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After “turn in your ballot on the last day” rhetoric, late ballots more than tripled and trended Republican

December 16, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

Vote on the last day advice from disinformation sources like Dr. Douglas Frank spread in Washington’s Third Congressional District last year.

When Joe Kent lost in an extremely close race last year, it followed months of advice from the candidate and others to Republican voters: submit your ballot at the last minute. This advice drew from the candidate’s experience in the August 2022 Primary, where Kent passed his opponent in the days after the first count, indicating that late voters propelled him over the top.

However, when Kent lost in the general, many people scrutinized the impact of the “vote late” advice.

Conservatives in the Southwest Washington district quickly reacted, with some asserting that the strategy of late voting did not help. In fact, the candidate himself reversed course just weeks after the election, explaining precisely why waiting to vote is a bad idea.

Essentially, life can get in the way. If you want to do something, do it early. Don’t wait and increase the chances that something else will stop you.

It’s also worth noting that the conspiracy theory underlying the “vote late” advice is baseless.

But, what I wanted to find out is whether the rhetoric had an impact on voter behavior. So, I analyzed available data on rejections and precinct results from the Secretary of State’s office for 2020 and 2022 in the WA3 and compared them side-by-side.

Two notable findings emerged:

Firstly, the number of late ballots more than tripled, despite a decline of 100,000 voters in the contest. In the 2020 election, with over 417,000 people casting ballots in the WA3, only 252 submitted ballots late. In 2022, despite a lower turnout of around 319,000 voters, 866 ballots were submitted late.

Here is the data file I worked from.

Second, late ballots shifted Republican between 2020 and 2022.

In 2020, voters in Democratic precincts were more likely to return ballots late.

In 2022, the trend line was much flatter.

An increase in late ballots from Republican precincts drove the overall increase in late ballots.

The bottom line is, though, the difference between the two candidates was more than 2,000 votes. While this is astronomically close, it is more than twice the difference in late votes that were not counted. That said, we obviously don’t have a count of possible Republican voters that didn’t even turn in a ballot because they realized they waited too long.

How to grow our local civic cultures and increase voter turnout: pay for it

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

Prologue: A bad year and two counties

This fall, Washington State saw the worst voter turnout ever. This could be surprising for advocates of Washington’s unique and open system of voting. In Washington, there is a ballot mailed to every registered voter, free-at-point-of-service ballot return, numerous free ballot drop boxes, same day voter registration, and many other progressive improvements to our voting system. Yet, our voter turnout (especially in odd-year, local-only elections) has been trending down.

Yet also, those improvements in our voting system have not been happening in a vacuum. Other forces have been forcing voter turnout down, and in fact, voter turnout would be falling faster and much lower if not for mail-in ballots and same day voter registration.

Many mark the decline of newspapers starting in 2005. This is about a half-decade before Washington’s vote-by-mail system was solidified statewide, and it illustrates the decline in our civic culture, while we were also

My personal thesis on the act of voting is that it is about information, not access. While access to the ballot may be constrained in some places, it isn’t here (generally). What we are lacking, are lacking in larger amounts each year, is access to information on what is on the ballot. With each economic contraction in the last few decades, newspapers have continued to suffer. Historically, newspapers provide the most information for voters on what is on their local ballots. Even with local television and radio, they lack the market penetration and depth of reporting that is needed to cover Federal Way politics the same way Seattle City Council or statewide issues are covered.

We can see the impact what remains of our media has on local voter turnout. Take the comparison between Thurston and Whatcom counties. Both counties are mid-sized in population for Washington counties and are on the I-5 corridor along Puget Sound in the suburban crescent of Seattle. Voter turnout in Thurston was below 40 percent. This wasn’t the lowest in recent history, but was in the neighborhood. Whatcom County was a statewide leader in turnout, breaking 50 percent, which was the highest of any county that wasn’t significantly smaller.

Both counties also had similar political landscapes this year. Both had public safety taxes on the ballot, both had important county-wide races.

What separates Thurston from Whatcom was the level of media coverage available in either community. Olympia has one daily newspaper, and no other significant locally-based news producers.

Whatcom County has two local newspapers (the Bellingham Herald and the Cascadia Daily News). Even though both the Olympian and Herald are owned by the same hedge fund, it seems that the Herald in slightly smaller Whatcom County has more reporters than the Olympian (five compared to three).

