Olympia Time

History, politics, people of Oly WA

The Power and the Truth: Our Long History of Owning Electricity

May 9, 2026 / / 4 Comments

Somewhere in Thurston County right now, someone’s staring at their Puget Sound Energy bill and doing the math. It’s not adding up. In January 2026, PSE raised residential electric rates somewhere between 9.3 and 13.1 percent, depending on how much power you use. For most households that’s more than eleven extra dollars a month. Not the end of the world on its own, but it’s been going up like this since 2012, and that adds up. Vonny Turner put it plainly on Nextdoor: his bill was running close to $600 a month, and he wanted to know if anyone else was thinking what he was thinking. Richard Ney was. So was Jeff Devlin, a mortgage guy who founded the Best of Olympia Facebook page. He’s not exactly a radical. Nextdoor isn’t exactly a hotbed of anti-corporate politics. On most days, the platform’s better known for people calling the cops on our houseless neighbors. But Devlin and his fellow posters have become the unlikely center of a real conversation about whether Thurston County should finally, after nearly a hundred years of trying, take its electricity away from a private company and give it to a public utility.

The conversation feels urgent and new. It isn’t. This is one of the longest-running political fights in Thurston County’s history, a conflict that’s outlasted its participants and its platforms, moving from union halls to legislative hearings to Facebook without changing its basic shape. Private utilities don’t give up territory. They create doubt, back the right candidates, outspend the opposition, and wait. It’s worked for nearly a hundred years.

The legal foundation for public power in Washington goes back to 1930, when voters passed an Initiative that let communities form nonprofit, locally governed Public Utility Districts. It was a Depression-era idea, and it made sense at the time. Private utilities were squeezing people, and the idea that electricity, like roads and schools, should be owned by the public had real political momentum. Thurston County voted to establish PUD No. 1 in 1938. But the vote created a legal entity with nothing behind it. No wires. No substations. No staff. The PUD existed on paper while Puget Sound Power and Light, the company that would eventually become PSE, kept running the actual electricity.

In the early 1950s, Thurston PUD joined a coalition of six districts and tried to buy Puget Power outright. It was a bold move. Puget’s board actually agreed to the sale in October 1952, then reversed course in 1953 after public power advocates blocked a separate merger deal and spooked the company’s leadership. The whole thing fell apart. With no path to electricity, the PUD changed course. In the late 1950s it acquired the Tanglewilde water system near what is now Lacey and quietly became a water utility instead. The argument against letting the PUD handle electricity had always been that a bigger, established provider was simply better suited for the job. It’s a convenient argument if you’re already the established provider, and it would keep getting used for the next seventy years.

By 1960, a new set of PUD commissioners was ready to fight again. They moved toward legally condemning Puget Power’s properties, which would’ve forced a sale. Puget Power did what it knew how to do: it backed a candidate. Vic Francis won a commission seat, joining pro-public-power commissioners Harvey Thompson and John McGuire. Then McGuire died in the spring of 1961 and everything stalled. The commission deadlocked one to one. At the same time, the legislature got into a four-day brawl over HB-197, the “right-to-vote” bill, which would’ve required a public referendum before any utility property could be condemned. It was a procedural wall designed to make condemnation nearly impossible. Francis resigned in early 1962. The special election that followed was won with money. The pro-private-power candidates were better funded, ran on a “no acquisition without a public vote” platform, and won. That was effectively it for the next fifty years.

The new commissioners, having won, tried to unload what was left. They proposed selling the Tanglewilde water system to the City of Olympia and sent out an informal ballot. Only 147 came back. The slim majority who responded said yes to the sale. Harvey Thompson, the only old-guard commissioner still on the board, wasn’t buying it. He argued that 50 percent participation wasn’t a mandate for anything. The sale stalled, the whole thing dragged into September 1962, and ultimately nothing happened. The PUD kept the water system. The institution survived almost by default.

That near-miss opens up an interesting question. If Olympia had taken over the water utility serving those eastern suburbs before Lacey existed as its own city, before it had incorporated and built its own political identity, would Lacey have ever become Lacey?

Instead, the PUD grew. With its electrical ambitions gone, it turned all its attention to water and got very good at it. As of 2026, it’s operating 272 separate water systems serving roughly 10,416 connections across five or six counties, with systems in Pierce, Lewis, King, and Grays Harbor in addition to Thurston. It’s not really one utility so much as a patchwork. At one end you’ve got Tanglewilde-Thompson Place in Lacey, the original acquisition, now serving close to 2,000 residential and commercial units. At the other end you’ve got Group B systems, three to fourteen connections, tucked into cul-de-sacs, often the last remnant of some old private well arrangement that the PUD took on because no one else would.

There’s something almost poignant about it. The PUD was built to democratize electricity and ended up as a decentralized custodian of other people’s water, managing hundreds of small, scattered systems that bigger utilities never wanted. It’s genuinely good at this. But when people now point at the Thurston PUD and say that’s the organization that should take over our electricity, they’re pointing at an institution whose entire working knowledge is wells and pipes. Not wires.

In January 2012, I stopped thinking about public power as an abstract policy question and started thinking about it as something that had actually happened to me. A historic snowstorm hit the Pacific Northwest and knocked the power out. We had young kids at home, including an infant. The first couple of days we told ourselves it would come back soon. It didn’t. When it became clear the outage was going to last days and not hours, we packed up the kids and drove south to Oregon to find a warm room with family. The thing I remember most is a gas station in Lewis County, the first one we found that was still running. The noise. The lines. People’s faces. Everyone trying to get gas so they could get out. That’s my reference point when I try to picture what a Cascadia earthquake might actually feel like to live through.

I didn’t fully understand at the time why the outage had been so bad and so slow to fix. The answer is structural. Private utilities like PSE are accountable to shareholders first. Overhead transmission lines are cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain than buried lines, and that cost advantage is real until a major storm hits and takes down the whole region at once. When that happens, you find out there’s no full-time repair crew standing by, because keeping a full-time crew on standby costs money that cuts into margins. So you bring in contract crews, and so does every other utility in the region dealing with the same storm, and it takes time. Public utilities work differently. They put any surplus back into the grid and they answer to elected commissioners who live in the service area and hear about it directly when the power goes out. In the counties served by public utilities during the January 2012 storm, 95 percent of customers had their power back within 24 hours.

That number became an argument, if not the central argument for the public power campaign that launched in the fall of 2011 and hit the ground a few months after the snow storm. The storm had given advocates something specific and local to point to: we sat in the dark for days and our neighbors didn’t. The Thurston Public Power Initiative built its case around three things. Reliability, local control, and lower rates through access to federal hydropower from the Bonneville Power Administration, which private utilities can’t tap. The argument was solid. The campaign, by the organizers’ own later account, wasn’t well run.

Proposition 1 went on the November 2012 ballot and lost badly. 59 percent voted no. 41 percent voted yes. The Alliance to Protect Thurston Power, the opposition PAC backed primarily by PSE, spent well into the six figures. The pro-initiative side raised around $37,000. PSE’s campaign hit the county with mailers, push-poll calls, and billboards, while separately running community goodwill advertising that presented the company as a generous local partner. The core scare message was about taxes. Independent analysts said the tax claim was misleading, that legal caps made the kind of increase PSE was implying essentially impossible without additional votes. It didn’t matter. The message landed. Voters were also stuck between two wildly different cost estimates: PSE put the acquisition cost close to $1 billion, while the PUD’s own analysis put it at $41 to $153 million depending on which parts of the service area you were talking about. That gap was enough to create real doubt. The Thurston County Chamber of Commerce came out against it. Former Secretary of State Ralph Munro said the PUD was taking on too much too fast.

The debate about ideas moved to costs and the better spending campaign was able to muddy the waters. And the pro-campaing could not or would not return to the cold houses and abandoned town in January.

The pattern across a hundred years is pretty consistent. In 1938, Thurston County votes to create a public utility and gets a legal shell. In 1952, a coalition tries to buy out the private utility and the deal collapses. In 1962, a private company backs its preferred candidates, wins the commission, and shuts down the acquisition effort for fifty years. In 2012, a corporation outspends a grassroots campaign sixteen to one and wins the county. In 2026, people are angry about their bills and the conversation is happening on Nextdoor instead of in union halls. The basic dynamic hasn’t changed. The opposition doesn’t have to win the argument. It just has to make the alternative scary enough that people stick with what they know.

Jeff Devlin’s change.org petition is just another possible start. So was the 2012 campaign, at the beginning. The question Thurston County has never managed to answer is what it would actually take to break this pattern. What does a movement big enough to overcome a corporate spending campaign look like? This time, is anyone willing to build it?

The Power and the Truth: Our Long History of Owning Electricity

May 9, 2026 / / 1 Comment

Somewhere in Thurston County right now, someone’s staring at their Puget Sound Energy bill and doing the math. It’s not adding up. In January 2026, PSE raised residential electric rates somewhere between 9.3 and 13.1 percent, depending on how much power you use. For most households that’s more than eleven extra dollars a month. Not the end of the world on its own, but it’s been going up like this since 2012, and that adds up. Vonny Turner put it plainly on Nextdoor: his bill was running close to $600 a month, and he wanted to know if anyone else was thinking what he was thinking. Richard Ney was. So was Jeff Devlin, a mortgage guy who founded the Best of Olympia Facebook page. He’s not exactly a radical. Nextdoor isn’t exactly a hotbed of anti-corporate politics. On most days, the platform’s better known for people calling the cops on our houseless neighbors. But Devlin and his fellow posters have become the unlikely center of a real conversation about whether Thurston County should finally, after nearly a hundred years of trying, take its electricity away from a private company and give it to a public utility.

