Olympia Time – History, politics, people of Oly WA

The New LD 22 in a bigger Washington State Legislature.

Going Closer to Home

April 18, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 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 / Emmett O'Connell / 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.

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 / Emmett O'Connell / 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.

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 / Emmett O'Connell / 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 / Emmett O'Connell / 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 / Emmett O'Connell / 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.

HB 2554 and the Long Shadow of Initiative 456

March 7, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

A relic of institutionalized racism has lived in a corner of Washington State law for over 40 years. As House Bill 2554 moves through the 2026 legislative session, that language is finally on the verge of being wiped clean.

The bill seeks to remove the statutory leftovers of Initiative 456. It was a ballot measure passed in 1984 during a time of intense anger toward tribal sovereignty. Similar repeal efforts made very little headway in 2010 and 2021, but the persistent work of Representative Debra Lekanoff has finally pushed the bill onto the governor’s desk. I wrote about this history five years ago, but I want to revisit it again.

It did receive a strange amount of opposition in the House. Most of that dissent focused on the technicality of repealing a voter-approved initiative rather than a defense of the words themselves.

To understand why this repeal matters, we have to look back at the concerted efforts to dismantle tribal treaty rights that followed the Boldt Decision.

The roots of Initiative 456 go back to the immediate aftermath of 1974’s U.S. v. Washington (the Boldt Decision). When the Supreme Court finally upheld Judge Boldt’s ruling in 1979, it did so against a backdrop of defiance. It is important to remember that the Supreme Court did not just uphold the Boldt Decision itself. It ruled on a group of cases that were actively trying to overturn it. These cases started in local courts and wound their way through the State Supreme Court and finally into federal courts. They were an effort by private actors (like fishing charter owners) to force the state of Washington to stop recognizing the sovereignty of treaty tribes in salmon management.

This era of resistance is best captured through the words of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Alfred Goodwin wrote the appeals-level decision in the “Passenger Vessel” case. He did not hold back regarding the state’s behavior. Goodwin was born in Bellingham and spent his youth in the Pacific Northwest. He eventually became one of the most respected judges in the country.

He observed that the resistance to tribal rights was uniquely aggressive. He wrote: “Except for some desegregation cases …, the district court has faced the most concerted official and private efforts to frustrate a decree of a federal court witnessed in this century.”

This comparison to the Jim Crow era South was not an exaggeration. He was writing in the 1970s when the comparison to the legal opposition to school desegregation was fresh and real. It was a direct reflection of the legal and physical blocks put in place to prevent tribes from using their court-affirmed right to half of the harvestable salmon.

In our own backyard, the Thurston County Courthouse was a stage for this resistance. Local judges, including Gerry Alexander, found themselves in a jurisdictional tug of war. Groups like the Washington State Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessel Association sued state agencies in local courts. Judges like Alexander would rule in their favor, leaning on state law. The groups wanted the state to stop complying with federal orders. They argued that the fifty percent allocation violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution. They were essentially trying to use state law to override federal treaty obligations.

When the U.S. Supreme Court finally used the Supremacy Clause to cancel these state judgments, the opposition did not give up. It just moved from the courtroom to the ballot box.

Initiative 456 was born from this shift in tactics. It was organized by a group called S/SPAWN, which stood for Steelhead and Salmon Protection Action for Washington Now. The measure was a masterclass in mom and apple pie political framing. Supporters admitted to writing the ballot title to sound deceptively wholesome. They wanted to avoid any immediate association with the controversial Boldt Decision. By focusing on the decommercialization of steelhead and claiming that state natural resource management should not consider special rights based on race, they confused a lot of voters. Polling at the time showed that half of the voters were undecided. Many were simply confused by the technical language.

This confusion is born out in the results. Initiative 456 had the third largest voter drop-off of any statewide election on the 1984 ballot. Only insurance and lands commmissioner races drew fewer voters. Initiative 464 (which dealt with sales tax on cars) had the most voters. Initiatives show up at the top of the ballot, so for over 28 percent of voters to drop off between one initiative and the next, and then to turn back around and vote in other races, it means something. If 75 percent of the voters who didn’t vote on 456 had voted against it, the initiative would have failed.

Despite a massive coalition of opposition, the initiative passed in all but four counties. This opposition coalition included Senator Dan Evans, church leaders, environmentalists, and even major timber companies. They argued the initiative was racist and illegal under the Supremacy Clause. They also warned that it threatened international fishing treaties with Canada.

