History, politics, people of Oly WA

Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 3 of 171)

Three ways to think about pedestrian deaths in Thurston County between 2006 and 2020

Somewhere back in the peak of the pandemic, there was a popular Facebook post here in Olympia that I thought was interesting. The post pointed at the signs distributed by Intercity Transit asking people to slow down. The social poster asked why we didn’t have signs asking for people to stop committing other crimes.

The idea was that anti-social behavior, visible homelessness and property crime were much bigger issues in Olympia than speeding and injuries to pedestrians because of speeding. Since then, I’ve been poking around for a way to compare like-for-like, to be able to compare the two sides of the argument, or just to get an idea of the scope of traffic related deaths in Thurston County.

So, I have been playing around with pedestrian death data from the federal Department of Transportation and come up with a few broad conclusions:

  • How being killed by a driver compares to any other homicidal death
  • When you’re more likely to be killed by a car and 
  • (most interesting to me) where you’re more likely to be killed by a car

A note on the data itself: most of this comes from the Fatality Analysis Reporting data from the USDOT. Other data I cobbled together from TRPC, the Thurston County Coroner’s Office and WASPC. It is also worth noting that the FAR data I used only goes through 2020, but 2021 and 2022 saw record pedestrian deaths.

1. Pedestrian deaths and murders are in the same neighborhood

To get to the main premise of the now-lost social post itself, that we should pay closer attention to other crimes and not just pedestrians being killed by cars, I suppose the data carries that point. But when you consider the vast majority of murders (over 90 percent in 2017 for example) were committed by non-strangers, that puts deaths by pedestrians in traffic in another context.

When you kill someone with your car, there are a lot of reasons outside the generalized behavior of drivers and pedestrians. These include bad road design, lack of marked crosswalks, left turns and large, multilane roads.
Bad road design, lack of crosswalks and our dependence on so-called stroads seems to make pedestrian deaths a much bigger part of local government. Obviously, each homicidal (or man-slaughter or non-natural) death is one of importance for public policy. But, I think my reaction to the main premise of the now-lost social media post is that it is at best a wash.

2. September is the deadliest month

What is surprising here is that the winter months are lower altogether than summer months overall. You would imagine that more light would lead to fewer deaths. But, according to research on the temporal nature of pedestrian deaths, there are more car trips in the summer, which lead to more deaths.

3. Downtown Olympia, Old Lacey and Grand Mound

The most interesting part of the traffic data is that you can easily geocode it. Here is a map of all pedestrian deaths in Thurston County.

 

What you can see are a few clusters of activity:
Old Lacey/East Olympia:
To summarize, Lilly Road north of Martin, Martin Road east of Lilly are both hotspots within the hotspot. But given the reasons for pedestrian deaths cited above, this area seems to be rate fairly high. But it is worth noting that there were more deaths here than in other places with the same characteristics, such as Yelm Highway or Hawks Prairie.
Downtown Olympia:

What is surprising here is that there aren’t more deaths in downtown Olympia. State, Capital Way, Legion and Plum are all different sorts of thoroughfares. But, in terms of pedestrian density and the amount of traffic going through downtown, it could be easily assumed that there would be more here. Possibly, though, the infrastructure here is kinder to pedestrians, making it much more likely that drivers will be cued to notice them or drive slow enough to not kill them in the case of an accident.

Grand Mound:
This was a surprise hot-spot to me. But, I am always surprised by Grand Mound, to be honest. There is a lot going on down there. It was years ago when I noticed that the census tracts that made up Grand Mound had the same population as Tumwater proper (not including the UGA). The kind of rural/not rural development here probably is dense enough to encourage some walking. But also, is low density enough not to encourage slow driving that would prevent pedestrian deaths.

Why I wasn’t born in the City of Lacey

I was raised in what had been, for like a couple of months, the City of Lacey. 

And, by order of the Supreme Court of Washington, is inside the City of Olympia.

My childhood neighborhood, generally Wilson Street between 22nd and 18th, was part of a push and pull between Lacey and Olympia for a few months in the mid-1960s.

Since the end of World War II and the construction of car-centric neighborhoods, Olympia began pushing out from its original 1890 borders. The city had annexed the area around the State/Pacific split in 1930, but paused until after the war to start grabbing small blocks here and there. But, by the 1960s, the unincorporated neighborhoods that had been built further east (collectively “Lacey”) began getting nervous and planning for their own city.