The conversation feels urgent and new. It isn’t. This is one of the longest-running political fights in Thurston County’s history, a conflict that’s outlasted its participants and its platforms, moving from union halls to legislative hearings to Facebook without changing its basic shape. Private utilities don’t give up territory. They create doubt, back the right candidates, outspend the opposition, and wait. It’s worked for nearly a hundred years.

The legal foundation for public power in Washington goes back to 1930, when voters passed an Initiative that let communities form nonprofit, locally governed Public Utility Districts. It was a Depression-era idea, and it made sense at the time. Private utilities were squeezing people, and the idea that electricity, like roads and schools, should be owned by the public had real political momentum. Thurston County voted to establish PUD No. 1 in 1938. But the vote created a legal entity with nothing behind it. No wires. No substations. No staff. The PUD existed on paper while Puget Sound Power and Light, the company that would eventually become PSE, kept running the actual electricity.

In the early 1950s, Thurston PUD joined a coalition of six districts and tried to buy Puget Power outright. It was a bold move. Puget’s board actually agreed to the sale in October 1952, then reversed course in 1953 after public power advocates blocked a separate merger deal and spooked the company’s leadership. The whole thing fell apart. With no path to electricity, the PUD changed course. In the late 1950s it acquired the Tanglewilde water system near what is now Lacey and quietly became a water utility instead. The argument against letting the PUD handle electricity had always been that a bigger, established provider was simply better suited for the job. It’s a convenient argument if you’re already the established provider, and it would keep getting used for the next seventy years.

By 1960, a new set of PUD commissioners was ready to fight again. They moved toward legally condemning Puget Power’s properties, which would’ve forced a sale. Puget Power did what it knew how to do: it backed a candidate. Vic Francis won a commission seat, joining pro-public-power commissioners Harvey Thompson and John McGuire. Then McGuire died in the spring of 1961 and everything stalled. The commission deadlocked one to one. At the same time, the legislature got into a four-day brawl over HB-197, the “right-to-vote” bill, which would’ve required a public referendum before any utility property could be condemned. It was a procedural wall designed to make condemnation nearly impossible. Francis resigned in early 1962. The special election that followed was won with money. The pro-private-power candidates were better funded, ran on a “no acquisition without a public vote” platform, and won. That was effectively it for the next fifty years.

The new commissioners, having won, tried to unload what was left. They proposed selling the Tanglewilde water system to the City of Olympia and sent out an informal ballot. Only 147 came back. The slim majority who responded said yes to the sale. Harvey Thompson, the only old-guard commissioner still on the board, wasn’t buying it. He argued that 50 percent participation wasn’t a mandate for anything. The sale stalled, the whole thing dragged into September 1962, and ultimately nothing happened. The PUD kept the water system. The institution survived almost by default.

That near-miss opens up an interesting question. If Olympia had taken over the water utility serving those eastern suburbs before Lacey existed as its own city, before it had incorporated and built its own political identity, would Lacey have ever become Lacey?

Instead, the PUD grew. With its electrical ambitions gone, it turned all its attention to water and got very good at it. As of 2026, it’s operating 272 separate water systems serving roughly 10,416 connections across five or six counties, with systems in Pierce, Lewis, King, and Grays Harbor in addition to Thurston. It’s not really one utility so much as a patchwork. At one end you’ve got Tanglewilde-Thompson Place in Lacey, the original acquisition, now serving close to 2,000 residential and commercial units. At the other end you’ve got Group B systems, three to fourteen connections, tucked into cul-de-sacs, often the last remnant of some old private well arrangement that the PUD took on because no one else would.

There’s something almost poignant about it. The PUD was built to democratize electricity and ended up as a decentralized custodian of other people’s water, managing hundreds of small, scattered systems that bigger utilities never wanted. It’s genuinely good at this. But when people now point at the Thurston PUD and say that’s the organization that should take over our electricity, they’re pointing at an institution whose entire working knowledge is wells and pipes. Not wires.

In January 2012, I stopped thinking about public power as an abstract policy question and started thinking about it as something that had actually happened to me. A historic snowstorm hit the Pacific Northwest and knocked the power out. We had young kids at home, including an infant. The first couple of days we told ourselves it would come back soon. It didn’t. When it became clear the outage was going to last days and not hours, we packed up the kids and drove south to Oregon to find a warm room with family. The thing I remember most is a gas station in Lewis County, the first one we found that was still running. The noise. The lines. People’s faces. Everyone trying to get gas so they could get out. That’s my reference point when I try to picture what a Cascadia earthquake might actually feel like to live through.

I didn’t fully understand at the time why the outage had been so bad and so slow to fix. The answer is structural. Private utilities like PSE are accountable to shareholders first. Overhead transmission lines are cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain than buried lines, and that cost advantage is real until a major storm hits and takes down the whole region at once. When that happens, you find out there’s no full-time repair crew standing by, because keeping a full-time crew on standby costs money that cuts into margins. So you bring in contract crews, and so does every other utility in the region dealing with the same storm, and it takes time. Public utilities work differently. They put any surplus back into the grid and they answer to elected commissioners who live in the service area and hear about it directly when the power goes out. In the counties served by public utilities during the January 2012 storm, 95 percent of customers had their power back within 24 hours.

That number became an argument, if not the central argument for the public power campaign that launched in the fall of 2011 and hit the ground a few months after the snow storm. The storm had given advocates something specific and local to point to: we sat in the dark for days and our neighbors didn’t. The Thurston Public Power Initiative built its case around three things. Reliability, local control, and lower rates through access to federal hydropower from the Bonneville Power Administration, which private utilities can’t tap. The argument was solid. The campaign, by the organizers’ own later account, wasn’t well run.

Proposition 1 went on the November 2012 ballot and lost badly. 59 percent voted no. 41 percent voted yes. The Alliance to Protect Thurston Power, the opposition PAC backed primarily by PSE, spent well into the six figures. The pro-initiative side raised around $37,000. PSE’s campaign hit the county with mailers, push-poll calls, and billboards, while separately running community goodwill advertising that presented the company as a generous local partner. The core scare message was about taxes. Independent analysts said the tax claim was misleading, that legal caps made the kind of increase PSE was implying essentially impossible without additional votes. It didn’t matter. The message landed. Voters were also stuck between two wildly different cost estimates: PSE put the acquisition cost close to $1 billion, while the PUD’s own analysis put it at $41 to $153 million depending on which parts of the service area you were talking about. That gap was enough to create real doubt. The Thurston County Chamber of Commerce came out against it. Former Secretary of State Ralph Munro said the PUD was taking on too much too fast.

The debate about ideas moved to costs and the better spending campaign was able to muddy the waters. And the pro-campaing could not or would not return to the cold houses and abandoned town in January.

The pattern across a hundred years is pretty consistent. In 1938, Thurston County votes to create a public utility and gets a legal shell. In 1952, a coalition tries to buy out the private utility and the deal collapses. In 1962, a private company backs its preferred candidates, wins the commission, and shuts down the acquisition effort for fifty years. In 2012, a corporation outspends a grassroots campaign sixteen to one and wins the county. In 2026, people are angry about their bills and the conversation is happening on Nextdoor instead of in union halls. The basic dynamic hasn’t changed. The opposition doesn’t have to win the argument. It just has to make the alternative scary enough that people stick with what they know.

Jeff Devlin’s change.org petition is just another possible start. So was the 2012 campaign, at the beginning. The question Thurston County has never managed to answer is what it would actually take to break this pattern. What does a movement big enough to overcome a corporate spending campaign look like? This time, is anyone willing to build it?

The Deep History and Structural Mismatch of Timberland Regional Library

May 2, 2026 / / 1 Comment

When Eric Wilson released his analysis of Timberland Regional Library‘s finances, he gave a name for something a lot of people had already felt but couldn’t quite pin down. He called it the “Scissors Effect.” Revenue and expenditures were diverging like open blades, compounding year over year, until the gap became a chasm. His report is urgent and damning. But it’s also the latest chapter in a much longer story, one that doesn’t start with a deficit. It starts with a blueprint drawn up in 1950 that designed a system that was, from its very first breath, a compromise between counties whose interests were never quite as aligned as he’d hoped.

The Wilson Reports: A Forensic Look at the Current Fiscal Crisis

The numbers Wilson presents are devastating in their simplicity. Between a baseline period and 2026, system-wide revenue grew by 18 percent. Expenditures grew by 34 percent. That gap might sound manageable in a single year, but it compounded into a structural deficit that expanded from $948,000 in 2023 to a projected $3.8 million shortfall for 2026. The scissors were open for years. Nobody in a position of authority said a word about the blades.

What makes Wilson’s analysis so striking isn’t the math. It’s the institutional culture that let the math go unaddressed for so long. As recently as September 2024, the Executive Director told the Board of Trustees and the general public that TRL was “in the black” and carried no deficit. This was said even as expenditures had exceeded revenue for two consecutive years. Early in 2025, leadership presented staffing plans asserting that no layoffs would be necessary. Within months, the system had collapsed into the largest reduction in force in its history, cutting 61 positions and eliminating 38 percent of branch staff. In December 2025, the board unanimously approved a $3.8 million deficit budget without any plan to address it, simultaneously breaching its own 30 percent reserve policy without apparent alarm.

