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The Indian Shaker Church and the Lewis Family totem pole

August 19, 2019 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Surprisingly terrible people.

And, by way of making this re-telling of these incongruent stories even weirder, they both originally were written about in the same edition of the Daily Olympian on July 5, 1970.

The Indian Shaker Church on Mud Bay needed to be rebuilt.

It had burned down in the winter before. And, in the summer of 1969, Indian Shaker adherents had noticed the roof had begun to cave in because of snow anyway.

The original church structure had been only been built in 1910, the same year the Indian Shaker church was formalized.

So, the community of this particular fairly new faith got together to rebuild. They also reached out to seek help. A Seattle architect sent down plans and Simpson Timber company gave and delivered all the wood they needed.

On July 4, 1970, Indian Shaker faithful from all across the region came to celebrate the reopening of the church. Because this church wasn’t just an Indian Shaker Church, but the Indian Shaker Church. The mother church.

I’m not a tribal member nor a person of this particular faith, so I won’t go into the history of the Indian Shaker religion. But, only to say that the religion was only founded in the late 1880s and for years was a robust expression of tribal culture. One white people even feared.

So, let’s leave that there for a second and move to a week earlier, on Cooper Point, when something else entirely happened.

While Indians from all over the region were planning their visit to their newly rebuilt mother church, a white family on the other side of the bay was dressing up as Indians and unveiling a brand new totem pole they’d just bought.

And, in only the way that white people being totally unaware of the way they look or how they would be judged almost 50 years later, the Lewis family and their friends not only dressed up as Indians and played recorded “musical Indian chants, alternatively soft and loud…” but they called themselves by terribly derogatory Indian names that I won’t recount here.

I should let you read the story yourself, and you really should, but the Lewis family should be judged. And judged harshly. The way they acted is not respectful. If their plan was to honor tribes and tribal history, treating it like a dress-up party is especially tasteless. I don’t need to tell you that, though.

Where did they even get the idea to buy a totem pole?

Three years before the party and unveiling (I’m not going to use the term they use, but read the story) one of Dick Lewis’ friends needed help moving his own totem pole. Being a nice friend, Dick came through with a truck and was smitten.

“Mrs. Lewis reported that ‘totem fever infested the Lewis tribe” and they determined to have one for themselves.”

Dedicated as “unfolding a bit of Pacific Coast history, reminding all of us our precious heritage and need to preserve our God-given rights and freedoms,” it provides “a tangible link between past and present” to the Lewises and the many people who are received as guests in their hospitable home.

This talk of freedom and God-given rights is a double serving of irony if you head back across the water to Mud Bay.

I mean, why were Indian Shaker adherents gathering on July 4?

Jeremiah George (Squaxin) wrote a bit in 2010:

When we practiced our culture in secrecy
(for our European conquerors were quick to label
us as hostile savages, disposing of us as such) tribes
came from miles and miles away to a potlatch we
called the 4th of July Celebration at Squaxin Island.
That celebration must have had an impact, because
an elder from Canada in his 70’s-80’s recalled when
he was young an “old” elder claimed his favorite
place was Squaxin Island. Culture got us through
hard times and the assimilation that keeps us distant from culture and the apocalyptic measures of
genocide that will continually go unaccounted for.

They had to celebrate on the fourth of July because they didn’t have the freedom to celebrate otherwise. In the early years of the Indian Shaker church, its members were arrested.

At the same time, the Lewis family was appropriating and pounding their chests about heritage and freedom, tribal members were being arrested and prosecuted all over western Washington for fishing. A right not reserved by God, but by treaty.

It would take only a little over three weeks for the fall chinook season to start and for two Puyallup tribal members, Bob Satiucum and Charles Cantrell, to be arrested for fishing. Just as illegal as it had been to be an Indian Shaker, it was still illegal to be an Indian fisherman in 1970. The Lewis family had the freedom to buy a totem pole and dress up like Indians, but actual Indians didn’t have the freedom to be Indians.

Ghettos and lost quadplexes at Nut Tree Loop: Our conversations 40 years ago around multifamily housing and how we got here

August 4, 2019 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

If you go up Eastside Street from downtown, it will eventually curve to the east and become 22nd Avenue. As 22nd Avenue approaches Boulevard, there is a small neighborhood on the left-hand side of the road called Nut Tree Loop.

This area around 22nd, Cain Road and Boulevard was the neighborhood I grew up in. I was born in 1976, so in my mind’s eye, I kind of remember Nut Tree Loop being built in the late 70s. And, I’ve always thought about it as a much nicer neighborhood surrounded by blocks of split-level ranch homes and older craftsmen. I think if you take a walk through Nut Tree now, that impression by Kid Emmett still holds true. Two homes recently sold in there for over $700,000 (in 2017) and $800,000 (last May).

So then, I was startled to find out when Dan Beuhler first envisioned Nut Tree Loop in 1976, he sketched out a neighborhood of 21 fourplexes “across one section of landscaped grounds.” Beuhler had already built a smaller development of apartments around the corner from Nut Tree. At the time called Eidleweiss, they are currently known at the Chateau Townhomes.

