Olympia Time

History, politics, people of Oly WA

Le Morte d’Lacey

June 27, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Last week, when I wrote about the sale of the South Sound Center by Bob Blume’s family to a real estate developer quietly closed a chapter for a region whose very geography Blume had shaped through his mid-century ambitions. He’s often called the “Father of Lacey,” and the title fits: he was the son of a janitor who arrived in the South Sound as a soldier and stayed to sell real estate. His vision wasn’t just to build a shopping center. It was to create a new kind of “downtown” for a community that didn’t yet exist.

Before Blume, the land east of Olympia was a landscape of “ghost plats,” lots laid out in the 1890s as the “New State Addition,” a traditional grid that was an optimistic monument to a get-rich-quick fever that evaporated in the Panic of 1893. By the 1960s, those residential blocks were still mostly empty, ripe for consolidation. Blume sensed a shift coming. The era of car-based, off-the-cloverleaf retail had arrived, and he saw the newly built Interstate 5 as a “river of commerce,” where every off-ramp was a port for business.

That private vision, though, required public infrastructure that the unincorporated fields of Lacey couldn’t provide. Blume and other local leaders realized they couldn’t afford to build the necessary roads and sewers on their own, so they pushed for Lacey’s incorporation in 1966. The municipality was literally built to support a mall.

For decades, Lacey’s identity was being “whatever Olympia isn’t,” the big-box sibling defined entirely by what Blume started. But sixty years on, the regional “river of commerce” has left a complex and costly legacy that the city is only now starting to work through.

The optimism Blume felt looking at those I-5 off-ramps tracked with a national mood. The interstate highway system was, by the broad numbers, a genuine triumph: it accounted for roughly a quarter of total U.S. productivity growth between 1950 and 1989, and the system is now so woven into the economy that removing it would shrink real U.S. GDP by 3.9%, a loss of up to $619 billion. But the success of the “river” came at a localized net loss for many of the communities it actually ran through.

The hidden costs of car-centric development are staggering, and they reach into municipal budgets in ways that Blume’s generation never had to reckon with. Sprawl of the kind Blume championed has become a form of wealth extraction from the cities it creates, pushing up the cost of public infrastructure by up to 40% and locking those cities into a structural maintenance burden of roughly $1 trillion a year across the country. Lacey, born from the mall, is now hitting the age where the full bill is coming due.

Lacey at 60: Status Report

Sixty years in, Lacey presents what you might call a Pavement Paradox. The 2025 State of the Streets report shows an average Pavement Condition Index of 84.6, with 96.8% of the city’s roads rated “good” or “very good.” Those numbers look like a success story. They’re not.

The high average is a mathematical illusion sustained by growth. New roads in newly annexed areas are propping up the network scores and hiding the deterioration happening in the city’s older core. That trick is running out of road. To clear the current maintenance backlog and hit an optimal network PCI of 90, the city is looking at a bill of $56.4 million, and if funding stays flat, the network PCI is projected to fall to 72 within a decade.

The city’s physical layout tells an equally uncomfortable story. Blume’s blueprint was built around moving cars quickly, not moving people, and the result is that 43% of Lacey’s street network has no sidewalks at all. In the older residential areas south of I-5, where the city was originally founded and where most of the affordable housing still is, sidewalks are often incomplete or just missing entirely. If you don’t drive, or can’t, the city is hostile territory.

Lacey’s planning documents use a Level of Traffic Stress scale, where LTS 1 is comfortable for all ages and LTS 4 is a real barrier to getting around.

Pedestrian conditions in the [Urban Growth Area] are predominantly LTS 4… Any roadway outside of neighborhoods without pedestrian facilities receives a PLTS of 4.

For sixty years, Lacey grew by building for cars. It’s now hit a point where it can’t widen its way out of congestion.

The city’s response has been to essentially reverse the Blume Blueprint. Lacey has moved away from a purely car-focused model toward a managed, multimodal approach, and a big part of that shift is the designation of “Strategy Corridors,” key segments like Sleater-Kinney Road and College Street where road widening is off the table. Instead of adding lanes, the city is going with road diets, roundabouts, and land-use changes to handle growth, trying to preserve community scale rather than giving more ground to the river of commerce. It’s a genuine break from the logic of the 1960s.

The city has also adopted a Multimodal Level of Service guideline that puts walking and biking first, with a new target of getting a low-stress bike route within about half a mile of every resident. That’s a direct response to the isolation that fragmented, mall-centered zoning created over the past sixty years. And by adopting a Safety Action Plan in 2025 focused on cutting serious injuries and fatalities, the city is finally acknowledging that moving cars fast can’t be the main goal anymore.

Lacey at 60 is a city going through a difficult but necessary maturation. It was born as a planning mistake, a municipality created to be the infrastructure arm of a private shopping mall. For decades it took the path of least resistance, building out a suburban auto-landscape that worked at the macroeconomic level but left residents with missing sidewalks, high traffic stress, and a $56 million maintenance backlog. Switching from a vehicle Level of Service standard to a Multimodal Level of Service is the city’s way of saying it’s finally trying to serve its residents instead of its commuters.

The “River of Commerce” built the city. It also cut it into isolated pieces that the current generation now has to stitch back together. Blume’s family sold the South Sound Center and moved on. The people of Lacey are the ones left living in the world he built. As the city looks toward 2045, the challenge is to become a place defined not by its proximity to an off-ramp, but by whether it actually works for the people who live there. The detour has lasted sixty years. The return trip has only just begun.

