economy and the tax base that supports everyone else tend to follow. The full conversation with Randy Van Dyke captures that argument in concrete, day-to-day terms from someone who lives it.

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

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A county cashier once walked off with more than $600,000 because one person took the money, recorded it, and reconciled the drawer. Shogren argues the Auditor is the last independent checkpoint before public dollars leave the treasury — and that Clallam is still rubber-stamping missing grant checks, a $5 “fee” that functions like a tax, and a $303.50 recording charge that mostly funds Olympia. Follow the money, she writes, or wait for the next unlocked drawer.

That sentence is the whole job description of a county auditor. Trust is what we owe one another as neighbors. It is not what you use to reconcile a cash drawer, approve a federal contractor, or explain a $303.50 recording fee that barely pays for recording. When government turns a blind eye, fraud does not announce itself. It finds the unlocked drawer, the unreviewed credit card, the “fee” that is really a tax, and the grant file with no paperwork.

I am running for Clallam County Auditor because that office is the last independent checkpoint before public money leaves the County Treasury. The Auditor audits claims before they are paid. The Auditor records the documents that transfer land. The Auditor signs the warrants for sixteen special districts. The Auditor is supposed to be the person who follows the money — not the person who shrugs and says the State Auditor will catch it later.

External audits catch about three percent of fraud. Tips catch forty-three percent. The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimates organizations lose roughly five percent of revenue to fraud every year, and that a typical scheme runs twelve months before anyone notices.

In small counties, the range cited for budget leakage — theft, timecard abuse, misuse of property, sloppy grant compliance — is often three to seven percent. That is not a rounding error. On a county budget, it is real money that never reaches roads, public safety, or the taxpayer’s pocket.

Here is what following the money looks like in Clallam County right now.

The unlocked cash drawer: Catherine Betts

From 2003 to 2009, Catherine Anne Betts was the cashier in the Clallam County Treasurer’s Office. She received real estate excise tax payments, recorded them, deposited them, and reconciled them — one person, start to finish. That combination is a textbook failure of internal control.

The scheme was simple and patient. Checks paid by the public were exchanged for cash from the drawer. Spreadsheets were manipulated with hidden entries. Documents were altered or destroyed. A State Auditor investigator later calculated cash shortfalls of at least $617,000; other estimates ran as high as $795,595. A jury convicted her in 2011 of aggravated first-degree theft, money laundering, and nineteen counts of filing false or fraudulent tax returns. She was sentenced to twelve years and ordered to pay more than $607,000 in restitution. Authorities never recovered the money.

The lesson is that Clallam County already knows what happens when no one separates duties, no one reviews the reconciliations, and everyone assumes the person at the window is honest. Insurance covered most of the loss. Controls would have prevented it. An Auditor who treats claim review as a rubber stamp is volunteering for the next version of the same story.

Questioned COVID dollars: statewide $1.17 billion, and a local finding

In June 2024 the Washington State Auditor released its review of how state agencies spent federal aid in fiscal year 2023. Auditors wrote a record 86 findings against 11 agencies and flagged about $1.17 billion as questioned costs — money that lacked adequate accounting to show it followed federal spending rules. More than half of those questioned dollars came from Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. Questioned costs are not the same thing as proven theft. They are the official way of saying: we cannot tell, from the file in front of us, that this was spent lawfully.

Clallam was not invisible in that era of federal money. The State Auditor’s report for the County’s 2024 books found that the County did not have adequate internal controls to ensure compliance with federal suspension and debarment rules on SLFRF (ARPA “COVID relief”) funds:

Federal law requires a check — a written certification, a contract clause, or a SAM.gov search — before paying $25,000 or more of federal money to a contractor. The County paid one contractor $31,239 without doing any of those three things.

By the time Report 1038644 was issued, the County had told the State Auditor the finding was fully corrected. Staff were now to route SLFRF purchases through grant administrators, who would verify debarment status before a contract or a disbursement.

In the same official schedule, the County still said it was only “in the process of amending its procurement policy to require that suspension and debarment required language be present in all agreements/contracts entered into by the County.” That rewrite was sitting with the civil division, delayed by “limited staff bandwidth and very high workloads,” with completion hoped for “sometime in 2026.”

An Auditor cannot rewrite federal grant law. An Auditor can refuse to treat a missing SAM.gov printout as a clerical inconvenience. Before a warrant issues on federal money, the file should show the verification. If it does not, the payment waits. That is not hostility to recovery programs. It is the minimum the federal government already required and that Clallam County, on at least one $31,239 contract, did not do.

A new per-parcel property tax dressed as a fee

On September 23, 2025, the Board of Commissioners adopted Resolution 70-2025 by a 2–1 vote and put a system of “rates and charges” on Clallam Conservation District parcels for ten years, 2026 through 2035. Most residential parcels pay $5.00 a year. The District projected about $194,600 in the first year. Over a decade, that is roughly two million dollars taken from property owners, appearing on the same statement as the property tax.

I challenged the charge in superior court as an unconstitutional tax under Article VII of the Washington Constitution and the three-factor test in Covell v. City of Seattle. A true fee is tied to a specific service or burden on the parcel that pays it. This charge funds broad, voluntary conservation programs — education, monitoring, habitat work, grant writing, technical assistance — whose benefits the District itself describes as general and community-wide. It is a flat amount, not a measured nexus to any particular lot.

Instead of support for programs, taxpayer funds have moved into operating accounts and have been used for administrative overhead and for legal defense of the very charge being challenged.

In April and May 2026 alone, “Clallam County Support Funding” — the vehicle for these parcel charges — came in at $22,975.13 and then $71,731.20. May 2026 legal bills included approximately $6,400 to the Seattle law firm Foster Garvey. The Conservation District represents that every dollar collected “stays local” – their own treasurer reports say otherwise:

The superior court granted the County and the District judgment on the pleadings and dismissed the case with prejudice on May 22, 2026. I did not accept that as the last word. I appealed. The opening brief is on file in the Court of Appeals, Division II, No. 62466-4. The question on appeal is whether a county may impose a flat per-parcel charge to fund general public programs and call it a “fee” so it never has to meet the constitutional rules that govern a tax.

Why does this belong in an Auditor’s race? Because the Auditor is the office that will keep seeing this money move — from the Treasurer’s collection, onto District warrants the Auditor’s finance staff process, through reports the public is asked to trust. If we cannot even get a clean answer to whether parcel “fees” are restricted to conservation projects or may pay overhead and litigation, we are not following the money. We are rubber-stamping a “fee” label on what functions as a tax.

Recording fees: a $303.50 first page that is mostly Olympia’s housing policy

Record a deed for anywhere in Clallam — Forks, Sequim, or Port Angeles — and the first page is $303.50. A deed of trust is $304.50. Extra pages are $1. The price does not change with the property. What has changed is that most of that first-page total is a statewide surcharge stack, not what it costs the Auditor to scan the page.

Washington still lists the old service charge in RCW 36.18.010: $5 for the first page and $1 after that. RCW 36.22.250 adds a $183 “document recording surcharge.” Of that $183 surcharge, $126.27 is remitted to the State Treasurer for three Department of Commerce accounts: $99.00 to the Home Security Fund, $23.97 to Affordable Housing for All, and $3.29 to the Landlord Mitigation Program.

RCW 36.22.185 adds an additional $100 for a “Covenant Homeownership Program assessment.”

The $100 Covenant assessment funds a statewide special-purpose credit program. The Legislature required a Covenant Homeownership Program Study — delivered in March 2024 by the National Fair Housing Alliance for the Housing Finance Commission — to document housing discrimination in Washington and to define who the program serves. https://wshfc.org/sites/default/files/2026-09/WSHFCWACHPFULLSTUDY32024.pdf

A separate research project — the University of Washington / Eastern Washington University Racial Restrictive Covenants Project — mapped tens of thousands of racially restrictive deeds and helped make a political case for the bill:

A qualifying Clallam buyer can apply. Most people who record a deed, refinance, or file an easement here will never see that $100 again.

Smaller preservation and archive add-ons push the posted first page to $303.50. A 2025 bill, HB 1858, pulled still more documents — assignments and substitutions of deeds of trust that used to be cheaper — into the high-fee stack.

On a standard first page, $57.73 stays in Clallam County the day you pay — roughly 19 cents of every recording dollar. About $225, or 74 cents of that $303.50, remits the same cycle to Olympia accounts. Some state grant money can return later for local homeless and housing work. That is real shelter funding. It is also money from a statewide pool Clallam County does not control.

Typical U.S. first-page recording fees run $10 to $50. California’s housing add-on is $75.

We should call the $303.50 what it is: a hidden tax on buying, selling, refinancing, and clearing title, charged the same in Clallam County as in King County.

As Auditor, I will show the breakdown on the fee schedule: here is the $5 service, here are the Olympia surcharges. If we want cheaper recording fees, the fight is RCW 36.22.250 and RCW 36.22.185. Until then, every closing in Clallam County is paying for metro housing policy on a rural paycheck.

A Public Integrity Unit — because the reporting path is broken

The pitch for a Public Integrity Unit starts with what has already happened here.

The State Auditor found that the executive director of the Shore Aquatic Center personally benefited from self-insurance payments, a payroll-tax refund that belonged to the district, and credit-card charges totaling more than $41,000, with additional questionable expenses behind that. Two of three County Commissioners sit on the pool district board. The Prosecutor cited a conflict and sent the matter to the Attorney General. Months passed with the director on paid leave before the district board terminated him.