And, what should constitute the future Lacey was pretty broad. In the early days of the planning for the city of Lacey, as early as 1963, the western border of the proposed City of Lacey was Boulevard Road itself, a full 3 miles away from the city’s current boundary.

It was in 1964 when the Olympia City Commission pushed east, annexing along Martin and Pacific Avenue, ending as far as Lilly Road on Martin Way. That effort started the official border war between Lacey and Olympia.

Pro-City residents in Lacey pushed for a vote in August 1964 to incorporate. That vote failed 505 to 857.

The part of Olympia that began Lacey

That same year, the residents of the Boulevard Road area also voted to reject annexation to the City of Olympia.

In 1966, when Lacey was on its way to successfully incorporating, the original fire station on Boulevard Road was actually a Lacey Fire District 3 station. So, it made sense that the “Olympia fringe area” was included in the new city.

When Lacey finally successfully incorporated in November 1966, Olympia quickly struck back. In December, the residents in the western portion of Lacey, stretching from near North Thurston High School down to the south end of Boulevard Road, submitted a petition for incorporation into Olympia.

Now, this is where it gets weird. The city commission received the petition in a closed-door meeting. Using what was later described by Lacey’s lawyers as an archaic law, the city commission scheduled an election that would allow not just the residents of the proposed annexation area to vote, but also the residents of the entire city. So, if the voters of the City of Olympia authorized the annexation of neighborhoods in another city, they were allowed to do so.

Lacey went ahead and scheduled a special election a few weeks later in February 1967 which would have allowed the area to de-annex from Lacey and return to the county. But, when Olympia voters passed their proposal for annexation in January, Lacey dropped their vote and sued to have the results of Olympia’s vote invalidated.

Ad that makes an excellent point about annexation rural areas.

The crux of the lawsuit apparently wasn’t where I grew up, but rather the north end of the annexation area along Martin Way.

The City of Lacey’s case was:
  • The two portions of the annexation area were not contiguous
  • The City of Olympia stacked the deck by not providing enough public notice
The courts, though, disagreed. It was true, the annexation law the City of Olympia was using hadn’t been touched since 1890, and it was still a law. And, they also disagreed on the definition of contiguous. Either way, they left Lacey packing and let stand the massive annexation, and Olympia stretched all the way to College Street.
The state legislature would also step up in 1969 and reform the 70+ year old annexation law that Olympia used to gobble up my family homestead and surrounding property. The new law would lengthen deadlines, to allow for better public notice, and actually make it easier for two small cities to join together.
Which is funny because, already occurring in 1969 was the most interesting part of this entire annexation drama.
In 1969, the cities of Olympia and Lacey would vote to consolidate. 
Before we get too far, the vote failed in both cities. But that there was even a vote exposes just how frail the existence of Lacey was in those early years. The measure was close all over Olympia, failing in 11 of 19 precincts and by fewer than 30 votes overall. 
Even though it failed by a 3 to 1 margin in Lacey, two precincts representing Panorama City voted in favor. So if those areas west of Chambers Lake and south of Pacific Avenue had their choice, Olympia’s annexations of 1964 and 1967 would have gone even further east more uniformly.

How an incumbent sheriff loses

Sheriffs have incumbency power. A lot of elected officials do, but with the acquittal of Sheriff Ed Troyer in Pierce County last week, it is worth looking into how sheriffs stick around and how some of them lose.

Troyer survived the court case (which would not have kicked him out of office), and will also not likely be subject to a recall effort. Recall elections are expensive and have a hard time getting off the ground. The Pierce County Council, which has officially shown its displeasure with Troyer, cannot fire the Sheriff. So, the next opportunity would be in a couple of years when Troyer heads back to the ballot.

For at least one answer about incumbent sheriffs, I want to go back to two Thurston County Sheriff campaigns, one from the mid-1980s and one from just a few weeks ago.

The call is coming from inside the house

Gary Edwards, 1986

Gary Edwards (who is now a county commissioner) had worked for the Thurston County Sheriffs Department for less than a decade, working his way up to detective by the mid-1980s. The then 39-year-old represented a new generation of law enforcement when he decided to challenge the sitting Sheriff, Dan Montgomery.

Montgomery apparently entered the race a weak leader, as one of the early articles on the race included five declared candidates, all from law enforcement backgrounds and two from other local agencies.