Where 40 or so nicer single-family homes now sit, 84 multi-family units would have been built, if Beuhler got his way. But instead, the Nut Tree fourplexes kicked off several years of debate in Olympia around multi-family housing, the results of which are still felt today.

And the nature of those conversations tells us a lot about why Olympia shut down the development of smaller multi-family housing since the 1980s.

I’ve written about this period of history in Olympia before. First I tracked the sharp decline in small multifamily housing in Olympia since an explosion in the mid-70s. Second, I took a look at zoning maps since the 1960s to the current day and found a declining area that allowed anything but single-family homes. Lastly, I charted the sprawl of single-family homes that resulted since Olympia downzoned.

In this look, I want to explore how we were talking about the change in the city that at one point allowed duplexes and small apartments and then outlawed them.

Beuhler’s proposal set off a series of contentious public meetings where the city planning commission (on which Beuhler inexplicably sat) decided the fate of the Nut Tree quadplexes. Over 500 individual Olympian’s testified to the city planning commission and the city commission itself (Olympia was not yet governed by a city council).

Times were tense when the city commission finally took up the Nut Tree fourplexes. When one city commissioner pointed out that in the late 70s incomes were not increasing at the same rate as the price of a single-family home and therefore it made sense to allow for denser, more affordable options in new construction, an audience member shouted: “Why don’t you move to New York?”

New York in the 1970s not necessarily being an example of a humming urban community. This fear of the urban, the denser and poorer community coming into newer single-family neighborhoods underlined the public debate around Nut Tree. While most of the top-line conversation was simply about the power of zoning and the expectations of homeowners that their newer neighbors would have the same zoning, when you dug down, you go the fear of the urban.

Facing that level of fire over one development was not something the city commission had experienced before, and they quickly put the Nut Tree quadplexes on the shelf.

After Nut Tree Loop, the city took a step back and began to examine multifamily housing across the city. The Citizen’s Multi-Family Housing Taskforce began meeting in January 1978 and worked throughout the spring and summer to deliver a zoning package to the city council.

But, like Nut Tree along 22nd, this proposal met with fierce opposition across the city.

As the city considered a plan that would expand multifamily housing throughout the city (even further than the citizen’s taskforce had intended), an unsigned editorial in the Olympian captured the mood of those opposed to denser housing: It isn’t our job to look after anyone but families and experts that disagree with us are bad.

Those who participated in seven months of hearings by the task force evidently want nothing of the philosophy that holds a community responsible for providing the kinds mixed housing needed by today’s mixed lifestyles — the singles, the elderly and the divorced for instance.

The planners are coming at the problem as theoreticians, as we see it, and they’re not handling the grassroots thinking very well at all… The latest effort to insert recommendations into a citizens report had too much of the smell of “we know what’s best for you” thinking about it.

The commission approved plans that would, on the one hand, allow multi-family housing, but, on the other, only after it was approved on a case-by-case basis. Even then, the economic class of the folks sitting on the Task Force was brought up.

From the city commission minutes in August 1978:

Paul Sparks said his concern is that we would be isolating the lower income families to certain areas away from services and from the city center. The people who are most affected by (the multi-family plan) were not involved on the Task Force.

Two unidentified women then entered into a heated discussion about the makeup of the Task Force, one asking how come low income people had not been considered and involved; the other replying the Planning Commission has asked for volunteers to serve on the Task Force and all this was in the papers and the radio.

The city commission passed a version of the Task Force recommendations, but they failed to turn on the spigot of multi-family housing.

By 1980, the planning commission had again passed a package that would expand multi-family housing across the city. The idea would have been in the early 80s to allow multifamily housing in all areas of Olympia, essentially banning single-family zoning.

And, again the residents of single-family neighborhoods stood up.

Multi-family housing in otherwise single-family neighborhoods will foster “the diverse kind of community that makes this community interesting and makes it rich,” (Raven Lidman) said.

She said when it comes to the good points of living in single-family neighborhoods, “tenants have those same desires.”

But Virginia Baxter, speaking after Lidman, said “The existing inviting neighborhoods will be destroyed, and there will be an exodus of homeowners” if multi-family housing comes to neighborhoods.

…

But Susan Hirst, protesting the proposal, said that multi-family renters will not gain much by being located inside single-family neighborhoods.

They will still be living in apartments, she said, and “you will simply be placing them into a neighborhood where other people have” the style of life the renters want.

But you have to look no further than Bill Grout to find the dark corner of the urbanism discussion in 1980 Olympia. In one article on the 1980 multi-family plan:

“You have increased police activity, increased crime, increased vandalism,” with multi-family housing, said Bill Grout.

Later that summer, as the city commission itself considered the plan, Grout crossed swords with a county leader in a discussion that might as well come out of our current conversation about Missing Middle housing:

Bill Grout, who said he represents Olympia’s homeowners, labeled the proposal one which “would turn Olympia into a ghetto.”

