County Commissioners To Make Housing Even More Unaffordable

County Commissioners To Make Housing Even More Unaffordable

What housing crisis? County Commissioners plan to make it even harder to afford housing in Jefferson County. They intend to increase the property tax levy at the same time that gas, food and all other costs are spiking. Homeowners already struggling to make ends meet will have to pay even more money to the county to keep from losing their homes.

The Commissioners have put taxpayers on notice that they intend to raise the ad valorem tax by 1%, something that has become an annual ritual for them. Raising property taxes makes housing more expensive. It also makes rentals more expensive, as landlords pass along rising costs to tenants.

Back in 2017 the BOCC declared a housing emergency. That emergency has been constantly reaffirmed in commissioner discussions. But the BOCC has never acted as though it took the emergency seriously. It has never taken advantage of the emergency declaration to loosen regulatory and land use restrictions, which drive up the cost and and limit the supply of  housing. And every year it continues to add to the cost of housing by raising property taxes.

How bad is our housing affordability crisis? Try finding an affordable rental. Good luck with that. And good luck to the first time home buyer. Young people who grew up in this county have no hope of buying a home here.

The crisis is real and strangling our economy. Employers lose workers, or prospective hires go elsewhere because they can’t afford to live here. We have people with jobs living in their cars, for heaven’s sake, because housing is so insanely expensive.  Many members of the creative class, who have made Port Townsend such a special, vibrant place, are leaving because they can’t afford to live here.

The Housing Solutions Network explains how bad it is:

  • Jefferson County is the second most unaffordable county in Washington state, after San Juan County—and nobody gets a house in San Juan County unless they are a millionaire or fortunate to inherit an island property.
  • Median home prices have jumped 65% in just five years, from $276,600 to $455,900. The minimum wage boost is insignificant when measured against such huge inflation in housing prices. Other incomes in Jefferson County have been almost stagnant.
  • Rental vacancies range from absolutely nothing to only 1%, meaning that even those with incomes can’t find a place to live.
  • 29% of renters pay 30% and more for housing.

Let’s hope housing activists speak out against the BOCC making housing more expensive for everyone. These painful tax increases hurt the poor, seniors, workers and young people the most. There is nothing “progressive” whatsoever about the BOCC’s property tax increases.

Anybody reading this who lives in Jefferson County knows too well the staggering property tax bills hitting them every year. Very few homeowners who do not have appreciating significant stock portfolios are seeing their incomes rise at the same rate their property tax bills keep going up.

The county is the beneficiary of unprecedented federal largesse. At the October 11, 2021, meeting of the Board of County Commissioners, acting county administrator Mark McCauley, in response to a question from Beth O’Neal, stated that Jefferson County has already received $3.129 million and will receive another $3.129 million in May 2022. Furthermore, the county expects another $4 million over the next two years from Washington State revenue sharing of those federal funds starting in September, 2022.

The BOCC has already raised taxes this year by increasing the sales tax rate to 9.1%.

There is always reason to question how the BOCC is spending the tax money it is already collecting. The same BOCC that again wants to raise taxes on a county still struggling with the economic costs of the COVID lockdowns and mandates, on top of inflation at the highest level in 20 years, found enough extra money to give out $337,000 in bonuses to county workers.  Those bonuses were from taxes paid by many people who lost their jobs and saw their businesses close during the lockdowns.

Affordable housing requires affordable property taxes. To keep the cost of housing from continuing to rise, property taxes must be held in check, even reduced. That is a direct and immediate step the BOCC could take to do something to address our housing affordability crisis.

It is time they act on the emergency they declared.

The hearing on raising property taxes yet again will be November 15, 2021. The Commissioners will be protected from facing angry, scared taxpayers as the meeting will be on-line. Written comments may be sent to jeffbocc@co.jefferson.wa.us. Follow instructions in the public notice on how to participate in the Zoom meeting. Click here to read those instructions.

 

Suffer the Little Children

Suffer the Little Children

At the October 4th meeting of the Jefferson County Board of County Commissioners, Department of Emergency Management Director Willie Bence provided the following update:

“We’re unlikely to do any more large clinics for the Pfizer booster dose population. Our next priority beginning the end of this month is going to be five to eleven-year-olds. So we’re eagerly awaiting that approval, so we’ll be ready for that at the end of this month through November…”

How did EM Director Bence know that this poorly-tested product was going to be approved, when less than a week before, the headline from this CNN report read “Pfizer submits data on Covid-19 vaccine for kids ages 5 to 11 to FDA, not seeking EUA yet.” In fact, it wasn’t until October 7th that Pfizer announced its formal request to the FDA for EUA—three days after Bence made his prescient announcement.

Willlie Bence, Jefferson County Emergency Management Director

What sort of crystal ball are they gazing into there in the Emergency Management office? I’ve filed a Public Records Request to find out, and I’ll share with PTFP readers what I learn.

The Nov. 4th edition of The Leader carried the water for the Jefferson/Clallam County Public Health officer, braying, “In other good news, Berry noted the potential approval of a COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11. ‘We’re very excited about that,’ she said.”

In the article “Pfizer COVID Vaccine Fails Risk-Benefit Analysis in Children 5 to 11,” Toby Rogers, PhD, explains the critical metric NNTV—it’s the “number needed to vaccinate” in order to prevent a single case, hospitalization, ICU admission or death. The best study to date determined that:

“…the NNTV to prevent one death is between 9,000 and 100,000 (95% confidence interval)… injecting all 28,384,878 children ages 5 to 11 with two doses of Pfizer, which is what the Biden administration wants to do, would save, at most, 45 lives… So then the NNTV to prevent a single fatality in this age group is 28,384,878 / 45 = 630,775. But it’s a two-dose regimen, so if one wants to calculate the NNTV per injection the number doubles to 1,261,550. It’s literally the worst NNTV in the history of vaccination.”

”Kirsch, Rose, and Crawford (2021) estimate the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System undercounts fatal reactions by a factor of 41, which would put the total fatal side effects in this age-range at 5,248. Kirsch et al. represent a conservative estimate because others have put the underreporting factor at 100… Simply put, the Biden administration plan would kill 5,248 children via Pfizer mRNA shots in order to save 45 children from dying of coronavirus.

Why is Willie Bence so “eager” and Allison Berry so “very excited” to inject this dangerous experimental gene therapy into our kids?

It would be comical were it not so diabolical. The first “pop-up” clinic for these young kids is at Blue Heron Middle School this Saturday, Nov. 13th from 9am to noon. The following weekend, Nov. 20th, the injection wagon rolls up to Chimacum Junior/Senior High School.

Pfizer’s Superhero theme is parroted by state and local health authorities on their social media pages, illustrating pharma’s complete capture of the agencies meant to oversee them.

