Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 49)

The City of Puget and how we build cities

August 30, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

There’s something about a neighboring city moving into nearby unincorporated neighborhoods that always gets people excited and wanting a city of their own. At least around here.

That’s exactly what happened in the 1960s when Lacey became a city.

The Birth of Lacey: A Rivalry with Olympia

Lacey’s path to cityhood was shaped by a rivalry with Olympia over annexation and control of fast-growing suburbs.

After World War II, Lacey shifted from farmland to a booming suburb, helped by projects like South Sound Mall. By the early 1960s, Olympia began pushing east, annexing land along Martin Way and Pacific Avenue up to Lilly Road. This sparked a “border war” as Lacey moved to incorporate and protect its own boundaries.

Lacey’s first incorporation vote in 1964 failed, but a second vote in November 1966 narrowly passed by about 200 votes. Almost immediately, conflict reignited. Residents of Lacey’s western “Olympia fringe area,” who had opposed incorporation, voted to leave and join Olympia in early 1967. Lacey sued to block the move, but courts upheld Olympia’s annexation under an old 1890 law (later changed in 1969).

That same year, voters in both cities considered merging into one. Supporters said it would cut costs, improve planning, and solve Lacey’s sewage problems by tapping Olympia’s system. The proposal failed, badly in Lacey, where residents strongly opposed merging.

The 1980s: Lacey Looks North to Puget

In the ’70s and ’80s, Lacey tried to annex eastward but hit resistance from established neighborhoods like Tanglewilde and Thompson Place. Much like Lacey in the ’60s, these neighborhoods didn’t want to join a bigger city, or form their own. They already had regional fire services, and Tanglewilde even formed its own park district, building the county’s only public pool.

So Lacey looked north, toward undeveloped land between those neighborhoods and Hawks Prairie.

During the 1980s, Lacey took an aggressive annexation strategy, focusing on big undeveloped areas with huge growth potential, like Hawks Prairie. This land promised billions in development and tens of thousands of jobs over two decades. Lacey wanted to bring in sewer, water, and other urban services while avoiding the political headaches of older neighborhoods.

At the same time, Lacey played defense. It annexed strategically to stop the proposed City of Puget, an effort by rural residents to block Lacey’s expansion. Just like Lacey vs. Olympia before it, the Lacey vs. Puget City battle took on the same tenor of trying to keep the neighboring big brother from taking over.

The proposed City of Puget was named after an unrealized metropolis on Johnson Point. Puget City was platted in 1870 (and promptly un-platted three years later) as a possible terminus for the railroad. There are actually a handful of homes that sit on “Puget City” parcels in the area, but obviously, the rail road city was never built. As Lacey started their march to the inland sea in the 1980s, rural residents staked their own claim and petitioned the boundary review board for the creation of the 3,000 person City of Puget.

The new city idea died after the Boundary Review Board voted it down 3-2. The board leaned on a rift between residents of the rural areas and developers and residents of larger planned neighborhoods that wanted Lacey’s services.

One big difference between the 1960s and the 1980s? The Boundary Review Board. Created in 1967, these boards added consistency to city formations and annexations. You can’t rewrite history with “what ifs,” but it’s interesting to imagine what Lacey’s future would’ve looked like if it had been blocked like Puget.

Ultimately, Lacey annexed thousands of acres, leapfrogging older neighborhoods to build new subdivisions and warehouses. Those skipped-over neighborhoods fought off annexation attempts for decades, and now, in 2025, Lacey is looking back at them again.

But first: How Cities Grow

This brings me back to my favorite academic paper I’ve read this year, The Neutral Criteria Myth. In a discussion about legislative redistricting, it points out that histories like Lacey’s show how city boundaries might look like simple lines on a map, but they are anything but neutral. These boundaries have long been used to shape communities, deciding who holds power and who gets resources.

Historically, these lines were often drawn with racial and economic bias. Redlining is a clear example, where minority neighborhoods were confined to underfunded areas. At the same time, wealthy, mostly white suburbs drew boundaries to separate themselves from urban centers, creating large gaps in wealth, schools, and public services. The truth is, there is no such thing as a neutral city boundary. These lines have always been about more than geography, they shape opportunity and segregation in ways that last for generations.

City lines affect property values, school funding, and even political representation. Local gerrymandering (redrawing district maps to favor one group) can tilt power and weaken others’ votes. Annexation decisions also play a role: cities often target areas that bring in tax revenue while avoiding neighborhoods that may be costly to serve.

This is exactly the situation Lacey faces today. Decades after growth management laws placed the old Tanglewilde and Thompson Place neighborhoods in Lacey’s Urban Growth Area, the city is now looking back at the areas it skipped over. They have studied what annexing these unincorporated neighborhoods would mean. Their new financial analysis offers a clear answer: annexation would likely cost more than it brings in, at least in the near term. The study examined three growth scenarios, and in every case, the city would face a financial hit. Even after 20 years, the costs of police, fire, and utilities outweigh the tax revenue these areas would generate.