Bob Blume, Olympia and the New State

June 20, 2026 / / 3 Comments

When Bob Blume wanted to build a shopping center on rural land east of Olympia, he knew he’d have to give something away. The interstate had already cut through from Olympia up to Tacoma, and the era of car-based, off-the-cloverleaf retail was here. There was no city off the Sleater-Kinney exit to support a large-scale retail development, but Blume dreamed the mall could one day be the downtown of a new one.

We can forgive Blume for using “downtown” to mean any commercial development surrounded by houses, because Olympia’s actual downtown was being carved up with parking lots at the time.

This week, the old South Sound Center was sold by the family of Bob Blume to a San Diego real estate developer. Blume himself passed away almost 20 years ago, but his legacy transformed Olympia by pulling at the frayed strings of our historic development patterns, tugging us further and further east into an annexation war that would eventually mean the creation of the City of Lacey.

But let’s take a step back 70 years before Blume to the first time anyone thought of building here.

The Ghost Plats and the Railroad

Long before the first shovel struck ground for a department store, the land was known as the New State Addition to Olympia. This massive 34-block neighborhood was laid out in a traditional right-angle grid, with long rectangular blocks, an optimistic monument to the get-rich-quick fever that gripped Washington in the 1890s. These “paper plats” were often sold to distant investors who never realized their property was frequently nothing more than open land. Decades before cars changed how we think of land and distance, there was a dream of Olympia’s blocks stretching east into what is now Lacey.

But when the Panic of 1893 hit, the imaginary wealth and city evaporated, leaving behind ghost plats” streets that existed only in local government records.

Late 1950s, you can see edge of Olympia, the outlines of the old plat and where the South Sound Center was in yellow.

The grid was eventually interrupted in 1936 when Weyerhaeuser constructed the Chehalis Western Railroad, bisecting the New State plat and creating the industrial line that would eventually serve as the western border of the South Sound Center. By the 1960s, these residential blocks were slowly being developed but were still mostly empty, ripe for consolidation. Blume, sensing the shift toward a car-centric society, because we’d literally built an interstate through the northern half of the New State Addition, began buying up and consolidating the old parcels, requesting vacations of roads that would never be built, to construct what he envisioned as a modern downtown for a new community.

The “Father of Lacey” and the Risk of the Big Box

The history of the center is really the personal story of Blume, a man often called the “Father of Lacey.” Born the son of a janitor in 1928, he quit school after the 8th grade to help his family, working jobs that included shoveling coal into boilers. He arrived in the South Sound as a soldier stationed at Fort Lewis and decided to stay after his discharge in the 1950s to sell real estate.

Blume’s vision wasn’t unconventional for the time. Like all other mall developers, he viewed the newly constructed Interstate as a “river of commerce,” where every off-ramp acted as a port for business.

That observation, though, was oddly lost on local financing. When he approached Olympia bankers for a loan, they legendarily laughed at him, dismissing the idea that anyone would drive out to the unincorporated fields of Lacey to shop. Undeterred, Blume secured funding in New York City and set his sights on a major anchor tenant to make the mall viable: Sears, Roebuck & Co.

The corporation’s policy required developers to donate the land for their stores as a condition of building. To secure the anchor he needed, Blume was forced to donate a full third of his land to the company, a sacrifice that made the shopping center viable, drawing in major tenants like Peoples and F.W. Woolworth.

That donation, and the eventual sale of what would become Target, carved up the parcel so the piece sold this week looks more like a jigsaw puzzle.

It was also a direct strike on downtown Olympia. Sears’ move to Lacey was a loss for the city, a sign of the change that would keep transforming downtown as larger national retailers left for Lacey and the Westside, chasing modern buildings surrounded by parking. Downtown adapted, narrowing its focus to smaller local retailers. But the decades of downtown doomerism started with Sears taking free land from Blume.

A Mall as the Mother of a City

The South Sound Center was the final reason for Lacey’s creation, the economic center-of-gravity that physically and politically birthed the city. In the early 1960s, the area was unincorporated and lacked basic municipal infrastructure.

The 1960s were marked by a fierce border war between Olympia and Lacey, triggered by Olympia’s aggressive use of assessed value annexations that moved its boundary east to Lilly Road by 1964. Olympia wanted to protect its retail base after Sears left for Lacey and began eating up land to do it. Lacey leaders resisted, claiming it was because the annexation process often bypassed a popular vote of the affected residents.

Realizing they couldn’t afford to build infrastructure privately, Blume and other local leaders, including A.G. Homann, the South Sound Center’s general contractor, pushed for incorporation, looking to leverage a city’s power to issue bonds for the infrastructure the new mall required. After a failed attempt in 1964, the incorporation effort succeeded in 1966, by a narrow margin of only 240 votes. Homann was sworn in as the city’s first Mayor, the moment the mall’s needs were finally codified into a new municipality.

Lacey’s original successful incorporation actually stretched further west than the current city, pushing past Boulevard Road. Olympia struck back by utilizing an archaic 1890 law that allowed the entire City of Olympia to vote on annexing Lacey’s western neighborhoods. Olympia voters agreed, and lopped that land back into the city. Lacey challenged the move, but the Washington Supreme Court upheld it, permanently shifting Olympia’s border east to its current orientation. 

The decade of tension culminated in 1969 with a failed proposal to consolidate the two cities into one, a measure defeated by only 30 votes in Olympia and rejected by a 3-to-1 margin in Lacey.

Surviving

The South Sound Center’s reign as the largest retail area in Thurston County lasted just over ten years. The 1978 opening of the Capital Mall on Olympia’s Westside kicked off what local observers called a “retailing Grand Prix,” and the competition with national shopping center owners who had deep pockets threatened the center’s dominance.