Whatcom County also has a local radio newsroom (KGMI). This is something Thurston County hasn’t had since KGY shut down their newsroom decades ago.

This is a mostly back of the napkin analysis. Surely the existence of a local city club in Whatcom (no like organization exists in Thurston) and the particulars of campaign spending had an impact. But, from my point of view, the beefier media available in Whatcom likely had a significant difference in voter turnout.

So what remains in front of us, is how to fund a repair in local media.

Why Washington needs a publicly funded Civic Information Network to address the local journalism crisis

Last year, the Washington State League of Women Voters correctly identified the most pressing issue facing our civic culture in Washington State. In their report “The Decline of Local News and Its Impact on Democracy,” the League authors pointed to the sharp decline in the sustainability of local news organizations across Washington. Washington State communities are indeed in a journalism crisis, with rural communities being hit especially hard.

The analysis of the league falls short, though, when it came to describing what kind of public policy solutions are going to allow Washington communities to lead themselves out of the local news crisis. While it describes the opinion of those currently leading legacy news organizations that public funding is not necessary, it does not delve deeply into public funding examples currently being explored in other states.

This white paper will expand on the interview of Robert McChesney in the LWV report and an effort in New Jersey for publicly funded local journalism. I will also point out that Washington not only already publicly funds journalism, I will also propose that we copy at least one example of state legislature permitted funding. By using state funding models already used in Washington State, we can also create a system that maximizes local decision-making and community buy-in.

Background: Supporting Emergent Non-profit News Organizations

The approach to the crisis in local journalism in Washington State has been limited. The only policies of note passed by the legislature were to extend an already existing Business and Operation tax exemption and establish a journalism fellowship program.

This public policy approach does not mesh with the broader approach to how the local journalism crisis is being address nationwide. A cut in the B&O tax benefits legacy news organizations that are structured as for-profit organizations and were part of (or subject to) the mass decline in local media in recent decades. The new organizations that have been founded to address the need created by the local news crisis have largely been non-profit in structure. They do not benefit from a cut in a tax they already do not pay.

Washington State should invest in a public funding system for local news organizations. This system should be built on an opt-in basis on the county level. It should represent a willingness of local leaders to address the local news crisis.

Washington State already has an example of direct public funding in journalism, though it oftentimes escapes notice. While the statehouse news corp has collapse in recent years, the public funding of TVW has continued to allow average Washingtonians unfettered access to the legislative process and other events on the state-government level. TVW provides much more than gavel-to-gavel coverage of the state legislature. They provide some of the most valuable and in-depth coverage of state government in the state. According to TVW’s most recent federal non-profit filing, over 80 percent of their funding comes directly from state government. Even if there is a bright line between funds they use to produce “gavel-to-gavel” coverage and money for shows like “Inside Olympia” or “The Impact,” the more journalistic efforts of TVW obviously benefit from the larger institution built with government funds.

Every state budget passed since the formation of TVW includes a passage similar to this one:

“The legislature finds that the commitment of on-going funding is necessary to ensure continuous, autonomous, and independent coverage of public affairs. For that purpose, the secretary of state shall enter into a contract with the nonprofit organization to provide public affairs coverage.“

The legislature should expand this commitment to “continuous, autonomous, and independent coverage of public affairs” from state government to every level of government across the State of Washington.

Public funding for local journalism would also put a focus on supporting local media for Washington’s non-profit and philanthropic communities. Currently, there are a handful of funds to support local journalism in Washington State (I found examples in Kitsap, King, Snohomish, Pierce and Yakima counties). All of these easily found examples fund only one-for profit and (mostly chain owned) media organization.

We are choosing to support organizations that have survived the wildfire, rather than the new green shoots of growth. We are working to sustain the organizations that were old and wealthy enough to make it survive, so far. Along the same lines, we are choosing communities that have enough wealth to support a for-profit news organization. Many of the communities have become news deserts in the last couple of decades tend to be poorer and more rural. It should not matter where you live for you to get reliable news about your government.

While supporting any local media outlet is laudable, we should find resources to support any local journalism organization, not just a legacy for-profit media organization.

