Clallam County Watchdog

Important Today: * Vote! Ballots are due by 8:00 p.m. A list of Clallam County ballot drop box locations can be found by clicking here . * Today's regular 10:00 a.m. commissioners’ meeting features the Citizens’ Forum , your only chance to ask questions and get answers. You can find information on participating in person or online here . Every acre of DNR-managed trust land locked up by lawsuits,...

Did you know a 2019 race in Clallam County was decided by only 3 votes? Your vote matters! Please return your ballot to an official ballot drop box by 8 p.m. tomorrow. Here is a list of Clallam County drop box locations. Two national wildlife refuges are up for grabs. A tribal oyster business wants them, and the Tribe’s own chairman says that’s how this started. Two Democrats on your ballot are wi...

I am not a politician. I’ve gotten some pushback on that statement over the last 14 months, but I still believe it. I didn’t enter this race to become an agent of government. I entered this race to represent the people of my community—many of whom, like me, felt they no longer had a voice in the decisions shaping our lives and our future. If I am elected, I will never forget whose business I am co...

Indivisible activist Martha Rudersdorf went behind the camera to ask why protesters support Mike French, and none named an issue. Meanwhile, French “liked” a Facebook post mocking a local woman for backing his opponent. She wrote to him four days ago and is still waiting for an answer. “Why Are You Supporting Mike French?” Martha Rudersdorf is a retired Sequim teacher and an Indivisible activist....

The Seegers/French race is coming down to the wire, and your ballot could decide it. Meanwhile, a vandal was caught on camera in Blyn, a Dignity Bus like the one Port Angeles is weighing already failed in Illinois, and county officials found a way to raise taxes without asking you. Here’s what you need to know this week. Your Ballot Could Decide This Race The Seegers/French race is going to be clo...

OlyCAP wants Port Angeles to help fund a converted motor coach with 20 individual sleep pods. The request comes from the same leadership that oversees a Safe Parking program limited to a handful of spaces. That program received over $118,000 in taxpayer funds approved by Commissioner Mike French, who sits on OlyCAP’s board. Public records showed substantial spending on OlyCAP staffing even as part...

Sixty years after the civil rights movement, racial segregation and discrimination are poised to make a quiet comeback under the leadership of the Clallam County Commissioners. They intend to use the Comprehensive Plan—the massive document that will chart the course of the county for the next twenty years—to accomplish it. French’s “Misspoke” Moment on a Non-Required Assessment Commissioner Mike F...

In this Sundays With Seegers, County Commissioner candidate Jake Seegers shares powerful news: 659 of our neighbors signed the petition to reopen Olympic Hot Springs Road. The signatures came from kitchen tables, family conversations, and booths at this summer’s festivals—proof that Clallam County is ready to lead. This is what happens when a community refuses to wait and decides to write its own...

Public-records emails from Commissioner Mike French reveal detailed, ongoing collaboration with arts advocates to advance a cultural-access sales tax, including advice on packing meetings and preparing presentations. The correspondence fits a broader record in which French has made time for special-interest campaigns on Towne Road and a proposed courthouse renaming, while general public input face...

Serenity House is covering nearly $800,000 in shortfalls while chasing roughly $12 million for a 36-unit low-barrier permanent supportive housing project in Sequim. Meanwhile, state tax dollars fund tribal-only homeownership, Peninsula Behavioral Health’s North View mirrors Seattle’s housing-first model, and commissioners budget association dues that include a sponsored “Bunny Break.” Tonight’s pu...

Commissioner Mike French sold Clallam County voters a five-year plan to put 900 people into family-wage jobs. The number has already been cut to 603. The coordinator calls even that target extremely ambitious, and the public scoreboard shows roughly 21 people who finished training and later reported a job or higher pay. Meanwhile, a $733,000 mobile welding trailer sits delayed by safety problems,...

This summer, a Clallam County Sheriff’s deputy followed a frantic man into the dark along the south side of Highway 101 in the “Baker Dip” in east Port Angeles. “Come here and look,” the man said. “Right here.” Two people were down. Neither was breathing. Paramedics arrived, confirmed no pulses, and began CPR while more sirens closed in. One of the men, John Michael Adkins, 54, was later taken to...