Wilson’s explanation for this is what he calls the “Governance Gap.” The board did receive monthly financial reports, but those reports only showed current-year data. That design made four consecutive deficit cycles look like isolated, one-time problems rather than a system in collapse. Leadership consistently reframed the numbers as “conservative estimates” or built-in “wiggle room” that wouldn’t actually materialize. Most critically, the board was denied multi-year financial projections. That’s a standard tool used by most of TRL’s peer library systems, some of which model their revenue and expenditure trajectories up to eleven years out. Without that kind of forward view, the board couldn’t see the fiscal cliff coming. By the time the ground gave way, the fall had already started.

Wilson’s diagnosis of “institutional optimism” is damning. It’s also, as the historical record makes clear, a very old pattern in this institution. One that was baked in long before any of its current administrators arrived.

History and the Bowerman Report: The Original “DNA”

To understand Timberland, you have to understand what it was built to solve and what it was never quite able to escape. The 1950 Proposed Regional Library Plan, known informally as the Bowerman Report, came out of genuine post-war optimism about making public services more rational and equitable. Its core argument was that small, independent municipal libraries were simply too limited in population and tax base to ever reach what Bowerman called “adequacy,” a standard of service comparable to what people in Washington’s largest cities could access. The fix was consolidation into regional systems organized around “natural trading and economic areas,” units large enough to generate at least $100,000 (or $1.4 million currently)  in annual revenue and support professionally trained staff. The model borrowed explicitly from the school district consolidations of the 1940s. The five counties Bowerman proposed to unite shared, in his assessment, “common economic interests.” That assumption started fraying almost immediately.

As early as 1948, Mason and Thurston counties had joined their library services into the Thurston-Mason Rural Library District, a partnership designed to share costs across unincorporated areas. By 1959, that partnership had deteriorated into open political conflict. Mason County commissioners were, in the language of the time, increasingly “irked” by the $12,000 annual cost of bookmobile service. They characterized the whole arrangement as a “book-deal” that wasn’t serving the county’s most remote residents, including people along the Hood Canal. The joint board came under fire for what Mason County leaders described as structural bias in favor of Thurston County. Things got tense enough that officials briefly floated the idea of abandoning the district entirely and just charging residents two to five dollars for individual library cards.

The 1960 formation of the South Puget Sound Regional Library, which brought the City of Olympia into the existing Thurston-Mason arrangement, was supposed to stabilize the coalition. It didn’t. It created a new center of political gravity instead. When the SPSRL board later tried to withdraw from the broader five-county regional demonstration, worried about the pace and terms of a proposed permanent district, the Mason and Thurston County commissioners didn’t take it lying down. They waited for vacancies on the SPSRL board and systematically filled those seats with members who supported the regional merger. The reconstituted board reversed the withdrawal. It was an early and telling sign that the five-county arrangement would be held together not by genuine shared purpose, but by political pressure and structural lock-in.

The Timberland Library Demonstration moved through the early 1960s amid persistent local skepticism. When a ballot measure in 1968 sought to make the district permanent, opposition showed up in distinctly local flavors. Some Lewis County residents questioned why they should pay for their “cows to read.” In Montesano, Grays Harbor County residents worried the new district would simply “take their building away.” Rural fire districts saw the library levy as a direct threat to their own funding, a competition for limited property tax dollars that would persist for decades. Despite all of it, the measure passed in November 1968 with 62 percent of the vote. Though it is notable the margin was barely over 50 percent in Lewis County. 

The first major existential threat arrived just four years later. By 1972, rural farm groups and granges in counties like Pacific and Lewis were circulating dissolution petitions. Their argument was straightforward: taxes were “skyrocketing” while services had declined, and the system was “top-heavy” with administrative overhead that consumed resources without delivering results. The legal question of whether a single county could walk away landed before Washington Attorney General Slade Gorton. His ruling had consequences that reach all the way to today. Gorton concluded that no county had the statutory authority to withdraw on its own. The only exit from the five-county arrangement was full dissolution of the entire district. And a dissolution petition required (at that time) signatures from 10 percent of the entire district’s voters, not just 10 percent from whichever county was unhappy. The five counties were, as a matter of law, locked in.

Picking Apart the Structure: A Failure of the Modern Model

Bowerman’s assumption that the five counties shared “common economic interests” made sense in 1950. It doesn’t hold up in 2026. The collapse of the timber industry across rural Washington and the growth of Thurston County as the center of state government have produced a demographic and economic shift that the original blueprint never accounted for.

In 1930, Thurston County held just 20 percent of the combined population of the five counties, ranking third behind Grays Harbor, which led the group at 38.4 percent. By 2020, Thurston had grown to represent 54.4 percent of the district’s total population, an outright majority, while Grays Harbor had dropped to just 14 percent of the regional share. These counties are no longer peers. They’re a large urban anchor and four rural not even satellites, all governed by rules designed for a region that no longer exists.

The comparison with the only other regional library system produced by the Bowerman framework is worth pausing on. The North Central Library, serving Chelan, Douglas, Okanogan, Grant, and Ferry counties, came from the same post-war consolidation logic. But its demographic story has been very different. Chelan County led the group in 1930 with 45.6 percent of the regional population. Grant County has grown significantly since then, producing a more distributed balance where no single county commands an outright majority. North Central hasn’t experienced the structural subsidy problem that now defines Timberland’s budget, and that’s not a coincidence. It is what happens when the founding assumptions of a regional model don’t get overturned by ninety years of uneven growth.

That subsidy problem is the crux of the modern critique. The Ridley-Simon Efficiency Test evaluates public services by measuring the ratio of effort, meaning expenditures and staffing, to results, meaning actual service delivery like circulation. By that measure, TRL’s own data shows a system that’s crossed into diminishing returns. Between 2017 and 2026, salary spending for TRL’s central Service Center doubled from $2.2 million to $4.4 million. The Service Center’s share of total staff rose from 14.4 percent to 19.2 percent, even as the rest of the system lost 30 frontline positions. TRL now delivers 9.6 circulations per resident. That’s the lowest figure among its six peer library systems. Sno-Isle delivers 13.3. Whatcom County delivers 14.2.

The county-level numbers are harder to ignore. In the 2026 budget, Thurston County generates $15.6 million in revenue and receives $6.6 million in local library expenditures. Grays Harbor generates $3.05 million and receives $2.98 million in local spending. Thurston is paying a $9 million premium into the regional system, a sum that largely funds central administrative overhead and the cost of keeping small, remote branches running in counties that couldn’t sustain them on their own.

There’s a structural fix that analysts have described as a “regional divorce,” transitioning from a consolidated district to a federated or contract-based model. Under that arrangement, Thurston County could redirect its $9 million premium toward services that fit an urban population: more digital licensing, longer hours, better technology infrastructure. The remaining four counties could form a smaller rural cooperative, scaled to their actual geography and potentially eligible for federal and state rural development grants that a mixed-district like TRL can’t easily pursue.

It’s a reasonable idea. It’s also currently functionally impossible, and a 2024 law made it harder. Senate Bill 5824 was passed in direct response to a 2023 attempt to dissolve the Columbia County Rural Library District in Dayton. That effort followed a dispute over books with LGBTQ+ themes, and it exposed what critics called a loophole: under the old law, it took signatures from just 10 percent of voters in the unincorporated area to force a dissolution vote of a rural library district that served a large non-annexed city. In Columbia County, that was 107 people. SB 5824 raised the threshold to 25 percent of all eligible voters across the entire district. It also extended voting rights to residents of incorporated cities who had previously been barred from dissolution votes even while paying taxes to support the library. The bill passed 44 to 5 in the Senate and 94 to 2 in the House.

The irony isn’t subtle. Gorton’s 1972 ruling locked the five counties together as a matter of judicial interpretation. SB 5824 has now reinforced that lock through statute, raising the bar for dissolution high enough that even a legitimate restructuring effort, one driven by fiscal reality and demographic change rather than a culture war, is out of reach without new legislation. The bill was written to protect libraries from bad-faith attacks. What it also does, as a side effect, is protect a dysfunctional regional structure from good-faith reform.

Bowerman warned in 1950 against “the conservative forces of vested interests” that would resist regional consolidation. He couldn’t have anticipated that the vested interest most difficult to move would eventually be the consolidated institution itself. Or that the expert, forward-looking governance tools he prescribed for adaptation would be precisely the tools a future administration would withhold from its own board. The DNA he wrote into Timberland Regional Library encoded both its ambition and its central problem: a system built for counties with common economic interests, in a region that’s spent seventy-five years quietly growing apart.

Gerry Lemon and what history gifts to the future

April 25, 2026 / / 0 Comments

The General Administration Building is being torn down. This is despite it being perhaps the most important building in Olympia’s history. And this is exactly as it should be.

We should know our history, know where we came from, know why we do the things we do. But preserving a structure that no longer serves our needs ties our hands at precisely the moment we need both arms free. There’s a difference between honoring the past and being imprisoned by it. A community that can’t tell the difference will eventually find itself curating ruins while its living members go unhoused and unserved.

Like much of Puget Sound history, Olympia’s story divides into distinct chapters: the territorial age, post-statehood through the Second World War, and the postwar decades that carried us to today. The great shift, from a community shaped by resource extraction to one shaped by the machinery of governance, happened in the years after the war. The GA Building is the hinge on which that transformation turned. And still, it should go. That age is over, the building costs too much, and we need the land more than we need the structure. The unque mosiac was moved, and I’m glad of that.