Why are we vaccinating children?

It was predicted by many that the highly profitable injections would eventually be aimed at the children, regardless of this age group’s negligibly low risk of severe or fatal outcomes, and despite the low transmission rates in schools and from the young to the old in household settings. With an eye on profit alone, career criminal outfit Pfizer sought EUA approval from the FDA for use of its mRNA jabs for this young cohort.

On October 26th, the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) supported Pfizer’s pitch, voting 17-0 (1 abstention).  Most of the committee have histories of deep commercial bonds with industry; eleven of them were “temporary” members. Committee member and apparent psychopath Dr. Eric Rubin, an infectious disease physician and editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said without a trace of irony,

“We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes. That’s how we found out about rare complications of other vaccines.”

Risks of myocarditis and pericarditis were acknowledged, but ultimately discounted. By the drug company’s own admission, the trial population size “was too small to detect any potential risks of myocarditis associated with vaccination.” The safety data provided by Pfizer showed that the two study cohort groups were followed for irresponsibly short periods of time—one for just two months, the other just two-and-a-half weeks. Throwing caution to the winds, they are experimenting on our children.

Aaron Siri, lead attorney at Siri & Glimstad, has won multiple lawsuits against Health and Human Services and its subordinate agencies. On behalf of the Informed Choice Action Network (ICAN), his firm is enlisting the aid of Congress members who care about civil liberties. He writes:

“The legal authority for the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) to issue an EUA for children for this product is lacking, including because there is no medical emergency for children and the vaccinated still become infected with and transmit the virus. (Infra § I.) It is also improper to issue an EUA for children when the data does not demonstrate that the known benefits outweigh the known risks, the trial was underpowered, and there are serious concerns regarding how they were conducted. (Infra § II.) The foregoing issues are compounded by the fact that federal health authorities have given financial immunity to Pfizer for injuries caused by this product, including if it engages in willful misconduct, despite a history of such conduct by Pfizer. (Infra § III.)”

There’s one more important fact that mainstream media isn’t reporting. On page 14 of the FDA fact sheet, it says “To provide a vaccine with an improved stability profile, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 for use in children 5-11 years of age uses tromethamine (Tris) buffer instead of the phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) as used in the previous formulation and excludes sodium chloride and potassium chloride.” Tromethamine is a blood acid reducer often used to stabilize people with heart attacks. Curiously, less than 5 months ago, the FDA approved Pradaxa, “the first oral blood thinning medication for children.”

Think they’re anticipating problems? Pradaxa is for patient populations “3 months to less than 12 years old with venous thromboembolism (a condition where blood clots form in the veins).” The press release casually adds, “The most common side effects of Pradaxa include digestive system symptoms and bleeding. Pradaxa can cause serious and fatal bleeding.”

Brought to you by…

With the yoke of liability off their neck, Pfizer is set to win the house with this gamble. News site Axios reported on Nov. 2nd that Pfizer’s jab “has quickly become the highest-selling drug in the world” adding that the pharma behemoth “forecasts revenue from the COVID-19 vaccine it developed with BioNTech will now reach $36 billion this year, up 7.5% from its previous estimate of $33.5 billion.”  The billions that would surely be paid out in civil courts for injuries and death from these therapies is being funneled directly into undue influence of the media, academia and clinical research. Market analyst site statista says “Pfizer spent around 11.6 billion U.S. dollars on selling, informational and administrative expenses in 2020.”  Advertising is included in that budget.

Ana Wolpin reported on the life-altering injuries sustained by Pfizer clinical trial participant, 12-year-old Maddie de Garay, in her Oct. 30th in-depth article on this site. The Vaccine Safety Research Association created a 30-second ad highlighting Maddie’s adverse events—severe damage Pfizer denied for months, eventually reporting to the FDA that she had a “stomach ache”—in advance of the VRBPAC meeting. Comcast initially agreed to broadcast the advert during episodes of “Saturday Night Live” and “Meet the Press.” The day before it was scheduled to air, Comcast officials pulled it.

 

Maddie De Garay, now 13, was severely injured after receiving the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine as a trial participant. Comcast agreed to run this 30-second ad, then pulled it.
Click to watch what Comcast censored.

Normalizing the abnormal

In the “new normal” characterized by inversion, life as we understood it no longer applies. “Vaccines” that are not really vaccines are “safe and effective” even though they cause injury and death and do not prevent transmission, infection, hospitalization or death. Influenza, the seasonal respiratory illness that typically kills over half a million people a year, magically disappears for 18 months, but now we’re told by these Svengalis that it will definitely return this winter.  Anaphylaxis, arrhythmia and fainting are commonplace. Top athletes regularly drop dead on the field, school mates die in zoom classes and strokes are to be expected in kids.

KIDS HAVE STROKES TOO – pharma’s New Normal

A nurse friend who left the employ of Jefferson Healthcare hospital this past spring related to me her shock and dismay at the constant refrain sung to co-workers who were out of commission for days post-injection with debilitating headaches and flu-like symptoms — “That means it’s working!”

Where are the adults in the room?

Port Ludlow residents Madison and Michael Clevenger, parents of three children aged 8 to 14, became concerned about state overreach while following SB-5889, which passed in March 2019. They were alarmed to learn of the concept of “protected individuals” which includes “A minor who may obtain health care without the consent of a parent or legal guardian, pursuant to state or federal law.” When Madison took their 14-year-old daughter to her sports physical this year, she was stunned when:

“…the doctor’s office would not email me a copy to turn in to the school because our daughter had not signed the waiver giving me access. The doctor’s office was able, however, to fax a copy to the school district without needing her signature.

“We could see that this experimental gene therapy would be pushed on our children in an environment where other adults can influence or pressure kids into major medical decisions without the consent of a parent. It was a very difficult decision to homeschool our children, but now that we are doing it, our kids are thriving and we all wish that we had started doing it years ago. It feels like a weight has been lifted. Every day that they would come home from school over the last couple years, they were stressed and there was hardly any joy left in what should be a happy childhood.”

They recounted another chilling experience of abrogation of parental rights:

“They [Chimacum School District] tested our daughter [the Covid swab test] without our consent, and that raises a lot of concern about other things the school district could ask a child to do without the consent of a parent or guardian.”

Pfizer is doing their very best to stealth a workaround of mindful parents like Madison and Michael, delivering the message directly to the kids with the best propaganda campaigns dirty money can buy.

Truthful information about vaccine risks like those Maddie experienced is censored, while pharma’s control of the global narrative is absolute. As seen earlier in the promo for vaccine clinics in Port Townsend and Chimacum schools, our health department repeats Pfizer’s insidious “Superhero” messaging to manipulate and brainwash our kids, with local schools marching in lockstep.