So, annexations have biases towards the needs of the current city residents. Systems like boundary review boards can help short-circuit these biases and bring more rational decision-making, but I think there is a broader model.

One idea I’ve been thinking about is to take city boundary decisions out of the hands of cities themselves. Currently, cities often push annexations for more tax revenue or strategic growth. But what if an independent board handled it instead, similar to the commissions used for legislative redistricting?

This board wouldn’t have a stake in politics or money. Its sole goal would be ensuring that services, water, sewer, police, fire, are delivered efficiently. It would focus on creating logical city limits that make sense for residents and future growth, not just for city budgets. The concept is simple: draw boundaries based on what works best for communities.

In many places, higher levels of government already step in to manage city boundaries rather than leaving decisions to individual cities. They do this because it can bring major public benefits, better planning, stronger services, and less wasteful competition between municipalities. Sometimes this happens through state or provincial laws. Other times, independent boards (like Boundary Review Commissions in the U.S. or Municipal Demarcation Boards in South Africa) take the lead. Their role is to look at the bigger picture: how to manage growth, avoid urban sprawl, and ensure communities are connected logically.

Why does this matter? When cities compete over territory for tax dollars, services suffer and local governments end up fighting instead of cooperating. Provincial or national intervention can fix that. In Canada, provinces sometimes merge or reorganize municipalities so services align and resources are shared fairly. In South Africa, national boards bring diverse communities together under one system, promoting equity and social cohesion.

The goal is simple: instead of a patchwork of self-interested annexations, create a more thoughtful, planned approach to city boundaries, one that serves people.

Facing the soft xenophobia of Emmett Watson

May 10, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

Governor Tom McCall of Oregon and Emmett Watson, the Seattle newspaper columnist I’m pretty sure my parents named me after, occupy a distinct corner of Pacific Northwest history. Both stood (figuratively and, at one point, literally) on the border of our region and asked people not to move here.

But in doing so, they provided air cover for a kind of xenophobic politics that helped cities across the region lower their density limits. Decades later, this became a fatal flaw in our politics and society.

Watson’s approach, from the 1960s through the 1990s, was often humorous and irreverent. He aimed to preserve Seattle’s unique, somewhat quirky character in the face of rapid growth and the perceived homogenization brought by newcomers and big development. He created the fictitious organization “Lesser Seattle” and its mock intelligence arm, “Keep the Bastards Out” (KBO), as playful rebukes to the ambitions of the real “Greater Seattle” boosters and Chamber of Commerce types.

McCall’s message, especially his famous “Visit but don’t stay,” was more direct and environmentally focused. Though charismatic and good with a soundbite, his core concern was growth management to protect Oregon’s environment. His message had broad implications for potential transplants, but his justification was rooted in ecological preservation more than the cultural anxiety that animated Watson.

Watson was definitely funny. And McCall, to Oregonians, was inspiring. But let’s focus on Watson, his impact on our culture, and most importantly, his jokes. He made sure to say that Lesser Seattle and KBO were fictitious, anyone could be the chair, and it was all just a joke.

But the joke was the power.

Jokes are gateways. Seemingly harmless humor targeting certain ideas can desensitize people and create a climate where more extreme rhetoric becomes acceptable. The humor acts as social lubricant, lowering defenses and making strong beliefs sound less shocking.

That’s exactly what happened in our Seattle-centric, Western Washington community. Watson would be cited again and again in letters to the editor as a humorous canary in the coal mine about growth.

Meanwhile, during the same period Watson was writing in earnest, city after city and neighborhood after neighborhood sought and received downzones: larger minimum lot sizes, bans on anything larger than single-family homes, all in the name of “preserving character” and controlling growth.

And again, we don’t need racist intent to have racist outcomes. These local zoning rules, implemented from the 1970s onward, pushed Black families out of whole neighborhoods in Seattle as white homeowners who benefited from post-World War economic growth looked for housing and drove up property values. In Olympia, we have whiter, less populated neighborhoods because we didn’t allow them to grow.

During the same period that Emmett Watson was playfully advocating for “Lesser Seattle” and the fictional “Keep the Bastards Out,” national media narratives were also shaping perceptions of Seattle in the context of racial tensions elsewhere. James Lyons points out in “Selling Seattle,” that following the Los Angeles riots in 1992, Seattle was increasingly portrayed as a desirable and safe haven for white middle-class professionals, a “white oasis” in contrast to the perceived urban decay and racial unrest of cities like Los Angeles. This media framing, while not explicitly espousing exclusionary policies, subtly reinforced an image of Seattle’s whiteness that was protected by exclusionary zoning, as a positive attribute, potentially providing an unconscious backdrop for the further arguments for downzoning that would later exacerbate our housing crisis.