The opposition campaign did not do its job to turn the undecided votes into no votes. Looking back at last week’s essay on pragmatism, I could see a simpler argument was possible, focusing on “we’re a serious state, we need to focus on bigger things and not let opposition to treaty rights define us” being an easy reason to vote no. But the populist appeal of “equal rights” carried the day. It was framed as the removal of special tribal privileges.

The 456 longtail

While the initiative was largely a message to Congress with no immediate power to override federal law, it stayed a strong political tool for years. Senator Slade Gorton tried to implement the core goals by introducing a federal bill in 1985. He wanted to ban tribal commercial steelhead fishing. The effort failed and even created a rift among conservatives. Senator Dan Evans joined the Reagan administration in speaking out against it.

However, the spirit of I-456 was kept alive by later Republican candidates for governor like Bob Williams (1988) and Ken Eikenberry (1992). Both insisted they would enforce the initiative if they were elected. Eikenberry’s endorsement showed that anti-tribal sentiment stayed embedded in the state’s conservative platform for years after the initial vote.

Another reason why 456 mattered was that the tribes’ work wasn’t done in the 1980s. A year after Bob Williams lost in the governor’s race, the tribes went back to court to reaffirm their treaty rights to shellfish, just as they had done in the 1970s for salmon. The decision to expand the federal understanding of treaty rights was not firm, and the tribes did not understand where exactly this new fight would end. Eventually, spanning the time of the Eikenberry campaign, the tribes would win reaffirmation of 50 percent of the shellfish harvest in 1995. But it was a possibility that with shellfish and its corresponding issues of private shellfish companies and private property rights on beaches, the treaty rights structure would fall apart.

Also by the mid-1990s, I-456 began to lose its relevance. The state started to transition toward more stable co-management. Tribal political power grew significantly. Campaign donations increased from the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. As the state and tribes moved further into what people called the “dawn of cooperation,” the aggressive tactics of the 1970s started to look outdated. Although the language of the initiative stayed in the Revised Code of Washington, it was seen as dead law. It was unenforceable because federal treaties are the supreme law of the land.

If you look at the actual text of RCW 77.110, you can see why it’s so problematic. It claims that the state should not recognize any rights to natural resources based on “ancestry” or “race.” This sounds fair on a very surface level, which is why the “Mom and apple pie” strategy worked so well. But in the context of Indian law, this is a direct attack on the political status of tribes. Treaties are not based on race. They are agreements between sovereign nations. By trying to redefine treaty rights as racial privileges, the writers of I-456 were trying to strip away the legal foundation of tribal sovereignty.

Our history can have a haunting presence.

There is a current lawsuit filed by Fish Northwest against the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife following the same pattern as the Passenger Vessel era lawsuits in the 1970s. Fish Northwest is an interesting group that has picked up anti-tribal sentiment that has found new energy over the past 10 years or so. Their litigation strategy echoes the past efforts by trying to cancel current fishing rules through state administrative law. It was filed in the same Thurston County Superior Court that hosted the original post-Boldt challenges. Currently, Fish Northwest is challenging salmon fishing seasons by claiming the state failed to follow procedures like the Regulatory Fairness Act.

The parallels are striking. The state describes the current lawsuit as a backdoor attempt to attack a federal agreement in state court. This happened after Fish Northwest was denied the right to join the federal U.S. v. Washington case directly. The underlying motive is still the same old “Fair Share” grievance. It is a long-standing belief that non-treaty fishers are not getting their due.

In July 2025, a Thurston County judge granted part of their petition. The judge found that the state’s rules were invalid because they failed to conduct a required Small Business Economic Impact Statement. This is a clever evolution of the 1970s and 1984 tactics. Instead of attacking treaties directly, they are using the language of “regulatory fairness” and “small business protection” to gum up the works.

This small business angle is particularly cynical. It frames the state’s cooperation with tribes as a burden on local economies. It ignores the fact that tribal fishing is also a massive economic driver for the region. While the state is currently appealing this ruling, the case represents a spirit that refuses to see tribes as partners. It is an attempt to run around decades of established case law.

As HB 2554 nears the governor’s desk in 2026, it serves as more than just a legislative cleanup. It is a formal rejection of the era of frustration described by Judge Goodwin. By removing the language of Initiative 456, the state is closing the book on an era that tried to turn Washington back into a battlefield of resistance.

