At last month’s Calico Cat Club forum, resident Karen Parker asked what non-tribal taxpayers gain when public money subsidizes jobs and business growth for sovereign nations that don’t carry the same tax load—and how that stacks against lost local revenue. Mike French called the benefit “easy and obvious”: Jamestown Healthcare filled the hole Virginia Mason left, then added a healing center and a 16-bed psychiatric facility. Gaps filled, trust built, a rising tide. That’s one way to tell things, but it isn’t the whole story.
The clinic campus started with the public hospital
The Fifth Avenue clinic French treats as proof of rescue did not appear from nowhere. In 2007, Olympic Medical Center—the taxpayer-owned hospital district—announced the new Jamestown medical center would sit on 2.5 acres donated by OMC. The public hospital gave up the land. The tribe built a clinic open to the general public and grew it into a regional operation.
French is not wrong that access improved. He is incomplete when he stops there. The county’s largest employer helped plant a competitor that is now the county’s second-largest employer, while OMC spent the following years fighting for cash.
This is no longer a small tribal clinic
Jamestown’s own reports treat the clinics as enterprises, not a last-resort charity shop. The tribe has said for years that the Family Health and Dental clinics run on a business model: income has to cover costs.
By the 2024 report, that business was regional—about 18,000 Family Health Clinic patients, more than 65,000 visits, 131 employees, plus dental volume and more than 290 Healing Clinic patients, most of them Clallam residents. Those are the same people still underwriting OMC.
The payment rules are not the same. Jamestown has publicized Medicaid encounter rates in the mid-$600s and participates in the federal 340B drug program.
In the 2024 Report to Tribal Citizens, as reported by Clallam County Watchdog, the tribe listed $85.9 million in total revenue. A commenter itemizing that same report’s revenue table put “Charges for Services/340B” at $47.2 million—the largest line on that list. The published description does not split that amount among primary care, MAT, dental, and 340B pharmacy. Even without that breakout, health billing and 340B sit at the center of the year the tribe put on paper.
Same community. Different rulebook.
Salish Seasons: public dollars, tribal ribbon
French’s ribbon-cutting line skips the invoice. Jamestown Salish Seasons, the 16-bed psychiatric facility next to the Healing Clinic, is a needed service. It is also a publicly financed building the tribe will own and run.
Reported cost: about $31.25 million. State capital budgets put $13 million, then $15 million, toward the project—$28 million before other grants. Jamestown’s 2023 citizen report said the quiet part: the tribe was “in a unique position to manage the facility but is not funding it with Tribal dollars.”
A separate Commerce behavioral-health grant of about $3.2 million sits beside those appropriations. If it landed on the same project, the taxpayer contribution nearly equals the full construction cost.
The original plan was that the tribe would own the site and OMC would operate the unit. After the hospital’s finances collapsed, Jamestown took the operating role too.
French presents that as the tribe filling a gap. It is also a public hospital too weak to run a service it was supposed to run, while a state-built facility opened under a different set of reimbursement rules.
The hospital is not a side note
OMC remains the county’s largest employer. It has posted years of operating losses, watched reserves collapse, drawn auditor “going concern” warnings, and lost providers.
Jamestown did not single-handedly break a rural hospital. Medicare mix, labor, and management all matter. What French’s answer omits is the competitive reality that Karen Parker asked him to weigh: a large non-tribal patient base, encounter-rate Medicaid, 340B, grants, tax-exempt status, and a shared labor pool—on land the public hospital once donated.
“Build trust” is not an accounting entry
French said the commissioners’ most important job is to build trust with the tribes and let them fill gaps. Trust is a real governing task. It is not an answer to the tax question.
Jamestown already employs at scale, runs clinics as businesses, takes state capital money, and bids against local firms. Recompete has been used to buy the tribe a hydroseeder and excavator for a new commercial line. Contractors who paid for their own equipment get to watch “workforce” funds capitalize a competitor that does not sit on the same tax footing.
Parker asked about subsidy and lost revenue. French answered with a clinic tour.
The clinics are real. The access is real. So are the donated acres, the millions in taxpayer-funded state grants, the health-business surplus, and the hospital still asking this county to keep it alive. A rising tide is a nice phrase. It is not a ledger.
Tonight
Clallam County Watchdog’s Jeff Tozzer is the guest speaker at this month’s Republican Women of Clallam County meeting. Anyone is welcome — including non-Republicans (like me) and non-women (like me). If transparency in local government is important to you, come. I look forward to answering your questions.
Potluck tonight (Thursday) at 5:30. I speak at 6:00. It’s in Happy Valley, a few minutes south of downtown Sequim. For the address and to RSVP, email Tanya Unruh at tanyanewdesign@gmail.com.