Watson tried to turn serious when talking to author Jonathan Raban late in his career. He started with a joke about the unseriousness of the Lesser Seattle movement, but pivoted to argue for downzoning and neighborhood character, zoning as a tool for protection. Raban, who had moved to Seattle as an already well-known writer and quickly became one of its most insightful and loving critics, pushed back. His words ring even truer now as we try to reverse the policies that led to today’s housing crisis: “…I am very skeptical about zoning laws and many forms of planning. You see, cities have their own organic existence. They evolve naturally as the years go by.”

The fatal error in Watson’s and McCall’s thinking was that California (already experiencing population growth pressure from immigration and a booming economy in the 1960s and ’70s) started ratcheting down zoning density before Oregon and Washington did.

The increased housing costs cited by Cascadian slow-growthers as proof of California’s “insanity” were not a symptom of too much growth, but of housing scarcity. And in response, we put the same shackles on ourselves: cutting housing production, driving up home prices and rents, and contributing to a coast-wide homelessness crisis.

One of the most hilarious twists in this story? McCall and Watson weren’t even revolutionary. They were just the latest copy of a long Cascadian tradition: the impulse to shut the door behind you.

We don’t even need to go back to overtly racist policy to see the pattern. Take an early political race. Michael T. Simmons, arguably the first American to settle in what’s now Western Washington, co-founded Tumwater and led an overland party that arrived when the only competition was Indigenous tribes and the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Just a decade after his 1845 arrival, Simmons ran for congressional delegate as an independent. His main issue? That too many “newcomers” were taking over local political parties and that the “old settlers” needed a voice to preserve their history.

He’d been here ten years. And already, Simmons was the “old settler.”

Lessons Learned About Changing the State Flag from the Short-Lived HB 1938

March 1, 2025 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

HB 1938 had a brief but illuminating journey: introduced, heard in a public hearing, and then left to expire without a vote out of committee. While its quick demise might seem discouraging, the process provided valuable insights and reasons to be hopeful for future efforts to redesign Washington’s state flag.

1. Sometimes You Don’t Need to Say Everything in Your Heart

Reflecting on the debate, I realized (thanks in part to a KUOW interview with a vexillologist) that centering the discussion on George Washington was the wrong approach. The focus should have been on what a new flag could look like, rather than defending or attacking a historical figure. My own blog post being picked up by the Daily Mail (which I admit had a certain appeal to me as an Irish American) probably distracted from the core issue and didn’t serve the movement well.

2. It Really Doesn’t Have Anything to Do with George Washington

Despite how much time the bill sponsor and I spent addressing concerns about Washington’s presence on the flag, the bill itself never mandated his removal. The design competition had no predetermined outcome, a point emphasized by many testifiers. The opposition’s fixation on Washington overshadowed the actual intent of the legislation: to allow for public input and a democratic design process.

3. Lots of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

The number of people signed up for the public hearing was pretty stark: 11 people signed in support, one was neutral, and 37 opposed the bill. Yet, those who actually showed up to testify were more evenly split in favor of change. Leading up to the hearing, the Republican caucus and aligned groups worked hard to stir up pro-Washington sentiment. I even saw a pro-gun rights channel discussing the bill. But when it came time to show up and testify, opposition voices largely lacked the passion or patience to engage. Meanwhile, pro-change advocates were more invested and willing to participate. While the decision to let the bill die this year is understandable, the nature of the testimony suggests there is a foundation to build upon in the future.

4. History Repeats Itself

Ironically, the argument over Washington’s place on the state flag mirrors the debate from 102 years ago when the very idea of a state flag was controversial. A 1913 bill similar to HB 1938 aimed to create a state flag but failed due to opposition from veterans’ groups, who saw it as unpatriotic and a challenge to the national flag. It wasn’t until a decade of advocacy, led in part by the Daughters of the American Revolution, that Washington finally adopted its current flag in 1923.

5. This Idea Is Far from Dead

If the primary opposition consists of defending Washington’s image and feigned confusion about what vexillology even is, I welcome the next iteration of HB 1938 or a similar bill. Over the past few weeks, several pro-new flag advocates emerged on short notice. Moving forward, it will be exciting to see who else steps up in support of a new, more representative flag for Washington State. The conversation isn’t over, it’s just a start.

Let the decimation of the Everett Herald be when we decided to save journalism in Washington

July 20, 2024 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

The sudden news at the Everett Herald is a reminder of the ongoing decline in working journalists in Washington State. Last month, 10 out of the 18 reporters on the ground and two editors were laid off at the daily newspaper in Snohomish County.

The story is sadly typical. Old chain ownership declares bankruptcy, new owners swoop in and pick up mastheads, circulation and advertising contacts at bargain-basement prices. The sale is made more palatable by cutting non-revenue positions at the get go. While the backlash may be loud, it’ll normally fade into the darkness as subscribers drift away and the rest of us accept the new normal.

