Three months after my office burned down in the Friday Harbor arson fire that took the Windermere offices, the Crow’s Nest, and a handful of other business back in 2022, I voluntarily left a senior GIS role with the geospatial giant ESRI in order to accept my first local government job. On July 5, 2022, I started the first day of my dream job as a land use planner with San Juan County DCD (Department of Community Development).
The pay cut was a minor sacrifice to finally engage my planning background and professional skillsets in a way that would directly contribute to my immediate community. Even more, I was excited to join a unionized office (Local 1849, part of AFSCME Council 2 union membership) and work with a diverse team of dedicated professionals within the County’s planning department.
I went from drowning in technical support cases with ESRI to drowning in ten years of backlogged permit reviews, and I was excited to really make a difference. Contention over land use challenges in the public sphere is a given I picked up on in graduate school and did not scare me off the tasks at hand.
I was so excited, in fact, that I convinced biologist/ecologist, Jessa Madosky, PhD, who also is the love of my life and spouse, to apply for the next land use planner vacancy that opened up some months later in 2022. We had worked professionally together on a superfund committee working group just outside of Asheville, NC and knew we could keep work at work and home at home. . She applied and was hired under David Williams to help fill another long-standing vacancy in the department.
Jessa’s hiring brought our total planner count to three fulltime current use review planners (myself, Jessa, and Shannon F.), one current use planner based on Orcas (Peter H.), and one vacation rental administrator/planner (Yancey Bagby). We were still one planner short from historic current use staffing levels, though oftentimes the long-term planners (Sophia C. and Colin M.) or environmental planner Brooke Sullivan, PhD, would assist in one manner or another.
Fast forward to December of 2023 and DCD department productivity had nearly doubled thanks to the work of unionized staff under supportive department heads David Williams and Norman Gollub (the latter of which was temporarily hired for 6 months). Our 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.
Some highlights of team efforts contributing to the success throughout that time included: DCD’s older, clunky land use review Q and A paper form (made in the 2010s) was replaced with a streamlined web application I developed as an addendum to the County’s long appreciated Polaris web maps.
Jessa Madosky, PhD, had taken lead on synthesizing County project permit timeline requirements with recent State law review timeline mandates (such as State Bill 5290) and coordinated with legal staff and DCD managers to improve the review processes and exempt certain steps when allowed.
The County’s cumbersome vacation rental certificate review process mandated by County Council was improved by Yancey Bagby by digitizing the process more completely as well as working more closely with operators.
And Brooke Sullivan, PhD, had made successful strides in upping the quality of environmental reports and streamlining mandatory SEPA review processes that made it more equitable across applications.
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).
In 2024, Mark Tompkins stepped in as interim DCD department head (in addition to interim County Manager) and brought in Kyle Dodd as the interim deputy for DCD. In an odd early move, Mark’s first policy change in DCD was to ban staff from bringing in dogs on January 16, 2024. Later policy changes were less formal and felt through action, often after the fact instead of a formal notice.
Current use staff were no longer being supported for formal training of any kind, despite the County initially promoting that it had $21k reserved for “[f]or testing & new certifications for DCD planners” in the preceding year’s budget.
On April 1, Kyle Dodd issued a SEPA determination against the recommendations of staff for a portable concrete batch plant that prompted a series of whistleblower notices to management and County Council.
On May 29, Mark reappropriated a DCD laptop (that had been requested by DCD staff since January) for use in the Health Department and just the day before, Kyle Dodd held a private meeting with Greg Laird of David Evans and Associates, Inc. (DEA) to discuss contracting out what was then unionized, current use permit review work to the firm.
One planner (Peter H.) quit his position shortly thereafter with the rest of us getting concerned for what might come next despite the fact that none of us had ever received a disciplinary action or corrective mandate in any of our personnel files.