Interestingly, as a fairly high profile sheriff employee, Edwards would normally make the paper a handful of times from the late 70s to the early 80s. But, there were no mentions for a full calendar year until he filed to run in February 1986. Was Montgomery working to silence a potential opponent? Later in the campaign, Montgomery would deny Edwards leave to allow him to campaign, which ended up causing the sitting sheriff more PR headaches than it was worth.

When the sheriff’s deputy association took a confidence vote on Montgomery that year, he received a majority by just a whisper, 51 to 49.

From the Olympian:

Some deputies were upset at Montgomery, saying he maintains an aloof posture in the department and isolates himself from the rank and file members. Morale was described as being low.

Edwards would end up beating Montgomery in the Republican side of the then not-Top Two primary and then dispatching a Democrat in the November general. He would serve until 2006 when he was replaced by Dan Kimball (who he endorsed) and then John Snaza (who Kimball had endorsed). 

Now come Deputy (and now Sheriff-Elect) Derek Sanders in 2022, who was more than ten years younger than Edwards when he entered the race for sheriff. He represents a similar kind of inside the house phenomena. He was endorsed by two former top administrators that served under incumbent John Snaza.

Look at this Edwards ’86 endorsement from then Deputy Paul Ingram:

“(Montgomery) has been one of the best sheriffs we’ve had. But the last two years, he hasn’t taken advice from anyone. He has lost two key administrators because of that. He’s taken by the power of the office.” 

And this endorsement for Sanders in 2022 from former Thurston Sheriff Chief Dave Pearsall:

“In the beginning (Snaza) had good ideas, intent, and vision. Unfortunately, it no longer appears this is the case. The Sheriff has lost any forward-thinking and vision as of late, which is likely why his Deputies considered a ‘vote of no confidence’ against him.”

This hand-off endorsement framing is interesting for people inside the institution to do, apparently. The sheriff’s office in any given county in Washington is huge, institutionally speaking. Criminal justice spending makes up a big part of the county budget. And the sheriff’s office is a big part of that piece of the pie, and is arguably the most public. So, people “inside the house” can protect the institution itself by saying “he used to be good, but now he’s bad, and I want this next person who is also one of us.” 

The call is coming from outside (but also inside) the house

That being said, it is also important for the rebels inside the house to connect with the mainstream of politics in the community. And, for a non-incumbent campaigner, this is not a small accomplishment. Because the sheriff sits at the top of such a huge public institution, it isn’t that easy for other elected officials to stand up and endorse a challenger.

In 1986, Edwards was able to round up institutional support across the county, including two mayors of Olympia. Sanders was able to match that this year, rounding up dozens of mayors, city council members and former and current state legislators from around the county. 

When Edwards faced an inside the house challenge in 2002 from Deputy Glen Quantz, he diffused the institutional support from lining up with the support that the deputy had gotten from the rank and file. The key was Quantz’s personal life (a bankruptcy and juvenile larceny conviction). Then Attorney General Chris Gregoire pulled her endorsement after Quantz’ past came out.

Edwards would end up not running again in 2006, heading off any potential inside challenge that was able to unify the rank and file with the political mainstream of the county.

Why this is an important discussion

For Troyer, his opponents in 2020 seemed to have reached the level of “inside the house” challenges. Even though he wasn’t an incumbent in 2020, his profile as the department’s communications director gave him a profile that was much higher than any other non-incumbent. The deputy union endorsed an unsuccessful primary candidate and Troyer’s official general challenger (who was also a sheriff’s office lieutenant). But, where they felt short, it seems, was uniting an inside challenge with the mainstream of Pierce County politics. 

Lt. Cynthia Fajardo raised more than twice what Troyer raised, but the vast majority of her funds were donations from herself. Running a self-financed campaign doesn’t signal trying to reach out and gain endorsements from a broad vein of the mainstream institutional politics in Pierce County. It was Troyer that received the endorsements from the 30th District Democrats and the Puyallup Tribe of Indians.

Michael Zoorob explored the sticking power of incumbent sheriffs, pointing out that they are able to hold off challenges the vast majority of the time. They even have longer tenure than appointed police chiefs, and self admittedly, are more secure in their jobs from political fall-out. 