Proposal: Sustainable Support for all local news

This proposal is based largely on the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. Similar to TVW, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium is a non-profit organization that receives funding directly from the New Jersey state government on an annual basis. Unlike TVW, the NJCI distributes those funds to other news organizations to produce local coverage.

For example, in 2022, the NCJI funded:

coLab (New Brunswick/Middlesex County) received a $40,000 grant for a program that will create a new community memory project in the Esperanza and Unity Square neighborhoods of New Brunswick. coLab and New Brunswick Tomorrow, in collaboration with Esperanza, a community-based Spanish-language creative storytelling project, are developing this initiative.

The Hammonton Gazette (Hammonton/Atlantic County) received e $35,000 grant to support freelance reporters who will cover municipal meetings in news deserts within Atlantic County and Camden County. This grant is awarded to the Gazette as a new funding opportunity, following their previous receipt of a first-round grant.

In the most recent state budget, the Washington legislature allowed up to $4 million in direct state funding to TVW. The most recent outlay to the NJCI was only $1 million. But these funds were spread across New Jersey to benefit communities of all sizes.

Neither the NCJI nor the state government have any ownership of projects funded through the NCJI. Structurally, the NCJI is housed at a local media institute at Montclair State University and is a consortium of Montclair and five other state owned universities. The NCJI is governed by a board of 16, including the six member universities. Other board members include appointments by state legislative caucuses, the state governor, private industry and the public.

Community-based, Washington-centric

A Washington State Civic Information Network could very well copy New Jersey’s top-heavy, statewide approach. This “full-stack” approach could involve TVW as an organizing entity, the state library and also the six, public four-year higher education institutions. Much like the NCJI, this statewide organization would accept funding requests statewide and distribute the funds through a simple grant program.

But Washington and New Jersey are two very different states. New Jersey is about 20 percent the physical size of Washington, with more than 2 million more people. Washington includes many more rural communities and would likely benefit from a more diffused funding and decision-making structure to support local journalism.

Fittingly, there are Washington State based example of local project funding that may generate more buy-in, especially in rural communities that have been the hardest hit by the journalism crisis. Each of these examples are ways we can devolve decision-making or funding to the local level, allowing for the highest level of public buy-in statewide.

Salmon recovery lead entities

Washington’s approach to salmon recovery is a model for this bottom up, state-level approach. Funding for salmon recovery projects begin on the watershed level. Proposals are first vetted by so-called “Salmon Recovery Lead Entities.” After they are ranked locally, final funding decisions are made by the statewide Salmon Recovery Funding Board. Normally, the top project in each watershed is funded. Subsequently, ranked projects are then funded, depending on funding available at the statewide level.

This option assumes a direct funding allocation from the state government that would be split across the state. In the salmon recovery example, a local non-profit or government entity steps up to become the “lead entity” to lead the public process of soliciting and vetting grants.

Housing and arts state/local funding

In recent years, the state legislature has allowed local governments to establish taxes to support housing (SHB 1416 in 2019) and the arts (SHB 2263 in 2015). While the former housing tax can be instituted on the council or commission level, the funding for the arts requires a vote of the people. Both are examples of a local community deciding on their own (either through an elected representative or directly through an election) that support for housing or the arts is a public need.

Both of these example also feature a grant-vetting decision process through a local board of some kind. This kind of local, transparent decision-making allow for decision-making to be made by the people most impacted and benefited by increased coverage. Like the salmon recovery example, local community funds, library districts or general local governments could step forward to lead the grant process.

Digital Advertising Tax

A suitable way to pay for local journalism is to tax the activity that is doing the most damage to the traditional ways of funding local journalism. Newspapers used to be the most effective ways to target customers in a local geography. But, with the advent of targeted digital advertising, only the most civic-minded and lose with money advertisers would choose a local newspaper over the Meta and Alphabet advertising platforms. However we choose to distribute public funds towards journalism, using a digital advertising tax would level the playing field by directing funds towards diverse news organizations, promoting a healthier media ecosystem.

It would act as a way to hold dominant digital advertising platforms responsible for the harms caused by their targeted advertising model, such as the spread of misinformation and data misuse. By taking a share of their profits, it incentivizes platforms to address these issues.

Maryland instituted a first-in-the-nation digital advertising tax in 2021. It is being challenged at both the state and local level, but it still in effect.

