"It's just not any of your business"

County to consider new parcel fee

A commissioner preaches bravery and empowerment—but when asked a simple question, he snaps, “It’s none of your business.” There’s a growing disconnect between what our leaders say and what they do, from secretive meetings and rising taxes to a conservation district crying poverty while funding DEI programs and threatening private landowners. If you’ve ever been told there’s no such thing as a stupid question, it might be time to start asking more of them.

“Today I’d like to talk about the importance of feeling empowered to ask questions and to share our ideas,” says the speaker warmly at the start of a short, heartwarming YouTube video. “Many of us are hesitant to make our voices heard—we think our question might be silly or unimportant, we fear that our ideas might not be accepted, sometimes we don’t even feel that we have the right to ask a question or to share an idea,” chuckles the speaker.

“It’s not other people who are holding us back from asking questions or sharing ideas, it’s our own fears.”

The three-minute video—titled Feeling Empowered to Ask Questions and Share Ideas—was uploaded four years ago and promotes “building trusting relationships” that “allow us to feel secure in asking questions and sharing ideas.” It stars none other than Clallam County Commissioner Mark Ozias.

“Do you want to know a secret? Almost everybody shares those fears,” Commissioner Ozias confides before explaining that once you are brave enough to ask a question, others recognize your bravery—which gives them permission to share their own ideas.

“There is no such thing as a stupid question,” Commissioner Ozias reminds us.

As soon as you begin to empower yourself, Commissioner Ozias adds, “You’re going to find that others almost always respond positively.”

“Yeah, I have nothing to say to you, Jeff. Thank you.”

“How do I get my questions answered?”

“Well, gosh, I don’t know. You’ll have to figure that out all by yourself, but it’s not going to be from me.”

— An exchange with Commissioner Ozias earlier this month

That all sounds wonderful. But when I asked Commissioner Ozias a simple question—why he was attending the weekly Clallam County Commission meeting remotely for the second week in a row—his answer was:

“It’s not a secret, Mr. Tozzer, it’s just not any of your business.”

I first posed the question during public comment and was met with silence. I asked a second time. Again, silence. Commissioners Johnson and French, as they do with almost every uncomfortable question, simply turned to the County Administrator for rescue. The third time I asked—“Am I allowed to know where Commissioner Mark Ozias is? Is it a secret?”—was when Commissioner Ozias snapped back.

If Commissioner Ozias was on vacation, he’s right—it wouldn’t be any of my business. But in the wake of repeated instances of deception, closed-door decision-making, and misplaced priorities, he should understand that many citizens no longer offer him the benefit of the doubt. Empowered people ask brave questions—because, as we’ve been told, “there’s no such thing as a stupid question.”

Consider the track record:

• A hush-hush breach of the Dungeness dike that cost taxpayers an estimated $10 million

• Secret meetings with the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe about stormwater mitigation that cost county taxpayers dearly

• False assurances that a county–tribal meeting would occur in the first quarter of this year to discuss tribal tax contributions (it didn’t)

• Public dollars paying for pizza parties for addicts—again—with no public discussion

• Deafening silence about the looming mass eviction of residents from 3 Crabs Road

When Commissioner Ozias is absent, residents should worry—he’s typically in Washington, D.C. learning how to hand over county parks to tribal control, or in Olympia pushing for tax increases without a vote of the people. Or he’s in Blyn, behind closed doors, helping draft the County Comprehensive Plan—seemingly to benefit his campaign’s top donor.

So no, Commissioner Ozias, it’s not unreasonable for the public to ask where their Commissioner is—especially when he’s drawing a full $108,695 salary and calling in to the job like it’s a side gig.

Who exactly is “We”?

While attending remotely, Commissioner Ozias delivered a legislative update:

About behavioral health: “…House Bill 1813, which has now passed out of the Senate as well as the House, and while this bill does not do everything we had hoped, it does still include meaningful impacts… so, not everything that we had hoped for, but still some movement in a positive direction.”

Commissioner Ozias repeatedly used the word “we” while discussing new legislation: pay-per-mile tax schemes, behavioral health funding (largely for drug addicts), gas tax hikes, and the push to raise the property tax cap from 1% to 3% without voter approval.

“Last week we were feeling relatively hopeful about the property tax increase,” Commissioner Ozias said.

Who exactly is “we”? His constituents? His fellow Commissioners? No—“we” is WSAC, the Washington State Association of Counties, a powerful lobbying group pushing tax increases across Washington State.

“At the Association of Counties, we are in the midst of our interviews—our finalist interviews—for the permanent executive director position,” Commissioner Ozias explained, giving details unrelated to county government but affecting the special interest group WSAC, on whose board he sits.

So while Clallam County residents struggle under rising costs, Commissioner Ozias isn’t representing us, he’s representing them—the lobbyists. And that is our business.

The Executive Committee of the Washington State Association of Counties.

A new “fee” to fund DEI

At the same meeting, Clallam Conservation District (CCD) District Manager Kim Williams asked the Commissioners for $60,000 in taxpayer funds.

Part of that money—$5,000—is earmarked for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training. While residents are worried about water meters on private wells and possible trenching across their land without easements, the CCD is still allocating thousands for feel-good initiatives with no clear public mandate.

Meanwhile, the CCD:

• Is pushing forward with a controversial ditch piping project in Sequim despite not having permission from property owners—under legal pressure from the Jamestown Tribe

• Is helping design the Dungeness Off-Channel Reservoir, despite not knowing how future maintenance or operations will be funded

• Is collaborating with WSU Extension, which is collecting data on race, income, and home values of coastal homeowners—sparking concern about relocation or eviction

• Is facing scrutiny for dodging public records requests and rising legal fees

Williams, however, insists they’re just trying to make ends meet.

“We are trying to scale back and use this funding to help us find more grant funding to support these programs that are not already supported by grants,” she said. “We’ve had quite an uptick in public records requests,” she added. “There are just more and more things that are not grant-covered,” she said.

Her solution? New fees for property owners. Williams floated a “rates and charges” system—not a tax, she said, but a parcel fee usually capped at $5.

Tribal land placed in trust status would, of course, be exempt from the fee, just as those parcels are exempt from water monitoring programs and many other county mandates.

“We have hired a consultant to run the assessor’s data and see what kind of a fee we can come up with, and we will be pursuing that for stable funding,” she added.

“We would go from there,” Williams concluded.