…

(County Commissioner George Barner) said the measure would build up the dwindling rental housing market and would enable low income and young persons to afford a place to live.

He said such housing should be encouraged in the urban areas because most conveniences are located there. He added it would also prevent urban housing sprawl.

Grout contradicted Barner, saying out that multi-family housing would drive down property values in single-family residential areas because renters generally do not take care of their property.

And, so the city turned the proposal down. Not actually turned it down, but rather just put it back on the shelf. A year later the city would approve a townhome ordinance that would allow a certain kind of multifamily housing throughout the city, though one that seemingly favored homeowners.

But, the time of multi-family housing tracking with population increase was over. Olympia would go through several incremental downzones to tighten up single-family zoning areas through the 80s and 90s

What does a medical exemption from vaccination mean in the Olympia School District?

March 10, 2019 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Measles can be prevented.

Medical exemptions for vaccinations in the Olympia School District and Washington State might not be what they appear to be.

On their face, these exemptions allow children who cannot be vaccinated (because of weakened immune systems, for example) to waive vaccination requirements and attend school. But, from what I’ve been able to gather from a public document request from the Olympia School District, the differences between personal-belief and medical exemptions is murky.

So murky that (please read to the bottom), I wonder if doctors or any medical professionals are necessary for the medical exemption process.

Let’s work backward first to see how I got here:

About a month ago, while the measles outbreak in Clark County was still new news, I updated what the vaccination rate for schools in Olympia was like. This was similar to other times I’d done this update, there are some scary high exemption rates in Olympia schools. But this time I noticed a new wrinkle: the top schools for personal-belief vaccine exemptions were also the top schools for medical exemptions.

Top Medical (bold if on both):

1. Olympia Community School (12.9 percent)
2. ORLA Montessori (8.5 percent)
3. Olympia Regional Learning Academy (6.3 percent)
4. Lincoln Elementary (4.6 percent)
5. Pioneer Elementary (2.7 percent)

Top Personal (bold if on both):

1. Lincoln Elementary (19.4 percent)
2. Avanti High School (17.6 percent)
3. Olympia Community School (16.1 percent)
4. Olympia Regional Learning Academy (15.8 percent)
5. ORLA Montessori (15 percent)

To me, this made little sense. If you were a parent of a child who had a medical reason to avoid immunizations, then I think you’d want to then use the herd immunity at your child’s school to help prevent infections. What I could see was that there was a correlation between parents who would seek a personal exemption from vaccines, ones that would seek a medical one, and the school they chose.

That made me assume that parents who are seeking medical exemptions are also not necessarily afraid to send their children into environments where a scarily low percentage of the children are vaccinated. This got me curious about the nature of medical exemptions in the Olympia School district overall.

So, I made a public records request for all medical exemption forms that represent active students in the Olympia School District. These are the documents I received and this is the spreadsheet I put together summarizing what I found (folder with both files here). The district blacked out student names and addresses before they gave me the documents, but they didn’t black out the names of doctors that signed medical exemptions.

Here is what I sussed out:

1. Naturopaths are slightly more likely to sign medical exemptions. While 25 percent of the medical exemptions I received from the school district, naturopaths only make up 20 percent of the provider types (family, pediatric and naturopath) that I assume would likely be presented with the form. Some forms were also signed by physician assistants and nurse practitioners.

2. Some doctors sign more than others. Like schools that seem to collect medical exemptions, some doctors seem to sign more than their share. This may be a consequence of who they see (people that are more willing to ask for a medical exemption), but I will probably never find that out. While a vast majority of the doctors who signed the forms only signed one, there were a few that signed several:

Jennifer Ash ND, 7
Lisa Barer MD, 6

Amy Belko MD, 4
Bridget Sipher MD, 4
Kevy Wijaya MD, 4
Richard Faiola NP, 4

3. What does a medical exemption even mean? Over 75 percent of the forms had both the “medical” box and “personal” exemption marked on the form. This seems to undercut the meaning of the medical exemption form altogether. What may seem like an inexplicable bunching of both medical and personal belief exemptions (why would an immune deficient child attend a school full of unnecessarily unvaccinated children?) isn’t. What it really could be is just a larger group of children whose parents declined vaccination for personal beliefs but got their doctor to sign a medical waiver.

Then there was this:

You might have already perused the documents the school district gave me, but if you haven’t, this is (as far as I can tell) a full-on medical exemption form with no details, exempt the student’s name and a parent’s signature. No medical professional’s name, no medical professional’s signature. This isn’t even a double-marked personal/medical exemption. This is a pure medical exemption that is on file at the Olympia School District, that purported to clear a student to have not been vaccinated for medical reasons, with no medical professional’s name on it.

If a parent can sign a medical exemption form and it be accepted by the school district, what is the point of even requiring them at all?

Where Olympia has lost population

March 7, 2019 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

When you think about population change in a growing region, you think of it as a constant. And, even though Olympia has been lagging behind Lacey in growth rate for the past few decades, Olympia is still on a gradual population climb.