Just prior to publication, a reader of the Free Press shared a Port Townsend School District alert received on his phone as “Parent News.” The rather lengthy update was titled “Information on Covid-19 Vaccinations for Students,” with a sub-head reading “Positive Impacts of Vaccination Status.”

This parent highlighted the upshot, which he considered to be the height of audacity and overreach:

*The school district will be participating in a program called Test to Stay, where unvaccinated students may still attend classes, but cannot participate in extracurricular or after-school or social activities, are expected to quarantine when not at school, must submit to COVID testing three days per week at school, must stay six feet away from others when traveling to and from school, and must eat outdoors (or stay six or more feet away from others when eating indoors). Individuals who don’t want to comply with this option will be placed in the seven day at-home quarantine.  NOTE: Students who are siblings in the same household with a COVID infected individual do not qualify for Test to Stay, due to the high rate of transmission within the immediate family.

*As the weather becomes cooler and we have to opt for more indoor activities, the different requirements for vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated may become more obvious. Indoor athletics and activities may be restricted for some students – as an example a positive COVID case on an indoor athletic team would require an unvaccinated basketball player to quarantine, whereas a vaccinated player (as long as he or she is asymptomatic) will continue to participate in the basketball program.

*Please know that the school district is not the decision maker for student vaccination mandates. Decisions on vaccination requirements are made at the federal and state levels. We don’t know when such decisions will be made by our governmental health entities, but do know that we, like other public schools, are required to comply with all state mandates.

If the last two years have taught us anything, we must expect that these draconian measures will soon be applied to the five to eleven-year-olds. Homeschooling is sounding better by the day. This Yale epidemiologist agrees—I’d Pull a Healthy Kid From School Before Giving Them the COVID Vaccine.

Travels Outside Washington State Should Shake Faith in Mandates

Travels Outside Washington State
Should Shake Faith in Mandates

A crisis of faith. Anybody who has recently traveled outside Washington State has good reason to seriously doubt the necessity for the lockdowns and mandates decreed by Governor Inslee and our public health officer. Other states are much freer. Some never locked down. Others required only looser restrictions for a much shorter period of time than we have experienced. Yet those states are doing better. You can feel it and see it in the shops and restaurants, in the museums and churches, in performance halls and on the streets.

I have taken two long trips since our public health officer required vaccine passports to dine out and masks indoors for everyone. One excursion was a 4,600 mile road trip through seven other states. We reached Iowa on a route across Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska. After wandering back roads and visiting small towns and villages amid Iowa’s cornfields, we returned on a northerly route through South Dakota, Wyoming again, Montana, Idaho’s panhandle and Washington’s Palouse country.

After leaving Washington, we were required to wear a mask only once, in the Pendleton factory store in Pendleton, Oregon. But the restaurant where we ate in that town told us not to bother.

In Idaho we saw next to no one wearing masks.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, some of the waiters and store clerks wore masks, some did not. Customers dared show their faces. We caught Michael Bublé at the Vivant Arena. His performance had been rescheduled two times since the onset of the pandemic. Admission required proof of vaccination. (I had weighed much of the evidence and studies, including articles on this site, and decided my health needs were best served by getting the Moderna vaccine.) Inside, the sold-out crowd of nearly 20,000 was maskless, as was Bublé. I can’t imagine him delivering Louie Prima’s “Just a Gigolo” through a blue surgical face covering. Some members of his orchestra wore masks—like the piano player—but not, of course, the men blowing saxophones or trombones or his backup singers.

In Wyoming and Nebraska, some employees at truck stops wore masks, as did some travelers. If the station were part of a national chain, the staff usually wore masks, but not at independent businesses. Nobody wore masks in the huge Cabela’s flagship store in Sidney, Nebraska.

Monumental taxidermy exhibit, Cabela’s, Sidney, NE

Mask wearing was entirely voluntary throughout the trip. The vast majority of people we saw chose not to wear masks.

In Dodge City, Iowa, the woman in the featured photo at top haphazardly wore a mask, but only as part of her costume. She was dishing out free cups of mac n’ cheese and mashed potatoes at a gas station, “just to cheer folks up.” That’s Iowa friendly, for you. Iowa really is a cheerful and amiable place. People meet your eye and smile at you on the street, in the stores… everywhere.

It was great to see so many smiling faces again. It’s a shame we had to travel to the center of the country for that pleasure.

The iconic Taylor’s Maid-Rite, Marshalltown, Iowa

For over a week we had seen no signs requiring masks until we were inside the Badlands National Park. At the bottom of a hill in the middle of nowhere sat a diminutive National Park Service tourism center. It announced that federal law required masks. About half the people complied. At Mount Rushmore nobody paid attention to placards repeating President Biden’s mask decree, though some people in masks did pose for photos with the four presidents—maskless—towering behind them.  Go figure.

Like its big sky and sprawling landscape, Montana was wide open. We got snowed in for two days in Livingston and holed up in a chain hotel. The staff wore masks, sort of. One of our fellow stranded travelers walked his dog after the blizzard lifted. He was out there alone making tracks in a patch of white and wearing a surgical mask.  God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy, so the Billy Currington song goes. Rather than “crazy”, it might be more accurate to say this man was “irrationally terrified.” But that would never work in a country song.

When we reached our hotel in Spokane on the return leg I caught the evil eye from a masked hotel clerk as I passed through the lobby trundling luggage to our room. Right, I’m back in Jay Inslee’s domain. It took me a while to locate the mask I had stuffed somewhere in the van. At least we did not have to pull out our vax passports for the unexpected delight of a dinner of fiery Ethiopian food. Showing our papers in order to dine out would not happen again until we had returned to Jefferson County.

We saw no bodies in the streets along our route. No black crepe over doors.  I know that’s overstating how we would measure the success of these states’ measures against COVID. But I paid attention to local news and read nothing about any medical crises.

Jay Inslee points to Idaho as a way of trying to convince people his dictatorial decrees and their costs and impositions are medically necessary to save lives. Yes, Idaho has gone through a challenging period of time as it struggled to maintain the delivery of medical services to everyone. But so did Washington. Starting in March 2020 for several months Governor Inslee flat out prohibited any medical procedures except treating COVID, addressing immediate threats to life (e.g., gun shot wounds) and surgical abortions. Hospitals were never close to overwhelmed. (See my article from last year, “You Can’t Believe Jay Inslee: His Big COVID Hospital Crisis Lie.”)