Specifically zooming into Pierce County, there seem to be some institutional advantages for Troyer coming into 2024 according to Zoorob:

1. Incumbent sheriffs tend to do well in the crowded attention years of Presidential elections. In fact,  sheriff elections on Presidential cycles are the most likely to be uncontested (compared to most contested in odd-year elections). When incumbent sheriffs are challenged during Presidential years though, according to Zoorob, the incumbent advantage disappears. It is basically the same as during any other kind of cycle.

2. The sheriff position in Pierce County is non-partisan, which also favors a sheriff with good name identification. The theory is the partisan marker is valuable information for the voter, and without that, they will lean on what they do know which may end up being the candidate they’ve even heard of.

A deeper look into Sheriff Sanders’ Thurston County

In my original post about the results from the 2022 general election, I vaguely pointed to results comparing how well successful candidates Sheriff Sanders and Senator Murray did against each other. Basically, both won by doing well in the dense, urban part of Thurston County. But, when you take their precinct results and compare them, you see Sanders lagging behind Murray in those dense neighborhoods and holding on tighter in the rural areas.

Here is the map (with legend!) that compares Murray (doing better in red) vs. Sanders (better in blue).

Because Murray did better overall in Thurston County, (58 to 55 percent) it is interesting to look at the places that Sanders not only won overall, but beat Murray. Here is the map with those precincts outlined in red.

The smallest pockets are places like Kinwood East (on the edge of Lacey) and Simmons 3 (on the edge of Tumwater):

Kinwood West
Simmons 3

Both of these are annexation candidates that have very few votes (about 90 in Kinwood West and fewer than 20 in Simmons 3). So, dense precincts that, if mixed with a larger city district, would likely have voted for a Democratic Senator.
The next collection are Lacey 28 and Lakeside. Both of these are (aptly described) are lake shore precincts. 
Lacey 28
Lakeside

What is at play here? Higher property values? The general lake shore politics that gives someone a unique perspective on county government? 

Lacey 28 is also the only incorporated precinct that falls into this collection, other than the entire city of Tenino, which is the third collection of precincts in this map. Why Tenino didn’t go vote for Murray makes sense, but why it voted for Sanders is worth discussing.
The last collection are the larger precincts around the edge of the urban growth area. I might have added Johnson Point (off the map) into the lake shore collection, but I’ll put it here with places like Delphi, Sunwood Lakes and Eaton Creek North.

These mostly wooded or rural precincts are pock marked with surban-esque neighborhoods carved out of the woods. But at least one looks like it could be plopped down directly into Hawks Prairie or Southeast Olympia:

Riverwood neighborhood off of Rich Road.

So my guess? These neighborhoods are far enough out of town that their politics would at least be marginally conservative. Or, at least conservative enough for Tiffany Smiley to edge out a win over Murray. All of these precincts were 45/55 precincts for Murray. But, they are also all neighborhoods that depend on the Sheriff’s office for police services. And, if they are generally unhappy with the service they receive (because of response times, they are likely to vote for the challenger over the incumbent. 

Some maps to help you understand the November 2022 General Election in Thurston County

1. Sanders won the Sheriff’s race leaning on urban voters, but…

Here are Sanders’ results in raw numbers. Blue he did better, and red worse. This is the prototypical Thurston County partisan map. Democratic candidates tend to do better and run up the score in the urban areas, and try to tamp down their losses in the rural precincts.
This is the map of taking Sanders’ percentages and taking away partisan ballot headliner Senator Patty Murray. What this map shows is though Sanders used the core of Olympia, Tumwater and Lacey to beat Snaza, he underperformed the top-of-the ticket Democrat to do it. Importantly to his win, he outpaced her in the rural areas.

Most importantly (and I think key to his win), there is a band of precincts close to the urban growth boundary where not only did he win the majority of the votes, but he outpaced Senator Murray.

2. The proposals to expand the county and port commissions passed, but exposed differences in opinion between the two bodies. 

First, the results from the county proposition:

And then the thinner, but also successful map, for the port. Same pattern, same broad victory. Just, thinner.

Both of the maps show the same general pattern we usually see, urban Thurston County voting one way, and then the further out of town you get, people vote another. What I was always curious about in this race is where the county did better than the port and vice versa.

In the map above, green areas saw more Port support vs. the County. But because the port was underwater vs. the county in all but half a dozen precincts, most of the green precincts are places where the county actually pulled more votes. I just did it this way to show variation. Doing it plus/minus 50 percent for each just showed a lot of pro-county areas. 