But, that population growth has not been consistently spread across the city. In fact, there are numerous neighborhoods that have actually lost a significant amount population in recent years.

To explore this phenomenon, I built a map in a tool called Policy Map. The variable I used was the rate of change in the five years between 2013 and 2017, according to the American Community Survey. These are interesting years because it was a time when the incoming population of our area outpaced new housing. So, at least in theory, our available housing became more crowded, not less.

A small caveat about this data. It is based on survey results collected by the Census Bureau. Being survey results it is less accurate than actual decadal census data. That said, all of these neighborhoods have seen measured losses of over 13 percent, which would probably outstrip any margin of error.

The first neighborhood in Olympia that lost a significant amount of population (again, more than 13.46 percent) was this one up in far northeast Olympia.

This Lilly to Southbay Road neighborhood is the outlier in the type of neighborhood that has lost population though. The much more typical neighborhood (in dark brown below) is an older, inner residential neighborhood.

Here’s the map key:

I’ve written about these neighborhoods before and in my mind, these are the neighborhoods that beginning in the late 1970s started seeing the impacts of growth cascading out of downtown. They experienced an influx of what we now call “missing middle” housing, multiplexes and small apartment buildings. But, instead of welcoming the growth and naturally more dense neighborhoods, these neighborhoods downzoned and pushed additional growth towards the edges of town. This new growth, in turn, paved over farms and forests.

When Olympia downzoned and gentrified

What happened after we downzoned and the middle went missing in Olympia?

But, why now are these neighborhoods that up until a few months ago were protected habitat for single-family homes losing population? Obviously, the neighborhoods weren’t becoming denser. I’m having a hard time finding data on the change in household size in the same year, but it stands to reason that stable households would have children age out eventually. If the parents stayed put, then theoretically, the population would decline.

Your semi-regular update on what schools have low vaccination rates around Olympia

February 4, 2019 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

Usually, about when there is something in the news about an outbreak around here, I’ll go to the state Department of Health and find out what the vaccination rates are at our local schools (and here). This time around, there is a measles outbreak just about an hour south of us, so I thought it would be nice to narrow in specifically on exemptions (personal, religious or health) for the measles, mumps, rubella vaccination.

According to the most recent data, there are a handful of schools in the Olympia area with fairly high exemption rates for the MMR vaccine.