The South Sound Center survived through constant adaptation, including the sale of the middle portion of the parcel to Target and the closure of the mall’s central walkway.

One of the stranger running failures of the commercial community around the mall was the decades-long campaign to rename Sleater-Kinney Road to South Sound Boulevard. It was driven by local businessmen who believed the historic name was hard to spell, hard to pronounce, and irrelevant to the area’s commercial identity. As early as 1967, Blume himself requested the change, a move later backed by the South Sound National Bank and other merchants who wanted the stretch between Martin Way and Pacific Avenue renamed. Jack Lewis, president of the Panorama Corporation, simultaneously proposed renaming the portion south of Pacific Avenue to Panorama Boulevard, dismissing the pioneer name as a “drab” title with no connection to anything in Lacey. \

The proposal met fierce opposition from residents and descendants of the Sleater and Kinney families, who’d homesteaded the land in 1880 and helped clear the original road. The Lacey City Council voted unanimously in January 1981 to keep the original name, and the proponents eventually gave up.

The End of the Blume Era

Bob Blume died in 2007, leaving behind a legacy that had turned a ghost plat into a new kind of city. In a final note on the decline of big box retail, Sears, the anchor that had cost Blume a third of his land but made his vision viable, left the center in 2020, thirteen years after his death.

With the Blume family’s sale of the rest of the property this week, the land where the South Sound Center sits falls out of family ownership for the first time in over 60 years.

The border wars between Olympia and Lacey were fought over neighborhoods that hadn’t been built yet. Southeast Olympia was mostly rural then, Douglas fir stands and open fields. Lacey’s pull toward car-centric commercial space shaped how that land eventually developed, and when we did build houses out here, we built suburbs.

One of the most precise definitions of Lacey I’ve ever heard is that it’s “whatever Olympia isn’t,” and that rings true.

If Olympia is defined by its downtown, then Lacey is the big-box brother, defined by its birth by Blume. The gravity well of Lacey’s car-based commercial development warped the expansion east of Olympia, and what grew out of that is probably our biggest planning mistake.

Dead Space Problem (a poem)

June 13, 2026 / / 0 Comments

I had a busy week this week, so I am going to do something different. I am going to give you a poem I wrote that will be part of a collection I release at the end of the year. Speaking of which, you can buy my collection from last year for $5.

Dead Space Problem is inspired by a debate up in Seattle whether to subdivide unused portions (as in no graves) of a cemetery to build housing. I’m sure even the Yimby-est among us can see how that went sideways.

1. Character

They wanted to build housing on a cemetery parcel. Technically, subdividing the cemetery parcel in a neighborhood so a new parcel could be made on which housing will be built.

Don’t worry, this isn’t the start of a story about houses being built over dead bodies. They are sure this isn’t what’s going on.

But the neighbors are complaining. Not about the dead, but about the character of the place. About the sanctity of the land. The sanctity of the place to be dead in, instead of a place to be alive in.

2. Modest proposal

How making room for the living makes it harder to operate a cemetery. How does a cemetery even make money?

Cemeteries are financial devices. Living off 10 to 15 percent of the original fee to keep the grass mowed and the fences repaired. I’m not sure what the upkeep is, other than what you’d do for your typical lawn.

Eventually, though, the financial devices will fail as inflation and lack of space to expand will catch up with the annuity nature of the cemetery itself. So taxpayers will eventually take over the ancient ritual of warehousing in the dirt boxes of our dead relatives. 

We have a space for living bodies problem and a space for dead bodies problem.

Instead, let’s decide if people can live here and there are these places people can live. And there are places where people can’t live. Let’s put our dead bodies in the places where we know we don’t want people to live.

Flood plains, prairies for endangered butterflies, National Monuments and parks.

We already know how to make human bodies into compost.

We should deliver our bodies to the places where we can’t build homes because we want to respect creation. And, financially speaking, we should charge the same fees and 10 to 15 percent will be set aside as an annuity to fund protecting the environment. 

Imagine visiting Aunt Claire near the Ape Caves under St. Helens or in the Hoh Rain Forest.

3. Truth

Salmon already do it. 

They end their lives and feed the animals that will feed their offspring. 

Salmon know it is true.

If Olympia Had Rails

June 6, 2026 / / 1 Comment

There’s a version of Olympia where you step off the commuter train at 7th Avenue and walk up into daylight at what was an old Greyhound station. You’re already downtown. You wait four minutes for a streetcar, and then 20 minutes later, you’re home. That city was closer to real than you’d think. What killed it wasn’t destiny. It was a series of small, ordinary choices that added up. These are the same choices that killed streetcars and rail mass transit in a lot of places, but we can pull at the threads here and think about what might have been.

The First Hinge: Who Owns the Wire

By the 1920s, the Stevens family had built Olympia’s streetcar system. When they sold their stake to what would eventually become Puget Sound Energy, they handed the city’s transit future to a company that had no real reason to care about it.

A utility company runs streetcars as a side hustle of selling electricity, treating ridership as an afterthought, and when the automobile started pulling riders away in the early 1930s, non-local owners had no particular reason to fight. In September 1933, the company ended the system, and local government stepped in with a motor bus network. The tracks were pulled up or paved over.

Now imagine the Stevens family sells instead to the City of Olympia, or to a proto-PUD, more than a decade before the Thurston PUD was actually formed. A city-owned system doesn’t need to sell electricity. It needs to move people. When ridership falls, it looks to updgrade the noisy, slow and bumpy cars with something new.