While the percentage of reporters is itself startling, I was shocked by the gross number. Ten reporters is about twice the number of reporters that cover Olympia or Thurston County (from Olympia and Thurston County) any given day.

And while such a large cut at one time in one paper is a shock to the system, reporter layoffs in the Puget Sound, or nationwide have been going on in earnest for about two decades.

The odd thing about the state of newspapers and news is that relatively speaking, Washington is doing better than most states news desert wise. Only Asotin County is officially marked as a news desert on the notorious UNC Journalism map. But even that is belied by the existence of a newspaper in Lewiston across the border in Idaho that covers Asotin County news.

But the fact that many of our newspapers have so far survived, just shows that the Herald layoff are just a reminder that there is still pretty far for us to fall. If we assume that Washington State has lost newsroom jobs at somewhere near the national rate, we are saving mastheads by losing reporters. Which means at some point, the newspapers themselves will start disappearing.

I started my career as a reporter over two decades ago in small, rural papers. While I loved the work, it didn’t take me long to move over to better paying media relations jobs. As someone who tries to earn media for a living, I can see how the decline in places to earn it has had an impact on our communities and my work.

I remember the early days of social media and the promise of telling “our own stories” without an intermediary. That certainly didn’t work out the way we thought it would. At first, we were migrating our work and content to platforms that “our audience” were using anyway. We adapted our content strategies to follow the curve preferred by platforms, then we began paying to access the audience that had opted in to seeing our content in the first place.

Now, most of our content is buried in walled gardens that are increasingly moving away from promoting content with outside links.

I’m heartened to see the Everett community fill up the Letter to the Editor inbox at the Herald with their pain. These letters are making the righteous case for local journalism. They aren’t wrong that communities are being made better when reporters are working. But to work, reporters need to get paid. And the economic argument of a post bankruptcy purchase. Even the most civically minded owners, profit, non-profit, (whatever) need money.

But I’ll be honest with you. There is no money is local journalism. There are two reasons.

Reasonable expectation that content on the internet is accessible (free). It is just how the web works. I click here, I get that. So if I have to pay for it, that’s too much friction for me to care. Especially when it is less than scintillating news about local issues. People expected they’d pay to have a newspaper delivered to their house or out of the box, but to pay for something on the internet is just too much bother.
Meta and Alphabet and programmatic advertising houses hoover up all the online ad revenue. Even if local news companies decided to open up their doors and lean totally on ad revenue, they could never keep up. These advertising behemoths operate on a different level. Their profit margins are massive because they don’t support supplying content to go alongside the ads. They just spend their time on profit producing spy tech that captures users and delivers incredibly cheap ads to eyeballs. As someone that controls an incredibly modest digital ad budget, I would be wasting money if I didn’t use these platforms. It is definitely time to break them up, but that is the job of the federal government, to be honest.

So, that’s the setup. More and more legacy media organizations will drift onto the shoals as the online media ad platforms lower the tide by sucking the ocean dry. If these legacy companies don’t just die, they’ll stay alive as raiders come by and keep them alive to pump the last bit of economic value out of them.

So, here’s what we should do

We don’t need to support the old legacy organizations. In a lot of places, we should. Despite their chain and, oftentimes, hedge fund owners, the people left working there are highly trained professional journalists, and we may consider honoring their work by helping pay for it any way we can. But they don’t have to be the only game in town.

So let me say this: if Everett comes out of this emotional moment in their community with just a smaller Everett Herald, I’ll be disappointed. Gig Harbor Now, Range (in Spokane) show how green shoots of new growth can start showing up in our communities.

If Everett is as worked up as they seem to be from the letters to the editor, the community up there should start talking about launching a new effort, raising money and generally not giving up.

Other than starting a brand-new thing from the ground up, the Everett community should also consider simply raising money to increase journalism in any form in their community. This can literally start tomorrow (hint hint)

Other examples of local private funding are the Nebraska Journalism Trust and the Central Valley Journalism Cooperative in California. I’m part of a team trying to get this going in Olympia too.

Lastly, I don’t think it is too far to explore how government can help support journalism. I spelled this out last year pretty comprehensively. Basically, I think we should copy the New Jersey Civic Information Network. But there are a few new developments that I think are worth covering.

Let’s not copy the JPRA in any sense. It is a link tax that ignores the structure of the open internet. And like I said above, the platforms the JPRA supporters say are “stealing” links are either actually driving traffic to legacy organizations that are starting be ignored by platforms anyway. Jeff Jarvis has the best thoughts on this, so I’ll defer to him.

A tax on online advertising that would fund a civic information network would be an almost perfect policy solution, though. Online advertising monopolies create negative externalities for local journalism. Carving off a piece of their revenue gained in Washington State and paying reporters would be a tight little loop. Both California and Maryland have passed these taxes, Washington should join.