Conclusion: We need to pay for it

We have the examples and tools to fund local journalism in Washington, while also providing a firebreak between government and their watch dogs. TVW provides an example of state funding of journalism in Washington. The NCJI shows us how another state built a statewide grant program to fund many journalism efforts. By copying examples in salmon recovery, housing and the arts, we can even move the funding from statewide to organizations making funding decisions on a hyper-local level.

As we continue through the journalism crisis, communities are finding new solutions to address their needs. These solutions are largely non-profit and digital first. While our legislature has addressed the crisis through a tax cut and fellowship program, these measures are initial steps that should be followed up with more direct funding.

School board races were much more interesting, and more confusing, this year (Thurston County election maps 2023)

November 24, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

The school board races in Olympia and North Thurston were a lot more interesting than these races usually are. Oftentimes, it seems, competitive school board races are debates are played under the table. Door-belling and interpersonal connections see to matter more than clearly stated policy position and interest-group endorsements.

But, that was before Moms for Liberty, trans-exclusionary policy debates and the issue of police in schools raised the nature of these races.

I have not spent a lot of time dissecting these races after-the-fact. So this is my first real go at it, in my memory. I’ll be especially unsure about how to read the maps for the North Thurston seats, since I don’t really look at Lacey on its own very much.

Olympia School District

The first two maps are for Hillary Seidel and Jess Tourtellotte-Palumbo.

Both of these maps are generally the same. Tourtellotte-Palumbo had a thinner margin of victory, so her territory is smaller. But her best precincts are the same as Seidel’s. They both did best closer to downtown Olympia, with their leads fading as they go further out of town.

The interesting map here is the race between sitting board members Maria Flores and Talauna Reed. Reed had been appointed by the board to serve in a westside district, but had moved before filing week to the eastside, so filed to run for the district seat currently filled by Flores. The problem for geography though is that both occupied nearly the same lane politically, with Flores being more towards the center of Reed’s leftward tilt.

Here is Maria Flores’ map:

This is a fairly dominant map, with Reed pulling only four precincts overall.

What is really interesting about the Flores/Reed race was that the voters noticed the crowded left-hand nature and started writing in other names. There were fewer than 130 write-ins in the first two races, but over 800 in the Flores/Reed race.

And those write-ins definitely trended towards where Flores was the strongest. Where voters were more likely to vote for Flores, more of them were also more likely looking for someone else.

This chart is Flores’ raw return against the percent of write-ins:

This chart shows the percentage of write-ins vs. the percentage difference for Flores against Seidel and Tourtellotte-Palumbo.

North Thurston School District

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Lacey and non-Olympia districts, but generally in how they relate to county-wide races. So, my observations here are pretty much based on a surface reading of the maps and numbers, with no additional insights or experience.

Michelle Gipson beat a sitting school board member with a map that was centered on older and denser precincts, with rural districts generally going to her opponent:

This is largely the same map Gretchen Maliska had in her race:

Esperanza A. Badillo-Diiorio’s map is strikingly different:

While on first blush, this map seems like the opposite map of Gipson or Maliska. This would mean that Badillo-Diiorio took an opposing path to victory, but was able to win enough cross over voters to beat Gipson or Maliska’s coalition. But from what we know about Badillo-Diiorio’s race, this isn’t likely to be true. Her opponent had pulled out of the race and endorsed her, leaving no real organized campaign to pull votes in another direction.

So, looking at all three races from a different perspective, you see an obvious correlation between Gipson and Maliska’s precinct returns.

For Badillo-Diiorio, though, her returns cut straight across the charts. Her good and bad precincts have no connection to the good and bad precincts in the other races. Which is confusing to me, especially since there weren’t more write-ins or undervotes in this race than the other ones. This leads me to believe that voters made their choice for Badillo-Diiorio using other information or motivation than they did in the other two races.

From an interesting kind of map to more typical maps in Thurston County’s general election (Prop 1 and County Commission races)

November 19, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 1 Comment

The maps for this year’s general election cover the range of fairly typical results and one rare kind of result.

Prop 1

Proposition 1 won 56 to 44 percent, which is a pretty decisive win in county politics. But it also reconnected parts of the county that aren’t normally voting together. Proposition 1 was mostly branded as a “public safety” tax, but it would have also given some money towards election security.