With a few more years to hold on, the solution in our real history was the PCC car, introduced in 1936. A consortium of transit operators, facing the same threat from the automobile, had commissioned the most advanced streetcar yet built: rubber-cushioned wheels, streamlined body, a cellular construction that made the ride smoother than anything that had run on rails before. Cities that were still operating when the PCC arrived had a genuine fighting chance. In this version of Olympia, the city’s system is still running and it gets PCC cars.

Building Out: The 1930s Through the 1950s

The original Olympia streetcar network was T-shaped, running east to Central Street and west to Rogers. In the years after the system upgrades to PCC cars, the city keeps building it out.

Puget Street gets a spur north to San Francisco Street in 1939, a short southwest line runs down Decatur to 9th Avenue. Eastside Street also gets a spur, and Division is now the terminus of a westside extension.

This stable era, the 1940s and 1960s, is when the system becomes something people actually count on. But it also ends as the PCC cars age and car-driven growth starts pushing the edges of Olympia. Interstate 5 does come through, but we need something else to save our rail network.

The Second Hinge: Forward Thrust

In the 1960s, Seattle-area voters were asked to approve Forward Thrust, a package of transit bonds that would have funded a regional rail system running on its own dedicated tracks, built with federal matching funds covering roughly 75 cents of every dollar. In real history, voters said no. The money went to Atlanta, which built MARTA. The Pacific Northwest spent the next several decades building highways instead.

In this history, Forward Thrust passes, and the effects pile up.

A regional rail authority forms decades earlier than Sound Transit did in reality, pulling in federal funds at a scale that was simply gone by the time the real Sound Transit came along.

And Boeing-Vertol, which in real history made a troubled attempt at light rail vehicles for Boston and San Francisco, struggling with chronic problems that plagued the cars for years, now has a well-funded local partner involved from the start. The collaboration produces something that works: a vehicle with smooth propulsion, a lightweight aluminum alloy frame, and a modular design that’s actually easy to maintain. The “Seattle-Spec” LRV succeeds in the field tests by early adopters in Olympia and Seattle. By the mid-1970s, transit authorities in Boston, San Francisco, and eventually London and Melbourne are buying American, and the Pacific Northwest has become an unexpected exporter of rail technology.

For Olympia, the immediate consequence is more modest: the city now has access to modern vehicles and a regional system extending south.

The Great Expansion: 1960s Through the 1980s

The 1960s and 1970s are when the system finally grows to match where the city has spread, the eastside line pushing out past Boulevard Road to St. Martin’s University, a new line dropping south down Capitol Way into Tumwater, and two loops filling in what the old spurs couldn’t reach: one connecting Boulevard Road with North Street on the outer eastside, another using 22nd Avenue on the interior southeast side. The Division Street line reaches Evergreen State College. South Puget Sound Community College gets connected via the old Black Lake Road grade.

The most consequential development isn’t a new route, though. It’s political. Lacey, which in real history incorporated as its own city in 1966, instead holds an election to re-annex into Olympia. The streetcar is the promise, and service to Lacey is the condition. Lacey becomes a neighborhood rather than a separate city, and because it never fully separates, it never builds up the political pressure for the kind of sprawl that real-history Lacey ended up with. Growth does occur east of Carpenter Road, clustering around Tanglewilde and Thompson Place, but it stays modest

The 1990s Regional Connection

Just as the regional rail system reaches Fort Lewis, extending south from the original Forward Thrust network through Tacoma and Lakewood, Burlington Northern announces plans to abandon the Fones Road line, nine miles of track cutting through what is now Lacey. In real history, that corridor becomes the Woodland Trail. Here, Thurston County holds a public vote to join the regional transit system and grabs the corridor for rail before it’s gone.

The new commuter line is built similar to regional rail around Chicago or Philadelphia. The new expansion connects to the regional system at Dupont and runs into downtown Olympia, with a station in Lacey placed at roughly where Depot Park sits today. The St. Martin’s streetcar line is extended south to meet the regional line. Downtown, the old 7th Avenue subway tunnel gets converted into an underground station, and you rise from it into daylight at the old Greyhound terminal.

The City

The story is about choices: the Stevens family selling to a utility, Seattle voters rejecting Forward Thrust, Burlington Northern abandoning the line, each one narrowing what the next choice could be.

The Olympia in this history isn’t utopian. I-5 still runs where it runs. Where the streetcar system meets the freeway, expensive bridging projects span the road. The car is still present. But the city has a different shape, denser along the lines, more walkable around the stations, more continuous across what in real history became the Olympia-Lacey seam. You can get from Evergreen to downtown without a car. You can get from downtown to Tacoma without one either.

That city was close. History hinges on small choices that expand with time. That’s what makes it worth imagining, not to mourn a future that didn’t happen, but to understand exactly what was given up, and when, and why.

Democratic Party Dominance in Washington State, Ireland 100 Years Ago and Mark Reed

May 30, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Democratic Party identification in Washington State has hit 50 percent. That’s the highest number I’ve found in over thirty years of polling data.

Because voter registration in Washington carries no partisan label, party identification floats. The only way to track it is through the demographic crosstabs buried in statewide polls, which I’ve been compiling in a spreadsheet. The numbers tell a consistent story: each spike of national tension pulls voters off the independent shelf and drops them, at least temporarily, into one of the two major parties.

Since the start of the current Trump era, Republican identification has ticked up roughly 1.5 percent on average across available polls. Democratic identification has surged approximately 7.5 percent, drawn almost entirely from independents, whose share has contracted by a corresponding 7 points.