A former Clallam PUD line foreman was paid $24,726 in residency stipends for living in Forks when a state audit found he was not residing there. A former DNR forest-check cruiser was accused of misappropriating about $28,800 in public funds. The “Doc Holiday” DNR land matter required a special deputy prosecuting attorney under RCW 36.27.040 and was referred to Kitsap. Public-records litigation revealed thousands of pages that should have been produced years earlier.

Clallam County has no independent place to take a suspected-employee-fraud complaint. The Sheriff’s public complaint portal is for Sheriff employees. A crime report is supposed to go to the agency with jurisdiction. That is not a reporting system. That is a closed loop.

San Bernardino County’s District Attorney maintains a Public Integrity Unit that investigates and prosecutes misuse of public funds, campaign and residency violations, bribery, timecard fraud, database abuse, and school and development schemes. The case list is not theoretical: a DA employee gambling in a county car on county time; fraudulent off-work orders; a supervisor arrested in a meeting; charter-school fund theft; payroll and travel-document fraud. The unit exists so a complaint does not have to travel through the accused person’s own chain of command.

A Clallam Public Integrity Unit does not require a new department. A part-time investigator with warrant and evidence experience, contracted as needed, would provide the county a place to send a tip that is not the suspect’s supervisor and is not the Attorney General’s 2,000-complaint-a-month inbox.

The common thread

These stories look unrelated only if you stop at the department name. COVID grant files, a cashier’s drawer, a $5 parcel line, a $303.50 recording window, a pool director’s credit card — they are the same failure in different clothing. Someone collected public money. Someone spent it, or sent it, or renamed it a fee. And the office that was supposed to look at the paper before the warrant printed treated the paper as a formality.

Deep Throat, at least in the movie, told the reporters to follow the money. The line is famous because it is ordinary. Money leaves a trail. Fees that are taxes leave a trail. Missing SAM.gov checks leave a trail. A cash drawer that only one person reconciles leaves a trail. The question in this race is whether Clallam’s Auditor will follow that trail or stamp the claim and move on.

Trust is not an internal control. Sunlight is. If you want an Auditor who follows the money — through the recording window, the grant file, the special-district warrant, and the parcel “fee” — that is the job I am asking you to hire me to do.

Virginia Shogren
Candidate for Clallam County Auditor
961 W. Oak Court, Sequim, WA 98382

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Virginia Shogren wrote this article, with research and editing assistance from an AI tool. She is a candidate for Clallam County Auditor. Neither the candidate nor her campaign paid Clallam County Watchdog for publication, and Watchdog paid nothing to the author. Learn more at virginiashogrenauditor.com.

You know Mike French is up for reelection when the paper tells you not to believe your eyes. This week’s potpourri is the gap between the official story and the street: a front report on crime dropping, a backpack taken at gunpoint, a $22-an-hour parking job, and a Colorado judge-threat suspect now on the Clallam jail roster.

The front page disconnect

You know Mike French is up for reelection when the Peninsula Daily News leads with “Police Chief: Crime, homelessness not necessarily connected in PA.”

The October 3 Emily Hanson feature treats a one-year dip as the story. Port Angeles Police Chief Brian Smith told the paper the law prohibits only specific conduct, so officers are limited when behavior is offensive but not criminal. That part is true, and it frustrates both the neighborhood and the cops who get the call. What the piece does not do is give a longer trend, count the people who stopped reporting because the same offenders cycle back onto the street, or dwell on OPNET’s lost funding, a thin 2025 patrol roster, or weakened pursuit rules.

Patrick Murphy, who works in the Prosecuting Attorney’s office and is running for District Court 1 judge, put it plainly: the comparison is 2024 to 2025, without context, and without the offenses that never make the spreadsheet.

His question is the right one. Do you trust a statistic stripped of the conditions that produced it, or what you watch happening on Front Street? Accountability is what he says he will bring to that bench.

The same feature cites a point-in-time count of 337 unhoused people in Port Angeles. The Census Bureau put the city at 20,146 in July 2025. That is about 1.67 percent of the population. The unanswered question is what share of city, county, fire, police, and NGO budgets that slice absorbs — EMT runs, police calls, harm-reduction programs, and staff time inside agencies that still describe themselves as underfunded. Most of any government budget is salary, benefits, and retirement. Even after that, the story nobody ran is the disproportion.

At some point the question is personal responsibility. Mental illness belongs in treatment. Addiction belongs in sobriety. Refusal is a choice, and it should end the claim on the taxpayer. When crime and encampments rise, and leaders tell you the rise is a misperception, that is the textbook definition of gaslighting.

At gunpoint, for a backpack

Is crime down? On September 24, just after 10:30 p.m., Port Angeles dispatch logged a different set of numbers.

A reporting party said a white male, about 40, in a black hoodie, blue pants, and black shoes stole a backpack, pulled a gun, cocked it, and aimed it. A second caller, a block south, heard the word “gun” and ran inside. Units set a perimeter near 9th and Laurel. County units checked east 9th. Officers spoke with an AM/PM employee, and asked for parking-lot video from 10:00 to 10:40. He had not heard anything, and nobody had reported a disturbance in the lot. The call cleared with a report.

Stealing a backpack, at gunpoint, on a weeknight in Port Angeles. Was that the Tuesday-night pattern here four years ago? The local paper didn’t report on this incident last month. Instead, it treated the annual spreadsheet as news.

From Mesa County to the Clallam roster

Terry Lynn Betts is listed in custody at the Clallam County Jail on the county’s public inmate roster.

In April 2016, about fifteen minutes after release from the Mesa County Jail in Grand Junction, Colorado, he walked into the City Market on Rood Avenue, asked for a pen, and wrote: “This is a robbery.” He was not armed. He later told police he wanted to be arrested again, and asked the clerks what was taking so long. He pleaded guilty to menacing and was sentenced to 18 months. From jail, he had written Chief Judge Brian Flynn asking for a life sentence, because he would be happier in prison.

In October 2018, a letter arrived for the same judge: “I plan on killing you with my 9mm handgun when I get out, which is soon. I plan on killing you for all the prison time you gave me in the past.” It was signed with Betts’s name, prison number, and date of birth. He was charged with retaliation against a judge and menacing.

That record now belongs to a man on the Clallam roster. Clallam has become a magnet for people who wore out their welcome somewhere else, and once they are booked here, the bill does not stay in Colorado. Defense counsel, food, medical care, and everything else that comes with a jail bed lands on the local taxpayer. People with this history are not staying where they were sentenced. They arrive here, and we pay for their stay.

Coffee, candidates, and a club room

The Republican Women of Clallam County are hosting both auditor candidates this Thursday, October 8, at 10 a.m. Virginia Shogren and Shoona Riggs will take questions in the club room at The Vintage Apartments, 1009 W. Brackett Road, Sequim. It is a potluck brunch. Parking is in the field behind the apartments. Seating is limited. RSVP to Tanya Unruh at tanyanewdesign@gmail.com.

The $22-per-hour parking attendant

Commissioner Mike French sits on the OlyCAP board. He voted to move county homeless funds toward Trinity United Methodist Church’s safe-parking pilot program in Sequim; the church then cuts checks to OlyCAP. The contract ceiling is $118,780 for three to five spaces.

WorkSource is now advertising the job that money buys: Safe Parking Host, through OlyCAP, in Sequim, $22 an hour, part-time, with paid time off. The shift is one hour a day, 5 to 6 p.m., five to seven days a week.

This could have been a youth service project, but now taxpayers are funding an NGO with public money for a single hour, with benefits attached. Volunteering would have looked better on a school application. Either nobody asked, or nobody wanted it. A safe parking program, or an OlyCAP jobs program?

No shelter, no animal-control deputy

Clallam no longer has a countywide open-admission animal shelter. The Sheriff’s Office contract for dangerous-dog holds now sits with Rise Rescue Alliance. On top of that, Animal Control Deputy Ed Bauck has been pulled back to the jail through January 1, 2027. Patrol still answers animal calls. That is not the same as having an animal-control officer.

A reader pointed to the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, which wrote an animal-control ordinance, put $1.5 million into San Bernardino’s shelter, and funded a mobile vet clinic for spay, neuter, vaccines, and chips. Chairman Ken Ramirez has described it as stewardship of people and animals. The local tribes have resources and a stated legacy of caring for the land and what lives on it.

Commissioner Mark Ozias has already said the board has no plan to fill this gap. A tribal partnership is an option on the table. Someone should put it there.

Page 3, before the health summary

Page 3 of the county’s annual public-health report is a land acknowledgment. It names the Jamestown S’Klallam, Lower Elwha Klallam, Makah, and Quileute tribes, honors stewardship, notes historical injustices, and commits the department to reconciliation and respect for cultural heritage, traditions, and rights.

A health department’s job is disease, sanitation, clinics, and vital records. Reconciliation is a political project. Putting it on page 3 of the annual health report, ahead of the work the levy and the general fund actually pay for, tells you which mission the letterhead prefers.

Library holds just got a lot more expensive

The library levy passed. The North Olympic Library System then voted on September 24 to spend it on outdoor hold lockers. The contract is $110,575 plus sales tax to FE Technologies, an Australian firm new to this market, against a $150,000 project budget. Port Angeles and Sequim get double units. Forks and Clallam Bay get singles. Each unit comes with a dehumidifier and a backup power supply. Maintenance is expected to run about $8,000 a year. Deployment is early 2027.