Please recall that Seattle received an emergency Army field hospital and sports arenas were turned into expansive hospital wards. Except for Inslee’s photo ops, these facilities were never used. Hospitals were actually quite empty and laying off nursing staff. Inslee ignored the pleas of the Washington hospital association and medical society to let doctors care for their patients. One can only wonder how many people Jay Inslee killed and caused to suffer grievously. One can only wonder how many cancer cases advanced to more serious stages because of Inslee’s orders that blocked preventive care and kept surgical theaters empty. I have a friend who was rushed not long ago into surgery to remove part of his cancerous colon. A fairly young man, his colonoscopy had been cancelled by Inslee’s 2020 order. The log jam caused by the disruption of delivery of medical services pushed his rescheduled appointment out almost a year. He was in the ER before that postponed appointment came around. He is now undergoing chemotherapy.

And, of course, there’s Florida, which I did not reach on my travels. That state has been mocked by our Governor and former public health officer for minimal restrictions that favored upholding the merits of personal and economic freedom. Yet Florida for some time has had the lowest per capita incidence of COVID infections in the country. Its economy is booming and it is not suffering infrastructure problems. Meanwhile, Inslee’s government has slashed ferry schedules and announced that mountain passes may not be regularly cleared of snow because the Washington Department of Transportation has lost so many key people to his vax mandate penalties.

I am writing now from Pennsylvania. In the past week I have worn a mask only in the senior facility where I’ve visited family members. The rule there is a bit nonsensical. The octogenarian walking to dinner must wear a mask, though they may be alone in the hallway. Inside the dining room, by way of contrast, I saw over a hundred senior citizens seated at tables talking and laughing without masks. Everyone has been vaccinated, and there have been no outbreaks of COVID since the start of the pandemic. The ladies playing cards in the Bistro and chatting in the lounges on the resident floors, I will add, regularly ignore the masking rules and management has let them be.

Life seems normal here. One can shop at the historic Allentown Fairgrounds Farmer’s Market. No need to cover your face to stock up on smoked pig’s ears or smoked beef trachea. And don’t pass up the fresh scrapple, a Pennsylvania Dutch delicacy. Yum.

I am heading back to SeaTac in a short while. Except when I am eating and drinking, I will have to wear a mask from the time I return my rental at the Philly airport until I reach my own car at SeaTac. Allowing people to remove their masks at any time during their flight seems to undermine the rationale for mandating masks at any other time. All those passengers crammed in a metal tube without masks eating and drinking (and stretching out their meals to extend their taste of liberty) would seem to risk spreading COVID—if there were a real risk. Alaska Airlines assures us that the air filtration systems in their planes are amazingly effective, rendering cabin air perfectly safe to breathe. I believe them.

I scored a first-class seat on the return trip. Conceivably, I could eat and drink for the six-plus hours it will take to cross the continent.  “Another coffee, please.” “Do you have more nuts?” I could then nibble my cashews and almonds one at a time and order a drink to sip afterwards and then request a bag of popcorn and stretch that out. And then, of course, I would again need to wet my whistle, very, very slowly.

Rick Steves says travel “acts as our greatest teacher.” So what are the lessons of traveling beyond our fear-riddled, mandate-hobbled community? The answer is obvious:  It doesn’t have to be this way.

Walkouts Worldwide Wake Up PT

Walkouts Worldwide Wake Up PT

Worldwide Walkouts swept America on November 3 from Berkeley to Miami, from New York City to Honolulu, from Las Vegas to Chicago, and even the sidewalks by the Ferry Dock of benighted Port Townsend.

What’s this all about? People have been battered during the epidemic for the last two years. And now their jobs, livelihoods, children’s education and way of life are being threatened because they refuse to take a government and employer-mandated experimental injection. Religious and medical exemptions are being rejected, but that is a false choice anyway… since when should folks need an exemption to exercise their personal right to reject a foreign substance being injected into their body by the government?

Worldwide Walkouts demand a return to freedom and democratic principles. Citizens around the globe are protesting loss of liberty, illegal mandates and tyrannical government overreach. Per Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:

“No government in history has ever surrendered power in the absence of a demand. We need to tell these governments and their friends in the technocracy, the Silicon Valley billionaire boys club, the mainstream media, and the pharmaceutical industry that we will no longer tolerate their trampling of citizens’ rights.”

The group was supported by the overwhelming majority of motorists, who honked horns and thumbed-up agreement with the action. The handful of negative reactions were responded to with calls of “We love you” and “God Bless!” One of the attendees remarked “This is spiritually uplifting. I feel so much better just being here.” There were over a dozen children in attendance, most of them more aware than our local electeds of the terror of coerced medical interventions.

People from all walks of life are fed up with government overreach in multiple aspects of our lives. In ever greater numbers, they’re taking their concerns to school boards, city and county councils, state capitols and the streets. Worldwide Walkouts will be a feature of our lives until the totalitarian thrust of our so-called “leaders” ends, until the following prediction vaporizes in the colossal exhale following an awakened global populace shouting “NO!”

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” —Aldous Huxley

Photos: Stephen Schumacher / Story: Stephen Schumacher & Annette Huenke

The Truth That Must Not Be Spoken

The Truth That Must Not Be Spoken

Do you know of local people who have been injured by
(or died from) the Covid injections?

You’re surely not hearing about vaccine injuries or deaths from any other local media. Obituaries about previously healthy residents who died following their jabs never mention that significant detail. Their obits simply say “passed unexpectedly,” or their deaths are attributed to contracting the Covid virus after being fully vaccinated.

Take the 60-year-old woman who died in May, only a week after she got her second shot. Her passing was denied to be a vaccine death by our county health department and instead claimed as a Covid death from the virus (see “New Wrinkle in Jefferson County’s ‘Fourth’ COVID Death“).

In the winter of 2021 I wrote about the vaccine-induced death of a friend’s aunt (“Death by Injection?“). Previously in good physical health, from the day she was vaccinated with the Pfizer experimental mRNA shot she rapidly began to lose her ability to function. Within a few days she was “having trouble sitting up straight,” and by day seven “she no longer could feed herself.”  Day eight, “she was unable to get up anymore, loss of control of torso and legs.”  On day nine, “we called the ambulance because we could not get her up.”  Once hospitalized, “she was unable to eat or swallow.”  Jefferson Healthcare couldn’t stop this downward spiral; my friend’s aunt died in the hospital.

Despite the indisputable temporal relationship to vaccination, despite no other reasonable explanation for her rapid decline and death, and despite the same pattern being seen in significant numbers of elderly around the world post-vaccination—Jefferson County’s doctors, hospital, and health department refused to acknowledge that her “unexpected” demise was caused by the vaccine. Contrary to CDC requirements for healthcare providers, they did not report either the initial adverse event or the death to VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System.

The cause of death listed on my friend’s aunt’s death certificate was “renal failure”. No mention of the Covid injection that began this cascade of events. A week before her death there had been nothing wrong with her kidneys. Why, after being hospitalized, would they suddenly fail, killing her?

