Local Political Fireworks
It's Primary Season
In a week where column-feet of ink are being spent on who is at the top of the Democratic ticket, it's easy to forget that there are local candidates and issues on the ballot which have a huge impact on our lives and over which we have much more influence.
It's local primary season in Washington State. We'll soon be choosing candidates to run for state and local office in November's General Election. Our primaries are open, with no party affiliation required, and, as in all our elections, all ballots are mailed.
My county, Island County, has three county commissioners. Two of the three are up for reelection, while the third is running for State Senate and will need to be replaced with a party nominee should she prevail. I'm in District 1, which covers the southern two thirds of Whidbey Island, where our Democratic commissioner is one of those up for reelection this year. She has a Democratic primary opponent, while two Republicans, one a developer, the other a fiscal hawk, are also on the ballot.
A group of us, half a dozen or so, all District 1 voters and with a range of environmental concerns from fireworks to drinking water, met several months ago with the incumbent, and are meeting this week with her Democratic primary challenger. We'll do our best to help spread the word on where candidates stand, as our local papers, like the national press, seem to be much more interested in the drama than in the issues.
Independence Day threw the fireworks issue into focus. Summer came early to Western Washington. The West Coast's June gloom, or “Juneuary”, with low cloud, fog, and occasional drizzle, usually persists through 4th July and has us celebrating Independence Day in our early summer uniform of shorts and a fleece, but this year, the edge of the heat dome nudged the gloom out and left us warm and dry from July 2nd. That, and the potential for a long weekend, likely encouraged even more summer people than usual to spend the fourth on our island.
While King County, which includes the cities of Seattle and Bellevue, bans private fireworks, our county does not. We live just up the hill from, and with a view over, a pair of beaches on which dueling second home owners see who can blow up the most Microsoft, Amazon, and Costco stock-option money. A sample brag overheard at a beach party a few years ago went like this: "I took the Yukon to the Indian reservation and said, 'fill it up'. Ten thousand dollars! I told my son 'You'd better keep your mouth shut on the ferry!'" I'm estimating these two beaches alone see over a quarter of a million dollars sent up in flames and smoke in just a few hours.
For us, especially with this year's weather, the fourth is a good time to stay home, have a few friends over, blast music on the deck for once because it’s drowned out anyway, and keep an eye on the roof! This year I wore a British flag T-shirt to celebrate both the end of fourteen years of Tory misrule in the UK and the Supreme Court's decision to allow the US to have kings again.
Not everyone had fun. According to a local Facebook scanner tracking group, two individuals were helicoptered to Harborview Hospital in Seattle, one with an exploded hand, another with three fingers blown off; a tree caught fire next to a residence; and several dogs and cats went missing. A friend who was under mortar fire for six days in Afghanistan takes his mountain bike to the woods and stays there till it's over. And then there's the impact on wildlife and the debris on the beaches.
We're under a drought declaration and there's a type 1 burn ban in place, but fireworks are still allowed. If the commissioners won't ban them, and they have not so far, there are other options such as putting the question on the ballot or moving the burn ban level decision down to the four Fire Chiefs rather than leaving it with the Fire Marshal, who is the Chief of Police. We're asking candidates for their position on those options.
This year's elections are happening against the backdrop of what's officially called Island County’s Comprehensive Plan Periodic Update 2025, and informally known as the Comp Plan.
These Comp Plans are mandated by Washington State's Growth Management Act, an approach to growth management unique among states, passed in 1990 and administered by the state Department of Commerce, which has this to say about it:
The Growth Management Act (GMA) was adopted to address ways to accommodate growth. It requires that the fastest-growing cities and counties complete comprehensive plans and development regulations to guide future growth. All jurisdictions are required to protect critical environmental areas and conserve natural resource lands, such as farms and forests. The GMA calls for communities to review and, if necessary, revise their plans and regulations every ten years to ensure they remain up-to-date.