Finally, on July 9, 2024, County Council agreed in a closed-door executive session to support Mark Tompkins’s decision for a “restructure” of DCD that involved the layoff of three current use planners (myself, Jessa Madosky PHD, and Yancey Bagby), a beloved planning retiree who had come back in an effort to help DCD as a part-time worker (Shannon F.), and one long-term/environmental planner (Brooke Sullivan, PhD).
The work of the three unionized, current use planners and one long-term, environmental planner was replaced by one new middle manager (with no employees) and a DEA contract initially signed to the tune of $1 million. The July 9 decision sparked a union grievance that is still in the process of being disputed and decided upon to this day.
By October 21, 2024, Mark Tompkins and Kyle Dodd presented information that DEA needed to add a fifth member to its team in order to keep up with permit review volume, which councilmember Jane Fuller believed indicated an improvement in efficiency. For the first six months of contracting work, DEA was averaging a cost of $8,834 per week, or nearly $1,100 per workflow step accomplished in that time. Between November 2024-November 2025, DEA’s invoices never fell below $40k/month and averaged over $13,600/week and the County had been invoiced for a total of $831,466.78.
Comparing before and after the 2024 layoff: The work of two Planner II’s, two Planner III’s, one part-time Planner IV, and 10 percent of the time of one long-term/Environmental Planner at the mid-level pay grade (higher than actual pay scales) would cost an estimated $7,241.60 per week (4.6 FTE, or full time equivalent) throughout the year under the 2023-2025 collective bargaining agreement.
The County’s outsourcing contract with DEA cost ($13,600/week) averaged almost twice that going into the final stretches of 2025 at a time when a stagnating economy typically lends itself to a stagnation/decrease in permit applications. Union-represented planners clocked an average of 40.3 workflow steps/week under a 32-hour work week schedule while the 5-person contract team (later a 6-person team) clocked an average of 8.0 steps/week on their own between July of 2024 and March of 2025.
Said another way, 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.
These fore-mentioned costs do not include the hours and legal consulting fees that the County put into defending its position against the union’s filed grievance, which went in front of the Washington State’s Public Employment Relations Committee (PERC) arbitration hearing held on March 26-29 of 2026. At the end of the 4-day long hearing, Mark Tompkins was the only witness that the County’s legal team called to testify in its defense against the grievance filed by the union for the 2024 decision.
On the union’s side, Local 1849 members and represented individuals were represented by a AFSCME’s Council 2 legal counsel and included the testimonies of all four affected employees as well as a three other witnesses. Kyle Dodd did not testify, nor did the previous HR director, nor any of the County Council members.
As summer begins to unfold the arbitration’s slow-moving final stages will continue to play out in accordance with Washington State labor laws. A decision may be expected as early as September 2026, though it may take considerably longer, and may result in anything from complete dismissal of the grievance to potential reinstatement of the affected employees in a “make whole” remedy in accordance with established labor law conventions much like those that played out in a similar situation in Carnation, WA as the Snoqualmie Valley Record reported.
As of December 9, 2025, County Council agreed with current DCD Department head and part-time islander, Sev Jones, to expand the DEA contract from an additional $350k to $450k going into 2026 in the midst of a budget deficit. Several community members respectfully voiced concerns over fiscal responsibility in DCD going into the new year which were met with a muffled snort from Council member Jane Fuller and a sarcastic response by Council member Kari McVeigh. Council Member Justin Paulsen remained silent.
In the end, I am hopeful for a healing outcome out of all this. The absence of that outcome does not need to further delay sharing a perspective that our community’s taxpayers and community at large may wish to hear. The arbitration’s hearing proceedings have closed and the County is about to tackle another round of budget cuts regardless of the timing of the arbitrator’s decision. Here’s to hoping this next round doesn’t leave any additional scars.
Marc Santos
RELATED ARTICLES:
Is the proposed concrete batching plant receiving special treatment?
San Juan County replacing current planners with outside firm
Axing 5 land use planners may prove costly to San Juan County
Concrete Batch Plant requires a CUP; MDNS issued incorrectly