When my friend questioned the attending physician about filing a VAERS report to document an association to the Covid shot, the doctor said she had not reported it. Her rationale was “How can we prove it?”

It is not their job to prove it. The CDC website states:

“Healthcare providers are REQUIRED [their emphasis] to report
to VAERS… adverse events [AEs] after COVID-19 vaccination…
regardless of causality…even if they are not sure if vaccination
caused the event.”

So in a long and difficult process, my friend reported the death to VAERS herself. She then sent a thoughtful email to former health officer Tom Locke, detailing the entire experience with her aunt and Jefferson County’s medical system, cc-ing the doctors involved and several others at Jefferson Healthcare. In her letter, she expressed concern “at the lack of interest in the potential causation or adverse effect the vaccine may have caused.”  She noted:

“The instructions for providers giving out any covid shots is they are required to report ANY adverse effect whether or not one can prove causation. As we should all know, these shots are still experimental, hence, the EUA. The very idea that people are racing through drive-thrus to get experimental shots and there seems to be no follow through in reporting adverse or possible adverse effects shows that there is really no scientific methodology happening here. At least at JHC from what I can tell.”

She then described feedback from others she knew who had gotten the shot. Nine out of ten had experienced adverse events—“from extreme pain, aching, headaches, bone infections, diabetic complications, heart decline to death”—and none had been reported to VAERS. Dr. Locke’s response, in part:

“As you correctly note, there does not have to be a proven cause and effect relationship with the observed adverse reactions. Without access to your aunt’s medical records, I am unable to comment on the possible causes of her rapidly progressive illness and death… I think your submission of a VAERS report was the right thing to do. I am not forwarding your note to the Jefferson County Board of Health since investigation of adverse vaccine reactions does not lie within their authority or responsibility.”

In other words, We are going to ignore this.

Our medical professionals at Jefferson Healthcare and the Jefferson County Health Department are out of compliance with CDC requirements. But it is clear that Locke had no intention of correcting the hospital’s failure to report adverse vaccine reactions or to even inform the health board of their lack of compliance. In the campaign to convince everyone to get their shots, public health officials certainly are not going to admit that any county resident was actually harmed, let alone killed by these injections.

Could Jefferson County Public Health’s leadership possibly get worse?

Enter Jefferson County’s new health officer, 36-year-old Dr. Allison Berry. On August 19, 2021, Berry participated in her first official Board of Health meeting. Responding to well-documented Covid vaccine safety issues raised during public comments, she called facts presented “a slurry of outright falsehoods, which is dangerous.”  In the inverted narrative being foisted on the public, she herself then spewed what many experts would describe as a stream of misinformation. (See “Health Enforcers Catch Misinformation Fever“)

Insisting that these experimental injections are safe, Berry said with a smile: “There have been no documented deaths due to the Covid-19 vaccine in either of the counties that I oversee.”

Of course there have been no documented deaths here. As with my friend’s aunt, adverse reactions, injuries and fatalities from the shots are being covered up, denied and re-labeled.

Another Jefferson County death directly after the shot that I was alerted to involved a medical practitioner who was instructed to intentionally attribute the death to other causes. “A med provider who lost a patient from injection, was dictated the response required to make,” said an email I received. No surprise that the provider was unwilling to come forward.

There are two consistencies in all the stories you will find here:

1) Vaccine adverse events are rarely, if ever, reported to VAERS.

2) Those talking about these injuries and deaths request anonymity.

Our local heath providers avoid reporting to VAERS to keep the “safe and effective” narrative afloat. Their job is to deny deaths and injuries from the shots, and demonize the healthy unvaccinated to pressure them into “compliance”. Some in our health care system admit privately that this is the narrative they are expected to follow, but they fear losing their jobs if they speak out in public.

Sad testimony to the medical tyranny we have descended into, forbidding transparency… where truth can only be whispered in private.

What is the reality in Jefferson County?

In addition to these deaths, I know two vaxxed people hospitalized for severe clotting, both sent to larger hospitals for treatment, neither acknowledged to be related to their shots. I’ve heard multiple stories about county residents who have been in constant pain since their vaccines, who regret that they succumbed to pressure and media propaganda.

One friend was told by a masked employee at a store checkout that he didn’t want the shot, but got it because he’d been promised he’d be able to work without a mask if he got vaccinated. He was anxious to remove his mask because it gave him severe migraines.

Since his shots, “All of my joints hurt, all of the time,” he said. My friend asked, “Has the pain been getting better over time?”  “Not at all,” he said. And now he’s required to mask again, causing him not only to suffer once more from the migraines, but from relentless joint pain from the shots, too. He’s angry—angry enough to complain to a random shopper about the bait-and-switch and about his vaccine injury.

A private healthcare practitioner described a rash of patients coming in post-vax with a range of troubling symptoms. “These symptoms include weeks of unrelenting diarrhea or digestive upset, flares from musculoskeletal conditions like plantar fasciitis, swollen painful joints and nerve pain, headaches and fatigue.”

A doctor told me, “I’ve seen a lot more people having to go to the ER with high blood pressure and atrial fibrillation—enough that they are in danger of having a stroke.” Another contact described a woman who has been having heart issues post-vax. Her heart began racing soon after the shots—tachycardia. She is now on drugs in an effort to keep her heart rate down, with a medical team that doesn’t know what else to do.

An email from a practitioner reported, “A huge proportion of my vaccinated patients had severe side-effects – let’s call them injuries or damage – immediately following vaccination.”  Of this large group who experienced injuries, these two gave him permission to be detailed here:

Another local practitioner told me she’d seen four patients with serious adverse effects after their shots. One told her, “I have had a migraine headache ever since I got the vaccine—unrelenting, all day, every day—and the doctors can’t do anything about it.”

The other three, all seen in the same week, had heart emergencies after their shots. One of them, a “perfectly healthy” woman prior to vaccination, had a heart attack. Another had breathing and other lung complications in addition to heart problems. As described below, damage to heart tissue is permanent and is being seen disproportionately in youth receiving the injections. Doctors are concerned that over the next few years many will die from the cardiac stress these vaccine injuries are placing on their hearts.

Among Jefferson Healthcare workers who will not speak publicly for fear of being fired is a hospital employee who in August admitted that HALF of the people they were seeing at the hospital with Covid were fully vaccinated. Data was being manipulated in order to claim that “nearly 90%” of the Covid cases were unvaccinated. (See “Health Enforcers Manipulate Data to Stigmatize Unvaxxed“)

Clotting, blinding headaches, joint pain, bleeding, neurological issues, cognitive impairment, exhaustion and other long-term injuries are being experienced by people who our medical system is at a loss to help. Mental health crises have skyrocketed. And open discussion about this fallout is not allowed.