It is an open question whether these results are more about the county’s reputation or the ports. But it is worth pointing out the cluster of green precincts (pro-port or anti-county) around Hawks Prairie and the Yelm area.

What a map of taxes-by-acre in Thurston County teaches us about downtown Olympia

This is a map of election results in Thurston County. It shows a fairly typical result by precinct. More liberal candidates (in this case Joel Hanson in last year’s port race) doing well in the urban core and more conservative candidates (Amy Evans) doing well in rural areas.

This is a map of property taxes by acre on the parcel level in Thurston County:

Generally speaking, these are the same patterns. The same places that tend to vote for more conservative candidates also pay less property taxes per acre. This isn’t exactly a new concept. Strong Towns, for example, pays a lot of attention to this concept of density paying off for local government finances. Their analysis goes even further and connects a simple tax by acre analysis (which I am doing) and brings in the cost of supplying services to low density rural and suburban areas, which is higher than urban, high density neighborhoods.

Here are a few closer looks, to see how the basic property tax by acre phenomena works.

Here is downtown Olympia:

Not only are the vast majority of the parcels blue (relatively high value), there are a lot of dark blue lots (the highest value category). The red areas in downtown Olympia are un-taxed public places like the Port of Olympia, the Capitol Campus and other government owned parcels. They aren’t a good counter-example against the phenomena we’re exploring here, they are just an illustration of the financial impact of being a state capitol.

Zooming out to Olympia overall now:

Lots of lighter blue, and most of the deeper blue is either newer developments or nodes of density around lower density, single-family neighborhoods. 

Now Lacey:

The thing that stands out here to me is the older core of Lacey is mostly lighter blue. 

Now the big map for me, the Rochester/Grand Mound area:

Even though this portion of Thurston County contains a large swath of suburban development on the way to Lewis County, most of the parcels are fairly low value by acre. According to the analyses I linked to above, these areas are more expensive to maintain, but produce less property taxes.
We’re familiar with this concept on a macro scale (donor states and counties), but it is interesting to see how this phenomenon exists on even the micro-neighborhood level. 
And how does this take us back downtown? This is just another example of how the multifamily tax exception is not that bad of an idea, policywise. A little while back, I did a back of the napkin analysis of how in a very short amount of time, the multifamily tax exemption would start paying dividends financially. The logic is that once the exemption is over, the increased value of the taxed parcel would be vastly more than the previously undeveloped version. By my figuring, it would only take seven years for the improved parcel to pay off the money lost in the exemption. And in the long run, it would a massive financial benefit. Allowing the parcel to stay a parking lot would be the actual drain.
What the tax-by-acre parcel map shows is that the talking point of “existing taxpayer subsidizing downtown high-rises” is a falsehood. On any scale, less dense neighborhoods are “paid for” by denser, more productive ones. The majority of existing Olympians (especially the ones that show up to city council to complain about density) live in unproductive single-family neighborhoods. The subsidy goes the other way around. 

In response to “In Defense of Priest Point Park”

In the debate over renaming Priest Point Park to Squaxin Park, David Nicandri has written “In Defense of Priest Point Park.” I’m glad David’s thoughts were finally posted. I had heard through the grapevine that he had come to a position counter to honoring the wishes of the Squaxin Island Tribe. His long-time work in local and statewide history makes his opinion worth weighing. 
That said, I want to offer some counterweight to his post. 
In the blog post below, I rely on David’s own “Olympia’s Forgotten Pioneers,” a history of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) in Olympia.
First off, setting the stage for the arrival of the Oblate Father Pascal Ricard in Olympia, Nicandri leaves out important context. First, he says coming to North America from France was against Ricard’s wishes. This is true, but because he was in ill health. The OMI was primarily a missionary order, so being sent overseas was not something a member of the OMI order wouldn’t expect.
Much of Nicandri’s post contextualizes the relationship between the priests in Olympia and the territorial government during the Puget Sound and treaty wars. You would think that, after reading David’s post, that the OMI priests were working counter to the government of Isaac Stevens and for the tribes. But, even Nicandri’s own book paints a much more complicated picture.
The relationship was more cordial than that. Each side realized the benefit of the other. During the treaty work at Walla Walla, he writes, “The OMI and Stevens were virtually a team; both told the Indians to listen to and obey the other.”
At best, the priests were complicit in the work of the territorial and military leaders to force the tribes to sign treaties and move them onto reservations. The work being done by missionaries like the OMI priest made the tribes much more likely to also do the wishes of the secular government. 
Nicandri:

On one occasion, Ricard inscribed “we have always said to the Indians, do not aggravate the Americans and they will not both you. If someone hurts you, complain to the authorities… even to the governor himself, and you will be rendered justice,” although he knew the Indians were not receiving it.