Legal challenges like the one from Fish Northwest will probably keep happening. But they will no longer have the comfort of seeing their ideas reflected in our state laws. The meaningless words are finally being stripped away. This leaves room for a future defined by working together rather than constant conflict. We’ve spent forty years with these words on the books. It’s about time we stop letting the past dictate how we manage our future.

Bush, Billings and the Peace that Forces Out

February 28, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

South Puget Sound holds a secret about our local character. We are not a monolith; we are the result of decades of pragmatic decisions resulting from a slow-motion collision. To understand why Washington works the way it does, you have to look past the modern Evergreen progressivism. You have to see the ghosts of two rival civilizations, New England and Appalachia, fighting it out over decades and finding ways to make peace. This dualism of the region is best described by Colin Woodard’s American Nations in his description of the Left Coast region.

Our regional identity is defined by a specific, recurring deal. It’s a truce between the institutional, moralizing drive of the New Englander and the fierce, reactive independence of the Scots-Irish borderer.

This synthesis created a unique form of Western whiteness. It’s pragmatic, corporate, and deeply exclusionary. It’s a culture that prioritizes the peace of the collective and the space of the individual, provided both parties are part of the original cultural contract.

Wealth over the Lash

In 1844, the Oregon Trail was less a path to freedom and more a filter for racial purity. When George Washington Bush reached the Willamette Valley, he was met with the Lash Laws. These weren’t mere suggestions. They were mandates for public whippings every six months for any Black person who refused to leave. This was the raw, Appalachian side of the frontier. It was a warrior ethic designed to protect white labor from any perceived competition, including enslaved peoples.

Bush’s response highlights the first major workaround in our history. He was a Black frontiersman of immense skill and even greater fortune. Rather than submit to the lash or return to Missouri, Bush used his wealth to lead five white families north of the Columbia River. He carried several thousand dollars in silver ingots. By settling in what would become Tumwater, he entered a geopolitical gray zone disputed between the U.S. and Great Britain. Bush was a seasoned veteran of the fur trade who had worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He knew the terrain. He knew the British authorities at Fort Vancouver. He knew how to navigate the cracks between empires.

The pragmatism of the early Washington establishment soon became clear. Federal laws like the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 technically barred Black settlers from owning land. However, the local white leadership saw a different calculation. Bush wasn’t just a neighbor. He was the wealthiest man on the frontier. He had financed the region’s first gristmill and sawmill. During the grain shortage of 1852, he refused to sell his wheat to speculators for a profit. Instead, he shared it freely with hungry white settlers. He only asked for repayment when they were able.

To the Yankee-minded legislators in the new Washington Territory, Bush was an asset to the order they wished to build. In 1855, the Washington Territorial Legislature unanimously petitioned Congress to grant him a special legal title to his 640-acre farm. They didn’t do this to challenge white supremacy. They did it because Bush’s wealth and conduct aligned with the Yankee desire for a stable, prosperous society. The deal was struck. The rules would be bent for the wealthy and the useful, even as exclusion remained the baseline for everyone else. This established a precedent that remains a cornerstone of our regional psyche.

The law is a tool for stability. Stability often requires the pragmatic absorption of exceptional outsiders who bolster the existing order.

The Olympia Method

The tension between these two nations reached a fever pitch in the 1880s during the Chinese expulsion craze. Across the Pacific Northwest, white labor was in revolt. In Tacoma and Seattle, the Appalachian impulse for direct action took over. Mobs led by the Knights of Labor burned Chinatowns and forced residents onto steamers at gunpoint. This was called the Tacoma Method. It was a visceral, populist purging of outsiders to protect the sovereignty of the white worker.

Olympia faced the same pressure on February 9, 1886. A radical mob gathered at the sound of the city’s fire bell. They intended to drive the Chinese population out of their homes on Fourth Avenue. But here, the Yankee impulse for institutional order stood its ground. Sheriff William Billings and 62 leading citizens didn’t step in because they were radicals for equality. In fact, a formal resolution from the Billings group in 1885 showed that the majority of Olympia’s white residents wanted the Chinese gone. They just disagreed on the method.

To the business elite, a riot was godless anarchy. It would ruin the town’s reputation and scare off investors from the East Coast. They were decidedly opposed to expulsion by force because it threatened the fabric of the New England on the Pacific they were trying to build. Under the protection of these deputies, the leaders of the mob were arrested and tried. They were eventually sentenced to prison at McNeil Island. This was a clear message from the Yankee leadership. The warrior ethic of the mob would not dictate the terms of society in the capital.