The legal conflict that produced the GA Building began in March 1954, when Thurston County Superior Court Judge Charles T. Wright ordered thirteen state agencies to move their headquarters from Seattle back to Olympia. His ruling rested on a constitutional requirement that the executive branch reside at the seat of government. Wright worried that allowing agencies to drift toward the larger city would reduce Olympia to little more than a name on a map. Governor Langlie and Attorney General Eastvold pushed back, arguing for a more flexible reading of the law. The local victory held anyway.

In August 1954, the Washington State Supreme Court upheld the lower court in a five-to-four ruling, with Justice Donworth holding for the majority that the framers of the State Constitution intended the entire executive department to be physically located at the seat of government. The court rejected the state’s argument for a modern, logistically convenient interpretation. Thirteen agencies, from the Department of Health to the Horse Racing Commission, were ordered to relocate to Olympia.

The people who drove this weren’t state officials. They were a small group of Olympia residents and business owners, determined to make their city the capital in fact and not just in name, represented by attorneys Smith Troy and John Spiller. Gerry Lemon and the Mottman family led the effort. They won, and it stuck.

The ruling triggered an immediate and massive expansion of Olympia’s built landscape. The GA Building, completed in 1956 at a cost of $4.3 million, was bulging at the seams almost from the day it opened, the first major structure built to house the returning agencies, already overwhelmed by the surge it was meant to contain. Decades of campus planning followed: the State Library, parking facilities, and more office blocks over on the East Campus. It was a major economic victory for Olympia, but it permanently changed the city’s character. The dense, monumental government core we have today is a direct result.

It was decided by a single vote. Think about that.

If Justice Hill’s dissent had carried, Washington’s agencies might have spread across the state, their headquarters placed in Seattle, Spokane, and Vancouver, closer to the populations they actually served. Olympia might have remained a smaller, seasonal hub, shaped by the rhythms of the legislative session rather than the weight of a permanent government campus. Historic neighborhoods that were later demolished for office blocks and parking garages might still be standing. The city might feel more like a town. But that’s not what happened. The GA Building is what happened, and it deserves to be remembered. It does not need to be kept.

The same argument is playing out right now in Seattle, though the stakes there involve catwalks and ladder cages rather than office buildings. Gas Works Park, on the north shore of Lake Union, started in 1906 as a coal gasification plant, supplying synthetic gas to the city for fifty years before closing in 1956. When Seattle began purchasing the land in 1962, the site was heavily contaminated with coal tar and heavy metals. Landscape architect Richard Haag had a different idea than demolition: he preserved the industrial ruins as sculpture, using bioremediation to treat the soil and incorporating the old machinery into the life of the park. It was a genuinely imaginative act, seeing the past as something to be lived with rather than erased.

The park is now on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s also become a serious problem. People have died after climbing and falling from the old structures, and deferred maintenance costs have grown untenable. Seattle Parks and Recreation sought approval to remove catwalks and ladder cages that couldn’t be made safe, while preservation groups and the Landmarks Preservation Board pushed back, accusing the city of demolition by neglect. As of early 2026, the city is moving to address the safety issues, but the Landmarks Board has repeatedly denied demolition proposals, insisting instead on a comprehensive preservation plan.

There’s an irony worth sitting with. What began as a public health hazard, a gasification plant poisoning land and air, was preserved in place and has continued to be a hazard in a different form. The commitment to honoring the past extended even to its dangers.

The Gas Works debate illustrates something that’s gone wrong in the preservation movement more broadly, a tendency to become transfixed like Narcissus by a fixed image of the past, unable to look away from the reflection long enough to notice the living world around it. Landmarking, which started as a reasonable tool for protecting genuinely significant places, has increasingly been turned to other purposes. In cities across Washington, it’s been used to block housing density and freeze neighborhoods in forms that suit current residents at the expense of those who need to live there. The practical effect, often though not always intentional, was exclusion, preserving the character of a neighborhood in ways that served the comfortable while denying shelter to those who needed it most.

The consequences aren’t abstractions. Washington has significant and persistent racial homeownership gaps. Black residents are substantially overrepresented among the homeless relative to their share of the general population. A large portion of renters statewide pay more than a third of their income toward housing. When we talk about protecting neighborhood character, it’s worth asking plainly whose character we mean, and at whose expense we’re protecting it.

History isn’t a museum. It’s a conversation between the dead and the living, and the living carry obligations too, not only to remember, but to act, to build, to provide for those who come after. Neighborhoods changed organically for generations, large homes subdivided to house more families, commercial buildings adapted to new uses, waterfronts reimagined as economies shifted. That’s not the destruction of history. That is history. When we use preservation law to stop that process, we’re not saving anything. We’re embalming it.

Gerry Lemon understood this. The same man who led the legal fight to make Olympia a real capital also gave the city something else entirely, donating the land and mosaic viewpoint overlooking the harbor from Fourth Avenue near Water Street, the gift that became the seed of Percival Landing. Where the 1954 legal victory filled Olympia with government buildings, Lemon’s waterfront gift pointed somewhere different, toward a place of public life, a boardwalk, a gathering place, a shoreline returned to the people who live near it.

It’s hard now to imagine downtown Olympia without Percival Landing. It seems inevitable. But it was a choice, and the alternative is visible in places like Coos Bay or Aberdeen, cities that held onto the industrial character of their waterfronts and found that character had little use for the people who remained. That’s what Olympia replaced.

Lemon was a boating enthusiast and former commodore of the Olympia Yacht Club, a man who understood that the health of a place depended on its usefulness to the people living in it. He also knew his contributions would outlast him not because they’d be preserved unchanged, but because they made possible something that could continue to grow. The GA Building was probably the great civic achievement of his public life. We can honor what it represents without keeping it standing.

We need to know our history, need to understand what brought us here and why. But history isn’t given to us so we can carry it around like a millstone, growing heavier with each year while the people around us go without shelter. It’s given to us so we can learn what it actually means to build something that lasts. And what lasts isn’t the building. What lasts is the act of making a place where people can live well, now and after we’re gone. We should remember. And then we should get back to work.

The New LD 22 in a bigger Washington State Legislature.

Going Closer to Home

April 18, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been thinking about apportionment and the impacts of capping the House of Representatives for at least 10 years. The obsession started when Washington State felt the impacts of the 2010 apportionment, the process that created the “Denny Heck” district. This was the first major redesign of our political boundaries in my adult life, a massive shift in how we see ourselves.

We talk often about the polarization of our politics. We rarely talk about the math of it. Our legislative bodies have been effectively downzoned, capped at a fixed density while the population they serve has exploded. This isn’t just about crowded calendars for representatives shuttling around their districts. It’s a fundamental surrender of legislative power to the executive branch, turning our representatives from neighbors into distant brands.

The Great Capping

The pivot point for the federal government was the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. Before this, as the American population grew, the House of Representatives grew with it. But in 1929, Congress froze its membership at 435. By doing so, they didn’t just limit their size. They transitioned the House from a human scale institution to an industrial scale one.

We can think about this like a city council decision. Imagine a neighborhood that is capped at one single family home per parcel even as a thousand people move into the area. That single home becomes a rare, high value asset. Only the extremely wealthy or those with deep institutional backing can afford to buy in. The neighborhood becomes exclusive and expensive, ending up utterly disconnected from the needs of the many.

By keeping the number of representatives low while the population surged to 330 million, we created a form of political homelessness. There simply isn’t enough room in our legislative neighborhood for everyone who wants to be involved. This forces the public to move their needs and demands into the only building that keeps growing. That building is the Executive Branch skyscraper.

As Danielle Allen, co-chair of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, recently noted:

The House of Representatives was meant to be the body closest to the people. By capping its growth, we have essentially frozen the House in time, while the nation has moved on. This stagnation has allowed the executive branch to expand into the vacuum of leadership, turning a body of representatives into a body of spectators. We must enlarge the House to ensure that it has the capacity to oversee a 21st-century government and to ensure that every citizen’s voice can be heard above the din of special interests and executive overreach.

The Species of the Iconoclast

This downzoning explains why someone like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is such an odd duck in modern DC. The 3rd Congressional District has a long history of protecting iconoclasts. These are people who cut against the grain of national party lines to represent the true essence of their geography.

We saw it in Jolene Unsoeld. She was an Olympian who entered office as an outsider and stayed that way, defying party expectations on everything from open government to gun rights. We saw it in Brian Baird. His independence was grounded in evidence and firsthand experience, the kind of conviction that meant supporting a surge in Iraq after visiting the country or being the first U.S. official in years to enter the Gaza Strip to condemn humanitarian devastation.

Now we see it in MGP. She isn’t a centrist in the way D.C. consultants use the term. She is a localist. Her politics are deeply rooted in the dignity of work and a Wendell Berry vision of local self-determination. When she hangs a 1950s chainsaw in her office, it’s a symbol of stewardship over consumption.

But in a capped House, MGP is an endangered species. When a district has 760,000 people, a candidate can no longer win through retail politics. They must buy mass media wholesale messaging, a requirement that demands national party money and adherence to a national brand. If we uncapped the House, we would likely see more people like her. It wouldn’t be because they share her specific policies. It would be because smaller districts allow for low to the ground campaigns that lean into the specific nature of a community.