2025 is our year for an update, and county staff are gearing up. They've held public outreach sessions and opened a web site for public input. This all sounds like a great opportunity to address a number of growth-related concerns. We're projecting a county population increase from 85,000 to 100,000 over the next 20 years. While the plan is likely to suggest that this growth will go mostly to our few cities, towns, and urban growth areas, and expect them to plan for it, in practice 85% of the building applications are for the rural zone, and the county has yet to figure out a way to say no. Everyone wants a five-, ten-, or twenty-acre ranchette with a house, barn, shop, well, and septic. The county already counts nine thousand wells, one for every seven people on groundwater, and we're adding hundreds more each year, each with a matching septic system. Add to that the clear cuts in the forests with loss of contiguous space for wildlife, degraded aquifer recharge, and inevitable reliance on cars for transportation, and it's easy to see why the GMA was enacted to discourage this kind of sprawl. These market-led growth patterns also perpetuate inequality in access to land and housing. Many of the five-, ten-, and twenty-acre lots are subdivisions of the original one hundred sixty acre lots stolen from the Native Americans and given away to "whites and half-breed Indians only" under the Dominion Land Claim Act of 1850.
The growth paten also leads to a lack in affordable housing, contributing to mountain-town disease in our sea level island, where developers only build expensive homes, their owners buy the cheap ones for AirBnBs then wonder why that restaurant's not open.
And yet, it's easy to see, too, the appeal of the cottage in the woods. Homesteading, despite its colonial roots, runs deep in the American psyche. Many of our friends, including some of those interviewing the candidates, Substack subscribers, county commissioners, and even state and county staff, choose that lifestyle. The result has been that previous comp plan updates have complied with the letter, but not the spirit, of the GMA. Planning directors have been fired and planning staff have been demoralized and have quit over this cognitive dissonance. It's a hot topic for candidates, as previous commissioners have, in the unforgettable words of Montana’s Poet Laureate Chris La Tray, "never met a developer whose leg they didn't want to hump," despite being elected on the back of environmental promises.
As recently as last week, you'd have found me firmly in the camp of a literal implementation of the GMA and ready to ask the commissioner candidates what code changes they would make to force development into the urban zones. But in my frustration, I had a zoom meeting with the Department of Commerce folks supervising Island County's update. Their view? The county needs a shift in public sentiment.
Hmmm. I've been thinking about that. The rural versus urban and environmentalist versus developer binaries are not serving any of us here (or, I could argue, anywhere). We need a more nuanced approach, one that makes rural living more environmentally friendly. It will need action on development regulations, zoning, and more. One thing's for certain; developers, and commissioners who are in their thrall, are not the ones to get us there. I'll be reframing my question to ask candidates how they plan to break the impasse; how they plan to have a conversation with all the stakeholders, urban and rural, developers and environmentalists, rather than have each group shouting from a soapbox. Hey, I can dream, can't I?
I've written about at length in previous essays about how the twin pressures of climate change and growth are threatening our county's water supply and natural environment, especially along our shorelines. The last four years have seen no progress on these issues, while county staff disillusionment and turnover persist. A prime reason is the extreme interpersonal dysfunction among our three commissioners. We are ready for a change.
Whether we can make progress on our county's issues over the next four years will depend much more on who is in the commissioners' seats than it will on who is in the White House. I suspect it's the same where you live. Go find out, and vote, all the way down the ticket. Local matters.
Thanks, as always, for reading or listening.
Really appreciate this focus on local governmental issues, here, John. It's also my experience working for decades in wildlife and forestry issues that all meaningful action takes place in the state and county boards of various sorts, this or that commission, and the local office of one or another federal land manager. The rising and falling of various tides in DC has very little impact on much of the actual stuff that happens in our hometowns and beloved public spaces.
I always wonder if the local authorities understand the carrying capacity of the island, and if they and the planning department factor in the resources needed to grow food?