Granted, the relationship between the American population and the OMI priest in Olympia was not always cordial. Because of their closeness to the tribes (and likely just plain old anti-foreign, anti-Catholic bigotry), white people in Olympia felt threatened by the priests. But at the end of the day, the American territorial government and the OMI priests were partners in the cultural damage done to the tribes.

Lastly, I want to address the broader thoughts Dave brings up earlier in his piece.

The most grievous was the hubris of cultural superiority, originating in the ethos of his time and civilization. This pattern was so common that Pope Francis is coming to North America this year in recognition of this Truth in the interest of Reconciliation.

Before we judge Ricard too severely, forbid that any of us should be judged for our actions by the standards of some future posterity.

This is exactly how we should be judged. And this is the entire reason I study history. It is cliché to say that thing about repeating history when you don’t learn it well enough. And I don’t think it’s an extreme statement that we still have a lot of divergent ideas about the place of religious minorities in America.

Nicandri’s “judged by our current actions by a better future” is a tamed down version of “if we pull these statues down, we’ll forget our history.” There is a big difference between honoring something by naming a park after it or building a statue and “forgetting history.” We don’t build statues to assassins, for example, but we do include them in our history. We aren’t taking “Olympia’s Forgotten Pioneers” out of the library and burning it. We are simply showing that we have a better understanding of history because we no longer want to honor religious colonialism. 

While what could be done to help Indian people in the 1850s may have been morally complex to French priests, we have the luxury of clearer vision. Nicandri in “Olympia’s Forgotten Pioneers”:

One might cynically suggest that Ricard was a contributor to the deculturalization of a whole people. But he and all the OMI realized the futility of the Indian struggle and tried to temporize the effect of white supremacy as best they could.

Ignoring the impacts of missionary work on deculturalization, we today don’t have to see the actual request from an existing sovereign tribal government to rename a park as futile. 
We don’t have to temporize the impacts of white supremacy.  We can fight it.

The easy and actually best way to rename Thurston County

Yeah, in fact, I do think we should rename Thurston County. Or everything named after Samuel Thurston, including Thurston Avenue in Olympia.

Here’s a brief update on why Samuel Thurston is not a good namesake. He never lived here, never visited here. His only actual impact here is the worst thing about him. Yes, he did write the Black Exclusion law in the Oregon Territory (which Thurston County was part of back in the day) and he did other things. But the worst thing is that he set our course that we travelled on well after his early death.

The name itself had more to with the politics of the moment in the 1850s. Thurston was a ruthless political operator. Major pieces of our region’s racist heritage took root from the Black Exclusion Laws, including:

The common thread through all of these episodes (and more) were that only white people should be allowed to paid labor. Everything else needed to be controlled and discouraged.

But, I don’t necessarily think we need to pick a new name. We can keep the Thurston moniker.

This was exactly what King County did when they changed who “King” honors from terrible Vice President Rufus King to really great Martin Luther King Jr. It is just a matter of finding a new Thurston.

The problem with “Thurston” that we didn’t have with “King” is that there aren’t any giants of politics and culture that we can point at immediately. There are a lot of good Thurstons, not single great one.

For example:

  • Rev. David Thurston of Maine was a pre-Civil War abolitionist minister. He would travel from town to town, preaching against slavery until they kicked him out.
  • Charles Brown Thurston, another New England abolitionist that served in the Civil War but also lived an otherwise quiet live. 
  • Rev. John L. Thurston, of Chicago. He was a fellow traveler of Martin Luther King Jr. and was president of the Chicago chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
  • Baratunde Thurston is a contemporary writer who has been very significant in the anti-racist movement. I mean, if you don’t know who this person is, I suggest you give him a look today. 
  • And, why are we so worried about last names? Thurston Moore was lead guitar for Sonic Youth. That’s pretty awesome.
  • Lastly, if you look back and deconstruct the name Thurston, you see some evidence that it is a construction of Thor (literally the god of thunder) and stone. As in Thor’s Stone. I mean Thor is pretty great, but not literally a Thurston. But, close enough to merit reference.
None of these people or imaginary made up gods are knock-it-out-of-the-park obvious like Martin Luther King Jr., but they all do have one thing in common: they are all better than Samuel Thurston.
So, here is my honest to god (Thor, whoever) answer to what we should with the name Thurston County (Avenue, of wherever). 
We should keep the name Thurston County, but strip it from Samuel Thurston and give it to literally all the good and decent Thurstons (and Thor’s Stone) that ever lived. 
I haven’t looked all that deeply, but there is no rule that I know of that says you have to keep who you name a place after to one person. 
I also don’t have an exhaustive list of Thurstons, but there is no reason that I can see that we can’t just open up the list again when we find a new one.

We should be able to rename Priest Point Park if we feel like it. And Squaxin Park makes perfect sense.

If you wanted to design someone who would be outraged at the prospect of renaming Priest Point Park, you could do much worse than me.

Priest Point Park is probably (outside state-owned parks around the capitol) the jewel of Olympia’s park system. More than 300 acres, featuring everything (except athletic fields) you’d want in a park, built first in 1905, it is big, it is old and everyone has been there. Now, the city council is reconsidering renaming it Squaxin Park.

I was born in Olympia. I’ve lived other places, but this is the place I’ve always considered home. I have a deeper emotional attachment to this place and the things that are here than anywhere else. And, for people who know me, that is an understatement.

I am also a cradle Catholic. I was raised in Olympia’s Catholic community. I went to school at St. Michael’s and church there every week for a good portion of my life. I was also born at St. Peter’s, but I doubt very much in the 1970s that the Sisters of Providence was what brought my parents to that particular hospital. It was the only game in town. I should also mention that while I was raised Catholic, and I have a latent respect for the faith, I walked away from it in the winter of 2009. But even then, it isn’t as if I have a axe to grind against Catholics or Catholic things.

I am also tied to here because of the things that happened here. I am very interested in the history of our community. I’ve written about it here at this blog and at other places. 

But it is the interest in history, or rather, how my particular taste in history, that drives me to want to  change the name of Priest Point Park. Simply, my interest in history is so I can help our community no understand our past, so we can make our future better.

It is important for us to have an accurate view of what happened, and give honors (like park names and statues) to things that matter, not just whatever we chose back in the day. We are allowed to review our past choices and then move on in a different direction.

But, here are a few good reasons for us to move on.

  1. The Oblate Priests of Mary Immaculate at Priest Point Park were only at Priest Point for 12 years. They showed up in 1848 and then moved on 1860. And, most importantly, they did not have any sort of direct connection to Catholic institutions that came later. St. Martin’s College, St. Peter’s Hospital, Sacred Heart and St. Michael’s were all founded decades later by non-Oblate members of the Church. To draw any connection between Oblate priests travelling west and other Catholic institutions is casual. 
  2. There is already another Priest Point on Puget Sound. Not just in the world, but very nearby here just north of Everett. And the northern one is an actual populated place, which probably makes it more significant. Seems dumb to have two. And if we want to change ours first, then good.
  3. The most important thing the Oblate priests did do is to act as a relay between the tribal communities in the South Sound and the white community during the Puget Sound War. The Puget Sound War was the conflict between the federal and territorial governments immediately following the Steven’s Treaties. The Oblate priests had spent a lot of effort trying to convert some of those Indians to Catholicism, so knew people on both sides of the conflict. But even this occurrence points us to the Squaxin Island Tribe, because we need to remember we were at war with them and we turned their namesake island into a prisoner camp. 
  4. Worse, Priest Point Park was where we imprisoned the tribal members who lived around Olympia before we moved them to Squaxin Island. Not a prison camp per se, but on the way to one.
  5. The entire logic behind sending missionaries to the west wasn’t to serve Catholics that had moved there, but to convert tribal members who had another religions already to Catholicism. Despite what Catholic historians will lay down later, an attempt at religious colonialism. Continuing to honor that portion of our history, especially given the rest of the context, is a weird decision. (I added this point a few hours after writing this initial post)
  6. The Squaxin Island Tribe asked us to. Their history runs deeper here, and their history is the one we try hard to ignore. Their history is the history we should try to pay closer attention to. The Squaxin Island tribal council passed a resolution on December 10, 2021 requesting the change. 
  7. Lastly, the priests never asked for the honor. They were long gone by the time the city ended up buying the property from the county over a century ago.