We’ve seen this before. At the end of the first Trump administration, Democratic ID jumped 8.25 percent, Republican ID fell 1.2 percent, and independent ID collapsed 14 points. The Biden era ran the current in the other direction, lifting Republican ID by 3.3 percent and Democratic ID by nearly 2, while independents dipped modestly. Independent identification surged during the late Obama years and again after the 2022 midterms, but under conditions of sharp national polarization, that middle ground gets absorbed.

The data itself is thinning out. The Northwest Progressive Institute and Future 42 both release topline results without demographic breakdowns, which limits how useful they are. The Elway Poll, for decades the most reliable regular tracker of Washington opinion, has ended. SurveyUSA drifted out of the market when KING TV stopped paying for polling. DHM Research now appears to be the last pollster doing regular statewide surveys in Washington.

Two things explain what the numbers show. One is the outsized pull of national politics on a state that might otherwise develop its own distinct political character. The other is the internal fracturing that tends to hit any party dominant enough to have no serious external opposition.

How Ireland Explains the Gravitational Pull of the Center

To understand the first one, it helps to zoom out, well out, to late 19th-century and early 20th-century Ireland. I know that sounds like a stretch. Stay with me.

Think of Washington not simply as a blue state but as a distinct political ecosystem caught in the gravitational field of a distant center. When the Conservative Party held power in London, Irish nationalist identity hardened, drawing together urban constitutionalists and rural agrarians, moderate Home Rulers and more radical nationalists, bound by shared resistance to a government they couldn’t control.

Washington Democrats work the same way. The coalition’s internal disagreements over housing density, tax structure, and the pace of reform are real. But under a right-leaning federal administration, those disagreements get pushed aside by a more urgent question: who controls the shield? The state’s 50 percent Democratic identification is a defensive posture built by voters who see state government as their primary buffer against what’s coming out of Washington, D.C.

The British Tories understood this consolidation well enough to try to dissolve it. Their strategy of Constructive Unionism poured infrastructure investment into Ireland and passed local land reforms, betting that solving material problems would defuse nationalist sentiment. It failed completely, because in a highly charged political environment, the practical argument gets swallowed by the symbolic one.

Washington Republicans face the same trap. Campaigns built on local material issues, highway funding, gas taxes, public safety, struggle to gain traction because a vote for a local Republican reads to most voters as an endorsement of the national party. The local argument can’t escape the national frame.

The deeper warning in this parallel is what happened when the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party ran out of credibility. The IPP spent decades telling voters it was their only realistic shield against London, while failing to deliver structural change at home. After 1916, a frustrated electorate abandoned it for the more radical Sinn Féin. Washington Democrats holding a supermajority built on oppositional energy face a structurally similar problem. If the resistance framing outlasts its usefulness without being replaced by durable accomplishment, the coalition fractures from the left.

Mark Reed and the Dominant 1920s Washington Republicans

That fracturing brings us to a closer historical analogue, not Ireland but Washington State itself, a century ago, when Republicans held the dominant position in Olympia and the contradictions of one-party rule were playing out across the legislature.

The parallels are uncomfortable. Then, as now, the fault line ran between institutional consolidators and ideological insurgents. Speaker Mark Reed built his power on a pragmatic economic vision, state-funded infrastructure and modest worker safety nets, that reflected the timber industry’s long-term interest in a stable, functional state. Governor Roland Hartley represented the Old Guard’s hardline fiscal reaction, contemptuous of what he saw as creeping progressivism in Reed’s program. They weren’t fighting over whether Republicans should govern. That was settled. They were fighting over what governing in a one-party state actually required them to do.

Today Jinkins plays the Reed role. Under her speakership the Democratic majority has grown from 57 to 59 seats, and her argument for keeping the gavel is essentially electoral: protect the coalition, don’t hand swing-district members a vote they can’t defend in November. Berg is doing something different. She’s using her position as House Finance Chair as an ideological launching point, championing House Bill 2100’s millionaire’s tax, posting caucus-facing FAQs about it directly on the caucus website, signaling to the party’s progressive base that there’s a leadership path willing to push the supermajority’s power to its limits, whatever the institutional cost.

The geographic echo is hard to miss. Hartley’s factional base was rooted in Snohomish County, where he’d been Mayor of Everett and where the county’s GOP delegation served as the center of insurgent resistance to the Seattle and timber-coast establishment. Berg represents the 44th Legislative District, anchored in Mill Creek and Snohomish. A century later, a challenge to the incumbent legislative leadership is rising out of Snohomish County again.

The immediate timeline mirrors the old primary dynamics. Both Jinkins and Berg are deferring the real fight until after November, each needing first to survive and, if possible, expand in the August primaries. If progressive challengers unseat moderate Democrats this summer, Berg’s path widens. If moderates hold, Jinkins retains the leverage.

The Dominant Party’s Dilemma

What the polling data, the Irish parallel, and the Jinkins-Berg contest all point to is a single underlying condition. In Washington State in 2026, the most consequential political battles aren’t happening between the two parties on the ballot. They’re happening inside one of them.

The Democratic Party’s 50 percent identification reflects real voter consolidation against a hostile federal administration. But consolidation built on opposition is temporary. It depends on the threat remaining vivid, the alternative remaining unacceptable, and the dominant party delivering enough at home that its internal factions have more to lose from breaking ranks than from holding together. None of those conditions is guaranteed.

History is pretty consistent on this point. The Irish Parliamentary Party learned it after 1916. Washington Republicans learned it in the Depression. The question for Washington Democrats is whether the current leadership, whichever faction wins in November, understands that while Democratic Party ID has been growing consistently, 50 percent is the highest it has ever been, not an average. And things are bound to change in unpredictable ways.