This map, which shows mixed results across both very urban and very rural precincts, is rare but not unknown in Thurston County politics. To illustrate this point, both College (arguably the most liberal precinct in the county) and Zenkner Valley (the most conservative) were in the bottom three of precincts for Yes votes.

The first time I saw this map in Thurston County, it was 10 years ago, when Sue Gunn beat Jeff Davis for the port commission. In the case of Gunn, the urban/rural connection was likely two-fold: urban voters who were attached to her pro-environmental message and rural voters who were attached to her anti-tax messaging.

In terms of Prop 1, I imagine this connection would be for urban voters who were voting against funding for police and rural voters who were just voting (again) against any kind of tax.

Interesting are the 12 pivotal precincts in the election for Sheriff Sanders last year. Sander’s map looked a lot like a Democrat/Republican map with more blue precincts near downtown Olympia and getting more conservative as you head out. And even though Sanders performed worse compared to the topline Democratic candidate (Senator Murray), there were a dozen or so precincts that went for Sanders but not Murray. All 12 of these precincts, though some of them fairly rural, passed Prop 1.

County Commission

These maps are more traditional Dem/non-Dem maps in Thurston County.

First, Wayne Fournier, who won 50 to 49:

This is about as bare bones as an inside to out Democratic map can be in Thurston County and still win. It is interesting that Vivian Eason did much better in Southeast Lacey than other non-Democratic candidates have done. And, we might have to start considering the rural precincts out west of Tumwater heading into the Black Hills as Democratic precincts.

Emily Clouse, who won 60 to 39 percent.

Same kind of map, but just more blue. There were a handful of precincts south of Tumwater that went for her, which is interesting. It is also worth noting she lost a couple of precincts by Johnson Point that I thought she had a chance at.

Where this map is most useful is to contrast her map with Fournier’s.

Because Clouse won by a higher percentage, it makes sense she did better (in blue) over the vast majority of the county. She even did marginally better in Tenino, where Fournier is mayor.

But, where Fournier did better was in the rural precincts around Tenino. This is probably evidence of Fournier’s work about a year ago to rally against sex offender housing in Maytown.

The (mostly) lack of evidence of the impact of race in Badillo-Diiorio/Scott race in for North Thurston Schools

November 11, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

For me, the most interesting election in the county this year was between a candidate for the North Thurston School district and her opponent, who had endorsed here.

In a more perfect world, no one would have voted for Stephanie Scott. She did not campaign and had endorsed Esperanza Badillo-Diiorio weeks before the primary election. But because she endorsed Badillo-Diiorio after the deadline to withdraw, Scott’s name remained on the ballot. And, probably more importantly, her candidate statement remained in the Voters’ Pamphlet.

In one of the oddest possible returns in the primary, Scott even finished ahead of Badillo-Diiorio for a few days as ballots were being counted before the primary was certified, possibly knocking a candidate she supported.

No one’s fault really, that’s just the way elections work. And, Scott did spend a lot of time campaigning for her opponent, so it wasn’t that big a surprise that Badillo-Diiorio will be certified the winner of the general election in a week or so.

But what I was interested in was the phenomena of two candidates with the names Badillo-Diiorio and Scott, where Scott was the candidate not really running.

Matt Barreto wrote an influential paper in 2012 (then a professor at the University of Washington) describing his finding of racism in the Yakima County results in a race between well-funded (and now Supreme Court Justice) Steven Gonzales and un-funded, non campaigning Bruce Danielson. Basically, Barreto compared the results for Danielson by precinct against those of other conservative candidates and found that Danielson would outperform those conservative candidates.

You can read Barreto’s entire study here.

Barreto’s example of an election impacted by racism looks like this:

Using a similar technique, the Badillo-Diiorio/Scott race looks like this:

Instead of using Republican candidates, I used the composite returns of the two non-Democrats (who could be fairly described as conservatives) who ran for countywide offices.

While Danielson outperformed the Republican in 100 percent of precincts, Scott only won 57 precincts compared to 49. Hardly a barn burner.

It is worth noting, that in Barreto’s analysis, he found racism impacting voting in Yakima and Grant counties (on the eastside) but did not find it in Snohomish County. It is very likely that Thurston County is more similar to Snohomish than Yakima or Grant.