Break up the ad tech giants. Just that.

Why Do Young People Vote Less? Reframing the Narrative Through Brain Development

December 31, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 2 Comments

This isn’t normally what you come to this blog for. But I wanted to share an essay I have been working on for a few months on youth voting:

Implications of Brain Science on Youth Voting

There’s tons more context below, but my main point of posting this essay it to get input. So, read on, but also read the essay and let me know what you think. Comments are on in the essay itself.

My experiences during the 2020 election prompted me to re-examine two persistent themes:

The stubbornly low voter turnout among those under 40 and
The ongoing wonder of brain development, an aspect I’ve observed firsthand as I cruise through my 40s and my own children approach adulthood.

My social media often echoes during elections with despair over young voter apathy, with cries of “Why don’t they care?” practically handing the future over to “the old people.” However, my years immersed in local government and political discourse have led to a new question: are we asking the right questions about youth participation?

This is not an exhaustive academic study, though I do cite relevant scholarly evidence. Rather, it is an exploration informed by my own experience. I’ve been a local newspaper reporter, I’ve done a local politics blog as a hobbyist, I have co-hosted a local politics podcast and served as a library trustee, I’ve been deeply engaged in the civic sphere. Currently, I am in a communications role for a local office elections office. So, this essay is not a thorough academic study, but framed on years of accumulated wealth of firsthand observations.

The point is: what if brain development holds a key to understanding the youth voting conundrum? Between the ages of 20 and 40, crucial non-cognitive skills – resilience, self-control, and decision-making – essential for navigating the complexities of voting, undergo significant maturation. This might explain the existing age gap in voter participation and render traditional solutions, such as early civic education, somewhat inadequate.

This suggests we may need to consider alternative approaches. Could compulsory voting, a wider spectrum of political choices, or even non-voting forms of participation like town halls prove more effective in engaging younger citizens?

Like I said, this isn’t normally what I post on this blog. I took the time to do some research and frame my thoughts, but I’m mostly interested in feedback. You can drop a comment here, comment on the essay itself, or contact me some other way to let me know if you think I’m heading in the wrong direction or whatever.

Why we don’t see the news

January 9, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Say you live in a neighborhood with older, educated people. The kind of people who make up the majority of print newspaper subscribers. Would you be afraid if you saw the newspaper deliveryman in the early morning? Would you recognize him?

During the same period of time we have seen the evaporation of local news, and along with it the actual printing and delivery of newspapers, we have also seen the increase of fear of another kind of traveler through our neighborhoods. Porch pirates follow delivery drivers from Amazon and other online platforms (but let’s be honest, it really is just Amazon). They quickly rush our porches, snatching up packages before we have a chance to retrieve them.

The phenomenon of online deliveries are a normal staple in our lives. There is an entire market of doorbell cameras and other accessories to protect or hide your deliveries. Videos from doorbell cameras are a consistent part of our media diet.

Online deliveries seem to have come out of the chaos of the early days of the pandemic, when we wondered out loud in mid-March 2020 if the police would use checkpoints to stop us from going to work.

Every option we had for going out into public suddenly had a separate option for no-touch delivery associated to it. Obviously, if you could afford it. All at once, between March and June 2020, blue trucks cruising our neighborhoods became normal. Along with the fear that those packages would be snatched off of our doorsteps before we were able to retrieve them. The package thief became the pilot fish of the basking shark of our home delivery economy.

Paired with the threat of catalytic converter thieves (the stronger, more violent, metallic cousins of porch pirates, crawling underneath cars, quickly cutting the valuable underbelly before skittering off into the night) we became newly aware of what was happening just outside our houses.

There became a sort of standard format to a post on Nextdoor.com or your neighborhood Facebook group. A homeowner would take a quick picture of someone walking through the neighborhood, wondering who this hooded person was. And if no one knew, and no one would ever seem to know who the blurry hooded person walking away from the photographer was, it was evidence that only increased suspicious was needed.

This is the context where anyone could mistake a newspaper delivery for a crime being committed.

When there were more newspapers being delivered, maybe a newspaper on the porch of near every house, the action of delivering newspapers was more recognizable. Subscribers decline, the newspaper owners cut days off printing, news coverage becomes patchy, you don’t recognize what you’re seeing at 2 a.m.

As news has declined, the news was still being delivered to some of our homes. It seems to make sense that this was more often in older and wealthier neighborhoods, where people still had a habit of paying to have the daily news printed out on paper and delivered in person.

After afternoon papers died decades ago, printing consolidated into fewer and fewer printing presses, paper delivery workers shifted from our own neighbors (thinking about the newspaper delivery boy, shakily steering their bike with a heavy sack of papers, tossing each one while also trying to stay upright) to wageworkers.

