Thank you to everyone who came out to the print launch party last Wednesday, September 9th!

1,000 newspapers have been distributed around Thurston County. You can pick up your very own copy free of charge at:

• Bar Francis

• Old School Pizzeria

• Schwartz’s

• The Brotherhood Lounge

• Orca Books

• Glowies

• Rainy Day Records

• San Francisco Street Bakery

• Sound and Vision

• Sophie’s Scoops

• Traditions

• Soul Kitchen

• Last Word Books

• Owl’s Nest

• Opal Salon

• Marmo (Shelton)

• Gabi’s Olympic Cards & Comics

• Timberland Regional Libraries (Olympia, Tumwater, Hawks Prairie)

…coming to more locations soon!

***

For more stories from September and previous months go to our website, www.olywip.org

On September 17th, the Olympia School Board was presented with a plan slating Madison, McKenny, and LP Brown Elementary Schools for closure. The written analysis justifying these closures coincides with a 90-day period for public hearings before a final vote on November 12th. If the board votes in favor of closing and consolidation, this school year will be the final operating year for these schools.

While this news may shock some, closures were never truly off the table after being introduced in 2023. Our district reached a crossroads where a clear path forward was never chosen. Now, we must finally decide: do we accept the promised efficiency of a larger school model, or do we fight for the values represented by our small neighborhood schools? This tension between community values and corporate-style consolidation isn’t unique to Olympia — it reflects the broader crisis facing public education and the growing trend toward divestment and privatization.

How Did We End Up Here Again?

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped public education. Districts scrambled to resolve remote learning challenges and navigate public health emergencies, all while families lost loved ones. Many students left the district and never returned. When in-person instruction resumed, seats remained empty, academic benchmarks were scattered, and financial planners for the district joined everyone in a frantic game of catch-up. No one foresaw this, and it drastically altered future enrollment and budget projections.

Back in 2016 when enrollment was trending upwards, Olympia voters passed a bond (a long-term loan that authorizes the district to do capital projects) presented as a way to lower class sizes in compliance with new state guidelines. Anticipating population growth, the bond funded infrastructure improvements, necessary repairs, and five mini-buildings at schools with the highest projected capacity needs. New construction delivered the improvements to facilities without the projected students to fill them.

Architects of the 2016 bond — and the voters who approved it — assumed expansion costs would be easily sustained by increased state funding as enrollment grew. Instead, over the next 10 years, enrollment gradually fell to roughly 1,000 students short of the 2016 projections, prompting administrators to panic over an impending budget “shortfall.” Superintendent Patrick Murphy convinced the board that closing small, under-enrolled elementary schools was the best way to cut costs. At a late-night meeting in December 2023, the board voted to initiate the timeline to close Madison and McKenny Elementary schools.

The public mobilized rapidly, leading to emotionally charged hearings. Ultimately, the closure process was halted not by public outcry, but by a Thurston County Superior Court judge. The district had failed to provide all legally required written analyses prior to the 90-day public comment window. Grassroots organizing hadn’t saved the schools, administrative incompetence simply pushed closures to the back burner.

Since that March 2024 court ruling, Superintendent Murphy has sought his pound of flesh elsewhere. A Reduction in Force (RIF) eliminated elementary art instruction, family liaisons, and other vital support positions. Yet these cuts still fell short of the district’s financial targets. Now, schools and the jobs attached to them are back on the chopping block.

The district’s current financial standing has been grossly miscommunicated. Many assume incorrectly that OSD is in debt. In reality, the district’s Ending Fund Balance (EFB) — the money remaining after all annual operating expenses are paid — is projected to be roughly $8.4 million. That is over $8 million sitting in reserves designed to serve as an emergency buffer. The Office of the Superintended of Public Instruction (OSPI) recommends an EFB be anywhere between 4% and 7% of a district’s annual operating budget, depending on multiple factors.

Olympia School District (OSD) currently maintains an EFB ratio of roughly 4.4%. To boost the district’s OSPI financial health score, Superintendent Murphy aims to push the EFB to 7.14% or higher by the 2028–2029 school year. This detail is critical: achieving a 7.14% EFB without new enrollment revenue requires cutting over $3 million in annual expenditures. The Superintendent insists closing schools is the best path forward. Many in the community strongly disagree. In order to understand this conflict more clearly, let’s examine some of the broader context.

What are some of the Structural Causes for OSD's Budget Problems?

Declining birth rates, dwindling federal funds, complex tax structures, inflation, private school competition, administrative bloat, teacher salaries — blame has been cast in virtually every direction. It is easy, and perhaps accurate, to attribute our financial strain to a combination of these factors. But responsibility is not shared equally among all actors, and it’s worth investigating where things don’t add up.