Two written personal accounts from local residents received:

After a single shot, a second Port Townsend woman wrote, “My symptoms include headache, brain fog, blurred vision, body aches & arthritic pain, and skin sensations like insect bites but nothing there.”

In a follow-up conversation, I learned that she had chosen the J&J vaccine to avoid having to get a second shot. She immediately started experiencing neuropathy, aches all over her body, and extreme fatigue. Her physician prescribed anti-inflammatory medication and she tried numerous detoxes and other interventions. While all these efforts helped some, four months later “none of my issues have totally gone away.”

Just across the inlet on Whidbey Island, a nurse of 35 years shared the denials and cover-ups that are going on there:

“Eight to ten percent of the people I see who got the shots
are very sick or died. Severe reactions—paralysis, heart
issues, miscarriages, clotting, terrible chest pain…”

She has asked many people, “How did you do with the shot?”  Some told her they did just fine, didn’t notice any problems. A large number, however, responded, “I regret it. I never felt the same.”

Like Jefferson Healthcare, Whidbey General is short on staff and, therefore, hospital beds. “Staff have all left who don’t want to vaxx,” this nurse said.

The spike protein is a pathogenic toxin – “We made a big mistake.”

In two articles last winter (1) (2), I described mechanisms of damage from these experimental shots that censored doctors and scientists were warning about. Since those articles, even more damning information has come to light.

A bombshell study by researchers at the Salk Institute was published at the end of April showing that the Covid spike protein alone, without the rest of the virus, is a pathogen—toxic. And unlike natural infection which may involve breathing in hundreds or thousands of virus particles, injections directly entering the bloodstream cause the body to produce billions or even trillions of those toxic spike proteins, potentially creating worse damage than contracting Covid naturally.

Dr. Byram Bridle, Associate Professor on Viral Immunology at the University of Guelph in Canada, worked under a government grant to develop a Covid vaccine: He is not only pro-vax, but a vaccine developer. He sounded the alarm in May when he saw the findings of a biodistribution study done by Pfizer. Not released to the public, it was obtained by Japan’s regulatory agency through a freedom of information act request. This research showed that the shot does not remain localized at the injection site as anticipated. Instead, spike proteins are distributed throughout the body, damaging the vascular system, causing strokes, heart inflammation, clotting issues and more.

“We made a big mistake. We never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and was a pathogenic protein. So by vaccinating people we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin… The spike protein gets into the blood, circulates through the blood in individuals over several days post-vaccination. It accumulates in a number of tissues such as the spleen, the bone marrow, the liver, the adrenal glands… in quite high concentrations in the ovaries… it can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause damage to the brain.” [source]

As of October 22, the vastly under-reported VAERS database shows over 800,000 adverse events and 17,619 deaths. That is nearly double all of the reported deaths from every childhood and adult vaccine combined in the 30-year history of VAERS.

A CDC fraud expert says that number of deaths is at least five times, and possibly ten times higher. In July, a whistleblower inside the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service (CMS) revealed that their data showed 48,465 people died shortly after receiving their injections. The lawsuit filed against the Department of Health and Human Services which includes the whistleblower’s declaration can be read here.

What have all the autopsies for deaths caused by the Covid shot shown us? As the agency responsible for guaranteeing the safety of this new experimental technology, you’d think that the CDC’s first order of business would be investigating how and why the vaccine was killing people. But the CDC has instead avoided autopsies that would shed light on on post-injection deaths. It took a German scientific report, published in June 2021, to give us the “First case of postmortem study in a patient vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2”.

“Researchers from Germany conducted the world’s first-ever postmortem study on a corpse that had been vaccinated against Covid-19 prior to their death. They discovered that every single organ of the deceased person’s body had become infested with spike proteins as a result of the vaccine.” [source]

Coroners are routinely refusing to conduct autopsies on deaths following Covid vaccination. Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough recently lost a patient to the Covid shot. When he ordered an autopsy, the order was denied. Families with loved ones killed by the vaccine are reporting the same experience. One woman’s death less than 24 hours after her first shot was listed as “failure to thrive/heart failure.” Her doctor also requested an autopsy and was refused. So her bereft son paid for one himself. The report confirmed her death was caused by the vaccine.

In a doctors’ roundtable, Dr. Ryan Cole, a pathologist running one of the largest clinical labs in Idaho, noted he was seeing a marked uptick in diseases among the vaccinated: “Post-vaccinated patients are having diseases that we normally don’t see at rates that are considerably alarming.”

Vaccinologist Dr. Robert Malone, one of the inventors of mRNA technology, and a colleague of regulatory agency scientists, confirmed Cole’s observation of disease uptick:

“The FDA is aware of this. This is the kind of thing I find most shocking. The FDA is fully aware that these data exist and yet they’re not disclosing them to the public… Both CDC and FDA are no longer respecting their own rules and laws.”

Out of ethical concerns, Malone, who took the shots himself, has joined the growing number of experts warning that the technology he helped develop is unsafe.

Malone, Bridle, Cole, McCullough, and every other expert exposing this information are under systematic attack by the control system to defame, discredit and silence them.

Now they’re going after the children

Many groups of medical experts around the world are urgently calling for an immediate halt to this experiment, describing it as a crime against humanity. Thousand of doctors and scientists, like Doctors for Covid Ethics, are warning that “Hapless and defenceless children are now becoming victims of the blasphemic and negligently regulated vaccination agenda” (Open Letter and Notice of Liability from Doctors and Scientists). Their scientific papers note that Covid vaccine dangers include “blood clots and leaky vessels,” immunological problems like “enhancing the severity of wild coronavirus infection,” and “flying under the immune system’s radar with the vaccine’s genetic code.”

Still, the pharma/medical/industrial complex presses on, with a constantly-changing narrative designed to stress and confuse, incrementally pushing ever-more oppressive dictates. Now because of the vaccine’s dismal failure to provide any protection at all after only a few months, all the previously “fully vaxxed” need boosters. These boosters will possibly offer a few months of antibodies to the original Covid virus, which is no longer in circulation. It does not protect against Delta or any of the other variants emerging in the vaccinated.

Pressure is ramping up not only to inject all adults, the kids are in the crosshairs. In August, on its Covid-19 webpage, Jefferson County Public Health featured the banner “VAX TO SCHOOL.”

Parroting CDC propaganda, our health department called for children 12 and older—who have statistically zero risk from the virus—to get the shots. The pitch on the website assured us that “COVID-19 vaccines are safe and very effective.”

As illustrated by volumes of data which the industry-captured CDC and FDA are not showing you, both claims are not only false, but inversions of the truth.

