Important Today:
Vote! Ballots are due by 8:00 p.m. A list of Clallam County ballot drop box locations can be found by clicking here.
Today's regular 10:00 a.m. commissioners’ meeting features the Citizens’ Forum, your only chance to ask questions and get answers. You can find information on participating in person or online here.
Every acre of DNR-managed trust land locked up by lawsuits, delays, and “conservation” designations is money that was promised to hospitals, schools, libraries, and county services. When that revenue disappears, the choice is simple: raise taxes or cut services. Clallam County’s leadership has spent the last year inviting the people driving those lockups into the boardroom for hours-long presentations while the “Troublemakers” who filmed themselves causing nearly $10,000 in damage face no consequences.
A New Report, Same Goal
The latest development from eco-activists is a 2026 report titled Elwha Watershed Protection: A Call for State Stewardship.
Produced by the Center for Responsible Forestry (Brel Froebe and Mary Jean Ryan), Earth Law Center (Elizabeth Dunne), Earth Economics, the Elwha Legacy Forests Coalition, the Legacy Forest Defense Coalition, and others, it urges the Washington Department of Natural Resources to designate large swaths of its Elwha Watershed holdings as a Natural Area Preserve and Natural Resources Conservation Area. That means permanently taking them off the timber harvest schedule.
The report calls itself “supplementary information” for the study the Legislature ordered DNR to do. Its real goal is simpler. It picks out land to take off the harvest schedule for good, argues that “ecosystem services” are worth more than timber sales, and suggests paying the trusts back with state programs funded by carbon-auction money.
That payback doesn’t make the cost disappear. It shifts the cost onto taxpayers and leaves the trusts with less working forest forever.
What the Report Doesn’t Count
The report’s big number, $367.5 million, sounds like cash. It isn’t. It’s an estimate of what clean water, wildlife habitat, recreation, and stored carbon are “worth” if these forests are left standing.
It’s spread over 120 years. It’s the total for more than a century, not a sum available today.
It’s borrowed. The authors didn’t measure the Elwha. They took values from studies of other forests and applied them here.
Even they shrink it. In today’s dollars, their own figure drops to $106.4 million.
No check is ever written, and none of it reaches a hospital district, a library, or a fire department. Timber sales do.
What the report never calculates is the number that matters most to those beneficiaries: the timber revenue they’d lose. In 65 pages, not one line puts a dollar figure on it. That loss gets waved away with a promise that Trust Land Transfer and Climate Commitment Act money will “make beneficiaries whole,” as long as the Legislature keeps paying, year after year.
The report also names the sales it wants stopped. There are six, totaling 608 acres. Parched and Tree Well were auctioned, and roads were started, but both are tied up in a lawsuit. Kicker, Bread & Butter, Alley Cat, and By a Whisker are paused by order of the Commissioner of Public Lands. That’s revenue already counted on, now sitting in limbo.
The People Writing the Report
Brel Froebe of the Center for Responsible Forestry—previously active with Defund the Bellingham Police—has received multi-hour platforms before the Clallam County Board of Commissioners to argue for removing prime timberlands from harvest. Elizabeth Dunne of the Earth Law Center, who has led litigation that temporarily halted road-building and timber sales in the Elwha area, has been right there with him.
Earth Law Center’s broader project is “rights of nature”—the idea that ecosystems should have legal personhood. The organization has been involved in efforts to grant legal standing to wild rice and similar features elsewhere. That legal theory is now being imported into Clallam County timber debates.
What the Land Acknowledgment Leaves Out
The report’s own land acknowledgment is the standard one: it honors the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe’s “enduring stewardship” of the watershed “since time immemorial” and commits to supporting their cultural heritage.
What it does not acknowledge is the modern, statutory purpose of these particular lands. They are trust lands managed by DNR to generate revenue for public beneficiaries—schools, hospitals, libraries, counties, and other junior taxing districts. When parcels remain locked in legal delays, injunctions, or activist-driven “replacement” schemes, the promised money doesn't arrive. The void is filled either by higher taxes on the people who live and work here or by cuts to the services those institutions were supposed to provide.