School	Percent exempt for measles, mumps, rubella	Percent with any personal and religious exemptions (not just MMR)	Percent with medical exemption (not just MMR)
OLY REGIONAL LEARNING ACADEMY	16.2%	22.1%	6.3%
ORLA MONTESSORI	15.5%	23.5%	8.5%
OLYMPIA COMMUNITY SCHOOL	12.9%	29.0%	12.9%
LINCOLN ELEMENTARY	12.7%	24.0%	4.6%
GRAVITY	12.5%	12.5%	0.0%
AVANTI HIGH SCHOOL	12.0%	19.0%	1.4%
Paramount Christian Academy	9.1%	9.1%	0.0%
TUMWATER WEST	9.1%	9.1%	0.0%
NOVA SCHOOL	8.6%	10.5%	1.0%
PIONEER ELEMENTARY	5.9%	10.6%	2.7%
BLACK LAKE ELEMENTARY	5.7%	7.7%	1.7%
REEVES MIDDLE SCHOOL	5.1%	13.6%	2.0%
MICHAEL T SIMMONS ELEMENTARY	5.0%	6.7%	1.4%
THURGOOD MARSHALL MIDDLE SCHOO	4.9%	8.2%	1.8%
BOSTON HARBOR ELEMENTARY	4.7%	8.3%	2.4%
ROOSEVELT ELEMENTARY	4.6%	7.2%	1.7%
GARFIELD ELEMENTARY	4.6%	9.9%	2.2%
EVERGREEN CHRISTIAN SCHOOL	4.4%	7.8%	0.0%
TUMWATER HIGH SCHOOL	4.1%	6.5%	0.8%
NEW MARKET HIGH SCHOOL	4.0%	4.0%	0.0%
EAST OLYMPIA ELEMENTARY	3.9%	5.5%	0.4%
MARGARET MCKENNY ELEMENTARY	3.9%	4.2%	0.0%
OLYMPIA HIGH SCHOOL	3.9%	9.6%	0.3%
JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL	3.9%	6.6%	0.9%
CENTENNIAL ELEMENTARY	3.7%	5.4%	1.1%
BLACK HILLS HIGH SCHOOL	3.7%	6.4%	1.5%
CAPITAL HIGH SCHOOL	3.7%	7.0%	0.6%
PETER G SCHMIDT ELEM	3.7%	4.5%	1.0%
GEORGE WASHINGTON BUSH MS	3.5%	6.7%	0.6%
LITTLEROCK ELEMENTARY	3.1%	4.5%	1.4%
SOUTH BAY ELEMENTARY	3.1%	4.1%	1.0%
TUMWATER MIDDLE SCHOOL	3.1%	5.0%	1.0%
TUMWATER HILL ELEMENTARY	3.1%	4.2%	0.5%
WASHINGTON MIDDLE SCHOOL	2.8%	6.3%	1.0%
LACEY ELEMENTARY	2.8%	3.6%	0.8%
OLYMPIA CHRISTIAN SCHOOL	2.6%	10.5%	0.0%
LYDIA HAWK ELEMENTARY	2.5%	3.1%	0.2%
MEADOWS ELEMENTARY	2.4%	2.8%	1.0%
SOUTH SOUND HIGH SCHOOL	2.4%	3.0%	0.0%
SECONDARY OPTIONS	2.4%	3.9%	0.8%
OLYMPIC VIEW ELEMENTARY	2.3%	2.5%	0.9%
NORTH THURSTON HS	2.3%	5.8%	1.4%
NORTHWEST CHRISTIAN HIGH SCHOOL	2.3%	2.3%	0.8%
CORNERSTONE CHRISTIAN SCHOOL	2.2%	2.2%	0.0%
JULIA BUTLER HANSEN ELEMENTARY	2.2%	2.2%	1.1%
MADISON ELEMENTARY	2.1%	5.4%	0.0%
GOSPEL OUTREACH	2.0%	2.0%	0.0%
HORIZONS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL	1.9%	2.6%	0.9%
L P BROWN ELEMENTARY	1.8%	2.4%	0.3%
COMMUNITY CHRISTIAN ACADEMY	1.8%	3.0%	0.0%
ST. MICHAEL SCHOOL	1.7%	3.5%	0.9%
KOMACHIN MIDDLE SCHOOL	1.7%	3.5%	0.9%
TIMBERLINE HIGH SCHOOL	1.7%	3.4%	0.4%
CHAMBERS PRAIRIE ELEMENTARY	1.7%	3.3%	0.7%
NISQUALLY MIDDLE SCHOOL	1.5%	2.7%	0.7%
WOODLAND ELEMENTARY	1.4%	2.2%	0.3%
RIVER RIDGE HIGH SCHOOL	1.4%	3.2%	0.5%
SALISH MIDDLE SCHOOL	1.3%	2.3%	0.7%
ASPIRE MIDDLE SCHOOL	1.2%	4.9%	0.0%
EVERGREEN FOREST ELEMENTARY	1.2%	2.8%	1.2%
HOLY FAMILY SCHOOL	1.2%	1.2%	1.2%
POPE JOHN PAUL II HIGH SCHOOL	1.1%	1.1%	0.0%
MCLANE ELEMENTARY	1.0%	2.3%	1.3%
CHINOOK MIDDLE SCHOOL	0.9%	4.0%	0.9%
MOUNTAIN VIEW ELEMENTARY	0.8%	2.0%	0.5%
PLEASANT GLADE ELEMENTARY	0.7%	1.7%	0.7%
SEVEN OAKS ELEMENTARY	0.7%	2.0%	0.2%
NEW MARKET SKILLS CENTER	0.3%	0.3%	0.0%
TOUCHSTONE SCHOOL	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
CAPITAL MONTESSORI SCHOOL	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%

Here is the most recent data from the state and the spreadsheet I used.

What leaves me scratching my head about this data is that when you parse out the medical and personal exemptions, they seem to follow the same general pattern. Schools with high personal/religious exemptions also have high medical exemption rates.

When I first started looking at this stuff, I assumed medical exemptions would be evenly dispersed across the area. It follows that since all of the schools that have high exemption rates are schools you either generally lottery into or opt into, that the personal/religious exemptions would gather there. In the same way that opting into certain schools is an expression of a family’s choice, so is opting out of vaccination. But the medical reasons for not being vaccinated, I don’t think, would be more general and would not necessarily be tied to a family’s school choices.

If you’re new to this issue or just need some background, here is some information you might find useful:

Here is an explanation on how those exemptions work.

You’ve heard about herd immunity, or how the vaccination rate in a group of people that protects people who can’t receive a vaccine. This is why a 16 percent exemption rate at ORLA or a 12 percent exemption rate at Lincoln are sort of scary.

According to the CDC, an immunization rate of 94 percent is necessary to prevent pertussis from persisting in a community. That is above the 88 percent that the exemption rate at Lincoln would indicate is that school’s immunization rate.

The Timberland Library Capital Facility Proposal was a reflection of our current reality

December 10, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 16 Comments

Timberland counties have changed a lot since the 1960s. Thurston County used to be about the same size as the other four counties. Now, all four combined are smaller than Thurston County.

So far, the dominant narrative about the now shelved Timberland Library capital facility proposal has been about the possible closures and consolidations of rural libraries. Hardly anywhere in the coverage is a good understanding of the balance of where Timberland’s revenues come from and how that money is spent. It has been just calmly accepted that closing any rural library is a sin, notwithstanding gaps in service in other parts of the five county district.