The board also authorized Executive Director Noah Glaude to approve change orders under $50,000 without returning to the board. Each locker gets a custom graphic wrap. NOLS plans to hire an artist.

The stated reasons are 24/7 pickup and privacy for people who do not want their holds sitting on an open shelf. The front desk already does that during library hours. Voters were told that if the levy failed, services would be cut. It passed, and the first new convenience is a locker, a hired artist to wrap it, and $50,000 in change-order authority the director can spend without coming back to the board.

Street legal?

If you could sum up Clallam County in one frame, it would be a derelict RV towing another RV with the front wall missing, parked in the shadow of the courthouse. Are you ready for a change yet?

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Forks Seegers / French candidate forum this morning

Jake Seegers and Mike French will be in Forks this morning (Wednesday) for the Chamber of Commerce’s Candidate Forum at Blakeslee’s Bar & Grill, 1222 S. Forks Ave, 11:30 am - 1 pm.

Teresa Fox Town Hall in Sequim this evening

Wednesday, October 7, 2026, 6:00 p.m., Sequim Prairie Grange at 290 Macleay Rd. She will open, then turn it over to the room. Incumbent Emily Randall is invited. Fox’s case is that Randall has been missing local forums while campaigning for candidates outside the state, and that the district deserves someone who shows up. She is running as a business professional and emergency manager, not a career politician. Details at foxforwa.com or info@foxforwa.com.

This morning the commissioners will read an Indigenous Peoples’ Day proclamation that no one requested, and that last year no one showed up to receive. A counter-proclamation sent September 9 is still unanswered. The reading shames the taxpayers who fund it, then clears the ground for the grants and land deals that follow.

Nobody asked

County Administrator Todd Mielke explained the rule a month ago. Proclamations get on the agenda because somebody asks. A club. A nonprofit. County employees who want a diaper drive. Staff writes it up and puts it on the calendar.

Asked at a commissioners’ forum where this one came from, Mark Ozias said he did not know if anyone requested it, and he did not recall how it began. He has been on the board eleven years. What he did recall is why he supports it. He “personally believes” the public needs a lesson in systemic discrimination, and that residents who say they had nothing to do with colonization hundreds of years ago have missed the point.

That is the origin story. Not a request. A commissioner using county letterhead for his own theory of inherited guilt. He said it is not a performance. A proclamation nobody requested, delivered to a room that nobody showed up to receive last year, is indeed a performance.

Commissioner Mike French agreed and said Ozias had explained it very well. He added a headcount: four federally recognized tribes have territory here. He also did not know how the proclamation got started.

Randy Johnson’s name is on the signature block with theirs. Three commissioners. None of them are tribal members. Salaries on the order of $118,000, paid for by taxpayers. Don’t forget, the second installment of your property taxes is due at the end of this month regardless of your ancestry, unless the land is held in exempt tribal status.

What they will not say

The proclamation does not say tribal people once lived here. It says the borders “encompass Tribal ancestral land” and that they have lived here “since time immemorial.” That is the phrase in the League of Women Voters textbooks given to third, fourth, and fifth-graders in this county.

A courtesy resolution does not rewrite a property deed. But it puts the sentence on county letterhead, so the next time a shoreline permit, a refuge handover, or Towne Road comes up, “ancestral land” is already baked into the county’s own language.

Leaving out the part that doesn’t fit

In 1847, about 150 Klallam warriors joined Suquamish fighters under Chief Seattle in an attack Suquamish oral history called a war of extermination against the Chemakum. Men were slaughtered. Women and children were taken as slaves. Klallam people then occupied that region, including today’s Port Townsend.

On May 8, 1792, Peter Puget, ashore with Vancouver’s expedition near present-day Port Townsend, found three poles topped with human skulls.

Before dawn on September 21, 1868, S’Klallam men led by Lame Jack killed seventeen Tsimshian tribal members camped on Dungeness Spit, including five women and two children. The party was resting before continuing to British Columbia. Jamestown’s own history page says captive-taking was common. Attacks, genocide, and extermination of rival tribes did a lot of damage to Indigenous peoples. The proclamation mentions none of it.

Watch the other account

Matt Walsh’s The Real History of the American Indians runs about 65 minutes, free on YouTube as What Schools Don’t Teach You About American Indians. Snow White, Cinderella, and smallpox blankets, he says, have one thing in common. They are fairy tales.

Walsh explains that raiding, scalping, and captive-taking were ordinary intertribal war practices long before Europeans arrived. The phrase "Trail of Tears" came later, after the event (many of the Indians owned black slaves who also made the journey). “Stolen land” works as a slogan, similar to the impulse behind a land acknowledgment.

Walsh’s point is simpler than the proclamation. When the United States won, it sent many of the defeated tribes to reserved land. A victorious tribe on this coast usually killed the men and took the women and children. The film is worthwhile. It is still a harder account than the “whereas” clauses in a proclamation that Mike French praises Mark Ozias for.

What the reading buys

No county money moves this morning. The vocabulary does all the work.

French chairs Recompete, the $35.6 million federal grant he is running on. One slice buys Jamestown a hydroseeder and a mini excavator so a tribal enterprise can enter a business local contractors already do. Jamestown has a budget of over $100 million, with about 213 members living in the area. The same premise of repairing historical injustices nearly led the commissioners to give Towne Road to the Jamestown corporation. The same proclamation underpins a current proposal to hand two national wildlife refuges to the Jamestown tribal government, which also runs commercial seafood harvest operations. The proclamation does not transfer the land. It tells the public the transfer would be justice.

This board let the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th arrive with no proclamation until the morning of. Shaming colonizers, with no one in the room, is a yearly ritual.

The one they ignored

On September 9, I emailed the commissioners and Administrator Mielke. I asked who requested this proclamation. I also asked that a second one be read beside it: residents of every background pay the taxes, no culture is innocent, and inherited guilt is not a governing program.

Under Mielke’s rule, a request plus draft language gets you on the calendar. Diaper-awareness week made it. Food waste made it. Dark skies made it. This proclamation did not. Nobody replied.

This was my proposed proclamation:

WHEREAS, the residents of Clallam County—of every background and ancestry—work, pay taxes, and sustain the government that serves them; and

WHEREAS, history shows that no culture or nation is without conflict or harm, and that the story of humanity is one of migration, struggle, and survival, not moral perfection; and

WHEREAS, people first arrived on this continent by migration thousands of years ago, long before modern borders existed, and all who live here today share the same earth and the same duty to treat one another with respect; and

WHEREAS, using history as a tool to divide present-day citizens or to assign inherited guilt risks deepening resentment rather than healing it; and

WHEREAS, working families in Clallam County already shoulder heavy burdens—rising costs, limited opportunities, and repeated calls to raise their own property taxes—while county funds often go to symbolic or politically fashionable projects instead of core needs such as infrastructure, public safety, and housing people can actually afford; and

WHEREAS, proclamations that emphasize virtue-signaling rather than measurable improvement distract from accountability and good government; and

WHEREAS, public officials are elected to represent all citizens equally, not to advance the interests of select organizations or donors; and

WHEREAS, lasting progress comes not from guilt or grievance, but from ensuring that every resident—regardless of ancestry—has the same chance to succeed through effort, education, and enterprise;

NOW, THEREFORE, we, the citizens of Clallam County, proclaim that unity, fairness, and shared responsibility are the foundation of a healthy community.

We call on our elected leaders to pursue fiscal responsibility, transparency, and equal respect for all taxpayers; to focus on opportunity rather than division; and to remember that the strength of this county lies not in rewriting the past, but in building a fair future together.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, we dedicate this day to the residents of Clallam County—those who keep its lights on, its roads repaired, and its spirit alive.

This morning

The board meets at 10 a.m. in the commissioners’ boardroom at the Clallam County Courthouse. The first public comment can address an agenda item, such as the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Proclamation. Remote comment is available via Zoom (click here for instructions). If you cannot be there, email all three commissioners at the Clerk of the Board: loni.gores@clallamcountywa.gov.

Comment as neighbors, not as categories. Everyone in that room is a Clallam County resident, and the outcomes worth arguing over are the same ones: roads, housing, public safety, and a tax bill that buys something real. Tell the commissioners the shaming is finished. Ancestry is not a debt, and genetics are not a governing program. Ask them who requested the proclamation. Then ask them to represent the county, and all the people who live in it.

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PABA Seegers / French forum this morning

The forum will be broadcast live on PABA’s Facebook page.

Todd Ortloff Show: Seegers / French conversation

Today – Candidate forum for Clallam County Commissioner District 3 with incumbent Mike French and challenger Jake Seegers. 1 pm on 1450AM, 101.7 (Port Angeles), 101.3 (Sequim), or listen online.

Sequim comprehenisve plan

The City of Sequim’s Planning Commission will be holding a Continued Public Hearing on the Draft 2025 Comprehensive Plan and Draft Title 18 Proposed Revisions today, Tuesday, October 6. The meeting will begin promptly at 5:30 p.m. PDT at the Sequim Civic Center (152 W Cedar St.) in the Council Chambers.

For more information, you can visit the Comprehensive Plan Page or view the meeting agenda.

Forks Seegers / French candidate forum Wednesday morning

Jake Seegers and Mike French will be in Forks on Wednesday for the Chamber of Commerce meeting for a Candidate Forum! Wednesday, October 7, Blakeslee's Bar & Grill 1222 S. Forks Ave 11:30 am - 1 pm.