Data disclosed from early Covid vaccine trials on children showed that 85% experienced adverse reactions from mild to serious. Damage from those trials was kept under wraps, as with 12-year-old participant Maddie, whose family took to social media to describe her massive injury. “It has been a frustrating 1.5 months to be told 7 out of the 8 times we took her to the ER, that every test is normal and this is all in her head. Like she can stop the excruciating pain she is in, numbness in her legs and hands, fainting, dizziness, major gastrointestinal issues, fuzzy mind, memory problems, rashes, ulcers and more.”

Maddie, a previously healthy, energetic, straight-A student, was reduced to crippling, scream-inducing pain that landed her in the emergency room within 24 hours of her second Pfizer trial dose. She told her family, “It feels like my heart is being ripped out through my neck.”

Stephanie de Garay testifies about her daughter Maddie’s vaccine injury, June 29, 2021

In a press conference five months later Maddie’s mother, a “pro-vaccine and pro-science” electrical engineer who also volunteered her two sons for the trials, reported:

“Over the next two and a half months her abdominal muscle and nerve pain became unbearable. She developed additional symptoms that included gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure, and heart rate, memory loss; she mixes up words, brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting, and then seizures… She developed verbal and motor tics. She had loss of feeling from the waist down and muscle weakness, drastic changes in her vision, urinary retention, and loss of bladder control, severely irregular and heavy menstrual cycles and eventually she had to have an NG tube put in to get nutrition.”

Pfizer tried to cover up the injuries first by calling Maddie a “mental patient,” then denying her problems were related to the vaccine, eventually reporting to the FDA she had “functional abdominal pain” (a stomach ache). Nine months later Maddie is still in a wheelchair, ignored by Pfizer, the FDA, the CDC and the NIH, who are all exempt from liability. [source]

Maddie’s mother asks, “Maddie volunteered for the Pfizer trial, why aren’t they researching her to figure out why this happened so other people don’t have to go through this?… She was totally fine before this. She did the right thing trying to help everybody else and they’re not helping her.”

A mass vaccination event for schoolchildren in Australia—in which parents were denied entry—resulted in at least two children dead, two in comas, and an unknown number of other casualties. In an August 24 interview with Dr. Peter McCullough, he says data from Australia shows that more patients are dying from the vaccine than the virus by 100-fold or more.

Formerly healthy American teens, many of them top athletes, are being hospitalized after the shot for heart damage, and deaths are mounting.

Doctors & Lawyers Issue Dire Warning to High School, College & Pro Athletes
August 8, 2021

On August 8th, medical experts joined sports coaches and an attorney in the webinar “Doctors & Lawyers Issue Dire Warning to High School, College & Pro Athletes.” Top cardiologist Peter McCullough explained (start at 9:07):

“We have about 3,000 certified cases of myocarditis or heart inflammation that have occurred—that’s what the CDC has confirmed. We have no idea how many more thousands of young people have been affected like this. The vaccines all have a dangerous mechanism of action where genetic material is taken up into the heart. It manifests by chest pain, the development of heart failure, EKG changes, abnormal blood tests showing the heart’s being injured, and then it progresses to heart failure or cardiovascular death in some people. I’ve seen these patients in my clinic… It doesn’t look like the vaccine is safe and it doesn’t even look like it works to prevent Covid-19.”

Nuclear cardiologist Dr. Richard Fleming agreed (start at 16:40):

“These viral cardiomyopathies or weakness to the heart, this inflammation and blood clotting occurring with these vaccines, are causing permanent damage to the heart… by and large, once that damage is done, it’s going to be permanent. You’ve got drugs that aren’t having any beneficial effect, but they’re having consequences. The facts in the EUA [Emergency Use Authorization] show these vaccines do not work.”

Former Chief Scientific Advisor to Pfizer, Dr. Michael Yeadon added (start at 34:45):

“All of these products home in to the ovaries and testicles. It’s not benign, it’s going to be harming those tissues. And there’s a second hit—[women’s bodies produce] antibodies against their own placentas when pregnant women are vaccinated with one of these vaccines. It’s just appalling. [There are] also reproductive health risks to males in that they concentrate in testicular tissue. I’m very concerned that they may not be able to have children.”

Putting a final nail in the coffin, pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole described the inability of the current shots to provide any protection at all against prevailing variants (start at 54:25):

“With Delta spreading quickly and being almost 98% of SARS-Cov-2 cases in the US now, this vaccine is out of date, it doesn’t work. The shot does not work against Delta. We’re giving a shot that can do extreme harm to the body, to the brain, to the vesicles, to the heart of these young individuals, and it’s for something that is out of date already.

“You have to realize that more than half of these youth have already had Covid and it is a triple risk for adverse reactions if you give them this shot… to put them at risk for something they don’t need. A broad natural immunity is far better than a vaccine immunity. We know that 17 years later those who have had SARS-Cov-1 still have T-cell memory and immunity. A broad natural immunity is a lifetime immunity.”

As the mainstream narrative about Covid crumbles, we witness increasing desperation to keep the public traumatized and to demonize the Americans who are seeing through the lies. And as more and more people lose faith in our medical system, government and media, pressure continues to ramp up to get dangerous experimental shots in every arm on earth.

It looks like the 5- to 11-year-olds are next

In the May 10 International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, MIT Senior Research Scientist Stephanie Seneff, PhD, co-authored “Worse Than the Disease?,” an extensive review of unintended consequences from the Covid shots. So disturbed by the science emerging about these vaccines, she has focused her academic research exclusively on this subject over the past year.

Dr. Paul Thomas with MIT scientist Stephanie Seneff, PhD, Episode 020, 10/13/21
Click on image and scroll to breakout interview

In an October 13 interview with pediatrician Dr. Paul Thomas, Seneff describes the effects of “monster messenger RNA” and “neurotoxic spike proteins”:

“The spike protein is neurotoxic… The brain and the heart are really sensitive to this vaccine. This myocarditis [heart inflammation] is really disturbing because the kids are getting a much higher rate of myocarditis… if you’re young you have zero chance of dying from Covid-19. And that vaccine can really mess you up — it can give you permanent heart damage…

“I think the reproductive system could be at great issue here, I think we could be causing a massive infertility crisis in the future generations—especially when we start vaccinating 5-year-old kids. I cannot believe that we’re saying fine, let’s roll it out for the kids… I’m in such a state of shock about this.”

In Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, Moderna shots have been suspended for young people due to increased risks of heart inflammation. Iceland halted the shots for all ages. Norway opted not to give 12- to 15-year olds second dose shots from any manufacturer because of the incidence of pericarditis and myocarditis, “especially among young men and boys.”

In September 2021, Nobel prize nominee Dr. Vladimir Zelenko co-authored “THE VACCINE DEATH REPORT – Evidence of millions of deaths and serious adverse events resulting from the experimental COVID-19 injections.”