Consider the federal and state backdrop. In 2007, education advocates filed a lawsuit arguing Washington State was violating its own constitution, which mandates:

“It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.”

The lawsuit demonstrated that relying on local property tax levies disproportionately benefited wealthy districts at the expense of poor ones, depriving students of an equitable, fully state-funded education.

While McCleary v. State of Washington moved through the courts, the Washington Legislature passed ESHB 2216 in 2009, redefining “basic education” to include full-day kindergarten and a 17:1 student-to-staff ratio in grades K–3. This policy change directly motivated OSD’s 2016 bond proposal.

While advocates celebrated these structural wins, state implementation faltered. A critical funding gap emerged as local levy capacity dried up faster than state dollars arrived, and some districts realized just how much they were benefiting from the levy structure. Districts like OSD continued passing local levies, but districts that lost levy funding before state allocations materialized to the same degree rapidly fell into deficits.

Faced with state-level mandates, local administrators must decide where to cut. At the top of the chain sits the Superintendent, who drafts the operational vision, and the School Board, which approves or rejects it. The Board consists of elected officials meant to advocate for the communities within their district.

At the base level there’s us, the constituency. Public comment is given at every Board Meeting that allows it, with many asking for budget considerations that align with the district’s own stated goals of “equity.” For frequent commenters, the process feels like an unwelcome formality. Any ideas or information presented are entertained primarily under legal obligation over a genuine interest from all board members in what the public has to say (OSD Board Meeting Schedules).

Our public school advocacy group, OSD4ALL, has researched and presented that as enrollment has declined, spending on administrative salaries and added positions have trended the opposite direction. When elementary art specialists were cut, the district added a new position in central administration to guide art programming for teachers to incorporate in their classrooms. This is just one example of many where funding is funneled away from student-facing positions and into administrative roles that rarely, if ever, set foot inside a classroom.

One alternative approach to revive the district’s financial health comes from the corporate world the administration often emulates: a comprehensive job audit. Evaluating job descriptions, actual daily tasks, and compensation across positions is a core tool of organizational efficiency. If budget cuts are necessary, why haven’t we audited high-salaried administrative positions first? Demanding an audit at the district level is a logical first step, yet leadership has neither conducted nor proposed one.

Beyond structural funding issues lies a frequently cited budget strain: declining birth rates and shifting family choices. Across the country, birth counts are falling, and parents of those fewer children are increasingly opting for private schools, charter programs, or homeschooling. In Olympia, the trend follows. Kindergarten enrollment in OSD is dropping at 2.5 times the rate of local birth count decline.

Getting Smart, an outside consultant firm hired by OSD, estimates that there are currently about 1,000 children within OSD boundaries who would be in k-8 but are not enrolled in public school. Where are these students going, and why aren’t they choosing OSD? The district lacks the survey data and targeted research to explain why families are opting out. If you were a School Board member, wouldn’t that be the very first question you’d want answered?

Who does a Closed School Serve?

A study recently released by Stanford University analyzed California school closures between 2011-2019 to evaluate whether closing under-enrolled campuses actually balances district budgets. The findings were clear: districts do not save money by closing schools. Minimal operational savings were consistently offset by revenue lost from families leaving the district, ongoing maintenance costs for vacant facilities, and a failure to reduce high-salaried administrative staff.

Despite being repeatedly presented to the OSD Board and Superintendent, this research has been largely dismissed under the logic that “we are not California.”

So consider the Bellevue School District, nestled in an affluent suburb of Seattle. Following the McCleary Decision, Bellevue faced a $20 million budget shortfall when caps were placed on its generous local levies.

In 2023, after heated debate, Bellevue closed and consolidated elementary schools. By 2025, those closures had failed to bridge the budget gap. Bellevue voluntarily entered binding conditions, allowing them to sell a vacant $30 million property to fund operations under newly created state emergency guidelines (SB 5412). Beyond that one-time real estate windfall, their recovery plan focused on trimming administrative overhead and restructuring transportation.

The Bellevue example reinforces what the Stanford study proved: closing neighborhood schools does not solve structural budget problems. Financial challenges are framed as emergencies that only consolidation can solve. Future bonds and levies are then funneled into building larger, centralized campuses, resulting not just in financial stagnation but the social erosion of established neighborhoods.

In Olympia, staff cuts have already occurred, and further reductions are being used as a threat if closures are rejected. One could assume that closing campuses would protect remaining jobs, but the opposite is true. As the Superintendent has explicitly noted in meetings, the primary savings from closures come from eliminating “redundant” positions: newer teachers, office staff, custodians, bus drivers, and food service workers. The district is effectively trying to cut the backbone of schools by eliminating some of the most essential yet lowest-paid jobs in the district. High paying admin positions, on the other hand, face less severe cuts.