Teresa Fox Town Hall Wednesday

Wednesday, October 7, 2026, 6:00 p.m., Sequim Prairie Grange at 290 Macleay Rd. She will open, then turn it over to the room. Incumbent Emily Randall is invited. Fox’s case is that Randall has been missing local forums while campaigning for candidates outside the state, and that the district deserves someone who shows up. She is running as a business professional and emergency manager, not a career politician. Details at foxforwa.com or info@foxforwa.com.

At a Sequim Rotary forum, Commissioner Mike French said Clallam County expanded harm reduction after the Jamestown Healing Clinic opened, so the program could “leverage that connection” and send active users to treatment. The county health officer who oversees that program also works at the clinic. Last year the Harm Reduction Health Center logged about 12,000 encounters and 27 on-site treatment assessments.

Much of the District 3 commissioners’ race has narrowed to one argument the public will not drop: harm reduction.

Incumbent Mike French, who also chairs the Board of Health, defends the Harm Reduction Health Center as an evidence-based program the county should stand by. Independent challenger Jake Seegers says the county should count how many people leave addiction, go back to a one-for-one needle exchange, keep naloxone available, and stop handing out smoking kits, foil, straws, and rectal “boofing” supplies.

A month before the election, Peninsula Daily News published the county’s preferred version of that argument.

The paper that cleaned it up

The October 2 piece, “Health program addresses perception,” quotes French as a supporter of best practices and Seegers as the man who says the program enables addiction. It then hands the rest of the column to Health and Human Services Deputy Director Jenny Oppelt and HRHC coordinator Lari Karan.

Oppelt walks readers through the origin story. In 2000, the Board of Health started a needle exchange. “One syringe comes in, and one syringe goes out.” Then the drug supply changed, the exchange became a syringe service program, and in 2023 it was renamed the Harm Reduction Health Center.

What the article does not say is that the county no longer runs an exchange. Participants are not required to return a used syringe. The 2025 county report lists 137,499 sterile syringes distributed and 67,244 sharps returned by participants. The same report lists 20,848 sterile pipe kits and 4,274 “other injection alternatives.” The offering includes foil, straws, and boofing kits. The old program and the current one share a building and a press release. They are not the same policy.

“We do not provide substances,” Oppelt stated in the article, which only means the county does not hand out drugs. But in 2023, it tried to. Jake Seegers reported that commissioners approved a plan to take illegal drugs from addicts, test them, and give those same drugs back. A county risk manager stopped it over legal and financial liability, so the program never launched. The county did not try to supply the substance. It did try to accept it, test it, and return it for use. That is more than the paper admits.

Then the success story. Oppelt says Clallam had 46 overdose deaths in 2023, the most on record, and 22 accidental drug overdose deaths in 2025, about a 51 percent drop. The next sentence in the Peninsula Daily News story is a tell: “Harm reduction is not the only reason for that increase.” They meant decrease. But the slip fits the argument. The paper treats the drop in deaths as the center’s success, then concedes that the Jamestown clinic and other outreach did much of the work.

Port Angeles Fire Department has already claimed a large share of that decline for Operation Shielding Hope, the community-paramedic response that started engaging overdose survivors who used to walk away.

The Jamestown clinic, which opened in 2022 and operates a mobile unit dosing clinic in Clallam Bay since March 2024, belongs in the picture too. So does the national fall in overdose deaths after fentanyl’s peak. Seegers has also pointed at the longer curve: from the year Allison Berry became health officer, 2018, through the local peak, Clallam’s overdose deaths rose far faster than Washington’s or the nation’s. A two-year drop after a record year is not a reason to hand out unlimited supplies.

The client spotlight does the rest of the work. Kristyn Milom, who does not use drugs, says she goes for nutrition drinks, cold compresses, and tampons, and that staff sees her as a human being.

Hygiene items and a clothing closet are real needs. Serenity House, TAFY, food banks, and a long list of other providers also offer them. Seven pages of free-food options in this county do not require a stop at the syringe counter. Using a homeless woman who needs tampons to soften a debate about meth pipes is your local government and legacy media colluding to propagandize.

What French said when the paper was not writing it

Last week, at the Sequim Rotary candidate forum, French said he wanted to clear up misconceptions.

“So, the first thing is, yes, Clallam County had an expansion of harm reduction a few years ago. A lot of that was response to, again, the Jamestown Healing Center opening, and harm reduction being a way to create a connection with active drug users so that you can leverage that connection to get them to go to treatment. So that’s the desire behind that expansion.”

That is the bluntest public explanation yet of why the program grew. The MAT Clinic opened in Sequim in 2022. The county renamed and broadened the program in 2023. French’s own account ties the expansion to the clinic: meet users with supplies, then move them to Medication-Assisted Treatment.

Jamestown is not a volunteer booth. The tribe runs the Healing Clinic as part of a profitable health enterprise. CC Watchdog has already reported the scale of that billing. By Mike French’s own account at the Sequim Rotary forum, the county expanded its taxpayer-funded supply program after the Jamestown Healing Clinic opened, specifically to create a connection with active users and move them into that clinic.

In his rebuttal to French, Jake Seegers did not argue about how many supplies went out. He argued about what happened next: 27 on-site treatment assessments out of about 12,000 encounters last year. “That’s a terrible conversion rate,” he 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.” If the expansion was about treatment, the county’s own tally, as Seegers read it, says it failed.

Health Officer Allison Berry oversees this arrangement. The Board of Health appointed her (then Allison Berry Unthank) on September 4, 2018. She already worked at Jamestown Family Health Clinic. She is now also health officer for Jefferson County, and the state Board of Health bio lists her part-time work in primary care and substance-use treatment at the Jamestown Healing Clinic. One of Berry’s employers, the County, writes the harm-reduction policy. The other employer, Jamestown, treats the patients that policy is supposed to produce, and gets paid for the visits. French chairs the board that keeps her in the first job. Nobody at Peninsula Daily News thought that was worth mentioning.

The Indiana story, and the budget cut he wants credit for

French then told the room the county has since cut the harm reduction program. He said he talked to Jamestown, Peninsula Behavioral Health, community paramedics, and 4PA. Joe DeScala of 4PA, French said, told him about half the supplies recovered on cleanups were unused. Staffing at the HRHC was reduced. Supplies were scaled back. Told that way, it sounds like a commissioner who heard the public and trimmed the waste.

Seegers answered with the other half of the story. The reduction followed the loss of state grant funding. The board didn't discover restraint after years of complaints. Full-time employees and drug-use supplies came down because the money dried up. French called it a course correction. Seegers called it a hole in the budget.

French closed with rural Indiana. He called the current local program evidence-based, and warned what happens if services like these are removed.

Scott County, Indiana, experienced a real outbreak in 2014 and 2015. About 215 HIV infections were eventually tied to it, in a town of roughly 4,200, almost all from injecting drugs with shared equipment. The county had about five HIV diagnoses in the prior decade. Indiana banned syringe sales without a prescription and did not allow needle exchanges. Possession could be a felony. The governor authorized a temporary exchange in 2015 after dozens of cases were already confirmed. Sharing then fell sharply. One study of participants found about an 88 percent drop in syringe sharing.

That is an argument for sterile syringes in a place that had none, during an injection outbreak of HIV. It is not an argument for Clallam County in 2026.

Clallam has had a syringe program since 2000. It is not facing a Scott County-style HIV cluster. The Indiana emergency program was a restricted exchange plus testing, contact tracing, and treatment. It was not a service desk for meth pipes, foil, straws, and boofing kits, and it was not needs-based distribution of hundreds of syringes with no return required.

Researchers credited sterile syringes, not a wider selection of crack pipes to choose from. Austin, Indiana, was an injection-driven HIV outbreak. The intervention tied to the drop in sharing and new infections was a syringe-services program: sterile needles, a place to return used ones, and a link to testing and treatment. That finding does not cover pipes, foils, or the rest of a safer-use menu.

Clallam County’s Harm Reduction Health Center does both. It runs syringe services and also hands out safer-smoking supplies, along with naloxone, test strips, wound care, and referrals. Using Indiana to defend the whole center treats evidence for one tool as evidence for the entire package.

Just like a seatbelt study can justify using seatbelts. It cannot justify handing out the rest of the car.

French wants both sides at once. The harm reduction program had to grow to feed Jamestown’s clinic. The program also had to be cut because unused supplies were piling up in cleanups. And the cut program is still the evidence-based model that stands between Clallam County and an HIV outbreak from a state that outlawed syringes. Those claims do not survive contact with each other.

The choice on the ballot

Seegers is not proposing to take naloxone away. He is proposing to measure the thing French says the expansion was for. How many people leave addiction. He would return syringe access to a one-for-one exchange, which is how this county ran the program for years, and drop the county-issued kits for smoking and rectal use. French has now said, in front of a Rotary club, that the broader program was built to move people into the Jamestown’s clinic. The county’s report says 27 assessments came out the other end.

Peninsula Daily News had the interviews, the website, and the death counts. It did not have the Rotary quote, Berry’s dual jobs, the 27 referrals, or the difference between an exchange and a supply desk. Readers can decide whether that was an oversight or another reason local papers are in decline. The timing, a month before the election, does not make the omission look accidental.

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PABA Seegers / French Forum on Tuesday

The forum will be broadcast live on PABA’s Facebook page.

Todd Ortloff Show: Seegers / French conversation

Tuesday – Candidate forum for Clallam County Commissioner District 3 with incumbent Mike French and challenger Jake Seegers. 1 pm on 1450AM, 101.7 (Port Angeles), 101.3 (Sequim), or listen online.