The law and order faction essentially told the mob that they agreed the Chinese should go, but they wouldn’t have a riot in the capital. They protected the Chinese residents from violence to preserve the sanctity of the law. This created a relative safety for Chinese merchants like Sam Fun Locke. He remained in Olympia for decades. He paid tribute to the Sheriff’s family every Lunar New Year in gratitude for the protection of the state. It was a pragmatic peace. The elite maintained the rule of law. Meanwhile, the white workers were eventually pacified by the slow, legalistic exclusion of Chinese labor through federal acts rather than street brawls.

The Two Nations

To understand why these events played out this way, we have to look at the two distinct parent nations that settled this place.

First, there is Yankeedom. According to Woodard, these settlers came largely by sea. They were the descendants of Puritans who believed in social engineering and the perfectibility of society. They viewed government as a tool to create a moral and highly regulated community. In their view, the collective had a responsibility to oversee the behavior of its members. Theirs was a missionary impulse to bring order to the wilderness.

Then there is Greater Appalachia. These settlers arrived overland via the Oregon Trail. They were the Highlanders of the American South and the Borderlands. Their culture was forged in centuries of constant warfare on the fringes of the British Isles. They were a heritage of border raiders who learned early on that the state was usually an enemy. They brought a warrior ethic and a deep, bone-deep suspicion of any authority that tried to tell them how to live. To them, personal sovereignty and the protection of kith and kin were the only true laws.

The Pacific Northwest became a battlefield where these two cultures collided. The Yankee wanted to build a schoolhouse and a tax system. The Appalachian wanted to be left alone on his prairie with his gun and his family. We see this battle time and time again in our state. In the battle between the Grange and the railroads, fostering the creation of port districts. And then the later subversion of port districts by corporate interests.

The resulting Left Coast culture is a bipolar soul. It is a place that loves regulation but demands individual self-expression and freedom from constraint. The peace between them is maintained by the Yankee side, promising to manage the logistics of the world. They handle the schools, the roads, and the corporate legalities so the Appalachian side can feel free. It is the pragmatism of Yankeedom easing the libertarian needs of the Appalachians. If you need space, they will engineer a way for you to have it, as long as you play by the institutional rules.

The Sawdust Aristocracy

This peace found an economic engine in the timber industry of the early 1900s. The conflict here was between the Industrial Workers of the World and the American Federation of Labor. The IWW, or Wobblies, were the true radicals. They wanted one big union that included everyone. They welcomed workers from different ethnic backgrounds and unskilled laborers. They represented a threat to the racial and social order of the region because they rejected the idea of a cultural contract based on race or skill.

In contrast, the craft unions of the AFL were the aristocrats of labor. They were overwhelmingly white. They bridged the gap between Appalachian Free Labor and corporate interests from New England. They focused on protecting their narrow privileges as skilled workers. As historian Aaron Goings observes, the timber barons found it much easier to deal with the AFL. The corporations and the white craft unions entered an alliance of convenience. The timber barons would grant modest wage increases and better conditions to the white skilled workers. In return, those workers would help the corporations and local vigilante groups purge the militant Wobblies.

This was a classic Yankee-Appalachian deal. The corporate interests provided the structure and the wages. The white workers provided the warrior ethic to keep the radicals at bay. The creation of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen during World War I was the ultimate expression of this deal. It was a company-funded union that combined patriotism with a partnership between capital and white labor. This was the regional identity in its final form. It was a peace between corporations and white workers. They agreed to exclude outsiders as long as it protected the peace and profits of the insiders. The Yankee corporate interest got the stability it needed to grow. The Appalachian descended worker got his sovereignty and his respectable wage. He got the comfort of knowing he was part of the aristocracy of labor.

This is the situation we see reflected in our current landscape. We create a world of high regulation and good government. They are the heirs to the leading citizens who deputized themselves in 1886 to keep the peace.

But to keep the peace, they must buy off the libertarian needs of the regional population. This is done by creating a framework where personal freedom is framed through the lens of corporate access and lifestyle choice. We see the cooperation between people who are deeply attached to kith and kin and the corporate interests that need a predictable environment for capital to thrive. The deal is the same as it was in the timber woods. The corporations provide the order and the space. The people provide the peace.

The whiteness of the region is the silent glue of this deal. It is a majority-white culture that has agreed on a synthesis. We will follow the rules as long as the rules protect our space and our sovereignty. This creates a region that is superficially progressive but deeply exclusionary in practice. We will exclude the outsider if their presence threatens the peace of our corporate labor compact.