The Mirror in the Mirror: The DC Plateau

This same hollowing out is happening right here in Washington State. There is a fascinating irony in our history. In 1930, just one year after the federal cap, Washington voters passed Initiative 57. It increased the size of our state legislature. We were upzoning our democracy as the feds were closing theirs.

However, that expansion hit a wall in the 1970s. Following the court case Prince v. Kramer and the shift to a redistricting commission, our legislature has been effectively capped at 147 members for over 50 years. Meanwhile, our population has more than doubled.

The result is a staggering representation inflation. In 1890, a Washington legislator represented about 3,000 people. Today, that ratio is over 52,000 to 1. Since that math splits the work of a single district among two representatives and a senator, the real ratio is 156,000 to 1.

At 3,000 to 1, a representative is a neighbor. At 52,000 to 1, a representative is a brand. We are losing the space where a useful, known member of the community could win a seat without a professional campaign apparatus.

The Institutional Friction Gap

The most dangerous byproduct of this cap is the loss of institutional friction. When a legislative body is too small to manage the complexity of a modern administrative state, the Executive Branch expands to fill the vacuum.

In Washington State, this impact is blunted. Our executive apparatus is split between more than a half dozen elected executives from Governor to Insurance Commissioner. In DC, the executive is unitary.

We see this in the fecklessness of the current Congress. When the President and the Congressional majority are the same, there is no friction. The legislature simply becomes a rubber stamp for the Executive’s national platform. When they are different, Congress often lacks the processing power to truly oversee the bureaucracy, a dynamic leading to a system where the President can largely do as they wish. The courts are left as the only remaining check.

Trump has demonstrated how far the edges of presidential power can be pushed when the legislature has unilaterally disarmed by refusing to grow. If there were 1,500 members of Congress, or 300 members of the Washington State Legislature, the surface area for oversight would be vastly larger. It would be much harder for a single executive voice to swamp the collective processing power of a truly representative body.

Reclaiming the Neighborhood Scale

We cannot have a Wendell Berry style of politics in a downzoned democracy. To save the iconoclast and restore the balance of power, we have to stop treating representation as a fixed scarcity.

Capping our legislative bodies was a choice made for the convenience of the incumbents. It was about the efficiency of the managers. But democracy isn’t supposed to be efficient in the industrial sense. It is supposed to be representative in the human sense. Whether in D.C. or in Olympia, we are living in the affordability crisis of a capped system. It is time to uncap the House, uncap the Legislature, and return our politics to a neighborhood scale.

Turning the corner at Block 46

April 11, 2026 / / 0 Comments

We are at least a decade into a counterrevolution in downtown Olympia. Urban Olympia LLC is systematically tearing up old surface lots and replacing them with housing. This brings us to the history of Block 46 of Sylvester’s Plat. The eastern portion of this block is currently on the developer’s list as they plan for a five story apartment building on what used to be a patch of concrete. For a hundred years, this block served as a laboratory for our ambitions. It shifted from a muddy shoreline to an industrial rail hub, then to a stagnant field of parking, and now toward a high-density residential future.

To understand why a five story apartment building is rising here, you have to look past the surface of the parking lots and into the dredge spoils of 1910.

The Disappeared Shoreline

In the late 19th century, Block 46 was essentially a frontier of the tide. The 1891 plat shows a few single family homes and a duplex, but the geography was different back then. Before the city was tamed by engineering, this was the edge of the Swantown Slough. It wasn’t a scenic beach with sand. Instead, it was a muddy shoreline much like the mudflats you see today near Buzz’s Bar and Grill on Mud Bay Road.

The transformation of this block was dictated by the Carlyon Fill of 1910 and 1911. Dr. P.H. Carlyon was a dentist and mayor with a relentless vision for the permanence of Olympia. He spearheaded the dredging of 2 million cubic yards of material from the bottom of Budd Inlet. This massive slurry was pumped behind bulkheads to create 29 blocks of new upland, including the area right next door to Block 46.

While the fill added land to the east, it fundamentally changed how people used Block 46. By stabilizing the area around downtown, the project allowed the Union Pacific to stretch its tracks across the city to reach a new terminal. The block was no longer a quiet residential edge. It became a strategic corridor for the Olympia Branch spur line.

Rails and the 1959 Disaster

By 1915, the Union Pacific had established a permanent foothold. They acquired a local startup line to connect downtown to the mainline at East Olympia. This 7.4 mile spur was the lifeblood of the city’s early 20th century economy. It carried beer from the brewery, plywood, and timber products.

Most noteable to us today, you could board the train in downtown Olympia and ride to Seattle, Portand or Tacoma. Passenger rail service has been lost to us for decades, but we can imagine how twice a day service by modern rail would have felt 110 years ago.

The presence of the rail line carved through the heart of Block 46. By the 1947 Sanborn maps, the domestic character of the block was starting to fade. The oil industry arrived on the east side. Maxwell Oil and Gull Oil established a footprint right next to the tracks. Yet, a surprising amount of housing stuck around on the south and west upland portions. Remnants of that era still stand today as the last two houses on 7th Avenue.

1908
1947

The most violent chapter in the rail history of the block occurred on Friday, March 13, 1959. A 900 ton segment of rail cars was left uncoupled and without brakes at the Tumwater border. The cars hurtled downhill and gained terrifying speed. They smashed into the Union Pacific Depot at over 60 miles per hour.

You can imagine living in of the houses on Block 46 as the rail cars flew buy and then hearing the unimaginable noise as they destroyed the depot.

The crash killed an employee and leveled a significant portion of the station. Though the depot was eventually rebuilt, the event marked a slow turning point. The industrial intensity of the rail line began to wane. It left behind underutilized land that would eventually become the hallmark of our 20th century downtown, the parking lot.

The Era of Stagnation

From the 1960s through the 1980s, the history of Block 46 became a story of divestment. Local families began selling their interests. Diamond Parking moved in and acquired two lots for vehicle storage. The Union Pacific eventually sold its interests to developers. The parking lots were leased specifically to various state agencies as they looked to keep their employees heading downtown by car.

In recent years, much of the block had settled into a low-value equilibrium. It was mostly asphalt. It generated a modest $7,000 annually in property taxes for local government. This was the stagnant parking lot phase, contributing very little to the city’s vibrancy or budget bottom line.

The Legion and Jefferson Project

Today, at least some of the asphalt is being torn up for a five story, 84,449 square foot mixed use development represents the first major residential investment on this block in a generation. It will house 91 units above ground-floor commercial space. The design uses a brick warehouse aesthetic that nods to the industrial past of the neighborhood.

Building here is not easy. Because the site sits on the soft silts of the historic shoreline, the foundation must rest on piles.

It is also fueled by a controversial financial tool called the Multi-Family Tax Exemption.

The Math of the Tax Gap

Critics often frame this tax exemption as a giveaway to developers. However, the fiscal reality of Block 46 suggests a different story.

Currently, the parking lot pays $7,000 a year. Once the apartment building is finished, the assessed taxes will jump to at least $100,000 (a best guess I arrived at by looking at a smaller apartment building nearby). Under the eight year exemption, the city essentially foregoes the $93,000 tax gap to make the high density project viable. This results in a short term loss of roughly $744,000.

But the math changes in year nine. The moment the exemption expires, the building begins paying its full $100,000 share. It takes only eight years of full payments for the city to repay its original investment. By year 17, which is less than two decades into the life of a building meant to last fifty years, the tax debt has broken even. Every year after that, the building generates 14 times the annual revenue of the original parking lot.

The But For Reality

This leads to a central mystery of urban planning called the “But For” test. Would this housing exist without the incentive? For decades, new housing in downtown Olympia was almost nonexistent. If a building isn’t built because the math doesn’t work for the developer, the city doesn’t lose millions in potential taxes. It simply continues to collect $7,000 a year from a parking lot. You cannot lose taxes on a building that does not exist.

What we don’t often ask is the impact urban sprawl has had in the “But For” context. But for building Henderson Boulevard from the interstate down to Eskridge, would Southeast Olympia exist the way it is today?

But for widening Mud Bay Road after Cooper Point, would the west side have grown the way it has? We don’t often talk about the subsidy that exists for suburban sprawl, especially as it reaches out into the woods in isolated pockets of neighborhood level development, but it does exist. So squinting at an eight year tax exemption instead of a permanent subsidy seems rich.

Beyond the property tax, we have to consider the hidden math of density. Ninety-one new households mean hundreds of people buying groceries and dining at downtown restaurants. It is also far cheaper for a city to provide services to 100 people on one city block than to 100 people spread across suburban sprawl.

The transition of Block 46 from a mudflats shoreline to a rail through-way, then to a parking lot, and finally to a residential hub is a microcosm of Olympia itself. The exemption isn’t a permanent subsidy. It is a deferred revenue strategy to speed through the parking lot era. The city is accepting a short term plateau to guarantee a massive, permanent increase in the tax base for the next half century. On the corner of Legion and Jefferson, we are finally trading the stagnation of the 20th century for the density of the 21st.

The Timberland Regional Library doesn’t face a stand-off, it faces some sort of evolution

April 4, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Dean Jewett should not be a library trustee. In our current political crisis around the Timberland Regional Library, though, I want to get that point out of the way quickly.

Right now, Timberland Regional Library has two open seats on its board of trustees. This might seem like a small detail compared to the massive budget crisis the library is facing, but it is worth dispatching why we are (probably) seeing a quiet, long running standoff between county commissioners in Mason and Thurston counties.