The Knox Hotel and the Fading of Distance

May 23, 2026 / / 0 Comments

This is the latest post in a series tracking how downtown Olympia’s pervasive parking lots replaced historically dense, walkable blocks. These older, pre-car structures are actually the city’s economic engine, generating far more tax revenue per acre than suburban sprawl. Ironically, as car-driven climate change threatens to submerge 370 acres of low-lying downtown by 2095, costing over $600 million in our most productive land, we risk preserving car-dependent zones while losing the very core that funds our local government. To solve our structural deficits, we must look at our physical structures.

It is strange for an essay about a parking lot to start with a boy rowing a boat.

But imagine the sound of an oar in oarlocks, clunking up Eld Inlet and then down Budd. Now imagine what it took for a kid to get a snack: row five miles, store the boat, grab the dog, walk through downtown Olympia to wherever they sold licorice, buy the licorice, and row back home. Maybe stop by his grandmother’s hotel on the way.

That’s not how we live now.

Jerry Knox’s childhood was shaped by a slow, physically demanding relationship with Olympia’s landscape, long before he became one of the people negotiating the region’s freeway system into existence. The same system that remade Olympia, and eventually tore down his family’s legacy.

Jerry spent his early boyhood in a rowboat on Eld Inlet. His most famous family story is the five-mile row into downtown Olympia for a ten-cent piece of licorice, his dog Gyp sitting in the bow the whole way.

Throughout his life, Jerry owned various vessels: outboards, inboards, a double-ender called the Hunky Dory. At 18, his connection to the water reached a lot further than Eld Inlet. He worked as an engine room boiler tender on a voyage through the Panama Canal.

Jerry’s grandmother, Frances Knox, went by Aunty Frank. She built the Knox Hotel and ran it for decades, sitting at the lobby desk, hosting community events, making the building a center of civic life in downtown Olympia for almost fifty years. It’s now a small parking lot behind the State Theatre. While the Knox was one of many community gravity wells in downtown Olympia, today the spot holds no one in orbit.

Brian Hovis produced amazing overlays of Sanborn (historic fire insurance maps) available at OlympiaHistory.org

Before Olympia, the Knox family farmed in Kansas. When their farm burned down, they loaded everything onto a chartered train car, family and belongings alike, horses included, and headed for Washington State.

In Hoquiam, Frances Knox’s brother-in-law, N.T. Loomis, met them and helped move their possessions from the train to a boat.

Then it all went wrong. Their boat capsized in the Hoquiam River before they could reach the end of tidewater. A whole season’s worth of supplies went into the current, leaving them nearly destitute, discouraged, at the edge of the wilderness they’d come so far to reach.

They survived on whatever they could salvage from the woods and streams. The image that stuck in the family’s memory is Frances at the table, serving her children dried carrots when nothing else was available. She had a fortitude that fit the frontier exactly.

The early years in Washington brought further tragedy. John Knox died in 1885, only a few years after their arrival, leaving Frances to raise six children on her own. She moved the family to Olympia. By the time she was looking for backing to build a hotel, her reputation for surviving hardship was so well established that she never had trouble getting it.

Before it became an apartment building, the hotel was a hotel first, obviously. It hosted travelers, and their comings and goings got noted in the paper.

When soldiers of the 91st Division stayed at the Knox before shipping off to the Great War, Aunty Frank took them for rides in her car. When they came back from the mud of Europe, they brought her a bronze statue.

It also had a kitchen. And in the first half of the 20th century, the Knox Hotel made space for all kinds of community events.

Thirty members of the Thurston County Women’s Educational Club gathered here at one point. You could hear them talking about things that matter. They’re talking about wealth. They’re debating whether it’s found in the bank or in the heart.

Mrs. Theodore Young spoke about school teachers who give themselves for the betterment of the community.

There were discussions on the necessity of legitimate rural gossip. They believe that women need to get together and talk just as much as men do. They believe in the helpfulness of social intercourse.

There was a violin solo by Miss Florence Holbrook. There was a song.

The residents had a tradition of placing joke gifts under the branches of the lobby Christmas tree.

The Knox was what we’d now call a Third Place.

Jerry’s grandmother and his aunt ran the Knox. Jerry was involved in a different branch of the family business.

Jerry’s aunt Charlotte, Frances’s daughter, took over the burden of management and held it for half a century. She was helped for a time by her niece Gertrude, Jerry’s sister.

Jerry’s father Clinton had built a garage beyond the hotel. After college, Jerry joined the family business, working in the garage, not the hotel. The family had been early adopters of the automobile, and that’s where the work was.

Jerry eventually left the family business and took his experience into a long career with the Department of Highways. He spent those years as a right-of-way purchaser for the I-5 freeway, the project that would contribute to the decline of downtown hotels like the one his grandmother had built.

The same boy who once measured distance by the pull of oars grew up to purchase the right-of-way for the interstate.

His job was to acquire the land for the new freeway, clearing the path for the infrastructure that will bypass the downtown core, buying the property that will become pavement. He was a diplomat of the very speed that makes the slow hospitality of his grandmother’s hotel unnecessary. The rowboat is gone. The physical connection to the inlet was replaced by the high-speed interstate.

This is the same highway that let Lacey grow, that some say destroyed Tumwater’s historic downtown, and that changed our community forever. It made the human scale of a boy rowing into town impossible to imagine in everyday life.

It’s a shift you can trace in Olympia’s own history: from a city where five miles was a significant physical journey by water, where people could walk or bike to a community gathering at the Knox, to one where that same distance is a few minutes on a concrete artery.

