Category: Uncategorized

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

1. Huynh and Payne (obviously) have the upper hand going into the general election. From the top line results, with both Huynh and Payne both breaking 50 percent, this seems obvious. But, when you look deeper at the map, you can really see how both Robbi Kesler and Corey Gauny are boxed in. From an…

A candidate for Olympia City Council recently released a list of ideas to prevent out-of-towners and corporations from buying homes in Olympia. The end would be to make housing was more affordable by making it harder for people who don’t live here to bid up houses. This is an interesting line of thinking, but first…

 Once the actual census data is publically released in August, we’re all going to hear officially that Lacey has more residents that Olympia.  Lacey has been nipping on our heals for decades, and has significantly closed the gap in the last 10 years. In 2010, Lacey was within 5,000 of Olympia. This has narrowed to…

  Just some social media that I hung onto. But it tells a consistent tale. Not only government can be trusted, big business can’t be either. During the peak of the restaurant-centered protest wave during our COVID-19 winter, I started noticing a consistent talking point among speakers at protests and on social media posts. It…

One thing about Dan Leahy’s analysis of the multifamily housing tax exemption that bothers me almost two years later is that he stopped at the eight-year life span of the tax exemption.  He illustrated that over the life of the exemption, the tax-paying owners (for example) of the 123 4th would not pay the $2.2…