Thurston County refused to approve Jewett for a seat. In response, Mason County refused to approve the candidate put forward by Thurston. Under the current rules, all five county commissions in the district have to agree to appoint a trustee. One disagreement can freeze the entire process.

After he was nominated by Mason County in 2024, Jewett was involved in a physical fight with a person experiencing homelessness. Police reports and video showed that the conflict started when Jewett got out of his truck and shouted insults about homeless people toward a man named Christopher Booth. Booth was just trying to dry a wet sleeping bag in the rain.

Jewett filmed the man and made derogatory remarks before things turned physical. While the resulting assault charges were eventually dismissed in 2025, it was only because the prosecutor could not find the victim to testify. The video evidence of the aggression did not go away.

To me, this is not the character of a library trustee.

If this was the basis of their decision, the Thurston County commissioners made the right call. Mason County has suggested bringing all five counties together to talk about his status, but the best move is to just put Jewett back on the shelf.

Broader Context of the Rural/Urban Stand-Off

I want to pull back the zoom from the drama of one board seat and look at the larger crisis facing Timberland, which is captured in how rural and urban parts of the district see and support library services.

The close-in facts are pretty stark: after closing out the 2026 budget, the library leadership suddenly found a $3.8 million hole in their finances. Their solution in February was to approve massive staffing cuts. This move left 40 percent of the public facing workers without a job. The public was rightfully angry. The executive director, Cheryl Heywood, ended up resigning.

I have a bit of history with this. I served on the Timberland board between 2010 and 2016. I started right after the library failed a levy lid lift in 2009. We were in the middle of a long and messy leadership process that eventually led us to Heywood.

I will be honest, and say I still do not fully understand where this $3.8 million hole came from right after a budget was approved. It has not been explained in a way that satisfies me.

Let’s pull the zoom out: the general story of the Timberland deficit is very real. It is the same story for almost every local government in Washington that relies on property taxes. There is an unrealistic 1 percent cap on how much those funds can grow each year. This traps property tax dependent districts in an inflationary spiral. They cannot keep up with rising costs because their revenue is legally capped at a level that stays below the rate of inflation.

The last time things got this bad was in 2018. Back then, the library tried to roll out a new plan for its buildings. That plan was meant to address the fiscal crisis and a deeper structural issue with how the district is organized.

Timberland was created in the 1960s. Back then, the five counties involved were roughly the same size. They had similar economies. But since then, the timber industry has collapsed. The state government has grown. Thurston County has exploded in size and wealth while the other four counties have mostly stayed the same.

Population in 1968 vs. 2018

The building plan in 2018 was a necessary reaction to these changes. Rural communities were terrified of losing their local library branches. But the math showed a massive imbalance. Thurston County provides more than half of the tax money for the entire district. It only gets about 41 percent of the spending. This means urban taxpayers are essentially paying 1.4 million dollars a year to subsidize rural library branches. Many of those same rural areas are the ones that consistently vote against the tax levies needed to keep the system running.

It is much more expensive to serve a person in rural Grays Harbor than it is in urban Thurston County. It actually costs nearly twice as much per borrower. By trying to keep every single old building open, the district was preventing itself from reaching other rural areas that had no service at all. The choice was between closing some buildings to modernize the system or letting the whole district rot under the weight of budget cuts.

That imbalance is still there in the 2025 budget. Thurston County is putting in over $9 million but only getting $6 million back in local services. This urban to rural subsidy is not a new idea. It is part of how government works at every level. Providing services in the woods is just more expensive than providing them in a city. Research shows it costs about 39 percent more to serve a rural resident because there is no density. Maintaining miles of road or water lines for just a few houses costs a lot more per person than it does in a crowded neighborhood. Small towns also lack the ability to spread costs out.

And this is just the bottom line of the budget itself. This discussion doesn’t address the fundamental disparity in providing capital costs across the district. The truth is (except in Yelm and Montesano), the cities own and keep up library buildings. But, outside cities, the district foots the bill. This creates a layer of further double taxation for city residents.

Stand-off between soul and money. We need both.

There are two different ways people are looking at this crisis right now. On one side, people like me see a data driven reality. We see a tax structure from the 1960s that is failing. For us, the funding cliff is a mathematical fact. On the other side, writers like John Hughes and Caelen McQuilkin see this as a man made disaster. They see it as cold hearted incompetence and a betrayal by a top heavy administration.

They mostly ignore the tax disparity between the counties. Instead, they focus on the idea that administrators kept their high salaries while cutting the people at the front desks. They see the move toward automated kiosks and unstaffed branches as an abandonment of the library as a sacred community hub.

The problem is that the current cuts are hitting the rural areas the hardest. Even if those branches are expensive to run, they are also the most fragile.

Looking back at the 2009 levy data, we can see the problematic political nature that this rural/urban split clearly has on the district. Urban areas supported the library at about 51 percent. Rural areas were only at 38 percent. That is a huge gap. In Thurston County, that gap was even wider. The only place where support was higher was in Shelton, where people were voting to join the district at the same time.

The core of the argument is that rural services are being reduced. But these are often the same places where voters did not support the library in the first place. I am not saying this as a punishment. I am saying that if the trustees want to pass a new levy lid lift soon, they have to face this reality. The current levy rate is about half of what is legally possible. We obviously need a new campaign for a levy lift as soon as possible. It is really the only way forward if we want to save these libraries.

One thing I have realized from reading research by groups like OCLC is that there is a disconnect in how we talk about this. I have spent years focusing on efficiency and data. But most people value the library because of its transformational impact. The push for branch closures and kiosks failed because it ignored the human element. A passionate librarian is what actually drives financial support. When you automate the building, you strip away the soul of the community.

The OCLC research presents a paradox that strangely points out that the people most likely to use the library are not the same people who are more likely to vote for funding. In places like Lewis County, the library is a lifeline. People still vote against tax increases there. Many people do not even realize the library is in trouble until they are about to lose it.

The love people feel for their library usually stays quiet until the building is about to disappear. To put it bluntly, the best time to ask for help is before you cut the budget. But you have to make sure everyone knows exactly what is on the chopping block first.

Epilogue: The Breaking Point

Next year, we’ll know a lot more about the future of Timberland. We’ll see how they address their current leadership vacuum. We’ll find out if the talk of a levy lid lift is real and possibly if it has passed. We’ll finally know if Timberland is going to continue its death spiral in terms of both services and its levy rate.

It’s worth noting that right now, it’s very hard to close a library district or for a county to withdraw from one. Gathering enough signatures across five different counties to put a shuttering initiative on the ballot is a massive task. It’s probably harder and more expensive to manage than a levy lid lift itself.

The legislature could do something about the fiscal cliff facing this district. They could do the same for every other local government in the state. They hold the sole authority to adjust that 1% growth limit. The political realities of that are difficult, but there is another, darker path the legislature could take.

As the levy campaign was failing back in 2009, two bills were introduced in the legislature. They didn’t get a hearing, but they offered a different vision for governance. These bills would have significantly simplified the process for a county to exit an intercounty rural library district. They would have allowed a county’s legislative authority to trigger an election just by passing a resolution. If the voters approved, that county would immediately leave the original district and automatically start its own.

To address the fairness and representation issues between counties like the ones in Timberland, the bills included a specific mandate. If one county has more than 50% of the total population but fewer than 50% of the trustees, the district would have to be divided into subdistricts of equal population. This would ensure that trustees actually live in the areas they represent. It would provide much more equitable governance for the most populous counties within a shared district.

These bills didn’t get a hearing, but they addressed fundamental issues surrounding how Timberland has changed and grown. That means someone was working and thinking about this issue enough to put it together, if not gathering the political will to bring change.

The fundamental structure of Timberland has not been addressed in decades. We haven’t changed how these regional libraries work since the mid-twentieth century. We might finally be reaching a breaking point, if the tides and organizational will shift one way or the other.

One way or another, the current system will not hold forever.

We Fought Iron Giants. And Won. We Fought Hardwood Oligarchs.

March 28, 2026 / / 0 Comments

You can look at our place and see a finished product. We look at the Tacoma waterfront, the glass of Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, and the landscape of a state that is established and permanent.

But if you scratch the surface of our legal code, specifically the patchwork of our 1889 Constitution, you see the scars of a street fight.

Washington State was not born from a polite agreement of settlers. It was wrestled into existence through a decades-long struggle against the iron hegemony of the railroads. Everything we have is a result of a battle. Our early history is born of wars with the railroads.

This history isn’t just a footnote, it is the fundamental DNA of our political identity. It’s why we were the rare state to let an NBA team walk rather than pay a ransom. It’s why, in 2026, as the NBA finally prepares to return to Seattle, they are doing so on our terms.

The Grange and the Commission

In the late 19th century, railroads were using discriminatory rates to crush small farmers while favoring industrial giants. They peddled influence by handing out free rail passes to judges and legislators. It was the 1890s version of a luxury suite.

Led by the Grange movement, Washingtonians spent twenty years agitating for oversight. The railroads argued that a regulatory commission would drive capital from the state. That threat has remained remarkably unchanged for 130 years. In 1905, the people finally won and established the first Railroad Commission.

Capital did not, in the end, flee the state.

This wasn’t just about freight rates. It was a shift in the social contract. It established that a corporation operating in Washington has a legal obligation to serve the public interest. That commission evolved into today’s Utilities and Transportation Commission. It’s a persistent reminder that in this state, we look at the books of the powerful before we give them our blessing.