Invited Into the Boardroom
This is not abstract. Local reporting and public records have already documented how the pattern works. County leadership under Chair Mike French has repeatedly given these voices a long platform, while ordinary residents who actually depend on the revenue stream are lucky to get three minutes at a microphone.
The same activist ecosystem that produced the report has been given preferential access, and the results show up in delayed sales, ongoing litigation, and pressure to treat productive trust lands as permanent conservation set-asides.
No Consequences for the “Troublemakers”
The same activist movement produced the “Troublemakers.” Last year, they entered the Doc Holliday timber sale area, removed DNR boundary markers and flagging, filmed themselves doing it, and delivered the materials to DNR headquarters in Olympia with a letter taking responsibility.
DNR police estimated the immediate cost of remarking at $9,536, not counting delays and staff time. The video and police report identified the participants by name and age. A Seattle Times piece treated the action as a human-interest story about older activists “hoping to save” forests.
The kind of accountability any ordinary citizen would face for damaging public property never materialized. The people who filmed themselves committing the acts then sat comfortably in the county boardroom for the very presentations pushing more permanent conservation.
December Is Coming
This isn’t an academic exercise. DNR has to deliver its Elwha recommendations to the Legislature in December 2026, and this report was written to shape them. The groups behind it have done their homework: field surveys, maps, economic modeling, and a ready-made legal pathway.
The Predictable Result
This is what happens when a growing activist class gets preferential access, and county leadership would rather host presentations than protect the people who pay the bills. Revenue promised to our hospitals, schools, and libraries gets traded for a theoretical number on a spreadsheet. Pressure for higher taxes grows, services get squeezed, and the people who filmed themselves pulling survey markers get a seat at the table instead of a court date. A land acknowledgment doesn’t change the arithmetic.
What You Can Do
Vote today. Ballots are due by 8:00 p.m. The direction of Clallam County is on the ballot.
Speak at the Citizens’ Forum at today’s 10:00 a.m. meeting. Ask the commissioners whether the county has calculated what these designations would cost its junior taxing districts, and whether they’ll ask DNR to put that number in its December report.
Contact DNR and your legislators before December. Ask them to require a full accounting of lost trust revenue before any land comes off the harvest schedule. The Board of Natural Resources oversees trust land decisions and takes public comment at its meetings. You have to register by 4:00 p.m. the Thursday before each meeting, and the page has the instructions.
Read the report yourself: Elwha Watershed Protection: A Call for State Stewardship.
Promises to replace revenue are only as good as the next budget. A working forest pays out year after year. A legislative promise pays only as long as someone in Olympia remembers it.
Thank You for Showing Up
Preliminary election results should drop tonight shortly after 8:00 p.m. Check the county auditor’s page.
KONP Radio (myclallamcounty.com) usually gives a brief write-up shortly after results are released.
Whatever the results, this community proved local news matters. Now it’s time for a breather.
I planned to send this after the election results came in, but then I realized the results don’t change a word of it.
These days it’s easy to just let the news wash over you. You didn’t. You read, asked questions, showed up, and stayed engaged, and that takes real work. It can be exhausting, especially in campaign season, and especially at the end of a county race unlike anything Clallam County has ever seen.
With international, national, and state headlines everywhere you look, you showed me there’s a real appetite for hyper-local news. You understand that the closer the news is to home, the more it affects us. Not a day goes by that I don’t feel grateful to be part of a community this engaged in its own civic life.
You’ve Earned a Break!
With that in mind, CC Watchdog is taking a short hiatus for the next few weeks so we can all decompress and remember what matters most. Believe it or not, commissioner races, tax hikes, and even comprehensive plans are small next to family, health, and time with old and new friends.
I’ll still check in now and then, because some important dates and meetings are coming up, but it won’t be every day.
In the meantime, please do something special for yourself this week. You’ve earned it.
Thank you, truly.
Jeff