Ultimately, our regional identity is a pragmatic one. We are a people who say that if you’re going to get all worked up about needing some space, we’ll figure out a way to get you some space. This is the true meaning of the Left Coast. It is a land where the order is designed to keep the freedom profitable.

The freedom is designed to keep the order from being overthrown. It is a truce written in silver ingots, fire bells, and timber contracts. It is a deal that ensures the aristocrats of labor and the barons of industry can coexist in a quiet, white-washed peace. We have built a world where the pragmatic decision is almost always to protect the status quo of the insiders, even if it means ignoring the ghosts of those who were never invited to the table.

Racism in Housing and the Importance of the Local Grind

February 21, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

As soon as Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Olympia didn’t look at the news. It looked inward.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, and one that feels incredibly familiar to us now. It’s the same collective gut punch we felt when George Floyd was murdered. We hit the streets, we organized, and we finally started asking the hard questions about our own backyard. In the days following Dr. King’s death, the Olympian ran a series of articles based on interviews with the local Black population. These pieces laid bare truths that we deeply know now, but they were radical to see in print back then.

In early April 1968, Black residents and activists explicitly labeled Olympia a “racist town.” They pointed to the city’s consistent failure to enact any kind of open housing legislation as the primary evidence. An activist named Dickson was particularly outspoken. He criticized the local hypocrisy of excluding Black people from institutions like the Elks Club while using their tax dollars to provide that same club with fire and police protection. He emphasized that the avenues normally open to any promising individual were closed to him solely because of his race.

In her research for “Blacks in Thurston County, Washington, 1950–1975” Dr. Thelma Jackson documents how systemic real estate practices actively pushed Black families out of the city centers. We often hear the local story that Black residents settled in Lacey because it was close to the military bases at Fort Lewis. Dr. Jackson’s work reveals that the steering was actually driven by legal barriers.

Because Lacey was largely unincorporated and newly developing during the 1950s and 60s, it lacked the exclusionary property deeds that barred non-whites from other neighborhoods. Real estate agents and developers capitalized on this by funneling Black buyers toward the few areas where they were legally allowed to own property. It was segregated by design, and it created a geography that persists in our county’s demographics today. Dr. Jackson notes that these obstacles forced families to find creative workarounds, like using white allies to scout and purchase homes on their behalf just to bypass door-slamming discrimination.

This was true even though these racially restrictive covenants had been legally unenforceable since the late 1940s after the Supreme Court struck them down. That didn’t stop Thurston County developers. They continued to add them to deeds for at least another half-decade after the court decision. They were banking on the fact that social pressure and realtor cooperation would do the work the law no longer could.

The local real estate industry was a major point of criticism. Residents were disturbed by a trend toward “ghettos,” and they accused realtors of steering Black families into specific areas while simultaneously discouraging white buyers from those same spots. John Finley noted that despite high employment, the local racial situation remained as dire as in other states. Others warned that forcing Black families into decaying, older housing would inevitably lead to state-sanctioned neglect.

Workers like Ed Chatman faced such significant difficulty finding any housing at all that activists began considering marches around City Hall. They wanted to force action against the pervasive slights and slurs that defined the community’s daily life.

The path toward open housing in Thurston County in 1968 was a contentious journey. It wasn’t a smooth transition. It was marked by urgent activism and fierce, vocal opposition. The movement gained real momentum in April 1968, shortly after Dr. King’s assassination, when the Thurston-Olympia Open Housing Committee presented petitions with over 1,500 signatures to county commissioners.

Key organizers like Patricia Avery, Herb Legg, and Paul Whelan led the charge, and they were supported by students and faculty from St. Martin’s College. Olympia eventually led the way by passing an emergency open housing ordinance on April 29. Lacey followed in late May, but only after its City Hall was jammed by proponents. Lacey’s path had bumps along the road because councilmen like William C. Ryan and Thomas Huntamer questioned the need for such laws. They suggested that discrimination simply wasn’t a local issue.

Opposition was often out in the open. Duke Stockton, a former teacher and self-described segregationist, was a fixture at these hearings. He argued that these laws infringed upon individual property rights. He was a true believer in being an actual racist, was a local organizer for a racist political party, and regularly spoke on a literal soapbox to rail against integration.