The 2008 Divorce: Strategic Non-Cooperation

Fast forward a century, and the role of the iron masters had been replaced by the Oklahoma City barons. In 2008, when Howard Schultz and later Clay Bennett demanded a public ransom to bring KeyArena up to NBA standards, they expected Washington to follow a specific model of governance. They thought we would subsidize a billionaire or let them steal our civic identity.

But Seattle applied what social theorist Gene Sharp calls nonviolent resistance. Sharp points out that power isn’t monolithic. It relies on “pillars of support.” By refusing to provide the financial pillar of a public subsidy, the city and the state withdrew their cooperation. We decided that the big league brand wasn’t worth the public debt.

We watched the Sonics leave for Oklahoma City. That city continues to fund its status through massive public sales taxes for arenas that will never make the public treasury whole. Seattle, meanwhile, waited. We practiced strategic patience. We waited for a private investor who saw the inherent value of our market.

The 2026 Return: Value over Ransom

This week, the NBA’s Board of Governors finally voted to explore expansion back to Seattle. The projected winners aren’t a group of out-of-state threat-makers. It’s Samantha Holloway and the Kraken ownership group. Crucially, they aren’t asking for a handout. They’ve already spent the private capital to build Climate Pledge Arena. This proves that when you have a community worth being in, the private sector will eventually adapt to your terms.

This reality makes the current debate over Washington’s 9.9% tax on millionaires feel like a repeat of the 1905 Railroad Commission fight. Republican legislators spent a record number of hours during the legislative session claiming that this millionaire tax would ensure the NBA would never return. They argued billionaires would never subject their millionaire players to a 9.9% hit on income over $1 million. They warned of a millionaire exodus.

Ironically, Howard Schultz was the first to flee, but he will likely be the rare one. As Professor Cristobal Young’s research shows, millionaires are the least mobile income group. They stay for the social and professional networks and the value of the community. Notably, Schultz is mostly retired. His wealth is in the bag. He actually has no reason to maintain ties here because he’s already taken what he needs.

The NBA is yawning past our tax because they care about money. They’re moving forward because Washington is a premier global market. Our community matters more than their tax preference.

The Joy of Sport vs. The Luxury Box

While we celebrate the return of the Sonics, we have to look at the disparity in our own backyard. We do not build billion-dollar arenas for the elite with public funds. But in cities like Olympia, we struggle to find the space or funding to build a single new soccer field for a local rec league.

In 2022, the state pointed out that only 24% of Washington youth met physical activity guidelines. Adult physical fitness tracks similarly, with women reporting lower numbers than men. Our travel ball culture has turned youth sports into a commercial product. It prioritizes elite sorting over universal access. For adults, field access is worse than for kids since most of our access is limited to schools. We are relegated to expensive corporate gyms.

The Senate passed SR 8664 to address the pent-up demand for recreation, but the funding remains a shadow of what we once considered giving to billionaires.

We should look to the Norwegian model, where the “joy of sport” is a fundamental right. In Norway, profits from the national gambling monopoly are funneled directly into local clubs and fields. They ban national championships and scorekeeping for children under 13 to keep the focus on social development rather than professional scouting. It is a system built for the 100%, not the 1%.

The Rich Can Take Care of Themselves, We Need to Take Care of Each Other

The history of Washington is a history of learning the same lesson the hard way. The rich can and do take care of themselves. We gave tax breaks to Boeing for decades, and they took the jobs to Chicago and South Carolina the moment it suited their bottom line.

Our governance should be for the people who stay. It should be for the runner on the local trail, the parent looking for a soccer field, and the citizen who believes our waterfronts and our infrastructure belong to the public.

In 1889, we fought the railroads and won. In 2008, we fought the NBA and didn’t blink. As we welcome the Sonics back, we do so with the confidence of a state that knows its own worth. We don’t need to subsidize the powerful to be Big League. We already are.

The Carlton and the Choices We Made to Get Here

March 21, 2026 / / 1 Comment

This is the start of what I hope to be a long-term project. I want to track the history of parking lots in downtown Olympia. They’ve become a dominant land use type. I made a map that shows just how pervasive these empty spaces really are.

It hasn’t always been this way. A few examples remain, but our blocks were historically covered in buildings. This density was a social good. Mixed uses like housing, workshops, and shops were tightly packed together. Everything was walkable because we didn’t have a choice. We didn’t have cars.

There’s another side to this that we don’t talk about enough. These dense blocks are more economically productive. They generate more tax revenue than suburban lots or big box stores. It’s a bit of a hidden truth that cities end up paying for the services of suburban and rural residents. Parking lots just eat away at the economic health of our local government.

Think about what we lose to sea level rise. If we don’t act by 2095, downtown Olympia will lose about 370 acres. That’s over 600 million dollars in value based on 2018 data. The land in low-lying Olympia is worth about 1.6 million dollars per acre. Land outside the flood zone is worth less than a third of that. The land most likely to be lost is our older city. It’s the part built before cars. It’s ironic that we’ll probably keep the car-dependent parts of town while the rising tide, caused by car pollution, takes the most productive core.

And, in an era of nearly every local government dealing with structural deficits, it’s worth looking at the literal structures causing the problem.

Scandal and Padlocks at the Hotel Carlton

My first case study is the gravel lot at State and Columbia. If you look at old Sanborn maps, you see a vibrant mix of life. There was a metal shop, a second-hand clothing store, the Salvation Army, and several restaurants. The main anchor was the Carlton Hotel.

The building started as the Carlton House. It stayed that way for a couple of generations. In 1891, it was the center of a local scandal. A seventeen-year-old girl named Lizzie Jacobs was taken there for safety after a failed elopement. Her suitor, John Beggs, got into a fight with Lizzie’s mother and knocked her to the sidewalk. The couple fled in a horse-drawn carriage before an officer stopped them.

By 1902, the place was renamed the Hotel Carlton. The new manager wanted a first-class establishment to show off Olympia’s prosperity. By 1908, you could get breakfast or dinner there for 25 cents. But things took a turn during Prohibition. In 1931, a lawsuit claimed the hotel was bought specifically to be a liquor joint. A federal court issued a padlock order. The hotel was forced to close for an entire year as a penalty.

By 1933, the owners tried to move past the legal trouble with a new name. The final chapter came in 1947, when it was called the Hotel Hutson. That August, the city ordered the building to be torn down. It was seemingly the end of a structure that had been a part of the landscape for decades. And that is where the history of the building goes cold. But before we continue, I want to talk about something else.

Naturally Occurring Affordability

If you look at old crime reports and news snippets from before 1947, it’s clear the Carlton and the Hutson were housing people who were down on their luck. It had become what we now call naturally occurring affordable housing. Nobody set out to build low-income housing here. It just happened because the building was 50 years old and rundown enough to be cheap.

We saw the same thing a few years ago with the Angelus Hotel at 4th and Columbia. These places stay affordable because they are old and lack new investment. They are rare now because modern rules make them impossible to build. Features like shared bathrooms or tiny rooms were often prohibited by modern codes. When these buildings get sold, the cost of safety upgrades is so high that the owners have to raise the rent. That moves them out of reach for the folks below the working class.

Even when we build on top of old parking lots, using more liberalized rules that allow for building in a way that we could 100 years ago, we have to wait decades for that cycle to restart. This creates a conflict between fixing up the city and keeping it stable for residents. The city effectively subsidizes its own gentrification. We trade historical affordability for a modern landscape that is legally and financially inaccessible to the people who live there now.

The Housing Crisis and the City Fathers

Back in 1947, the city certainly didn’t care about low-end housing. They ordered the Carlton torn down despite a massive housing shortage. This was after service members from Fort Lewis and McChord Field started flooding Olympia. The crisis was so bad that people were renting out converted chicken coops.

Even with that level of desperation, Olympia’s leadership rejected federal housing funds. Local landlords actually celebrated the decision with New Year’s toasts in 1943 because they knew it meant they could keep the rents high. They were happy the city turned down the money. The mayor who rejected the money made a half-hearted public appeal for landlords to keep rents low, but it didn’t do much. At the same time, the city was moving to destroy Little Hollywood, the shantytown on the edges of the Deschutes Estuary. The city knew there was a shortage, but they still opted to tear down what little housing existed.

The Ghost of the Carlton

Even with the demolition order, buildings didn’t vanish immediately. Aerial photos from the fifties still show a building at that spot, but not the angular-roof version that was the Carlton. There was also a newer flat-roof building used by the Olympia School District. It seems the old hotel address was absorbed into the school district offices.

In the 1970s, the location started hosting a senior center. A local nonprofit found a good deal in the abandoned school offices. Seniors would go there to pick up bus passes well into the 1980s. When the senior center finally moved across the street to the modern community center, the Carlton’s footprint was finally gone into a parking lot.

We decided after the 1940s that cars were more important than anything else we could do with the land. But it’s heartening that the Carlton survived long enough to be used for something good. It helped educate children and support seniors before it finally became a lot for cars.

Looking at this gravel lot today, we don’t necessarily see a place to leave a car. We can see the lost economic vitality that could be funding our services. We can see the naturally occurring affordable housing that we regulated out of existence for decades. We can see the choice we made to trade a vibrant, productive community for a flat surface that contributes nothing to our future, exempt the moral backing of climate change and sea level rise.

It took nearly a century for the wrecking ball to finally win at State and Columbia. Now, we are the ones living with the quiet, expensive consequences of that victory.