Teresa Fox Town Hall Wednesday

Wednesday, October 7, 2026, 6:00 p.m., Sequim Prairie Grange at 290 Macleay Rd. She will open, then turn it over to the room. Incumbent Emily Randall is invited. Fox’s case is that Randall has been missing local forums while campaigning for candidates outside the state, and that the district deserves someone who shows up. She is running as a business professional and emergency manager, not a career politician. Details at foxforwa.com or info@foxforwa.com.

In this Sundays With Seegers, commissioner candidate Jake Seegers addresses a rumor head-on. Everyone has heard the stories: people struggling with addiction and homelessness are being transported to Port Angeles from communities across Washington. Public records show that, at least in the treatment system, transportation from outside the county is not a rumor—it happens. The more important question is what happens after people arrive.

The Question Residents Keep Asking

During an April Public Safety Town Hall, Mike French was asked whether Clallam County’s homelessness and harm-reduction services are drawing people from outside the area. He said he does not have definitive data. His answer was still “generally no.”

He offered remoteness instead. Someone with a warrant elsewhere, he suggested, might head for a place less connected to the community they are trying to leave. He also warned against blaming outsiders. “The focus right now is on finger-pointing,” he said, and treating arrivals as “not our community” would be “an abdication of our responsibility.”

That does not answer the question residents were asking. If remoteness is the main draw, why are so many people concentrated exactly where the services are? And it does not address a narrower claim: that public agencies, hospitals, courts, and treatment systems are moving vulnerable people from elsewhere in Washington to Port Angeles. They are, and the history of a treatment facility at Fifth and Race shows how that happens.

French returned to the subject in a later debate, after he and Jake Seegers were asked about homeless, addicted, and mentally ill people being bused to Port Angeles. French said:

“This is something that obviously, like, I’ve heard since I’ve been in public office from individuals. People have the right to move around the country; that’s how America works. So, people move around. People come here, people leave here, there’s nothing we can do to stop that.”

On the constitutional point, he is right. Americans can move where they choose, and government should not decide where someone is allowed to live. Choosing to travel here is not the same thing as a hospital, court, or treatment system sending someone here.

A $450,000 State Grant

The story begins in 2014 with the former Port Angeles Care Center at 825 E. Fifth Street.

CRALI Properties, associated with Craig Phillips of American Behavioral Health Systems (ABHS), purchased the former nursing home for $175,000. Phillips told the Peninsula Daily News that Specialty Services, a business under the ABHS umbrella, had received a $450,000 grant from the Washington Department of Social and Health Services to purchase the building, remodel it, and establish treatment there. The money was part of a $2.6 million legislative appropriation intended to establish eight 16-bed inpatient treatment centers around Washington.

But Specialty Services was not simply opening another business.

Operating a residential chemical-dependency treatment facility at that location required a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) from the City of Port Angeles, and the proposal sparked significant debate among neighbors. The initial plan called for a 16-bed inpatient treatment center, with an additional 16-bed detoxification center proposed for the same building if funding could be secured.

Supporters argued that people struggling with addiction were safer in treatment than on the streets.

Danetta Rutten, a former Clallam County probation officer who lived in the neighborhood, told the Peninsula Daily News that there was “nothing to fear” from the treatment center.

“And I live in this neighborhood, too,” Rutten said.

“We have more to fear about what’s on the corner and what’s walking the street not in treatment than we have to fear with people that are in treatment.”

But some neighbors raised a concern that would become particularly relevant in the years ahead: What would happen when patients brought to Port Angeles from elsewhere left the facility or completed treatment?

Pamela Blakeman put the concern bluntly:

“If the clinic is approved, the town needs to be ready to absorb more needy people.”

Other residents raised concerns about transportation and whether people brought to Port Angeles from other parts of the state would actually return home—or remain in the community.

Many of those concerns sound remarkably familiar today.

ABHS representatives attempted to address them.

The proposed facility would provide residential treatment for people requiring short-term detoxification or longer-term substance-abuse treatment.

ABHS representatives sought to reassure neighbors that patients would be supervised while in treatment and that the facility would not simply release people into the surrounding neighborhood.

And there was another important assurance:

Clallam County residents would be prioritized.

As reported by Peninsula Daily News, Sally Beaven, then director of Specialty Services, promised:

“We’ve come to fill a need.”

Craig Phillips echoed,

“I know from 30 years of experience that if there’s no inpatient treatment on the Peninsula, then the 16 beds will be full all the time.”

The Promise to Prioritize Locals

That wasn’t merely a talking point; it became a condition of the permit.

When the Planning Commission approved the conditional use permit, it imposed five conditions. Condition No. 4 stated plainly:

“The applicants will prioritize occupancy for Clallam County residents.”

The permit was initially approved for twelve months, through June 11, 2015. Continued operation beyond that date was subject to review based on compliance with the CUP conditions.

When the City conducted that review in 2015, Assistant Planner Scott Johns recommended extending the permit indefinitely, stating:

“All 5 original conditions of approval have been met by the applicant.”

But the City’s justification for determining that the local-priority requirement had been satisfied is revealing.

Immediately beneath the requirement that Specialty Services “prioritize occupancy for Clallam County Residents,” the City’s review stated:

“SSII (Specialty Services 2) has remained inclusive of all counties in the State of Washington, including Clallam County.”

Those are not the same standard.

Prioritizing Clallam County residents means giving Clallam County residents preference.

Being inclusive of all counties means treating Clallam County as one county among 39.

Yet City staff concluded that all five conditions had been satisfied and recommended extending the permit indefinitely.

Nathan West, then Port Angeles’ Director of Community and Economic Development and now City Manager, approved the extension.

A treatment facility established in Port Angeles with state funding had been permitted with an explicit requirement to prioritize Clallam County residents. Yet when the City later reviewed compliance with that requirement, it apparently treated serving patients from throughout Washington as sufficient.

Then City Council Erased the CUP

Even a weak condition is still a condition—until the code changes.

Six years later, that is exactly what happened.

In December 2021, the Port Angeles City Council adopted Ordinance 3688 as part of a broader effort to increase residential building capacity, provide greater flexibility for housing development, and remove regulatory barriers to new housing.

Mike French was serving on the Port Angeles City Council at the time. He has since pointed to those housing reforms as contributing to the multifamily, duplex, and ADU development now occurring in Port Angeles.

“On housing, eight or nine years ago, when I was at the city, I was one of the people advocating for some common-sense reforms to make it so that we have more housing options and types available. We did regulatory reforms to make sure that we weren’t putting up barriers in front of housing developers and increasing costs for no reason. We had zoning reform, including setbacks, minimum lot sizes, things like that, and then adding incentives. We added a multifamily housing tax exemption so that people who wanted to build four units or larger could get a small property tax break, or, if they promised affordability, a larger property tax break. And then I would say that, eight or nine years later, you can walk around Port Angeles and see those housing types being constructed. You can see, probably two or three blocks away, a duplex being built across from Hamilton. Go up to 14th and E, a couple blocks off 14th, and you can see a whole neighborhood of duplexes being built… Those duplexes that you can walk around and see being built, or a lot of times some of the ADUs, they were illegal to build eight years ago. So we made the changes”

But the sweeping zoning changes had another consequence.

They made treatment facilities an outright permitted use. Specialty Services therefore no longer needed the Conditional Use Permit that had governed the facility—including its explicit requirement that “the applicants will prioritize occupancy for Clallam County Residents.”

In response to a public-records request asking the City for the current Conditional Use Permit governing Specialty Services, City Clerk Kari Martinez-Bailey confirmed that the old CUP no longer governed the use:

“Council made the use permitted out right in December 2021 with Ordinance 3688, therefore the CUP we provided has been non-applicable for at least five years.”

In other words, the zoning change eliminated the need for the conditional-use approval that had contained the local-priority requirement.

The original local guarantee and the leverage to enforce it disappeared with Ordinance 3688, passed by Mike French.

No Longer Local

Local leaders did not hold ABHS to the requirement to prioritize Clallam County residents. Eventually, that requirement disappeared altogether.

Specialty Services once offered both detoxification and inpatient treatment for men and women. Its Conditional Use Permit also explicitly required the facility to prioritize Clallam County residents.

Without that mandate, the model changed dramatically.

Specialty Services II now operates as an inpatient treatment center for men only. Detoxification is no longer offered. That represents the loss of a critical component of local recovery services. For someone dependent on fentanyl and ready to enter recovery, detox may be necessary before transitioning into residential inpatient treatment.

Specialty Services is no longer required to prioritize Clallam County residents and provide the same spectrum of treatment services originally envisioned for the local community.

After repeated attempts to reach Specialty Services management to arrange a sit-down meeting were unsuccessful, I began speaking with current and former employees.

What they told me deserves attention.

The employees I spoke with estimated that a large majority of the patients they encounter come from outside Clallam County. One estimated the number could be as high as 90%.

Those are employee estimates, not independently verified patient data. But they raise an important question: How did a treatment facility established with public funding and originally permitted with an explicit requirement to prioritize Clallam County residents evolve into one that primarily serves patients brought in from elsewhere?

A Statewide Pipeline

Parent company American Behavioral Health Systems (ABHS) does not exclusively serve Clallam County.

The organization has a longstanding relationship with the Washington Department of Corrections to provide residential substance-use treatment for people involved with the criminal-justice system. That includes participants in Washington’s Drug Offender Sentencing Alternative, or DOSA.