Even in the unlikely event that student enrollment remains steady after closures, fewer drivers will haul children farther distances, fewer food service workers will prepare meals, fewer custodial staff will manage facilities, and more students will be packed into limited classrooms and shared spaces.

No promises have been made by the Superintendent to reduce class sizes, bring back staff or programs that have been cut, or to even provide more resources to schools that receive the students from closed schools.

Perhaps they know these promises would mean a complete financial negation of the meager savings a closure would provide.

On a human level, what’s lost goes beyond buildings, payroll, or line items. We lose the heart of our neighborhood, communities uprooted for what amounts to administrative preference.

Can we honestly argue this serves the public good?

Relying on school closures as a frontline solution reveals a profound lack of imagination, a reliance on weak conventions, and an extreme deficit in leadership. We should expect the same from our leaders that we demand from our children: to stay grounded in our values and to use creative problem-solving to fight for what matters.

Nationwide, we are facing the dismantling of the Department of Education and the erosion of funds for underserved populations. As federal resources shrink, state budgets struggle to fill the void. The expansion of school vouchers and unmonitored charter options worsens a split system where rich families retain advantages while poor and oppressed students bear the brunt of systemic divestment.

When you ask anything of the School Board, administrators, or legislators, they point to the finances. They explicitly tell us that current decisions are driven by capital rather than community needs or educational outcomes. The U.S. spends more per student than nearly any other country, yet academic outcomes remain average or worse. If students are not benefiting from these investments, who is?

Subscribe to Works in Progress to get part-two delivered straight to your inbox when it comes out on October 16.

Jacqueline Garrison is a full-time parent, part-time volunteer, and a dedicated advocate for public education and transit.

Oh, Labor Day, what a glorious day! In leftist circles, we sometimes hear conspiracy theories about how the September Labor Day was a “counterrevolutionary” move by the state to distract workers from the real labor day, May Day. The truth is a bit more nuanced.

The late 19th century was a vibrant period of labor militance and major worker strikes. To appease labor unions and the growing support for making Labor Day a holiday -- and to undermine the radical association with May Day -- the United States made Labor Day a national holiday in 1894.

The idea for a September labor celebration actually came from across the border. In 1872, Toronto printers struck for a nine-hour workday, and the annual labor celebrations that grew out of their fight became a fixture in Canada. When Peter J. McGuire (a key leader of the early American Federation of Labor) witnessed one such Canadian festival in 1882, he was inspired to bring the idea stateside. The first U.S. Labor Day was in fact celebrated September 5, 1882, in New York City — before May Day was immortalized in 1886.

May Day, on the other hand, was inspired by the sacrifice and fierce determination of Chicago workers in the 1886 Haymarket Affair. What began as a peaceful rally became one of the most violent days in U.S. labor history when someone (whose identity has never been officially confirmed) bombed the square with dynamite killing several protesters and police. Workers’ demands for an eight-hour work day enraged bosses who enlisted the police to crack down on the labor movement with lethal force. Although there was no evidence linking them to the bombing, seven anarchists were sentenced to death for the explosion. Of those seven, four were hanged, one committed suicide, and two later had their sentences reduced.

International Workers’ Day (May Day) is inspired by, and in memory of, the fight of those courageous Chicago workers. Beginning in 1926, May Day was commemorated worldwide with huge demonstrations and the closing of most workplaces. From Russia to France to Mexico, the explosive labor struggle in Chicago is honored by labor movements across the globe and is observed as an official holiday in many countries — with one notable exception, the United States.

The capacity for organized workers to win better wages, benefits, conditions, and the ability to make decisions over the workplace faces steep challenges. As a result of increasingly hostile federal and state governments, labor is weakened in both the private and public sector. Most people in the U.S. work for private companies. Only 6% of workers in the private sector are unionized, a steady decline since the mid-1950’s when more than a third of workers in the private sector were in a union. The few private unions that are still active are often unable to win even limited demands. Since the 1990s, when massive trade deregulation opened borders for large corporations, private sector unions have faced the unique challenge of capital flight -- where employers pick up and move to a new location without organized labor

Capital has the ability to transcend borders while the majority of workers do not. When capital can move freely but workers can’t, the scale is tipped in favor of the ruling class. Beginning on May 1, 2006, May Day in the U.S., although not an official holiday, is observed with demonstrations and rallies as International Workers Day with an emphasis on immigrant justice. Confronting globalized capitalism requires a globalized working class struggle. May Day is explicitly international while nationalism splinters the working class -- something the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) has long recognized.

Although the public sector employs only 15% of all workers, 33% of them are members of unions, more than five times the private sector rate. Half of all union members work in the public sector such as in local, state and national government. That turns public sector unions into a primary target for anti-democratic, free-market actors. Namely, major corporations and right-wing leaders. Conservatives attack the public sector precisely because it is where labor most often still wins. For example, the structural assaults against teachers and public education are designed to crush union membership and demonstrate the uphill battle facing labor advocates and social justice movements as a whole.