The Greater Olympia Board of Realtors, led by president Lee Childers, endorsed the view that fair housing legislation deprived property owners of a basic individual freedom. Mrs. Maxine Padget, a spokesperson for the realtors, argued that civil rights advocates were attempting to dominate policies even when existing rules weren’t being violated.

One of the most specific fights was over the timeline for filing complaints. The proposed ordinance suggested a 50-day window for a citizen to file an unfair housing statement. The realtors pushed back hard. Mrs. Padget argued the limit should be 30 days, while Lee Childers suggested a 10-day limit. They reasoned that a long delay was unreasonable and unfair to brokers. In reality, a 10-day window would have made it nearly impossible for a victim of discrimination to gather evidence and file a claim.

Childers also argued that the real estate fraternity shouldn’t be the only group subject to these regulations. He felt that any non-discrimination requirements should fall equally upon private homeowners as they did on agents. While some realtors stated they would go along with an ordinance as businessmen, they remained firm that civil rights go both ways and that the protection of property must be maintained above all else.

Legal hurdles further complicated the process. County Prosecutor Harold Koch identified numerous legal loopholes in the proposed county-wide human rights commission. He criticized it as an unenforceable gesture and accused the committee of trying to grant vigilante investigative powers to a group that wasn’t part of law enforcement.

These disagreements led to a fractured system. While proponents wanted one uniform law, Tumwater eventually divorced itself from the area-wide effort by passing its own specific version. This version included blanket defenses for landowners and provisions for private hearings. Bruce Pym argued these additions subverted the entire spirit of the law. Because of these complexities, while the county adopted an ordinance in late May, they deferred action on a human rights commission for a long time.

Ten years later, this history should feel familiar. Where open housing ordinances existed, zoning and economic realities began to undercut the progress. Olympia’s modern housing landscape was forged in the late 1970s, which was a period marked by the largest influx of new residents in our history. Before this, the construction of small multi-family housing, like duplexes and quadplexes, generally tracked with population growth.

However, a series of contentious debates starting in 1976 fundamentally altered the city’s trajectory. This led to systematic downzoning that prioritized exclusive single-family neighborhoods. A pivotal moment occurred with the Nut Tree Loop proposal. A developer envisioned 21 quadplexes on what is now a neighborhood of expensive single-family homes. This project sparked fierce public opposition.

Residents expressed a fear of the urban and the potential for denser, poorer communities to enter their neighborhoods. Opponents used inflammatory rhetoric. They claimed that multi-family housing would turn Olympia into a ghetto and lead to increased crime. By 1980, despite some city leaders arguing for denser living to prevent sprawl, the city commission succumbed to pressure and began shelving plans for multi-family expansion.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Olympia implemented systematic downzones that outlawed anything other than single-family homes in many residential areas. This policy transformed hundreds of existing duplexes and small apartment buildings into non-conforming units. The stated goal was to encourage home ownership, but the practical result was gentrification.

The impact on our city’s racial makeup has been profound. While we passed Open Housing ordinances in 1968 to combat explicit discrimination, the subsequent zoning laws created a different form of segregation. In the Pacific Northwest, income serves as a proxy for race. Because single-family homes are the most expensive housing type, neighborhoods dominated by them have remained predominantly white.

Data shows a clear correlation: the more single-family homes a neighborhood has, the higher its percentage of white residents. In recent decades, the city adopted a nodes approach to density. They concentrated apartments in commercial areas like Capital Mall while protecting single-family neighborhoods. This strategy has led to a stark racial divide. Between 2010 and 2017, the high-density node in Tract 105.1 on the westside became significantly more diverse, while the adjacent single-family neighborhood in Tract 105.2 actually grew whiter.

This isn’t a unique local failing. You can see similar examples across the country of communities using downzoning as a tool to implicitly preserve racial divisions when other methods became illegal. In Arlington, Massachusetts, they once zoned for plenty of apartments. But as integration became a real prospect in the 1960s, their attitude toward development shifted. Activists used both explicit and coded anti-integration language to rally opposition to apartments and push for downzoning.

Unlike earlier efforts, our local downzoning efforts are largely absent of on the surface racial animus. I’m not saying these neighborhood activists weren’t trying to keep their neighborhoods white. I think you can draw a pretty clear conclusion there. I’m just saying there isn’t much smoking gun evidence in the historical record.

However, you don’t have to look far to see downzoning tied directly to the broader civil rights struggle. When you pull back from these small-scale efforts to a nationwide view, you see single-family zoning being discussed in a much different way. When we were downzoning, the NAACP was struggling to find inroads in the courtrooms to fight against exclusionary zoning.