Before Interstate 5, the Knox Hotel was sold in April 1945 to W. M. Tompkins of Tacoma.

The Knox family had already made the transition to a full-time apartment building. Charlotte Knox had stepped away. Aunty Franky passed in 1943. The buyers, the Tompkins, were themselves a signal of what was coming. Before buying the downtown hotel, they’d spent three years running Auto Courts, the roadside lodging that would eventually replace the traditional urban hotel.

In its last twenty years, the newspaper mentions of the hotel shift from clubs holding meetings and Christmas parties to untimely deaths of elderly residents and crimes. Like the Carlton a couple of blocks over, the Knox had become naturally occurring affordable housing.

A place like the Knox gets affordable when the original family that treated it like a community institution is gone, and the building just gets older and cheaper. People need a place to live, and some can’t afford much. Places stay affordable because they’re old and nobody’s investing in them. They’re rare now because modern codes outlawed the features that made them work: shared bathrooms, tiny rooms. When these buildings sell, the cost of bringing them up to code forces rents up and out of reach for the people who need them most.

Then comes January of 1966. It’s a time of stormy protests at City Hall. Residents won a fight against the widening of Carlyon Avenue. They’re worried about their property. They’re worried about losing their neighborhood. And they’re able to defend it, or what they think it is. But the momentum of the car is too strong for the Knox. City engineers are focused on arterial improvements and right-of-way problems.

In the middle of all this, the Knox Hotel is razed. The sturdy three-story concrete structure meets the machinery of Franz Schlottman. The building that stood for over half a century is reduced to rubble. The Daily Olympian calls it being “mauled with kindness.”

There’s no kindness in a wrecking ball. There’s only the need for more space.

The site is prepared. It’s cleared of its history. It’s flattened. It becomes a parking lot.

Howard Schultz and the Demons of Ambition

May 16, 2026 / / 2 Comments

When Howard Schultz criticized Seattle this week, he wasn’t inventing a grievance. He was re-enacting one.

He was the latest in a long line of people who’ve stood up in Washington State and said that Seattle has turned against the people who built it. That line goes back at least to the shopkeepers and labor organizers who faced off over Chinese exclusion in 1886, who believed roughly the same thing, and who were right and wrong in roughly equal measure. The players change. The tension underneath doesn’t.

To understand what’s actually happening in Washington State in 2026, the warnings about businesses leaving, the fights over taxes, the feeling that something has broken, you have to start not with Schultz but with a couple of historians who’ve spent their careers trying to explain why this place is the way it is.

Colin Woodard’s argument, in his book American Nations, is that the Pacific Northwest was built by two groups of settlers who had almost nothing in common. The first he calls the Yankee impulse. These were New Englanders who came west with a plan: build a better society, governed by rules and institutions, by people who believed government could actually improve human life. They founded the universities and the civic organizations and the reform movements. They also believed in the power of commerce and capitalism. For them, business was the building block of community and it wasn’t just a nice idea. It was a moral obligation.

The second group, what Woodard calls the Appalachian surge, came for the opposite reason. They weren’t building anything. They were getting out. They brought a deep suspicion of authority, a commitment to being left alone, and what Seattle critic Fred Moody would later call in Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, an “ethos of anti-ambition.” A pride in opting out. In refusing the terms the powerful had written. Seattle became a city that welcomed dropouts and rebels, a place with what Moody affectionately called “slob appeal.”

Put these two groups together and you get a region that’s been arguing with itself ever since. It wants good government and hates being governed. It builds large corporations and then turns on them as symbols of the conformity it was trying to escape. Woodard calls this a “fecund hybrid.” It can produce both Microsoft and the WTO riots in the same decade.

Moody’s account of the WTO riots, which he called “Apocalypso,” is still the best explanation of what happens when these two traditions crash into each other with nothing in between. Mayor Paul Schell, a classic Yankee “vision guy,” genuinely believed Seattle’s niceness would make it a model for the world. Instead, the streets blew up. The bicycle cops, the friendly symbol of the city’s relaxed self-image, were replaced overnight by what Moody called “Darth Vaders,” riot police in black gear. Beneath the utopian surface there’s always what Moody calls a “truncheoneer” waiting. Starbucks, which had been a scrappy local success story, had transitioned to the New England ideal of the Pacific Northwest corporation, along with Boeing and Microsoft and became a window to smash.

The pandemic, two decades later, showed what the synthesis looks like when it works. Christine Gregoire’s “Challenge Seattle” coalition pulled the private sector together fast. Boeing made PPE. Starbucks helped streamline vaccination logistics. It was the New England tradition at its most functional: disciplined, science-first, with business and government pulling in the same direction. The curve bent.

That spirit is gone now, or at least that’s what Schultz and Gregoire both say. And the question of why is where the standard take on this story goes off the rails.

Most of the coverage frames this as Seattle versus business, progressivism versus capitalism, taxes versus growth. It’s not a useless frame. But it misses the most important political fact about Washington State right now: the Republican Party hasn’t produced a statewide elected official or protected a statewide incumbent in a generation. So, this is a civil war inside the Democratic Party. And once you see that, Schultz’s op-ed looks completely different.

As a sidenote, this isn’t the first time Washington State politics have been defined by the internal politics of one party. In the 1920s, Republicans had been so dominant for so long, that only a handful of Democrats were elected to the state legislature. All the important political debates happened between various kind of Republicans.

