Reading San Juan County’s Budget in Brief, you’re confronted with numerous reasons that the county is facing substantial budget shortfalls  including among others  inflation, limits on property tax increases,  state and federal mandates,

What isn’t included are the costs of the abrupt  decision to fire  the Department of Community Development current land use staff and contract out the work to an out of state firm.

The questionable move was made at the behest of Interim County Manager Mark Tompkins and Kyle Dodd serving as interim Deputy Director of DCD.

Five staff members of DCD were fired by Tompkins, who was also serving as interim Director of DCD as well as Director of Health and Human Services. The firings were done days before Jessica Hudson took on the position of County Manager.

Prior to the firings, an application to site and operate a concrete batch plant in Olerin Business Park on San Juan Island was filed in early 2024. Despite five county planners making the case that issuing a MDNS and not requiring a CUP were not compliant with the county code, Dodd and Tompkins overruled the planners. In August 2024,

An August 2024 ruling by San Juan County Hearing Examiner agreed with the planners’ position. He ruled that the “MDNS issued on or about May 1, 2024 for the applicant’s proposal, assigned File No. LANDUSE-24-0045, is clearly erroneous and shall be withdrawn. The applicant’s proposal to site a concrete plant in the Olerin Business Park on San Juan Island requires a new conditional use permit.”

Costs include:

• $1 million contract with David Evans and Associates (DEA), an Oregon Corporation.to do the current use planning previously done by the fired DCD staff.
• The contract was increased by $450,000 in the 2026 budget.
• The legal consulting fees the county incurred fighting the grievance filed by the union. (Tompkins said in an interview that the county had followed all union requirements.)
• Still to be determined are the costs if the Washington  State’s Public Employment Relations Committee (PERC) decides in favor of the union. A decision could be issued in September at the earliest.

Former planner Marc Santos wrote in his article “Planning Scars from the San Juans: Looking back to 2024″ that “prior to the firings, the current use team was starting to make a major dent in getting through the backlogged permits by streamlining the review processes and tracking workflow step completion more consistently in the online permitting system. This also allowed us to track workflow progress with more accuracy, which allowed for more transparency and fairness than previous years had allowed for.

“In the absence of official management metrics, workflow steps became the backbone of documenting productivity in the department and current use planning staff went from completing 1,506 workflow steps in 2022 to completing as many as 2,540 workflow steps in 2023. Under the 32-hour work week model initially proposed by management and put into effect on October 1, 2023, union staff averaged 40.3 workflow steps per week.”

“….the unionized DCD Planners were costing County tax payers roughly $180/step under a shortened work week schedule while the DEA contract signed by Mark Tompkins cost the County roughly $1,100/step per week by early 2025 with no signs of levelling off. The slower pace of the contract works was being augmented by a new middle manager position, Darcie Nielsen, who does not have any employees working under her.

In addition to doubling department productivity, the team was able to timely process two major approvals for bona fide affordable housing projects on Lopez Island (21 units in total).”

It is time for the county to clean up this mess and free up funds. Having an interim county manager restructure DCD less than a month before the arrival of the new county manager was an expensive unforced error..

Sharon Kivisto

Editor, San Juan Islander