HUD Secretary George Romney tried to force the Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan, to strike single-family zoning and allow affordable housing in 1970. His effort failed, and his political career ended because of it. Civil rights organizations then retrenched to fight unheralded courtroom battles over zoning in the Midwest and the East Coast.

According to the NAACP in the early 70s, the suburbs were the new civil rights battleground. They argued we should do battle in the townships and villages to lower zoning barriers and create opportunities for Black families seeking housing closer to jobs. The National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing said segregation won’t stop until local governments are deprived of the power to manipulate zoning to screen out families on the basis of income and, implicitly, of race.

In Seattle, the end result of five decades of downzoning is white-majority neighborhoods expanding across the city. One collection of blocks in the Leschi neighborhood went from over 90 percent Black in the 1970s to 11 percent today. The Black population of King County was pushed south and out of Seattle.

In Olympia, neighborhoods that downzoned saw a smaller increase in racial diversity over the last 10 years. Not only did these neighborhoods stay whiter, but in the middle of a historic housing crisis, these neighborhoods actually had fewer people living in them in 2020 than they did in 2010.

I’ve said this before. But it is well worth repeating: There are few open racists left. Duke Stockton’s don’t stalk city council meetings anymore. That is obviously an advancement in my lifetime. But you don’t have to be racist to benefit from racist outcomes and a racist system. There is a huge layer of people who will tell you they are not racist but participate in racist systems before you ever get to the people working to dismantle them.

We know the current landscape of dominant, exclusionary single-family zoning happened at the same time the last tools to legally and openly discriminate in housing were taken away. We also know the nation’s leading civil rights organizations have actively worked against this kind of zoning for half a century.

I’ve been writing these essays specifically this month because it’s February. I’ve tried to get out of my own way during Black History Month and give space to stories that highlight where we’ve been.

We sure do live in interesting times. It is hard for us to slow down and take a look at our context when we seem to be hurtling downhill. Every day, some new outrages and crises draw our attention away from the ground at our feet. What I am reminded of is that there is always so much to fight for here and now.

Martin Luther King was killed in Tennessee, the country caught on fire, and the right thing to do for Olympians was to finally force the passage of open housing ordinances. They were weak. They didn’t address the underlying zoning. For decades, we lost the plot.

But this slow boring of hard boards in local politics is always there for you if you have passion and perspective.

It is something you can impact. You have more control here than you think.

We are tending a garden in a storm. We can’t stop the wind from blowing. But we can choose which stakes to reinforce and which seeds to protect. It is easy to get overwhelmed by massive, national debates that feel completely out of our hands, but that energy can be better spent on the hard boards right in front of us. By focusing our effort on things we can actually influence, we trade anxious, unattached frustration for tangible progress. We accept that we can’t control the entire city’s direction, but we have agency over how we show up.

Move fast, break things: The life and times of Washington’s first black, female prosecutor

February 14, 2026 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

In the history of Washington state politics, some figures are remembered for their scandals, and others are remembered for their longevity. Then there is Bernardean Broadous.

In 1994, Broadous did not just win an election. She shattered a glass ceiling that had remained untouched since Washington State was founded. She was the first Black woman elected to a county office in the history of Washington, and the first African American to hold an executive county position in Thurston County.

Today, her tenure is largely a footnote. It is often treated as a failed experiment in management. Meanwhile, the man who replaced her, Edward Holm, oversaw an office that cost taxpayers millions of dollars because of his documented behavior. Looking closely at the years between 1994 and 2002 in Thurston County reveals a stark hypocrisy. We see a woman of color judged by the noise of change she was trying to force, while her white male successor was given a pass for actual, adjudicated damage to the public.

The 1994 campaign for Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney was a masterclass in grassroots disruption. Broadous was a Republican with only three years of legal experience. She ran against John Bumford, a veteran Democrat who was the hand-picked successor of the retiring 20-year incumbent, Patrick Sutherland.

On paper, Broadous was a long shot. Bumford had fifteen years in the office and the public endorsement of 26 of the 28 deputy prosecutors in the department. The institutional resistance was immediate. Before the first ballot was cast, her future subordinates called her incompetent in the local press. Bumford focused his campaign on experience. Broadous flipped that argument. She did not say she had more years in a courtroom. She said those years were spent perfecting a broken status quo. She accused the office of being too quick to settle cases and claimed that, as a deputy, cases were taken away from her when she refused to reduce charges.