What is left unaddressed here or in Barreto’s work, is why anyone would vote for a candidate who is actively not campaigning. Or, more specifically, in Scott’s case, endorsing and campaigning for their opponent.

I’m sure the lack of media coverage in the race had some impact. Most of what voters heard in this race likely came from the Voters’ Pamphlet, which did not provide a lot of difference between the two candidates. That seems to be born out in the results. Compared to the two other North Thurston school races, Badillo-Diiorio/Scott had more undervotes (people not voting at all) and write-ins.

So, in the end, it is likely just voters not entirely sure what to do. The majority of Scott voters likely would have voted for her opponent had they learned she was no longer in the race.

Why Sixty-Five Road?

November 4, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

As roads go, Sixty-Five Road is a short one. On Olympia’s far Westside, it covers the gap between 20th Avenue NW and 14th Avenue NW. If you’ve ever been out to Hansen Elementary or Marshall Middle, that’s the road you’ve been on. It also serves as the western boarder to the Goldcrest Neighborhood and the eastern line of the Homeport Apartments.

For a boring name, it is also a very unique name. As a writer in the Olympian (who was exploring interesting place names) quipped in the 1980s: “Where, one wonders, are the other 64 roads?” Where, indeed.

That question leads us to the first clue in the origin of the name: it was likely a left-over from a defunct road classification system. For example, for 4th Avenue in Olympia, even if it wasn’t there, we’d assume the next most southern street is 5th. And, even though State Avenue is the one immediately north, we can safely assume at one point it was called 3rd. And, six blocks south of 4th is 10th. And, so on.

But, for Sixty-Five Road, there are no other north-to-south running roads with similar names.

But, let’s start at the beginning of the road’s history.

In Resolution 2833, the Thurston County Commission officially named in August 1961:

I find a couple of interesting things about this:

It is just “Sixty-Five Road,” not “the Sixty-Five Road.” And, even though its presentation has changed over the year to include the number swapped (Road Sixty-Five) or turned into numerals and swapped (Road 65), it started out as written out.
Currently, the southern end of Sixty-Five Road is 14th, but if you go east far enough, it becomes Walnut. In those days, Walnut was the name of the road all the way to that part of town.

So, here is our first clue about an archaic road numbering system. This is a legal ad from 1970:

Since we know Walnut was the name of 14th when Sixty-Five road was named, we can assume “County Road No. 65” was also another name it was called. I’m assuming “County Road No. 65” was the official engineers’ name for the road, which was shortened in common use to “Sixty-Five Road” by the time it was officially named.

One of my favorite examples of this change in construction over time was the original name for Boulevard Road on Olympia’s Eastside, which was “Grand Boulevard.”

So, what we would need to find would be another reference to a “County Road No. xx” in the decades before the 1960s.

Here is what I found in 1937:

County Road No. 298 was definitely a thing that existed in Thurston County. I’m not sure exactly where, but there was at one point a numbering system for county roads with that construction.

There is an additional reference I found from 1912 with the construction “county highway No. x”

So there you go, where are all the other 64 or 297 roads indeed?

Why did denser neighborhoods vote for the Regional Fire Authority?

May 6, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 5 Comments

Yesterday, the detailed precinct-by-precinct data for the recent April 25 election was released, and a certain trend became evident when I mapped out the results. This exercise serves as an essential reminder that even so-called “blowout” elections can have nuances that are crucial to comprehend if we aim to understand our community.

Here are the straightforward results by precinct (and the data I used):

What I see here is fairly straightforward. Downtown Olympia, the apartment complexes on the west and far east sides of Olympia, and likely Tumwater’s most densely populated neighborhoods along Tumwater Hill, all voted in favor of the Regional Fire Authority. On the other hand, the nearby westside and southeast Olympia led the vote against the RFA.

When comparing the approval rates for the public art election last April to the RFA this spring on a map of Olympia (excluding downtown), the same pattern emerges. The far eastside and westside apartment precincts were the only areas in town where the RFA received more votes than the public art proposition.

The turnout maps for the April 2023 vote present a somewhat mixed bag at first glance. On this map, I noticed the high-density neighborhoods that voted for the RFA are represented on both sides of the turnout scale. However, the less dense neighborhoods tend to appear on the higher turnout side.