They are in their own cars, packed with maybe three or five different editions. Papers even stopped employing their own routes and used subcontractors employed by several companies. Printing presses used to be running four hours a day, printing out one or two editions for one newspaper’s flag. Now newspapers consolidate printing. They use a regional facility around the clock, printing several newspapers at different times of day, changing delivery to a professional, regional task.

Even paper companies are moving away from newsprint production to make cardboard boxes. Our porches see more boxes than newsprint.

And, newspaper delivery workers don’t work the dawn hours anymore, delivering as the sun was coming up. They work earlier in the dark night. Consolidation and longer routes, forced them to stretch out their days.

This was the nature of the world where Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer decided to leave his home after midnight in January to trail after a car visiting his neighborhood.

We like to talk about how newspapers are an important corner of our democracy and that in a lot of ways, they represent our civic life, our republic. Said President Thomas Jefferson: “…were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Sedrick Altheimer was delivering the guardian of the republic when the Pierce County Sheriff confronted him in fear that he was a thief. Altheimer tried to explain more than once that he was just delivering newspapers when Troyer told a publically-employed 911 operator that Altheimer had threatened his life, brought down the entirety of Pierce County law enforcement onto the situation. And then, Troyer apparently changed his story.

For me, it was the height of irony that Troyer spent decades professionally speaking to the press that filled the pages that were once so much more commonly landing on the doorsteps of his neighbors. He was the spokesperson for the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, and other than maybe the Sheriff himself, was the most well-known sheriff employee in Pierce County. But let’s be honest, he was the most well known sheriff employee because he was in the news.

And, this is the irony. When it came time to talk about the night with Altheimer, Troyer would eschew the local newspaper and public radio station and go instead to Seattle-based opinion radio to get his side of the story told. He didn’t need to go to the mainstream news anymore, because opinion-based content is beating it to our eyeballs.

We know what grabs our attention. In fact, we know what makes us read and what advertisers are able to leverage to get us to watch their ads. We know because that is where the smart money is.

The same thing that has happened to newspaper delivery workers has also happened to the news itself. Almost everything we read or see online is built to grab our attention. Alphabet and Meta have built ad networks that have nearly totally destroyed newspapers and other locally based news content producers because they were able to weaponize our attentions towards emotionally engaging content.

So, when what we see is actually sober, well researched, locally produced news, we see it as some other kind of partisan content. We don’t agree with it, so it cannot possibly be true. It drives us back into our more firmly held beliefs.

This isn’t an exact explanation about how this sort of belief reinforcement works. There is actually a way to get people, even hardened partisans, to read and take in what they don’t necessarily believe, but it is hard. But, the bad way happens more often.

It was smarter for Troyer to go to the media platforms that were sharpened on this post-newspaper attention economy. He could easily tell his truth with little challenge, and his fans would be there for him in large numbers because they were conditioned to go to those platforms to see the “real truth” that was finally not being hidden from them anymore.

Emotion-manipulating media platforms sew distrust in the establishment media because sewing distrust is an effective tool to keep their own fans from hearing counter-messaging and from looking under their own hoods and their own logical paths. And, while Tucker Carlson is normally talking about the New York Times or the Washington Post, the same strategy also taints the Seattle Times and the Tacoma News Tribune because (surprise) people don’t get nuance. But it is sometimes Jason Rantz talking about the woke reporters at King 5.

The economy of the local news means there is less and less money coming in, which means fewer reporters, a lower quality and quantify product being pushed onto digital platforms, and fewer subscriptions being taken for a print product.

So, when what we see is a newspaper delivery worker, we don’t know who the person is and the top cop sees a middle-of-the-night porch pirate.

And, what we see is responsible journalism, we mistake it for partisan, attention content, but just from the other side of the battle we all seem to be engaged in, because what is what we are prone to see anymore.

The easy and actually best way to rename Thurston County

March 20, 2022 / Emmett O'Connell / 3 Comments

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:

Chinese police tax;
Anti-Chinese riots in the 1880s; and
1920s anti-immigration laws were spawned in the Pacific Northwest

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.

March 14, 2022 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.

Forgetting Thanksgiving Island

November 25, 2021 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

A week or so ago, Feliks Banel put out a challenge to find the origin of the name of Thanksgiving Island. Thanksgiving Island was a small piece of land that you can see on some old maps on the stretch of the Columbia River between the Gorge and where the Snake joins. The image of an “Island of Thanksgiving” stokes the imagination. But the actual history of the naming is pretty pedestrian.

I think I ended up winning the challenge by finding a 1968 Oregonian article that covered geographic features that would disappear after the inundation by the John Day Dam reservoir. According to the article, Thanksgiving Island was named after an event. A steamboat landed on the island on Thanksgiving. That is a pretty normal sounding explanation, especially when you cross-reference the steamboat era of the Columbia River with when Thanksgiving as a national holiday was first coming into focus.