DOSA allows eligible individuals to receive substance-use treatment as part of an alternative criminal sentence. But placement in residential treatment is not the same as incarceration.

ABHS is not a jail. A DOSA participant can physically walk away at any time.

That does not mean leaving is permitted under the terms of the person’s sentence or that there are no consequences. Walking away from required treatment can constitute a DOSA violation and result in DOC or court action.

But ABHS employees are treatment providers, not correctional officers. They do not operate a secure correctional facility designed to physically prevent a patient from leaving.

That distinction is important.

It means someone involved with the criminal-justice system can be transported from another Washington community to an ABHS treatment facility and then leave before completing treatment. Once outside the facility, the treatment provider cannot simply detain that person as a correctional institution could.

And that possibility is not merely hypothetical.

There are documented cases elsewhere in Washington involving DOSA participants or other justice-involved individuals who entered ABHS treatment, left or failed to complete the program, and were subsequently implicated in serious criminal incidents in the communities where they had been placed.

What Can Happen When Someone Walks Away

In March of this year, police in Chehalis arrested Moises Castillo Flores, a Walla Walla man who prosecutors said was supposed to be serving a residential DOSA at ABHS.

According to The Chronicle, Castillo Flores had recently abandoned treatment. Police subsequently arrested him for allegedly breaking into Mint City Coffee Roasting. He also had an active warrant from Walla Walla County.

That doesn’t mean everyone who leaves treatment commits a crime. But it demonstrates something important:

An out-of-county DOSA participant can be placed at an ABHS treatment center, leave treatment, and remain in the community where that facility is located.

An older, far more serious example exists.

In 2012, convicted felon Charles Wallace was released from the Spokane County Jail into the care of ABHS for inpatient drug treatment. According to a timeline later released by the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, Wallace left treatment within days.

Weeks later, Wallace shot Spokane County Sheriff’s Deputies Matt Spink and Mike Northway during a traffic stop before ultimately killing himself following a pursuit.

That makes the transportation and discharge process especially important.

The Transportation Disconnect

I have spoken with local law-enforcement officers, service providers, and people actively using drugs who describe the same troubling pattern: people are transported to Port Angeles from outside Clallam County for treatment at Specialty Services, then complete treatment or leave the program early and remain in the community.

Current and former employees described efforts to arrange transportation when patients leave. But they also said patients are not necessarily escorted to the bus station or placed aboard transportation that will actually take them home.

That is a far cry from what Specialty Services’ director told the community in 2014.

At the time, residents were assured that patients simply wanted to get better and return home—and that those leaving the facility would be provided return bus tickets, with a service provider making sure they actually got on the bus home.

Despite her support for the facility, Kathy Wahto, then executive director of Serenity House, offered a warning that now sounds remarkably visionary:

“Local people must currently go out-of-area for inpatient treatment. Too many never return home safely. Exiting treatment into a strange community without the support of a caring family often reverts in immediate reversion to addiction.”

That was the danger she identified in 2014: sending vulnerable people into treatment far from their homes and support networks can leave them stranded in an unfamiliar community when treatment ends or fails.

More than a decade later, the concern has been reversed.

Instead of Clallam County residents being sent elsewhere and potentially stranded there, employees, service providers, law enforcement, and people living within the local drug culture describe patients being transported here from communities across Washington—and some remaining here after their treatment ends.

The original CUP attempted to provide at least one safeguard by requiring Specialty Services to prioritize Clallam County residents. That condition is gone. The detox program is gone. And the assurances about transportation home deserve renewed scrutiny.

Local leaders helped create Clallam County’s own Hotel California for patients brought here from across the state:

They can check out any time they like—but they may never leave.

Then I Heard From Leia

After I began talking publicly about this issue, I heard from a former driver for Dungeness Line.

Her name is Leia.

She described driving the shuttle route between SeaTac, Seattle hospitals, and Port Angeles.

She said she began noticing a pattern.

Several times a week, she recalled picking up passengers at Virginia Mason Medical Center who were headed to Port Angeles. According to Leia, passengers openly discussed detox, treatment, homelessness, and addiction. They had been instructed to travel to the treatment facility near Fifth and Race.

But the shuttle did not take them there. Its final stop was Gateway Transit Center in downtown Port Angeles. And, according to Leia, nobody was waiting for them.

“When the shuttle pulled into the Gateway Transit Center, there was no one there to meet them.”

She says they dropped the passengers downtown and told them which city bus to take to reach the treatment facility.

One passenger particularly stuck with her.

He told Leia that he had just spent several days detoxing at Virginia Mason. While he was there, his boyfriend had died from an overdose. He described homelessness, addiction, and an estranged family.

When the shuttle reached Port Angeles, Leia asked whether somebody from the treatment center was meeting him.

According to her account, nobody was.

He and another passenger told her they had simply been given directions for the city bus that would take them to treatment.

Leia is careful about what she is—and isn’t—claiming.

She does not blame Dungeness Line. The shuttle company was simply providing transportation. And she does not claim that these passengers necessarily failed to reach treatment.

Her concern is the gap:

“It seems risky to discharge people directly from detox, transport them to a different community, and then expect them to find their own way across town using public transportation without anyone meeting them.”

Her proposed solution is remarkably simple: communication between the sending hospital and receiving treatment center so somebody can meet vulnerable patients and ensure they actually arrive.

And then: make sure that they get home.

So are People Being Bussed Here?

For treatment, yes—evidence shows people are transported to Port Angeles from elsewhere in Washington.

That statement should not be stretched beyond what the evidence establishes.

The documents do not prove that every out-of-county patient becomes homeless here. Leia’s account does not establish how many transported patients fail to reach Specialty Services. Nor have I found public data showing how many Specialty Services patients originate in Clallam County versus elsewhere.

Those numbers should be made public.

But we don’t need speculation to identify the policy questions.

The original Port Angeles treatment facility was established with a $450,000 state grant. Its CUP required prioritizing Clallam County residents. The City’s own 2015 review acknowledged admissions from throughout Washington while nevertheless concluding that the permit conditions had been satisfied. Later zoning changes made the CUP itself inapplicable.

Meanwhile, ABHS participates in statewide treatment systems, including DOC-funded treatment, and firsthand testimony describes people traveling from Seattle-area hospitals to downtown Port Angeles before navigating the final leg to treatment on their own.

Those are facts worth examining.

Treatment Itself Isn’t the Problem

This is where an important distinction matters.

I support local treatment.

People battling fentanyl, methamphetamine, and alcohol addiction need somewhere to go when they decide they want help.

I want capacity for both men and women.

Port Angeles once had co-ed residential treatment and withdrawal management/detoxification at the same Fifth Street location with a mandate to treat locals first.

Today, this ABHS location provides inpatient treatment to men only.

I have met people trapped in addiction and living outside who are waiting for treatment. I have asked them: Why not ABHS?

The answers are often the same:

They don’t offer detox.
They don’t treat women.

I want detox back at Specialty Services.

I want a written protocol that Clallam residents are first in line for scarce beds, and that no one is discharged into our parks and public spaces after they are brought here from other communities.

It’s time to work with our local treatment provider — the one that promised to “come fill a [local] need” — to make these changes.

Treatment is not the enemy.

An unlocked statewide funnel with no local duty is.

Leadership Had a Tool

The 2014 CUP required local priority and a one-year look-back. Staff converted “prioritize” into “include.”

Then, in 2021, the City Council—with Mike French serving as a councilmember—changed the zoning and made the treatment use permitted outright. According to the City Clerk, that made the old CUP “non-applicable.”

With it went the condition requiring local priority.

ABHS switched gears and transformed into a statewide pipeline — including DOC and hospital discharge desks — into our community.

We keep hearing that services are not a magnet.
We keep seeing otherwise.

Our treatment slots, outreach hours, jail beds, and sidewalks are finite. When they are consumed by people sent here for a program that they can walk away from, Clallam residents wait longer for the help we were promised ABHS would deliver.

The history of Specialty Services shows how a program originally presented as a local resource can evolve into part of a statewide system.

The next step is not to demonize treatment or the people who need it.

It is to insist on transparent numbers, reliable transportation protocols, clear responsibility when somebody leaves treatment, and an honest accounting of whether the system is meeting the needs of the community in which it operates.

That is a conversation that Clallam County, Port Angeles, and ABHS must be willing to have.

What Can You Do?

Clallam County once had a local detox and residential program for men and women, with a permit condition that locals come first. Detox is gone. The women’s beds are gone. The local-priority rule is gone.

Email the Clallam County commissioners at loni.gores@clallamcountywa.gov and the Port Angeles City Council at council@cityofpa.us. Ask for a local detox facility that accepts both men and women and puts Clallam County residents first in line for scarce beds. Ask that no one brought here from another community be discharged onto our sidewalks, parks, or transit center.

A short note is enough. Say you live here, and say what you want back.

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

Jake Seegers told the Board of Commissioners that the Climate Element portion of the Comprehensive Plan is written for government, nonprofits, and activists — not for the people who own the land. Then Futurewise attorney Brooke Frickleton asked them not to adopt it, called the vulnerability study only “one step,” and cited the group’s new Thurston County win: planning without hard, action-forcing policies is not enough. That was a preview of a lawsuit coming to Clallam County.

Who Futurewise is

Brooke Frickleton spoke to the commissioners on Tuesday via Zoom. She works for Futurewise, a Seattle land-use group that polices the Growth Management Act. The Futurewise method is simple: comment on a Comp Plan, then sue the county before the Growth Management Hearings Board if the language isn't strict enough.