Here’s a link to the draft proposal. It generally calls for consolidation of rural libraries buildings and the roll out of different types of library models (like Open+) that could have expanded hours.

During my tenure (between 2010 and 2016) on the Timberland board, we had to twice explain to east Lewis County communities that despite them voting to annex into the district that we would not automatically open libraries in their cities. Toledo and Morton both annexed, and because of the nature of the district (TRL doesn’t build libraries inside cities) and the budget (pretty thin), there was no way we’d vote to open new buildings.

The capital facilities proposal would have helped the board take a look at the hard issues of where to spend money, but unfortunately, the board of trustees put it back on the shelf in favor of what will probably be across he board budget cuts.

The capital facilities plan itself wasn’t a step back from serving rural communities, but a recognition of how the demographics of the district have changed and how library services have changed. It was also an acknowledgment that for decades the district has served some rural areas at the detriment of others.

I saw this process fold out slow motion when we were discussing the future of library services in Amanda Park. We had the option to close or drastically scale back services there because of some facilities issues with the library building. Stepping back from Amanda Park would have allowed the district to provide some service to the North Coast (Taholah down to outside Ocean Shores), which has always been part of Timberland but has never been directly served. But at almost the last minute, Grays Harbor County came through with funding to save the Amanda Park library and services there, and dooming any expansion into the North Coast.

So, there’s that, the choosing of one rural community over the other. Additionally, there is also the seemingly forced ignorance of leaders and activists in rural communities of how the library is even funded.

Take this passage from Brian Mittge in the Centralia Chronicle:

Timberland’s professional library administrators in their Tumwater headquarters should spend a lot more time out in their rural communities. They had planned an elaborate set of listening sessions. Maybe instead of that, they should also spend some time in the Randle mill a half mile from their library. Or go in the woods with some of those namesake loggers whose revenue still pays for a big chunk of Timberland’s operations.

Timber funds pay for less than 10 percent of Timberland’s budget and have been a shrinking part of the revenue stream for years. They are also extremely volatile, meaning the library cannot count on them from year to year. Property taxes, on the other hand, are stable and are making up a larger and larger portion of the district budget.

I want to pause and make sure this point is heard, because this has been missing from the coverage of the library facility debate so far: Thurston County, where more than half of the people in the district live and who pay for more than half of the budget, only receives 41 percent of the expenditures from the district.

In fact, next year, Thurston County residents will spend $1.4 million outside of their own county on library services in Pacific, Grays Harbor and Lewis County.

From the Capital Facilities Proposal:

And, this isn’t just because Thurston County has the largest population, the most stable economy and valuable property. It also gets to the nature of the communities in Thurston County. It is simply just cheaper to provide library services in urban areas.

This is an interesting set of stats from the proposal:

–>

	Daily Cost per borrower	Cost per circ
Grays Harbor	$38.97	$9.72
Lewis	$31.72	$8.11
Mason	$35.10	$9.47
Pacific	$35.50	$9.08
*Thurston*	*$22.89*	*$5.92*

It costs almost half per borrower and per circulated item to provide library services in Thurston County than it does in Grays Harbor County. And it cost significantly less than in any other county. This is because on average the libraries are larger and more popular, meaning economies of scale can be created making it less expensive per head to deliver services. People also live closer together, meaning no matter where you live in Olympia, Tumwater and most of Lacey, the trip to the library isn’t too far.

I understand we’re part of big library district. I understand that services in rural areas are harder and more expensive to deliver. But, I also want folks advocating for their branches in incorporated areas of rural counties to recognize that if my county were not part of an inter-county rural library district, we would have $1.4 million more to spend on library services. Pointing out to us that the library district was founded to provide services in the rural areas does not change the fact that if we left, we could maintain more than four Hoquiam-sized libraries in Thurston County.

Timberland Regional Library has a hard choice to make in the next year if we wan to stay afloat. We can cut services across all libraries and make them less valuable across the board. We can close and consolidate library services. We can also raise taxes.

But before we make those decisions, everyone needs to take a clear look at how this whole thing is put together.

Reducing impact fees will be great, but we need to talk about how we built our city

December 8, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Next week the Olympia City Council will talk about an ordinance that will lower impact fees for affordable housing.

More specifically, the ordinance will lower impact fees for “housing with a monthly housing expense that is
no greater than 30 percent of 80 percent of the median family income.” The idea is that since developers make the most money building high-end housing for people that can afford it, this will create an incentive to build less expensive housing for those who can’t.

But in the short term, I think we should pull back and take a look at impact fees in general and what kind of housing this ordinance is likely to encourage.

First though, let’s say that impact fees are a one time fee for initial impacts that a new house will have on Olympia. Things like new roads, new parks, new schools are paid for out of these fees. But, long-term maintenance of these public assets come out of property taxes that end up being paid on the value of each home. So, while the initial burden of new homes can be blunted by impact fees, long term maintenance is everyone’s problem. And, that is when we get into choosing what kind of housing we choose to build.