The authors ask, “Why do some people die, or become disabled for life, while others seem just fine after being inoculated?”  They point to evidence that “some people get a harmless substance injected, while others get a shot with 5, 10, 20, or 30 micrograms of mRNA… in the booster shots some vials contain as much as 100 or even 250 micrograms of mRNA.”

Among the concerns documented in the report are large amounts of graphene oxide found in vaccine vials which can alter our electro-magnetic field and disrupt the normal functioning of organs, permanently altered DNA modifying the human genome, and dramatic damage to blood cells following injection.

Healthy red blood cells are smooth and spherical, non-clumping,
even in color, shape and size.

Micrograph of live blood cells 24 hours after the mRNA vaccine shows crystallized red cells called Heinz bodies, large symplasts of graphene oxide crystals center and Orotic acid crystals in the upper right hand corner.

“We reveal the real risk of an unprecedented genocide… The data suggests that we may currently be witnessing the greatest organized mass murder in the history of our world.”

 

What if doctors and scientists who are being censored are right?

 

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Do you know of local people who have been injured by
(or died from) the Covid injections?

If you have a vaccine injury or death story to share,
please send it to vaxinjury@porttownsendfreepress.com

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County Kills Housing in Order to Save It

County Kills Housing in Order to Save It

After declaring a housing emergency in Jefferson County, public officials have now taken action to make the situation worse. On October 4 the Board of County Commissioners declared a new emergency establishing a moratorium on processing housing applications, then on October 11 repealed and replaced it.  What’s up with all that?

Our county was already under a housing emergency declared by the BoCC on July 31, 2017 under Resolution 35-17.  It has been over 4 years since this declaration, and we still have a dire lack of housing. Even as the BoCC empaneled a task force to “look into it,” we are still lacking housing for both the well-off and those needing affordable housing.

We certainly do not have a lack of land. We do not have a lack of talk. But we do have a lack of action. Let’s look at the talk: 

OlyCap talks about constructing an apartment building in Port Townsend next to the Permit center, on land basically donated by Jefferson County. That property acquisition was more than two years ago (September 9, 2019).  They even had a ground-breaking ceremony. However, nothing has happened there as yet.

The Legislature allowed some religious organization to install temporary housing on their property. So some “wooden tents” were built. They provide temporary housing to a few.

The County and City engineered the tent camp on the Fairgrounds. That turned out to be a debacle. Now, they have built another tent city on Mill Road.

But aside from these baby steps, the reality has amounted to just talk. 

Now the County has declared another housing emergency under Moratorium Ordinance No. 06-1011-21… not to allow more housing, but to prohibit more housing!

That’s right, the County has acted to prohibit housing at the same time as they have a declared housing emergency. 

Why have they done this? According to the BoCC’s proclamation, they “enacted a moratorium for one year to pause on certain types of development that could result in densities incompatible with zoning in rural areas.”

But what is meant by incompatible? The minimum lot size in Jefferson County is 5 acres per the zoning regulations. If a lot was in existence prior to the county adopting the Growth Management Act (GMA) it is a legal lot. But now it appears the county might try and make any lot created prior to 1971 unbuildable if it is less than 5 acres.

So the question has to be asked; why is there a 5 acre standard? In the zoning and legal industries it is called a 5 acre bright-line standard.

Under a court case called Thurston County v. W. Wash. Growth Mgmt. Hearings Bd., No. 80115-1, the State Supreme Court ruled that there is no 5 acre minimum “bright-line” standard under the GMA. This was remanded down to the Western Washington Growth Management Board and under Case No. 05-2-0002 Order On Remand Finding Compliance (Rural Lands) stated that:

In the Final Decision and Order of July 20, 2005 the Board observed that densities that are no more than one dwelling unit per 5 acres “are generally considered ‘rural’ under the GMA”, and that “Densities that are not urban but are greater than one dwelling unit per 5 acres are generally deemed to promote sprawl in violation of goal 2 of the GMA”, citing numerous prior Board decisions to that effect. In the appeal of this case, the Supreme Court found the application of an urban/rural five acre bright-line exceeded the Board’s jurisdiction. The Board has since followed that Supreme Court directive and will continue to do so.

In addition, they stated that:

The GMA does not define what constitutes “rural densities”; rather, rural densities are “not characterized by urban growth” and are “consistent with rural character.” “Whether a particular density is rural in nature is a question of fact based on the specific circumstances of each case.” Nor does the GMA dictate a specific manner of achieving a variety of rural densities. “Local conditions may be considered and innovative zoning techniques employed to achieve a variety of rural densities.”

This leaves open the question: What is the minimum lot size in rural lands?  To answer this question you need to look at the Growth Management Act:

  • Under RCW 36.70A.070(5)(b) it states that: “The rural element shall provide for a variety of rural densities…”
  • Under RCW 36.70A.030(17) it states that: “Rural development can consist of a variety of uses and residential densities…”
  • Under RCW 36.70A.030(18) it states that: “Rural services do not include storm or sanitary sewers…”
  • Under RCW 36.70A.030(20) it states that: “Urban governmental services” or “urban services” include those public services and public facilities at an intensity historically and typically provided in cities, specifically including storm and sanitary sewer systems…”

In other words, the difference between rural and urban is whether there is sewer available or not.

Under WAC 246-272A-0320 Table X the minimum lot size depends on the type of soils and whether there is public water available. The minimum lot size ranges from 12,500 square feet to 2.5 acres.

In considering all the above it is clear that retaining a 5 acre minimum lot size is not consistent with the GMA. In fact, the minimum lot size could be 12,500 square feet (0.2869 acres). It is clearly up to the county to have a range of rural residential densities. Currently the County has not provided a range of rural densities.

Now we get to the crux of this new Emergency Moratorium. There are over 900 subdivisions in Jefferson County. Most of these subdivisions were created prior to 1971. Most of the lots created were less than 12,500 square feet in area.

So some people are trying to use the Boundary Line Adjustment to reconfigure existing lots that are less than 12,500 square feet. Most of the substandard lots (substandard because sewers are not available) are 5,000 to 7,000 square feet.

There are many of these lots in Jefferson County. Once they are reconfigured they can meet the 12,500 square foot minimum to build on septic.

Why should we care?  The answer is simple: Under basic economics of supply and demand, as the supply decreases and the demand increase, the price will go up. That is why homes and land are being bid up.

Our supply of homes and land to build on is in short supply, thus the price is going up. This is not a problem for people with the money to bid a home up in value, but it is quite a problem for those of lesser means. 

In time this may contribute to areas like Irondale being gentrified… but then where can poorer people there afford to live?

There are many deeply concerned citizens currently working on solutions to our housing crisis. A more democratic approach might have been a concerted effort by county authorities to solicit input from the public prior to instituting a stop-gap measure which, in the near term, is certain to compound the problem.