In a normal year, Futurewise runs 15 to 20 active appeals. It advertises that it wins about 70 percent of them. This statewide Comp Plan cycle, it expected that caseload to triple.

What they want is not another study. They want action-forcing policies — timelines, named departments, measurable targets, and “shall” instead of “encourage.” Thurston County already learned that. Futurewise challenged its climate element. The Hearings Board called the county “clearly erroneous.” Frickleton brought that ruling into Clallam’s chambers as the new standard.

Someone did the job the Commissioners would not

House Bill 1181 requires fully planning counties, including Clallam, to add a climate resilience section to the Comp Plan. It does not require Clallam to pay for a Climate Vulnerability Assessment, lock the most aggressive temperature forecasts into the plan, or turn soft words like “promote,” “encourage,” and “explore” into a 20-year enforcement manual.

The County’s own draft Climate Element admits Clallam “is not required to address” the greenhouse-gas reduction section.

Then it brags that staff “exceeded the minimum requirements of HB 1181.” That is not compliance. That is a choice.

Jake Seegers named the funding source during his public comment: Climate Commitment Act funds. He named the consultant: Cascadia Consulting. He named the product: the most extreme climate story they could write and still call it science.

The Climate Vulnerability Assessment (CVA) cover page even carries the CCA logo. The acknowledgements list Diane Harvey first, then Bruce Emery and Tim Havel, then Cascadia’s Mary Ann Rozance, Abigail Lambert, Alyssa Rodriguez, Meg Horst, and Sebastian Espinosa. This is not a mystery document. These are the authors.

After the hearing, Jake put it in writing to the commissioners and Director Emery:

Commissioners and Director Emery,

It was a mistake to undertake a Climate Vulnerability Assessment built around extreme assumptions and to have the process spearheaded by activists already committed to a particular climate-policy perspective.

You have now provided Futurewise with ammunition to demand additional restrictions on Clallam County property owners for years to come.

The CVA should be rewritten using reasonable assumptions, clearly stated uncertainties, and a balanced assessment of risks before the Comprehensive Plan is finalized.

The people of Clallam County will not be intimidated or directed by threats from Futurewise.

I hope that you won’t be either.

Kind regards,

Jake Seegers

That is what a constituent sounds like when he still thinks the Board represents him.

The study picked the hottest numbers, then treated them as fact

Clallam Climate Vulnerability

10.4MB ∙ PDF file

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Open page 14 of the assessment Jake marked up.

NOAA: “Since 1895, Clallam’s average annual temperature is up 1.4°F.” That is 130 years of actual record.

Next sentence: “By the end of the century, average summer maximum temperatures are projected to rise 9°F from a historical baseline of 68.4°F.” The source is Abatzoglou and Brown, 2012 — MACA, a method more than a decade old. Jake’s note on the page is the whole argument: MACA is a computer method that takes big global climate models and paints them onto a local map. “Highest end of predictions” means they did not use a middle forecast. They used the hottest example in that stack.

The next line — that this warming “will bring significant consequences” — cites the North Olympic Development Council, the NGO on whose board Commissioner Mark Ozias sits. The county farms the science to an NGO behind closed doors. A sitting commissioner presides over that NGO. The same man then votes on the plan when it comes back to the dais. That is not independent analysis. That is a glaring conflict of interest.

Page 15 then admits the CVA “primarily uses” RCP 8.5. That is the “business-as-usual,” highest-emissions pathway. It projects about 4.3°C (7.7°F) of global warming by 2100. That is not a middle estimate. That is the top of the stack used as if it were the county thermometer.

Page 14: “The rate of human-induced climate change far outpaces natural variability (Perlwitz, 2017).”

Jake told the Board: go look it up. The paper is a chapter on large-scale circulation and climate variability. It does not carry the slogan the way the CVA uses it. That slogan is now in a land-use document. Once the Comp Plan adopts it, staff will not have to re-prove the science every time they touch your file. A wider buffer, a climate overlay, a well restriction, a denied bulkhead, a “managed retreat” line — each one can be sold as consistency with the plan the County already chose. “We’re just following the science” will mean: we locked the hottest assumption into the bible, and now we are enforcing the bible.

The assessment even photographs the target. Pages 7–8 show 3 Crabs Road under king-tide water and treat the pictures as proof that climate planning must swallow shoreline property.

The Comp Plan draft already points toward overlays, high-risk zoning, climate language on property, and “long-term visioning” that includes managed retreat. The Marine Resources Committee told Commissioner Mark Ozias to change “should” to “shall,” treat climate forecasts as binding, and put a biologist on Critical Areas and shoreline files. Tribal trust land is exempt; your property is not.

Deaths, “especially Tribal elders,” and two sets of rules

Page 24 of the CVA leans on the 2021 heat dome: 126 official heat-related deaths statewide, then “441 more people died during this period than expected.” Jake’s margin note: There were a lot of excess deaths in 2021, not just heat.

Overdose deaths in this county were part of that year. Heat was real. Turning a contested statewide number into Comp Plan gospel is how you manufacture urgency and then regulate against it.

Then comes the sorting of people. Same page: “vulnerable groups like older adults, especially Tribal elders, and those with chronic health conditions.” Jake asked an honest question: why are tribal elders “especially” compared with every other older adult in Clallam County? Heat does not check tribal enrollment. Policy does.

Page 17 lists “frontline communities”: seniors, mobile-home residents, the chronically ill, low-income households, Tribal communities, seasonal visitors, outdoor workers.

Workshop notes from the County’s own process said the same thing: “older adults, especially for Tribal elders.” The draft Climate Element repeats the same thing. Food banks and a list of NGOs get listed as “climate resilience.” The property owner trying to take care of a parcel gets listed as something to regulate.

Jake named the two-tier county out loud. Nonprofits stay “safely above the fray,” he said, “despite their contribution to the environmental catastrophe on Tumwater Creek.” Property owners keep losing. The fix?: Meet House Bill 1181 only; do not exceed it. And if the Board actually worked for the people, it would stop treating a house and a parcel as a problem and start treating them as this county’s greatest private asset—including common-sense room for vacation rentals and short-term uses —instead of another round of bans.

On trust land, the Jamestown Tribe runs its own environmental process under TEPA. County Critical Areas Code does not apply the way it does on a private tax parcel.

CC Watchdog documented the Tribe’s TEPA notice to expand the driving range at Cedars at Dungeness: grade the site and fill part of a Class III wetland. Once that course went into trust, it left the county rulebook that still governs your buffers, wells, and shoreline work.

Same watershed. Rural well owners get lectured on every gallon. The CVA writes “especially Tribal elders” into the climate study. An 18-hole, water-heavy golf course does not sit under the same county code. That is not one environmental standard. That is two sets of rules.

Harvey, Cascadia, and the office that wrote the record

Diane Harvey, Code Enforcement and Special Projects Manager, is listed as project lead on the CVA. This site has already shown her asking the Planning Commission for more enforcement fees, more discretion, and mass notices that make people “fold” once they see the Hearing Examiner. The same office that wants a thicker whip is helping write the climate chapter that will justify the next round of “violations.”

Cascadia Consulting is the hired pen. The County paired the Hazard Mitigation Plan with the Climate Element and paid Cascadia hundreds of thousands to do both. Cascadia has also worked with the North Olympic Development Council and the Jamestown Tribe. CC Watchdog has reported Cascadia’s use of ICLEI tools. ICLEI is the German-based network that sells local governments software, methods, and a global “movement” vocabulary. The NODC — the nonprofit Commissioner Ozias has led — recruited local governments toward ICLEI membership and even offered to help pay dues. NODC and the Tribe have been ICLEI members. That is not a planning department finding science in a file cabinet. That is a consultant-nonprofit-tribal circuit writing the assumptions, then sending them to the dais for a vote.

Bruce Emery is the DCD director. The Climate Element is his department’s product. The Planning Commission is only advisory. Jake said it: you three make the call. You own every sentence and every restriction that follows. He told the commissioners, you are responsible for this.

The Board’s pattern is not courage. It is delay until the activist draft is the only draft left, then a shrug that the State or Futurewise “made us.” Secure entry at the courthouse sat unfinished for years after a 2017 mandate, as Jake noted, while this 600-plus-page Comp Plan is being rushed as if the people were the problem. Waiting on a luggage scanner took nearly a decade. Waiting for property owners is treated as heresy.

A Comp Plan is not a brochure. It is the 20-year instruction book for Critical Areas, shoreline rules, housing, wells, rentals, and what “climate risk” means when you want to pull a permit. Extreme assumptions in, extreme code out. Futurewise does not need to invent a record. Harvey, Cascadia, and CCA dollars already typed it.

Jake asked for leaders who will take a risk for the people, not for the government. This Board has shown the opposite habit: protect the process, protect the nonprofits, protect the consultants, and tell the owner to wait his three minutes and thank them for their comment.

How threats of a lawsuit work — and why the Washington State Association of Counties, led by Clallam’s own commissioners, will not stand in the way — is the next story. Stay tuned for Part II.

Tuesday, October 13, 10:30 a.m. — pack the room

Do not send one polite email and stay home. Sit where they have to see you.

Tell them to rewrite the CVA with reasonable assumptions and stated uncertainty — not RCP 8.5 dressed up as destiny, not “especially Tribal elders,” not 441 excess deaths treated as a local land-use finding. Tell them to meet HB 1181 only. Tell them Futurewise does not get a veto. Tell them property owners are not the climate problem.