Thanksgiving Island disappeared under thousands of cubic feet of water of the John Day reservoir in 1971. Because even when it did exist, it was an island in a river, its existence was always temporary. These kinds of islands are formed and destroyed by erosion and sedimentation caused by the river moving back and forth across its flood plain, cutting new channels.

Even without the John Day covering an entire landscape, that Thanksgiving Island would still exist today is an open question.

And this ethereal existence of Thanksgiving Island gives us a useful way to think about history, how we know anything in history and what we do with it.

Thanksgiving Island itself is interesting not because it tells us anything about ourselves, but because it was the only Thanksgiving Island recorded, and it is late November and people think about these kinds of things now. But there is a lot more to know about that particular stretch of the Columbia that we have forgotten.

During my internet searching to solve Feliks’ mystery challenge, I came across this personal history by Sam H. Gill, the “oldest living steamboat engineer” on the Columbia River. In his history, he recounts the details of a massacre at Thanksgiving Island that I’d already heard about and wrote up here.

During the Bannock and Paiute War in 1878, the U.S. Army outfitted a steamboat with a Gatling gun and set it to patrol the Columbia. Lt. Mellville C. Wilkinson commanded the gunboat Northwest as he and his crew patrolled the Columbia River. Wilkinson’s mission was to prevent a tribe from the Oregon side from crossing to Washington. He would commit one of the countless under-recorded massacres of Indians by American soldiers.

According to Gill, the Thanksgiving Island Massacre was quick and cruel:

In the afternoon when we had reached Thanksgiving Island, a band of Indians with a large number of horses were discovered on the north bank, evidently coming west. At this locality, there are a series of three high hills presenting rounded fronts and sloping down to the narrow flat area between the base of the hills and the river. The hill separated by deep draws or canyons which is the general formation of the Washington shore in this section.

On first sight of the Indians, they were just coming up out of the draws and crossing the front of the next intervening hill. They were about two miles upstream from us and perhaps 500 feet up the hillside. They were evidently surprised at seeing the boat and began hastening to the next draw, for a hiding place.

When the Indians didn’t respond to the whistle of the steamboat to stop running, “the Gatling gun was prepared and brought into action… The capacity of the gun is 400 shots a minute, and we fired at them for several minutes.”

Michael McKenzie writing in the Columbia magazine in 2008 recounts that even at that time, what Lt. Wilkinson commanded his troops to do was not universally supported:

Steaming down from Wallula, he fired his artillery and Gatling gun without the slightest provocation into a group of peaceful natives camped there, killing at least two men and one woman, wounding others, and laying waste to the entire camp. Even some of the settlers of the period reacted to his action with distaste, (A.D.) Pambrun calling it a “massacre” and stating flatly that “there was no excuse” for what Wilkinson had done. The following month the Walla Walla Union heaped scorn on the lieutenant’s action…

Massacre survivor Jim Soh-yowit in 1917 told his story to historian L.V. McWhorter

…a band of Indians crossed the Columbia at Oom-i-tal-lum and pitched camp on the Washington shore. There were women and children in this camp, all peaceable, the men not having many arms. A steamboat came down the river, and without any warning opened fire on us with what seemed a machine gun. A man named Wah-la-lowie, belonging at La-qwe on the Columbia, was shot in the belly and killed. He was a middle-aged man. A middle aged women named Wah-lul-mi from Ti-che-chim, on the Columbia, was shot in the forehead, and fell dead. The Indians scattered and hid.

I had a single breech-loading rifle which I grabbed and ran among the rocks and lay so they could not see me. A few horses were killed. They fired at where I lay hid but did not reach me. Finally the boat went away without landing. Indians lost a lot of things, for they did not try to gather up their belongings.

Shaw-ou-way-coot-shy-ah to McWhorter:

The white people from The Dalles, they all organized and got guns and got a steamboat and went up to the village and they killed all the old people, [who] don’t do nothing, all the old ladies and all the old men and before these Indians got back to their home they were all dead so part of them went up to the Umatilla River and then part of them went up the Columbia River and crossed the Columbia River …and they came there to a white man and his wife and some of the Indians says, “Here the white people have killed our fathers and mothers and they were not doing any harm, now I am going to kill this white man to make even.”

The murder Shaw-ou-way-coot-shy-ah talked about is the much better documented revenge killing a few days later of two white people.

We know why Wilkinson’s Thanksgiving Island Massacre is forgotten and the murder of Blanche Bunting Perkins and Lorenzo Perkins is remembered. It is the same reason we keep up the statue of John R. Rogers and say nice things about Senator Slade Gorton after he dies.

The history we know is skewed. We don’t write down nearly enough, and we seek to remember the things that keep us near our already existing legends. And, pulling the ends of history, so we can better understand episodes as clearly misremembered as the Whitman murders, is hard.