Up until very recently, most of Olympia was locked into single family home only zoning. Now, more neighborhoods are open for what is called Missing Middle housing types, like duplexes, townhomes, etc. And, a lot of people are connecting this impact fee proposal to the Missing Middle proposal. Larry Dzieza’s post on Nextdoor about the cut in impact fees is even called “Missing Middle Tax/Fee Cut for Developers.”

What people aren’t talking about is that so-called Missing Middle development leads to higher valued properties, which leads to more taxable value for the city in the long run.

Here is how that works.

Generally, downtown Olympia is pretty valuable to the city and produces a lot of tax revenue (here and here). This is generally because the auto-centered suburban development style just isn’t as valuable.

Let’s get to another good example of how this is working in Olympia. Take this block of densely packed housing along Jefferson:

This isn’t likely anyone’s favorite place in Olympia, it sits on a stretch of Jefferson that has train tracks and is just a good example of what kind of housing we used to build downtown. At at just less than 10 percent of an acre it is valued at $2,661,538.46 per acre. When you look at the map, you can see it isn’t even out of the neighborhood in terms of value per acre.

Let’s go a few miles south on 37th Street, south of Olympia High School a block or so. This is a neighborhood of single family homes in a neighborhood with no sidewalks, and though it is walking distance to two schools and a couple of churches, isn’t really what anyone would consider walkable in general.

And, these four house, clocking in at just over an acre, are valued at 1,617,475.73 per acre.

And, looking at this map, you see very similar values per acre among the neighbors.

Another way to look at it is to think about what value is being lost to the city of Olympia by sea level rise. Downtown Olympia by 2095 (if we don’t do anything) will lost about 370 acres and about $600,491,269 in total value. The land in low lying Olympia is valued at $1,631,769.75 per acre, Compared to the value of the land outside the inundation zone at $494,018.11.

So, coming back to the finances of the city. In the short run, we want more walkable neighborhoods filled with affordable housing of various sizes and types. So, we want to cut impact fees to help this happen. Single family housing is more expensive to the consumer (even using the data provided by opponents of the Missing Middle). But, because high density housing uses the land more efficiently, it ends up providing more taxes to the city itself, blunting the need for impact fees anyway.

How crossover votes doomed Bud Blake (and more maps from the election weeks ago)

November 29, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Something I started noticing the last few months is how the geography of Independent and Democratic crossover voters seemed to follow a certain logic.

For example, if you took the precincts in Thurston County that voted for both Hilary Franz for lands commissioner and Gary Edwards for county commissioner, they seemed to generally fall into the geography that I’ve described as a general suburban belt between downtown Olympia and the rural south county.

Now for a second, I want to remind you how weird it is that there are places that voted for a guy who literally does not believe in land use regulation and also Hilary Franz.

In the same way that these neighborhoods combined their votes to support a liberal statewide candidate and an independent conservative candidate in 2016, a lot of the same places combined to support both conservative Independent Bud Blake and Democrat Maria Cantwell this year. But, they weren’t the same places. And because these crossover precincts shifted, Bud Blake wasn’t able to pull out a victory.

Just looking at the raw numbers, Bud Blake did worse. There were 21 precincts that voted for the Independent/Democratic combination in both years and 42 that only went for Edwards and Franz in 2016. Blake was only able to pick up 34 Maria Cantwell precincts to replace those Edwards/Franz districts he lost.

When you look at the geography, it gets clearer why Bud’s crossover precincts weren’t able to pull him over the finish line. They represent a shift in how voters arranged themselves on the map. In this map of crossover precincts orange is both 2016/18, red is only 2016 and blue is only 2018.

So, while it seems there is a lot of flipping (neighboring precincts going one way in 2016 and another in 2018) when you get down into the blue precincts that Bud Blake won alongside Maria Cantwell this fall, they have a slightly more rural flavor than Gary Edwards’ exclusive crossovers in 2016. While it could mean that Democratic voters were more enthusiastic this year, making places that had been Independent/Republican in 2016 Independent/Democratic this year, I don’t think that happened.

I think the action was more on the Democratic side of the commissioner race. And, while it seems close geographically, I think Bud’s Democratic opponent Tye Mesner moved the battle lines ever slow slightly further out towards the rural part of the county. While only being a few blocks here and there, by moving the crossover precincts that Bud Blake was able to win further away from the center of the county, he gained more votes in liberal precincts.

And yes, I know its been almost a month since election day and I’m usually much better about getting these maps out. I apologize.

In recent episodes of the Olympia Standard and OlyTalks, I talk about a few of these maps. Both these episodes are worth a listen if you want to hear me break these down. Or, if you have a question, just drop me a line.

Thurston County Commissioner
Thurston County Prosecutor
Thurston County PUD
Intercity Transit Prop 1

We used to tear down houses to build more houses. Until we didn’t

November 3, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

The most telling passage for me in this incredibly bad attempted takedown of sensible housing proposals in Olympia was this:

If you live in one of the older, near-town Olympia neighborhoods, big changes are looming for your neighborhood.