Write all three commissioners through Clerk Loni Gores at loni.gores@clallamcountywa.gov and write DCD Director Bruce Emery at Bruce.Emery@clallamcountywa.gov.

If they will not serve the people in the room, they should not be shocked when the room stops treating them as a government.

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This article and podcast were delayed due to a power outage.

If you want a snapshot of Clallam County right now, skip the official talking points. Look at the boycott threats, the “voter-approved” fee voters never approved, the homeless-voting flyer that treats ID as optional, and the grant money that chases addiction as if the shortage of counselors is the main problem. This week’s potpourri is not one story. It is a pattern.

Don’t Sit With Us at Lunch

The commissioner race has two camps, and neither is “pro Mike French.” It is pro-Seegers or anti-Seegers. Indivisible activists, backed by the League of Women Voters, now have a message for businesses that stand with Jake Seegers: drop him, or lose customers.

One Facebook post put it bluntly: “Don’t they know they’re going to lose like 50% of their customers if they do that? Smart business owners are going to say ‘no.’”

That is not civic engagement. It is the grade school version of politics: “Sit with us cool girls, or you are not invited to my birthday party.” These groups have already floated boycotts of businesses tied to Seegers and CC Watchdog. The tactic is intimidation dressed up as virtue.

Maybe “smart” business owners are tired of clearing tents and sleeping bags off their stoops before opening. Maybe they are tired of fentanyl foil and washing human waste out of their alleyways. Or maybe they are just tired of rising taxes that fund commissioner pet projects, poet laureate included.

Listen: Virginia Shogren on Clallamity Jen

Play the Clallamity Jen interview with county auditor candidate Virginia Shogren. The interesting part is not the position. It is the evolution: a progressive Democrat who started asking different questions about her political identity.

Clallamity Jen

A Real Candidate Conversation with Virginia Shogren

Thank you, Virginia, for taking the time to make this podcast…

Listen now

21 days ago · 15 likes · 19 comments · Clallamity Jen

Shogren is running to restore trust in elections and watch the money. She wants paper ballots you can see and count, processes the public can oversee, and an auditor’s office that treats waste as the enemy. Washington already mails ballots. The question she raises is whether voters still have real oversight, or whether software and untraceable steps have replaced it.

If you care who runs elections and who watches the books, listen to the interview before you decide.

Sequim This Week

Here is a snapshot of Sequim. A person sitting in the middle of JCPenney Plaza, belongings piled around them, a blanket draped over their head.

A few blocks away, laundry day on Washington Street: an entire line of clothes drying on the bushes at one of the main entrances to town, in the commercial hub of a small city that still likes to call itself charming.

This county is teeming with NGOs surviving off your taxes, and the list of programs for homelessness, addiction, and mental health keeps growing. So ask the only questions that matter:

Is it getting better?
Is this the hometown you remember?
The town you moved to a year ago?
The place you want your grandchildren to see when they visit the town you chose for retirement?

Are you embarrassed? And if you are, are you ready for change?

No ID? No Address? No Problem!

From the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence comes a flyer that should stop you cold:

• “WE WANT YOU TO VOTE IF YOU WANT TO!”

• “You do not need a picture ID or proof of address to register to vote in Washington.”

• If you are homeless, you can still register. Give a location you consider home—a shelter, park, motor home, intersection—and a mailing address so the ballot can find you: a P.O. box, a friend’s house, a shelter, or general delivery.

That is state law. It also invites you to treat the most basic check—who is this person, and where do they live?—as optional. Advocates can walk people through the county auditor’s office process. The rest of the county is supposed to trust the result.

$800,000 Goes Back—After Years of Controversy

Habitat for Humanity of Clallam County has told the commissioners it will not take the $800,000 Opportunity Fund award for Lyon’s Landing. In an August 20 memo, Board President Danny Steiger and CEO Colleen Robinson said the organization has not drawn a dollar of the grant. After a board review and a capital-campaign feasibility study, Habitat will sequence its two big projects: finish the roughly 48-home Sequim Avenue development first, and pause active work on the 45-home Carlsborg site. They will not pursue the extension they asked for days earlier. The county can send the money to other eligible projects. Any future ask, they note, would be a brand-new application.

That is the polite version. The long version has been on CC Watchdog for years.

Habitat first tried to move Lyon’s Landing with a no-bid arrangement with the Jamestown Corporation—an estimated $2.6 million slice of site work—while arguing that, as a nonprofit not yet using state or federal dollars, it did not have to run a formal bid. The Jamestown Tribe had also given Habitat $50,000 and the NGO hired a Native American Housing Liaison. County legal staff then spent months asking whether public Opportunity Funds turned the job into a public work under state law and county code. Commissioners still awarded the $800,000 with a “must meet all legal requirements” caveat. Then came the shovels-in-the-dirt photo behind Sunny Farms.

Then, for a long stretch, nothing.

Now Habitat says it cannot confidently spend the award in the extension window and is stepping back. Call it stewardship if you want. Call it the end of a deal that never should have been structured that way. Either way, the land off Mill Road is still waiting, and $800,000 in sales-tax money is finally free to be treated like public money again.

Harvest of Hope Raises $469,500—and a Familiar Line About Taxes

The Peninsula Daily News covered a real local success: Olympic Medical Center Foundation’s 24th Harvest of Hope gala raised a record $469,500 for local cancer care.

The Jamestown Tribe received the Rick Kaps Award. Then came the line worth remembering. Chairman Ron Allen said the tribe “started with zero” in the 1970s without federal recognition. Then, “Our tax base is our businesses.”

How convenient that the tribe’s tax base is its businesses. Everyone else’s tax base is the property-tax bill that pays for roads, schools, and fire departments. The tribe bought the land for its family clinic from your public hospital, Olympic Medical Center, for $1.00. Allen called the tribes’ endeavors “inclusive.” Try using the tribe’s beach, pavilion, or gym when the signs say tribal members only, and see how inclusive it is. Or try getting hired by the county’s second largest employer when you are more qualified but not a tribal member.

Celebrate the cancer money. Do not pretend the tax story is the same for everyone.

$10,000 to Redesign Addiction Studies

Molina Healthcare gave the Peninsula College Foundation $10,000 to redesign the addiction-studies curriculum and tighten the path into the bachelor of applied science in behavioral health.

Read it another way: addiction is also a jobs program and a degree track. As long as the crisis stays large, there is curriculum to write, grants to chase, and a pipeline to feed. The college says it will align coursework with employer needs and state rules. Fair enough. Just notice what never gets treated as the goal: fewer addicts, not more certified staff managing them.

You Don’t Need a Crystal Ball. Watch these Cities.

You do not need tarot cards to see where Housing First and harm reduction lead. You need Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Watch Nick Shirley’s video investigating the fentanyl crisis across those cities and see how much they have in common with Clallam County.

Watch the addicts in that video and ask the question officials keep dodging: Is what they need a $350,000 luxury apartment with a dog-wash station and a harbor view? Is one more clean crack pipe the thing that finally makes them ready for recovery? Clallam is not inventing a new model. It is importing one that already has a body count. This is a drug crisis, not a housing shortage. Our streets have become asylums for the addicted and mentally ill. A county cannot solve a problem it refuses to name. These conditions are the squalor that members of the League of Women Voters, Indivisible, and the Democratic Socialists are pushing the county’s Board of Health to maintain.

Does this look like compassion to you?

“Voter Approved” — Except the Voters Didn’t Approve It

Four years ago, Mike French made Conservation District funding part of his campaign. Last year he backed a parcel fee, then flipped to “no” at the last minute when the other two commissioners were clearly going to pass it. He got to be the “good guy” and look more moderate after three years of pushing for tax hikes. The fee was unpopular. It still passed without a public vote.

Now look at your property-tax statement. The fee is listed as a “voter approved” tax.

Jake Seegers independently submitted 1,032 signatures against it. History got rewritten on the bill. A commissioner-only passage became “the voters said yes.”

Listen: Antonio Price on Clallamity Jen

Assessor candidate Antonio Price sat down with Clallamity Jen. Start there if you want to understand the person, not just the office: fair booth, high-school diploma, how long he has lived here, why he is running now, and whether he wants voters focused on party or on the job.

Clallamity Jen

A Real Candidate Conversation with Antonio Price

Intro Haiku…

Listen now

18 days ago · 14 likes · 5 comments · Clallamity Jen

Jen did something useful before the policy questions. She separated the elected assessor from the myths. The assessor values property. The Legislature writes the tax laws. The treasurer collects the money. Taxing districts set their levies. Staff does the technical appraisal work. The Department of Revenue still owns pieces of the system.

Then the real questions: Should property photos stay online 24/7, or should owners with safety concerns get more control? How does a newly elected official oversee an existing department without pretending to be the appraiser? And if voters do not understand how a levy hits their bill, whose job is it to close that gap?

Listen to the answers and decide if the Price is right.

Read the Strait Shooter: The Harm Capsule

Do not skip this week’s satirical Strait Shooter, “Know Your Community: The Harm Capsule.” Imagine the county’s 2026 time capsule packed with the artifacts that actually define the era: Narcan, needles, boofing kits, shower vouchers, and grant paperwork.

That is the snapshot they would bury. Read it. Then look around and ask whether they are joking.

The Strait Shooter

The Tuesday Twist

Salsa School Of Investigation Issues Breakthrough After Finding A Dotted Line…

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17 days ago · 15 likes · 10 comments · The Strait Shooter

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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

187KB ∙ PDF file

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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.

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.