The pattern becomes even more apparent when focusing solely on the Olympia precincts that took part in the art proposition. In the map below, precincts that turned out more for art last year are depicted in blue, while those that turned out more for fire are in red.

These maps reveal an interesting pattern. In general, precincts that turned out more in favor of the RFA (versus art) tended to vote more in favor of the RFA. This conclusion is supported by the chart below, which demonstrates this trend quite clearly:

Essentially, the precincts that voted against the RFA likely did so because of a general lack of turnout. In those precincts, people may have returned a ballot for the arts, but chose to hold onto their ballots for the fire vote.

Additionally, I want to revisit the topic of how apartment dwellers voted, as it relates to the messaging of the “Save our Fire Departments” (or No on Prop 1) campaign. The opponents of the RFA highlighted the higher costs that apartment dwellers would pay under the proposed formula to finance the RFA. However, this argument seems to have fallen on deaf ears, possibly due to where the No campaign focused its outreach. It’s worth noting that this argument didn’t resonate with its intended audience, as evidenced by the approval and turnout maps.

Okay, but really, why?

I’ve seen general observations that apartment dwellers fear fire more than people who live in single family homes. And that makes inherent sense, I suppose. But I haven’t found any polling or research that backs this assumption up.

How our history of downzoning is an argument against “local control” in the legislature and has huge impacts on racial discrimination in housing

February 23, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 2 Comments

Eastside Olympia in the midst of large downzone.

As the legislature discusses zoning reform that would allow for modest density increases in exclusionary singe family neighborhoods, it is important to focus on the history of so-called “local control.”

The ability for local governments to determine their own zoning fate has become the primary argument against statewide zoning reform. But the history of neighborhood and city-scale decision-making (aka “local control) puts a sharp focus on housing discrimination and how we’ve excluded people from our communities.

When we discuss racist housing discrimination in the Northwest, we talk about racially restrictive covenants that flourished through the 50s and redlining during the 30s. We skip past the successful whisper campaign that sunk Seattle’s first attempt at an open housing ordinance in the mid-1960s, and head straight towards the Fair Housing Act and the state and local versions of the same law.

After that, our history tells us, housing discrimination has been against the law, and we’ve been slowly bending towards justice. Leftovers like exclusionary single family zoning are artifacts of time before the 1960s civil rights campaigns and are the high hanging fruit after years of struggle.

But when I think about housing discrimination in the Pacific Northwest, I usually start with the 1970s. That is when you see the term “downzone” show up in our regional press. Before that time, there was no single word for taking a neighborhood that was zoned for a mix of densities and only allowing single family zoning.

In response to the outlawing of outright housing discrimination, local governments turned to tools like downzoning to restrict growth and prevent the continued construction of housing that would be affordable across incomes. Exclusive single-family zoning began replacing higher density zoning across the region.

This era of downzoning after the Fair Housing Act begs for more historic understanding. As a community historian, I am most familiar with downzoning efforts in Olympia from the late 1970s to the 1990s. But in a cursory look at other western Washington communities, you can see the same pattern. I can trace stories of Individual neighborhoods starting in the 1970s lobbying for downzones from high density to middle density and any middle density options being chased out of neighborhoods in exchange for single family zoning.

I have done a fairly deep dive into the Olympia history of downzoning, which I’ve written about here. But with the debate over local control in the legislature, there is a need for a deeper understanding of how our communities reacted to the passing of strict housing discrimination laws and why so many decided to push to decrease densities.

There is a classic example on Queen Anne Hill where neighbors fought to downzone in the early 70s. Throughout the 1950s, the City of Seattle planned higher and higher densities in neighborhoods around downtown, including Queen Anne Hill. Just months after Seattle’s open housing ordinance went into effect, Queen Ann neighbors were at city hall, fighting for fewer neighbors to come to their streets.

In Olympia, the downzoning battle began on the Eastside in what is now one of the most exclusive single family neighborhoods. A developer proposed a series of fourplexes, but ended up igniting years of struggle, which resulted in a citywide reassessment of high and middle density housing. A few years later, neighbors of another inner, Eastside neighborhood, fought to further downzone their part of town to “stabilize” the neighborhood.

