When I wrote “Griffin Place and What Comes Next” I laid out how the pressures coming from state growth rules are shaping projects in town whether people realize it or not. That article focused on one project, but this one has a larger purpose. Before I get too far into the weeds I want to be clear about why I am writing this. I am asking anyone who reads this, whether you live inside town limits or anywhere else on the island, to speak up and tell the Town Council that it is all right to say no to these huge growth expectations. It is all right to tell the state that the numbers do not fit. And if saying no exposes cracks in the structure that lead to the failure of the incorporated town, then that only shows the structure itself no longer matches the community it is supposed to serve. If saying no leads to better outcomes, then we will finally know what works. Either way, silence is not going to help us. Your voice will. This article looks at the bigger picture that sits behind all of this, because the decisions being shaped right now will affect every one of us for years to come.
Before going any further, anybody who reads me knows I like to make sure we all understand the critter we are talking about, and once again Friday Harbor is the only incorporated town within San Juan County. The port, the county, and the ferry system are all separate governments that simply happen to sit inside the town’s footprint, and people move between them every day. Everyone on the island relies on the town because the public schools are here, the ferry lands here, and most essential services flow through here. But the requirements that come with being an incorporated town fall most directly on the twenty eight hundred residents who live inside the town limits, even though the effects reach far beyond them.
If you have watched recent meetings, you have seen Community Development Director Ryan Erickson walk the Town Council through the consultant packet from BERK. It is a huge document, more than one hundred pages long, and the Town Council is only partway through it. Even so, you can hear Town Council members speaking as if many of the outcomes are already settled. Instead of stepping back and asking whether the basic assumptions fit the reality of a small incorporated town with limited land and costly infrastructure that was already expanded for growth that never came, the discussion jumps to where taller buildings might go or how much parking might be needed. The bigger question is being skipped. The town is trying to make the numbers work instead of asking whether the numbers make sense in the first place.
This is where the frustration many people feel finally makes sense. The problem is not one decision or one project. The problem is the structure itself. Government has a way of putting the cart before the horse, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It explains why plans feel backwards. It explains why people say there is no common sense. It explains why the results often seem out of step with the place we live.
Government does not begin by asking what the community can sustain. It begins by asking what the state requires. The Growth Management Act is the clearest example. Instead of asking what an island with limited access can realistically support, the state gives counties the population tools, the county sets the allocation, and the Town Council is told to build plans around those numbers. Everything becomes a reverse engineering exercise. The plan becomes a product of the numbers instead of the numbers being shaped by the plan. It is cart before horse in its purest form.
The same backward method is at work in the growth model. The town is being asked to zone for a future that is not likely to arrive. The proposals assume a level of growth that has never happened here. They assume economic engines that no longer exist. Instead of starting from the question of what the town and the island can realistically carry, the Town Council is being pushed to build a plan around a model created somewhere else. The result is exactly what you would expect. The structural mismatch is the real issue. The town is reacting to mandates it has no ability to meet. At this point, we are building a cart so big it would take two strong draft horses to pull it, and all we have to hook up to it is a sweet little pony. That is how far off the expectations are from the reality of what a small incorporated town on an island can carry.
Now that the structure has been laid bare, this is the right moment to look at the numbers themselves. The county hands the town a housing target of nine hundred sixteen additional units that we are expected to plan for. For a town of about twenty eight hundred residents, that is a massive number. The BERK packet shows that under current zoning inside town limits there is room for about two hundred ninety seven new homes. If the town adopted every recommended upzone and expanded every proposed UGA, the number rises to about five hundred seventy nine. Even in the most aggressive scenario, the model still falls more than three hundred units short of the required nine hundred sixteen.
The employment expectations follow the same pattern. The county has allocated five hundred sixty three net new jobs to Friday Harbor and its UGA between now and 2045. BERK’s employment appendix shows how that could be met on paper by creating a large light industrial UGA by the airport and assuming that future job growth will concentrate there. In that model there is room on paper for about nine hundred thirty five new jobs. But those numbers depend on land that is not served by sewer, would require major infrastructure extensions, and sits in an area that has no real economic base to support that kind of growth. The spreadsheet shows capacity, but capacity is not the same thing as realistic growth.
This brings us back to the twenty eight hundred residents who live inside the town limits. They are the ones who pay the town utility rates. They are the ones who fund the municipal corporation. They are the ones who will pay for any water and sewer upgrades required to support the numbers the county assigns. The island uses the town every day, but the cost of the structure falls only on the people who live inside town limits. Because what we are describing above is not a future that will ever materialize, the people who live inside the town limits are being set up to pay for something that cannot exist.
People should also understand that even if they do not live inside town limits, the decisions made by the five people who sit on Town Council shape daily life for the entire island. There is not anything that happens in town without the approval of Town Council, and for a quick example on the smallest scale, just think about the roundabouts. That project affected every resident and every visitor, even though only the twenty eight hundred people inside the town limits had any say in the government that approved it. Because of how the structure works, those five seats are some of the most powerful positions in the county. They control the hub where the ferry lands, where every child goes to school, where the county government sits, and where most businesses operate. We should always respect anyone who steps up to serve, especially since the pay is low and the workload is real. But there is another problem that rarely gets talked about. Only the twenty eight hundred residents who live inside the town limits are eligible to run for those seats, and that is a very small pool to pull leadership from. Combine that with a job that is thankless, weedy, and pays almost nothing, and it is no surprise that the same people stay in those seats for a long time and that the positions are rarely contested. Some have served for more than fifteen years. That is not healthy for any government, and it is another sign that the structure we are using does not fit.
By this point it should be clear that the Town cannot keep absorbing every requirement that comes down from the state or the county. At some point the only responsible choice is to push back when the numbers do not fit. And as I said earlier, if saying no exposes cracks in the system that cause the town to fail, then that is proof the town should not exist as a standalone corporation in the first place. I am repeating that point on purpose because it matters. It is the only honest way to find out what actually works. And if saying no leads to better outcomes, then we will finally know what works. What does not work is pretending that a small island town can keep forcing a square peg into a round hole. So reach out to the Town Council and tell them you support them when they take the harder road.
People deserve to understand that the frustration they feel is not coming from one development or one meeting. It is coming from a system that keeps forcing twenty eight hundred residents to shoulder responsibilities that properly belong to the island as a whole. If the system continues down this path, then it is fair to ask whether the structure we are using still makes sense. People deserve a structure that fits, not one that asks a small town to carry more than it possibly can.
Jeremy Nash