Mist and Filter: Reclaim Your Discernment

March 14, 2026 / / 2 Comments

This week, I want to take a step back from the usual history and politics. Instead, I want to talk about “now.” I mean literally what you are doing in this moment. I want to talk about your discernment. This is about the choices you make regarding what you read or, more broadly, the media you consume.

To that end, thank you for reading this.

I want to acknowledge that most of you are probably reading this on a social media feed. My relationship with these platforms has shifted lately. I started by posting these essays directly into the feed of a platform I used to use for everything. It was my space for social updates, political debate, and personal stories. I shared different things with different circles of friends. Just about a year ago, I stepped away from that space entirely. I hid all my old content and stopped posting for a while. It was only a few months ago that I decided to share these essays there again. They also live on my personal blog and go out as an email newsletter. I’ll come back to that.

I got the core idea for this essay from the second season of a podcast called Hush. It was hosted by Leah Sottile, who is one of the most talented journalists in the Pacific Northwest. If you haven’t listened to it, you really should. The second season investigates the truth behind the death of a young woman in rural Columbia County, Oregon. If you live near me in Washington, this place feels very familiar. It is a lot like Mason, Grays Harbor, or Pacific counties. These are rural areas that are poorer than the I-5 corridor. They don’t have large, suburban towns. Life there is stretched out across long roads lined with commercial timberland. Curiously, these communities are not always supported by timber jobs anymore. The trees are there, but the steady payrolls often aren’t.

The most important part of the series looks at how news moves through these towns. We live in a society that has largely moved past the daily physical newspaper. Several episodes of the podcast discuss how media is changing during this pivot point. We are stuck between the death of the local paper and the rise of what we loosely call social media.

In places like Columbia County, the information landscape feels a lot like the weather. When the local paper fades, it doesn’t leave behind a clear, empty space. It leaves a mist. Information becomes hazy and hard to pin down. You can see the outlines of what’s happening in your town, but the details are blurred by rumors and social media chatter. This mist makes it difficult to know where the solid ground of a fact ends, and the fog of a theory begins. This is the definition problem we’re stuck in: we are trying to navigate a new world using old maps that don’t account for the weather.

The Problem With Definitions

We have a definition problem right now. This is why I don’t trust most polling about where people get their news. A typical poll asks a simple question: “Where do you get your news?” The results usually show that fewer people say “the local newspaper,” while more people say “social media.” This is a shallow way to look at the world. These polls offer almost no context on what “social media” actually means to the person answering.

Think about the variety of that term. Does it mean a well-funded influencer who speaks at political rallies but sues when institutions don’t treat them like a journalist? Does it mean a post from your cousin Ray? Does it mean watching short videos made by a former Washington Post reporter who now works for themselves?

The term “social media” is too blurry. At the same time, the term “newspaper” has become too specific. We need better ways to describe what is happening. We know what newspapers are because we remember what they used to be. As recently as the mid-2000s, if you lived in a medium-sized town and said “the newspaper,” people knew what you meant. You were talking about a well-staffed organization. It had reporters for different topics. It was usually owned by a chain, which meant it had professional human resources and legal standards. It had at least two layers of editors to steady the tiller. There was a business office for ads and subscriptions. Usually, there was an executive who cared enough to go to the Kiwanis or Chamber meetings.

That is not what people mean today. Most of those business functions now live in a different city or state. A local paper might only have three or four reporters left. These people have to cover everything at once. If there is still an editor who lives in the actual town, they are likely overwhelmed. They have no local support to help them make tough calls.

A newspaper used to be an institution. Now, at best, it is a small operation. Those are two very different things. One is an anchor for a community. The other is just a branch of a business trying to stay afloat. They are fighting one small battle in a world war thousands of miles above us.

The Physics of Friction

Social media is just a tool. It is often used poorly by the ghosts of local media companies. However, it is used very effectively by people who want to spread anger or misinformation. Our current media mess is actually rooted in how newspapers started in the United States in the 1800s.

I often talk about the history of the press. Most papers used to be proudly partisan. In its early days, my local paper, The Olympian, called itself a Republican newspaper. The idea of a neutral, non-partisan press supported mostly by ads is a relatively new invention. It feels old because it is what our parents grew up with. They remember it as “the way it always was.” Because of that, we treat the loss of the neutral paper like a lost inheritance. We view it the same way we view walkable downtowns.

We didn’t lose downtowns by accident. We built Walmarts, malls, and massive parking lots to replace them. We leveled parts of our city centers to make room for cars. We wanted people who lived in far-off neighborhoods to be able to drive in and park easily. We chose convenience over community.

We did the same thing to newspapers. As social media platforms grew over the last twenty years, they started eating the ad sales that kept newspapers alive. Eventually, two or three large platforms became the only way for businesses to reach people. This happened so fast that ad buyers didn’t have a choice. Why would a local business struggle to buy a print ad or obscure banner ad when they could just put a digital ad on a platform that targets everyone instantly?

The platforms didn’t just take the revenue. They changed the visibility of our communities. In the old days of the partisan press, you knew exactly where a paper stood. It was bright and clear, even if it was biased. Now, the algorithms have created a digital mist. We see what the system wants us to see, filtered through a logic we aren’t allowed to understand. We’re wandering through this mist of recommended content, losing sight of the local landmarks that used to keep us grounded. We’ve traded the friction of the sidewalk for the phantom images of the feed.

The adtech systems owned by Google might be broken up soon. In April 2025, a federal court ruled that Google holds an illegal monopoly over the technology used for advertising. This case has moved into a high-stakes phase to decide the punishment. The Department of Justice wants Google to sell off parts of its business to make the market fair again. Google says this is too extreme. A judge is expected to make a final decision later in 2026. This will likely lead to years of appeals.

Following this victory, thousands of publishers are now suing for billions of dollars in lost revenue. Late last year, a court made things easier for them. These publishers no longer have to prove Google is a monopoly because the court already decided that. Now they just have to prove how much money they lost.

Even if the publishers win, the results might not help your local town. The money will likely go to the large companies or private equity firms that bought up the papers years ago. They are the ones left holding the bag.

The real goal should be changing the economics of media. The way this information gets paid for is the most important part. When you put all of the attention economy into one giant bucket, you stop caring about the quality of the content. You just want people to keep looking at the screen. Anything that makes it easier to keep scrolling is good for business. Anything that makes you stop and think is bad for business.

The current system is a filter. That filter is designed to boost ad sales. But a local institution is based on friction. Friction, in this case, is local knowledge. It is human-scale.

Jane Jacobs described the importance of the relationships that exist when you can walk down the street to a local store. You might go there to grab some apples. You talk to the person behind the counter. That is a human interaction. It is different from ordering apples online and having a stranger in a car drop them at your door. The walk and the conversation are friction” but they are also what build a community.

The Choice to Look Away

When I looked at the history of the towns in the Hush podcast, I was surprised. I expected to find old partisan newspapers because that is usually the case in the West.

I wanted to write about how we have seen this shift before. I wanted to show how old partisan papers had been the “steamrollers” that destroyed the media landscape that came before them. Eventually, those papers grew up and became responsible to their towns.

But in Columbia County, I found a newspaper that just wanted to be fair. In 1891, the editor of the Oregon Mist wrote a letter to his readers. He said he would give them the best paper his limited budget allowed. He asked the public to help by sending in reports of what was happening in their neighborhoods. He invited people to discuss matters of general interest. But he also said he would reject letters that were “radical and personal” in nature.

Think about that filter. This editor wasn’t an algorithm. He lived in the community. You could see him on the street. You knew where his house was. If you disagreed with him, you knew where to find him. The entire information system was built on a foundation of trust.

Maybe this is why my town, Olympia, used to have several different newspapers at the same time. They served the same people and covered the same news. They just did it at different speeds. People trusted those papers because they knew the people writing them.

As I said, you are probably reading this on a popular platform. I have gotten into the habit of posting on this site again. But it has been a long time since I tried to show my whole life there. I stopped posting about my family. I hid my old photos. I realized that the platform was asking for too much of my personal life in exchange for engagement. I couldn’t do that anymore.

I am posting these essays as an experiment. And since starting, it seems like people enjoy the weekly updates. I am grateful for that. But I am also going to ask you to do something strange.

I want you to stop. Please stop depending on an algorithm to tell you what to read. Use your own mind to decide what content is worth your time. I think you should do two specific things.

First, subscribe to my email newsletter. I will send you what I write every week. I will also include my podcast. You have an email address for a reason. Use it to take control of your reading habits.

Second, you should look into an RSS reader. These are older tools from the earlier days of the internet. They are very simple. They collect content from the websites you choose and show it to you in order, from oldest to newest. I have been using one for over twenty years. It is like a podcast app, but for reading. It allows you to subscribe to a website without giving that site your personal data or letting an algorithm get in the middle.

This is about discernment. We don’t really know what is happening inside the code of these big platforms. I won’t use the word addictive, because I am not a doctor. But I will say that it is not healthy to let a company you don’t know decide what information enters your brain.

Editors used to be the gatekeepers. In a perfect world, you knew the editor. You could judge their work. You could tell them they were wrong. An algorithm is different. It doesn’t exist as a person you can talk to. You can’t hold it accountable for the mistakes it makes.

We need big changes. We need to break up monopolies. We need to make these platforms more transparent. Those are systemic problems. But you can take individual action right now. You can choose to find your news and your essays directly. You can subscribe to a newsletter and never like or comment on a social media post again. That is how you break through the mist and reclaim your own attention.

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