The way Jay Elder presents this is if to imply that this threat to older homes near the center of a city is new. That developers are just now getting around to licking their chops on older homes, after having developed all the old farms and ranches outside town.

But in fact this is the opposite of what has always happened in Olympia. It has only been in the last few decades that “older, near town Olympia neighborhoods” have been protected from development pressures. I’ve written about the history of downzoning in Olympia. This is the process of taking what used to be areas zoned for higher density and putting it into a lower density. These processes in the late 70s through the 90s specifically protected near-town Olympia neighborhoods.

What happened after these downzones was that new housing was placed in areas that didn’t already have housing, such as old farms and ranches and forests. We protected older neighborhoods, we sprawled.

But, it hasn’t always been this way. It used to be in Olympia that as our city grew, we traded lower density, single family blocks for higher density blocks. This process has been going on for so long that some of these higher density blocks are now considered historic themselves.

The Weidner Auto Court on the north end of downtown is a great example of this process. The then hotel was built in 1929 on the site of a handful of single family homes. You can see these homes in an overlay of the 1924 Sanborn map:

One of the houses that we lost to what is now an apartment building belonged to Louis Ouellette. I can’t find a picture of that particular house, but the man himself seemed pretty impressive. He was the surveyor general for the county and he founded the Puget Sound and Chehalis Railway. Not no one but also not someone whose house was saved when it was time to change.

I cant’t even find a photo of the Ouellette house online anywhere. When people think of old tragedies, houses and places we’ve lost (like the myth of I-5 destroying downtown Tumwater), I don’t hear people pining for the Oullette house. And now we look at the the auto court building itself as something historic that needs to be preserved.

My favorite example is the Columbia Manor Apartments one block over. In this overlay of that block you see a much larger home on the site of the 1939 apartments:

This was the Gowley house, which at at moment in history, was a historic home. It was an unofficial governor’s mansion, Gowley himself was an important statewide leader, his wife was a “Mercer girl” and he died oversees where he was serving as the consul general to Japan.

It was also an impressive looking house. From the Washington State Historical Society:

Any of those things would have qualified it to be saved today. But, in 1939 the house was gone (no one really knows the circumstances of its razing) and now we have 10 apartments for 10 families when once we had one house for one (wealthy) family.

When we freeze neighborhoods in time, when we throw around words like “established” to prevent opportunities for more housing for more families, we don’t allow our city to move forward. It is also deliberate ignorance of how our city has always developed. Nearby, lower density neighborhoods used to always get more dense.

We already know that “tear-downs” are happening in Olympia and Thurston County. But instead of being replaced by higher density developments in the past, we’re replacing older, more affordable single family homes with newer, more expensive, single family homes:

The single largest category of tear-downs in this analysis (which also includes Lacey and Tumwater) were single family homes replaced by newer single family homes. Older homes are going to get rebuilt by someone, someday. We might as well follow the traditional way of allowing older, closer in neighborhoods to become more dense.

Is the Independent era in Thurston County (and Washington) over?

October 15, 2018 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Buried deep inside the results of the recent Crosscut/Elway poll was a surprising result, something that hasn’t happened in over four years, and not with any consistency since the Bush administration.

For the first time since January 2014, more respondents in a state wide poll said that they were Democrats and not Independents. In the last 12 of 15 polls taken since the beginning of 2008 that I’ve been able to track down, self identified Independents have been the plurality in Washington State.

Here is the data I’m working with.

The results in the Crosscut/Elway poll are not unexpected. Since 2015, the strength of Independent identification has been slackening. This narrow plurality of Democrats (37 percent to 35 percent Independents) falls into an ongoing trend.

On the surface, it seems like the strong hand of national politics is having a lot of influence in Washington State. While we saw a “normal” order of political identification in Washington during the Bush years, Independents started cropping up after President Obama was elected. And then, given the choice of another unpopular Republican president, Washington voters have begun to flock back to the Democratic label. It seems like the Democratic label in Washington is strongest when in resistance against an unpopular Republican administration. But, that support relaxes when a Democrat is in office.

I was able to track down some partisan identification data from the late 1990s, and it seems like you can see this trend is now repeating itself between the Clinton and Bush years. In 1996, 35 percent said they were Independents in Washington, but after Bush was elected Democrats were the plurality consistently through 2008.

So, bringing it home to Thurston County, what does this mean for our all Independent county commission? At the very least, not anything good. We’ve already seen that in the primary election, Independent Bud Blake has a much harder task to gather votes this time around. It seems clear to me that in our local elections, using the Independent label has allowed candidates like Blake (and Gary Edwards and John Hutchings two years ago) to obscure where they sit on the ideological spectrum.

How else can you explain Edwards, who literally does not believe in land use regulation, winning alongside Hillary Franz, a Democratic candidate for lands commissioner. There is literally no policy overlap between the two candidates, yet enough people made a contradictory choice of both Franz and Edwards to push him over the top.

It will be interesting to see with the power of the Independent label waning, what will happen with Bud Blake.

Olympia Time