Every historian should feel chastened by the last election in Virginia. The common trope is that one of the reasons Democrats did not do well was because voters were afraid of how history will be taught in schools. Targeting the 1619 Project puts the continued understanding of history in the bulls-eye. There is a real force behind not continuing to research the years our civilization has existed, because the information we surface is contrary to the accepted narrative.

We absolutely forgot why Thanksgiving Island was named what it was. We also forgot the Thanksgiving Island Massacre. But we didn’t forget the Perkinses. And knowing what we know and why we know it helps us see ourselves and the harm we caused. And if we find echos of that harm in our lives and our communities, we can try to make it better.

A good apology includes two things: an explanation of what you did wrong and what you will do to fix it.

And like the geomorphology nature of Thanksgiving Island and the landscape capture of the John Day dam reservoir, our understanding of what happened in the past has ebbed and intensified.

To be honest, the name Thanksgiving Island is trivia. It was a fun adventure, it gave me a chance to chat with a cool historian, but it doesn’t help us move forward.

Re-remembering the Massacre of Thanksgiving Island is much more instructive. It gives us a peak into the brutality of the Bannock and Paiute War and how our country came to dominate our region. Knowing what we did is the first part of a good apology. Knowing what harm we created.

The second part of a good apology is much harder.

How proposed legislative and congressional redistricting maps impact Olympia and Thurston County

September 30, 2021 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Starting last week, redistricting commissioners in Washington State have been releasing proposed maps for legislative and congressional districts.

Democratic appointees April Sims and Brady Piñero Walkinshaw and Republican appointees Paul Graves and Jo Fain have taken different approaches to moving borders in Thurston County and around Olympia. In this post I’ll take a look at the legislative and congressional proposals, taking a zoomed in look at what they could mean for our community

The need for all of these legislative maps is to shrink the 22nd District, it is about 7,000 people too large by its current boarders. Alternatively, the districts that the 22nd traditionally borders (the 35th and 20th) are both underpopulated by a few thousand. Each of the proposed maps approaches this task in different ways.

The Graves and Walkinshaw maps approach by taking similar routes. First Graves:

Then Walkinshaw:

Both of these move various rural districts into different combinations of southern Thurston County and let the 35th district in Mason County take up more of mid-suburban Thurston County and Cooper Point. The 22nd District is going to become more compact, and its interesting that most of the mapmakers are taking off the west side and leaving urban Lacey largely inside the district.

In addition to Lacey/Olympia balance, taking the Cooper Point peninsula out of the 22nd would leave Evergreen State College out of the 22nd for the first time in history.

This includes the College precinct, which is the most dependably Democratic district in the county. While one precinct hardly a legislative district makes, it is interesting to see it on the other side of the line.

Another note about Walkinshaw’s legislative map. In it, the 35th takes up so much of Thurston County, I would be super curious what the population split between Mason and Thurston County is. The 35th has traditionally been a Mason County district, but in this map, I think Thurston County might make up the majority of the population.

Sims’ map for the 22nd is the most outlandish, in my opinion:

Take a closer look:

The map takes away so much of the Westside that is literally splits the City of Olympia in two! There isn’t a lot I can really say about this map other than to say that I don’t think that’s a great idea.

Compared to that, Fain’s map isn’t very fun at all. Of all four, it maintains the current 22nd district the most:

Nothing much to see here.

Speaking of nothing much to see here, and moving on to the Congressional District maps, here is Sims’ proposal for the 10th in Thurston County:

This is a fairly status quo map, which pretty much keeps the congressional district lines in Thurston County the same while carving Mason County out of the 10th, making it a strictly Thurston/Pierce county district. Like the 22nd, the 10th is also slightly overpopulated and needs to shrink to maintain proportionality.

Walkinshaw’s map for the 10th is downright fascinating:

I mean, that’s simple.

It is the same as Sims’ in that the 10th becomes a Pierce/Thurston district, but it takes in *all* of Thurston County. I have to admit, I like how simplistic that becomes.

Graves’ proposal for Thurston County is by far the most radical:

It would remove the 10th congressional district from Thurston County altogether and move it into Pierce and King counties. Then, Thurston County would be carved up between three more competitive districts. Oddly, while this 6th district would stretch from Olympia out and around the Olympic Peninsula, including the entire Kitsap Peninsula, it would still be a fairly safe Democratic district. This surprises me, but that’s according to commissioner Graves.

Fain’s congressional map is a split between Sims’ and Graves’ in how it treats Thurston County.

The 10th still makes it all the way south to Olympia, but the 6th and the 8th still split up the rest of the county.

Most fascinating about the Republican maps is how they treat the SE portion of Lacey. Both map separate Lacey proper with at least a portion of the Lacey UGA from the city.

Graves:

Fain:

What I can say about this technique is that it is a small example in our county for Republican mapmakers to stretch rural districts as far into suburban precincts, without breaking up Lacey.