You can see similar examples across the country of communities picking up downzoning as a tool to implicitly preserve racial divisions when other methods became illegal. Arlington, MA (a Boston suburb) wrote its own history of downzoning, pointing out that before the 1960s, they zoned for plenty of apartments. But, according to a city-written FAQ: “…as segregation in greater Boston was challenged and integration became a real prospect across the region, Arlington’s attitude toward development shifted. Concerted opposition to development projects began in the 1960s and became more organized in the early 1970s. Activists used both explicit and coded anti-integration language to rally opposition to apartment development and the related effort to downzone portions of the town.”

Unlike earlier efforts in the Pacific Northwest, other than coded references to “ghettos,” our downzoning efforts are largely absent of on the surface racial animus. I’m not saying that these neighborhood activists weren’t trying to keep their neighborhoods white. In fact, I think you can draw a pretty clear conclusion to what many of them were up to. I’m just saying there isn’t anything clear in the historical record.

What I am saying is that you don’t have to look very far to see downzoning in the Pacific Northwest tied directly to the broader civil rights struggle. When you pull back out from these small-scale, downzoning efforts to a nationwide view, you see single family zoning being discussed in a much different way. When Pacific Northwest communities were downzoning, the NAACP was struggling to find inroads in the courtrooms to fight against exclusionary single family zoning.

HUD Secretary George Romney (and former Michigan governor) went to Warren, Michigan in 1970 to attempt to force the Detroit suburb to strike single family zoning and allow smaller, more affordable (and therefore affordable to racial minorities). His effort failed, his political career ended, and the civil rights organizations retrenched and fought unheralded courtroom battles over single family zoning in the Midwest, the South and the East Coast.

According to the NAACP, in the early 70s: the suburbs are “the new civil rights battleground” and we should do battle out in the townships and villages to lower zoning barriers and thereby create opportunities for Negroes seeking housing closer to today’s jobs at prices they can afford and pay.”

National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (also in the early 1970s): segregation won’t stop until “local governments have been deprived of the power… to manipulate zoning and other controls to screen out families on the basis of income and, implicitly, of race.”

What we can say for sure, that our decreasing densities through downzones had very real impacts on the racial makeup of our neighborhoods.

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

In Olympia (that never had a substantial racially diverse neighborhood like Seattle) neighborhoods that downzoned saw a smaller increase in racial diversity over the last 10 years. Not only did these neighborhoods stay whiter, in the middle of a historic housing crisis, these neighborhoods actually had fewer people living in them in 2020 than they did in 2010.

There are few open racists left. That is obviously an advancement in my lifetime.

You don’t have to be racist to benefit from racist outcomes and a racist system. There is a huge layer of people who will tell you they are not racist but participate in racist systems before you get to people working to dismantle racist systems.

We know the current landscape of dominant, exclusionary single family zoning in our region happened at the same time the last tools to legally and openly discriminate in housing were taken away. We also know the nation’s leading civil rights organization has actively worked against exclusionary single family zoning.

Our history is not at all unique, but we should keep in mind as the legislature takes another attempt at creating a minimum zoning standard for Washington State. Local control is the tool that low density neighborhoods used for five decades to sustain racially discriminatory impacts of city-scale zoning.

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.

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

January 2, 2023 / Emmett O'Connell / 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

1. Pedestrian deaths and murders are in the same neighborhood

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

When you kill someone with your car, there are a lot of reasons outside the generalized behavior of drivers and pedestrians. These include bad road design, lack of marked crosswalks, left turns and large, multilane roads.

Bad road design, lack of crosswalks and our dependence on so-called stroads seems to make pedestrian deaths a much bigger part of local government. Obviously, each homicidal (or man-slaughter or non-natural) death is one of importance for public policy. But, I think my reaction to the main premise of the now-lost social media post is that it is at best a wash.

2. September is the deadliest month

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

3. Downtown Olympia, Old Lacey and Grand Mound

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

What you can see are a few clusters of activity:

Old Lacey/East Olympia:

To summarize, Lilly Road north of Martin, Martin Road east of Lilly are both hotspots within the hotspot. But given the reasons for pedestrian deaths cited above, this area seems to be rate fairly high. But it is worth noting that there were more deaths here than in other places with the same characteristics, such as Yelm Highway or Hawks Prairie.

Downtown Olympia:

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

Grand Mound:

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

Olympia Time