Board of Health Chair Mike French has hammered Jake Seegers over a two-year-old church metaphor. Meanwhile, the health officer French oversees once posted that she would shoot a sitting president in his sleep, fantasized about sterilizing her brother, and mocked patients—yet the Board has refused to put her professionalism on the agenda. The double standard is the point that our leaders are missin...

Lincoln warned that a free people die by suicide, not by foreign armies. Shogren applies that to Clallam elections: a tabulation system she says an auditor once called “easily hackable,” a results page that opened with a password during testing, and a canvassing board that said refusing to certify is a crime. If the public cannot watch the count without a vendor password, she writes, the county ca...

Ballots are in the mail today. After serving as a Charter Review Commissioner last year and closely following Clallam County politics for the past three years, I’m sharing exactly how I’ll vote—if you’re curious. These choices prioritize spending restraint, parental rights, fairness, accountability, and constitutional governance over ideology or special interests. Please join the discussion in the...

Reminder: Today, October 13, 10:30 a.m. — pack the room. The comprehensive plan public hearing is open for comment in person or virtually ; if the next 20 years in Clallam County matter to you, show up and tell the commissioners and DCD Director Bruce Emery that Futurewise gets no veto , that the Climate Vulnerability Assessment was never required (only a climate resilience element under HB 1181),...

(Read Part I first: “ The Board Wrote Futurewise’s Lawsuit for Them .”) This is the second half of what happened at the Comp Plan hearing. The first half was Jake Seegers warning the Board it had already written Futurewise’s lawsuit for them. This piece is about the activist NGO that sues counties—and the county association that will not fight it—plus what Commissioner Mike French said days later...

Intro by Jeff Tozzer Warning: This article contains graphic images of human waste. Every morning before the doors open at Van Dyke Hardwoods on First Street, someone has to walk the alley. Trash gets scattered. Sleeping bags pile up and get abandoned. Needles turn up. There have been fires started at the back door, break-ins, and, more than once, human waste left right outside the shop. Randy Van...

A county cashier once walked off with more than $600,000 because one person took the money, recorded it, and reconciled the drawer. Shogren argues the Auditor is the last independent checkpoint before public dollars leave the treasury — and that Clallam is still rubber-stamping missing grant checks, a $5 “fee” that functions like a tax, and a $303.50 recording charge that mostly funds Olympia. Fol...

You know Mike French is up for reelection when the paper tells you not to believe your eyes. This week’s potpourri is the gap between the official story and the street: a front report on crime dropping, a backpack taken at gunpoint, a $22-an-hour parking job, and a Colorado judge-threat suspect now on the Clallam jail roster. The front page disconnect You know Mike French is up for reelection when...

This morning the commissioners will read an Indigenous Peoples’ Day proclamation that no one requested, and that last year no one showed up to receive. A counter-proclamation sent September 9 is still unanswered. The reading shames the taxpayers who fund it, then clears the ground for the grants and land deals that follow. Nobody asked County Administrator Todd Mielke explained the rule a month ag...

At a Sequim Rotary forum, Commissioner Mike French said Clallam County expanded harm reduction after the Jamestown Healing Clinic opened, so the program could “leverage that connection” and send active users to treatment. The county health officer who oversees that program also works at the clinic. Last year the Harm Reduction Health Center logged about 12,000 encounters and 27 on-site treatment a...

In this Sundays With Seegers , commissioner candidate Jake Seegers addresses a rumor head-on. Everyone has heard the stories: people struggling with addiction and homelessness are being transported to Port Angeles from communities across Washington. Public records show that, at least in the treatment system, transportation from outside the county is not a rumor—it happens. The more important quest...

Jake Seegers told the Board of Commissioners that the Climate Element portion of the Comprehensive Plan is written for government, nonprofits, and activists — not for the people who own the land. Then Futurewise attorney Brooke Frickleton asked them not to adopt it, called the vulnerability study only “one step,” and cited the group’s new Thurston County win: planning without hard, action-forcing...

This article and podcast were delayed due to a power outage. If you want a snapshot of Clallam County right now, skip the official talking points. Look at the boycott threats, the “voter-approved” fee voters never approved, the homeless-voting flyer that treats ID as optional, and the grant money that chases addiction as if the shortage of counselors is the main problem. This week’s potpourri is n...