Broadous used a specialized team of volunteers to bridge the funding gap. Bumford outraised her two-to-one, with the vast majority of his funds coming from his own pocket. Her campaign used a fleet of painted vans to counter the expensive bus advertisements of her opponent. They filmed Broadous in living rooms answering questions to show her forthright nature. This was a sophisticated data operation, too. Her team analyzed precinct numbers to find winnable areas in the suburbs. They timed their mailers to hit exactly when ballots arrived. This strategy worked.

Broadous pulled off a stunning upset and won by 867 votes. And, in the broader sweep of history here, it was the last stand for Republican institutional power in Thurston County before it became a Democratic stronghold. 1994 was the last high-water mark for Republicans in Washington State and Thurston County, before falling reliably into today’s pattern.

Broadous entered office in 1995 with a mandate for change. She inherited an office that had functioned under one man for two decades. She brought a focus on accountability and efficiency. Her most significant achievement was the Juvenile Diversion Reform. Before Broadous, the juvenile system was slow and lacked direction. She started a program that required offenders to face sanctions or charges within 12 days of an arrest. She used Community Accountability Boards made of local volunteers to determine punishments. This program resulted in a 50 percent reduction in felony recidivism. Broadous was also a founding architect of the Thurston County Drug Court. She pushed for a system that offered non-violent offenders treatment and testing as an alternative to jail. She believed the message of the law was lost if punishment was not swift and sure.

Just looking at the raw numbers, prosecutions in Thurston County went from around 1,000 each year before Broadous to nearly double that during her tenure.

However, we cannot ignore that these reforms created internal conflict. Broadous was a demanding manager. She restricted plea bargains to prevent deal shopping. This stripped deputy prosecutors of their autonomy. To Broadous, this was accountability. To her staff, it was a lack of trust.

In her first 19 months, 18 deputy prosecutors left the office. This high turnover became the main criticism against her. Critics claimed the remaining staff were overworked. Defense attorneys complained that her refusal to negotiate was clogging the court system. Broadous did not back down.

By 1998, Ed Holm saw the turnover in the office as a political weapon. He campaigned on a platform of restoring stability. The narrative against Broadous was cemented by two legal actions filed just weeks before the primary election. In July 1998, a former employee named Betty Benefiel filed a lawsuit alleging Broadous treated her unfairly. In August 1998, a secretary named Sheila Kirby filed a claim for emotional distress. Broadous called these attacks politically motivated. The timing was certainly suspicious, but the damage was done. Holm used the lawsuits to argue that Broadous could not lead. Broadous lost the election and received less than 40 percent of the vote.

Holm was hailed as a stabilizer.

But the stability he promised was a myth. By 2001, three female deputy prosecutors sued Holm and his management team for sexual discrimination and a hostile work environment.

The details revealed in the Holm trial were far worse than anything alleged against Broadous. The plaintiffs alleged that women were given lower pay and less desirable assignments. They described the office as a boys’ club. The lawsuit detailed inappropriate sexual comments and lewd jokes. The jury eventually found that Holm and his office retaliated against the women after they complained about the discrimination. In 2006, a jury ruled in favor of the women. They found that the county had discriminated against them based on their gender. They also found that the office had created a hostile work environment.

The most telling part of this story is the final cost to the public. The lawsuits against Broadous that dominated the news in 1998 went nowhere. They stayed in the court system for four years. In 2002, after Broadous was out of office and Holm himself decided not to run again, the parties signed an agreement to drop the cases. No money was paid to the plaintiffs. No wrongdoing was ever proven. The cost to the taxpayers for these lawsuits was zero dollars. These claims were dismissed with prejudice, meaning they could never be brought again.

Compare that to the Ed Holm settlement. The jury awarded the three women $1.52 million for the discrimination and retaliation they endured. The judge then added $1.45 million in attorney fees. By the time the case was fully settled and the appeals were finished in 2011, the total cost reached nearly $6 million. When you weigh the two administrations, the Broadous years were characterized by administrative friction and turnover that cost the public nothing in court. The Holm years were characterized by systemic misconduct that left the county with a multi-million dollar bill.

The historical memory of Thurston County should take another at Bernardean Broadous. She was a historic first who tried to modernize a stagnant system. She was a Black woman who walked into a white male-dominated field and demanded high standards. She was punished for it. We remember her for the turnover and the noise of lawsuits that ended in nothing.