Renaming the park doesn’t take anything away from Olympia. Catholics still make up a significant portion of our community’s religious adherents. The priests didn’t front the money to the city in 1905 when the parcels became available from a failed housing development. That was George Mottman. Local lawyer P.M. Troy did the spade work, pulling together the title work to make sure the city got as much of the property as possible, since much of it was already split into lots. But we didn’t name the park after those two men. They just went with the inherited name that locals had always called the spot.

Four questions from the last election in map form (Fall 2021 edition)

 1. Did Talauna Reed’s strategy of encouraging voting in high density apartment complexes work? 

2. Why did Reed get a post-primary bounce in SE Olympia?

And, it is more than the bottom line result that she did not win. When I look at the maps, she didn’t move the needle in the neighborhoods with large apartment buildings. I had seen this approach being promoted on social media, and I was incredibly interested to see if it would work (in a winning result) or move the needle (by improving her returns in neighborhoods with more large apartment buildings).

First off, here is the map for her overall vote percentage:

Her best precincts were basically on the Eastside north of the highway and on the near-in Westside. Only one of these precincts (the blue one furthest west) has a collection of larger apartment buildings. 

Since I heard about the approach to focus on larger apartment buildings after the primary, I think looking at the change in raw votes and percentage change would be important. This is especially true since the primary finished very close between Lisa Parshley, Reed and Wendy Carlson. This meant that Carlson’s large number of voters (for someone who didn’t advance) were up for grabs.

First, here is the percentage change:

And here is the raw number of votes change:

And here you might start seeing a pattern with higher turnout with apartment dwellers. On the far Eastside by the hospital and down South of Ken Lake there might be some movement. 

But what is also consistent in these two maps in the handful of SE Olympia precincts where overall Reed did not do well. They also had large movements toward her during the primary to general shift. These are places where Carlson had a lot of votes to give up after she didn’t make it through the primary. And despite not doing well, Reed picked up a fair amount of votes.

3. What is the meaning of the weirdest countywide map I have ever seen?

Eight years ago, I thought I’d seen the weirdest map ever when Sue Gunn won both extremely rural and conservative precincts and urban and liberal precincts. 

For a reference of how a Thurston County results map should look like, look at the Amy Evans/Joel Hanson for Port Commission map. Hanson is in blue, Evans in red.

Here you see the traditional urban to rural way these maps are organized. Hanson does better in the urban center of Olympia, while Evans does better in the rural areas and builds in towards Olympia. The battleground are the suburban belts around Olympia, including Lacey, Tumwater and a bit further out. From this map, you can see Evans won this by limiting Hanson’s precincts to largely inside Olympia.

But, would someone please explain to me this? This is the Bob Iyall (blue) and Jesse Simmons (red) race for Olympia Port Commission: 

As normal, Iyall did do pretty well in the middle of the map. And, if you told me that Iyall did really well in Olympia, but Simmons bossed all of Lacey, I would have said this map was a lot closer than what it was. Here, it seems like it is the rest of the county vs. Lacey. I have never seen a map in Thurston County where a candidate does really well in Lacey and isn’t able to translate that into better results elsewhere in the suburban belt or either in the urban core of Olympia or out in the rural areas.

4. Why did the right lane candidates have such varied success across the map?

I didn’t want to do election results maps for the other city of Olympia races, because they all seemed to follow the same pattern of conservative candidates doing well on the far Westside and SE Olympia  and the eventual winners doing well everywhere else. I did do Reed’s race because as the only one left in the progressive lane, she was unique. 

Well, what I did do was map the precincts won by any or all of the candidates in the right-hand lane. Candi Mercer didn’t win any precincts, so she’s not on this map.

The three remaining (Weigand, Kesler and Gauny) won several precincts in SE Olympia together. Weigand and Kesler then combined to win a couple more on the SE side and on the far Westside (both traditional conservative-for-Olympia territory). Kesler then won two on her own, both on the edges of town. Weigand in blue then picked up the rest of SE Olympia and the far Westside. He also won an inside precinct that includes the East Bay Harbor condominiums. 

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