But Schultz isn’t writing to Republicans. There are no Republicans to write to, not at the statewide level. He’s writing to the centrist, business-aligned Democrats who used to run Washington State, the people Christine Gregoire represented, that Gary Locke represented when he crafted a policy package to keep Boeing here. These are the ones who thought you could keep labor and the Chamber of Commerce in the same coalition. That coalition is losing ground inside the party, and Schultz knows it. His column isn’t really an economic argument. It’s a distress signal from a faction that’s being outmaneuvered within its own party.

Once you see it that way, everything shifts. The new taxes, the “socialist rhetoric” Schultz attributes to Mayor Katie Wilson aren’t accidents or failures of economic understanding. They’re the deliberate choices of a coalition that’s decided it doesn’t need the Schultz wing to win elections in Washington State. Lately, they’ve been right

But here’s where Woodard’s framework, useful as it is for understanding the past, might actually lead us astray.

He’s right about the history. The Yankee and Appalachian traditions really did shape this place, and the tension between them really does explain a lot, from the WTO riots to the pandemic response to what’s happening now. But those traditions aren’t frozen. They’re being recombined.

What’s happening isn’t the old synthesis falling apart. It’s two new versions of it forming, competing for the same ground.

The first version mixes the communitarian side of New England with the live-and-let-live ethic from the Appalachian tradition. The result is a politics that’s comfortable using collective power on social questions, pro-trans, pro-DEI, anti-racist, committed to equity as something the community actively builds, while also holding to the Appalachian idea that the government has no business regulating who you are or how you live. This coalition is fine with progressive taxes because it doesn’t read taxation of the rich as government overreach. It reads it as investment. It’s not anti-business, exactly. It’s indifferent to business as a civic priority. The economy, in this view, is plumbing. It needs to work, but it’s not the point.

The second version mixes the rules-based, institutionalist side of New England with the pro-business instinct from the Appalachian tradition. This is the Schultz coalition. It believes in civic partnership, in the kind of collaboration between business and government that made the pandemic response work. It also believes that growth comes first, that you can’t redistribute your way to prosperity, and that treating your biggest employers as adversaries is a serious mistake. It’s not against government. It’s against incompetent government. Those are different things.

These two coalitions have more in common than either would like to admit. They both trace back to the same regional mix Woodard describes. They both say they believe in good government. They both say they’re fighting for the soul of the Pacific Northwest. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has spent a generation mostly absent from statewide politics, occasionally trying to woo the Schultz coalition with pro-business appeals, but unable to get past what the national party has become.

So Democrats fight each other. In primaries. In city council races. In the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The party is big enough to hold both coalitions right now. But probably not forever.

Fred Moody has this image he uses for the history of the Northwest. He calls it a “bucking-bronco sine wave”: boom, bust, purge, renewal. He’s always liked tech collapses as what he calls “cleansing opportunities,” moments when the phantom wealth burns off and the region gets back to its actual self. There’s something glossy about that view. It suggests that what’s happening now is just another dip, and that the region will find its way back, as it always has.

But this time feels different. The automation rolling through Amazon and Microsoft isn’t a market correction. It’s structural.

Moody actually wrote about an earlier version of this. When he was covering the 1990s tech boom, he would recognize the Microsoft and Amazon generation as a new mutation of Woodard’s Yankee New Englanders: same utopian conviction, same faith that the right tools could perfect the world, just expressed through software instead of civic institutions. The people building Encarta thought they were democratizing knowledge. The VR evangelists thought they were reinventing human experience. Moody wasn’t unsympathetic, but he wasn’t fooled either. These were the “vision guys” in updated form, with the same blind spot the original ones always had: their utopia tends to arrive on the backs of people who don’t get to share in it. The Encarta team got laid off when the internet made their product obsolete. The VR evangelists mostly got absorbed or let go when the hype ran out. Now the engineers who built the AI tools are being displaced by the AI tools. It’s the same pattern, one cycle later, except this time the technology actually worked.

When Weyerhaeuser replaced loggers with machines through the 1980s, the region eventually settled on a story about spotted owls and environmental regulation that let everyone off the hook. The real story was that automation had been eating jobs for years before the spotted owl became a symbol. We’re probably going to be tempted to do the same thing now, to make this a story about taxes and progressive overreach, and miss what’s actually happening to workers as AI takes over more of what software engineers and middle managers used to do.

The Schultz coalition wants to restore what made the old tech economy work, without quite admitting that the new one is walking away from workers.

Which is why the debate Schultz is asking us to have might be the wrong one. Whether Jeff Bezos stays in Washington or moves to Miami, whether Starbucks shifts five hundred corporate jobs to Tennessee, those aren’t the numbers that will define this region’s future. The numbers that matter are the software engineers, the middle managers, the logistics coordinators whose jobs are being automated away by the same companies that spent decades making this one of the most prosperous places in the country.

Both political traditions, in their remixed forms, actually have something to offer here if they’re willing to use it. Progressive taxation applied to the profits of automation isn’t just redistribution for its own sake. It’s a way to make sure that when an algorithm replaces a team of engineers, the gains don’t just flow to shareholders while the engineers figure out what to do next. That instinct, using collective power to push back when technology rewrites the terms of work, is older than either coalition. It’s what the Yankee communitarians and the Appalachian labor organizers were both doing, in different ways, from the beginning.

Schultz ends his column calling for a “new compact,” and he’s right that one is needed. But the compact he’s describing is between government and business. The one that’s actually needed is between the economy that’s coming and the workers who built the one we have. That’s been the argument in this region from the start. The actors keep changing. The stakes don’t.

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

May 9, 2026 / / 8 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 Deep History and Structural Mismatch of Timberland Regional Library

May 2, 2026 / / 2 Comments

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.

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