The growth of neoliberalism causes heightened individualism and lack of solidarity among workers. Revitalizing the labor movement counteracts the atomization of the working class. Organizing a union is about more than winning meager concessions. It is about restoring the dignity of workers, reversing the obscene expansion of wealth inequality, and resisting authoritarianism. It’s about transforming an economic system that reinforces the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few.

There is growing support among the general public for unionization, which is a prerequisite for reversing the decline we’ve seen over the last few decades. While society would benefit from increased union membership and unionized workshops, strengthened collective bargaining power alone cannot deliver economic justice. To make that a reality, what is needed is social movement unionism — a more radical, class-wide political struggle whose demands go beyond better wages and benefits.

Labor Day should stand for something more than a day off work and a chance to attend a picnic or rally. It should stand for workers having more power in the union, the workplace, and the right to more fulfilling work. It should stand for organizing all workers including the precariat and winning demands that benefit the whole working class.

One powerful narrative that keeps workers’ rights suppressed is the contemporary concept of “work-life balance.” This is a bit of a controversial position because so many labor advocates champion this concept. But the unfortunate and unintended result of this framing is that it ends up telling workers that your life at work is somehow not your life. In the “work/life balance” narrative we’re all made out to be either an employee or a civilian, as if there are two severed halves of our existence that aren’t intrinsically related. Labor organizing taken seriously seeks to materially improve working conditions and life outside the workplace. Organizing should never be reduced to a workplace; it is a transformation of our relationship to power in all spheres of life.

Labor is more than unions and the workers in unions; it is also nonunion workers and the unemployed. We need to build a labor movement that also organizes for causes off-the-clock that meets worker needs such as universal health and free childcare, that challenges militarism, authoritarianism and AI; that unites with other social movements for justice and liberation and acts in solidarity with workers across the globe. Everyone does labor every day, some just get paid for it.

Happy Labor Day

History is not only what happened, but also how things are remembered. Since 1990, Works in Progress (WIP) has been a platform for the public and independent thinking of a community assuming control of its own history. A summary of WIP headlines from when it was first published up to now illustrates both the global and local nature of Olympia’s political sensibilities.

Fifty years of neoliberalism have demolished social and political institutions across the country. “Capitalism is eating democracy alive,” says cultural critic Catherine Liu. Organizations like WIP are the frontline of defense against the Far Right. With massive corporations devouring newsrooms everywhere, WIP lets Olympia tell its own story.

The Birth of Works in Progress

Works in Progress published its first newspaper in May of 1990, but its story starts two years earlier during Jesse Jackson’s remarkable 1988 presidential run. Influenced by the Black Panther Party, Jackson formed a national organization called The Rainbow Coalition to build mass support for his campaigns. During his 1988 candidacy, unofficial local chapters started to pop up all over, including one in Olympia that attracted a recent Evergreen graduate by the name of Sylvia Smith. Smith and the Thurston County Rainbow Coalition (TCRC) would go on to launch WIP, but not before a dramatic split occurred with the statewide organization, The Washington State Rainbow Coalition (WSRC).

When George H. W. Bush won the presidency in 1988, Coalition locals turned their focus to internal development. The WSRC began working on obtaining official status as a chapter of the National Rainbow Coalition (NRC). At their founding convention in early 1989, the WSRC elected a seven person executive committee. One elected member was Dave Jette of Thurston County, an idiosyncratic, popular figure among coalition members.

Jette described the founding convention as “wildly successful. Some 270 Rainbow members from all across the state attended it, and worked out a detailed political platform … to organize the most powerful, democratic, and progressive political organization in the history of Washington State.” Notably, the founding convention identified creating a statewide newspaper, called Rainbow News, as an important objective.

After the convention, Jette and two others travelled to Chicago to attend the National Rainbow Coalition meeting. There, the Washington delegation found themselves at odds with Jesse Jackson’s newly proposed organizational blueprint. Cindy Domingo, a leader of the King County Rainbow Coalition wrote, “Jackson … came down with an iron fist and stated … that all … Rainbow chapters will be transformed into his personal presidential campaign structure.” The WSRC defied Jackson’s proposal. As a result, they were rejected from officially joining the NRC, but continued under the Rainbow name.

Throughout 1989, divisions opened up at the state level along three significant lines. Some saw the Rainbow Coalition as a means of turning the Democratic Party into a truly democratic organization; others saw the Democratic Party as a means toward building an independent party; and a third tendency did not engage in electoral politics. The WSRC stagnated and membership declined from almost 1000 to 300. Jette was tasked with planning a retreat for March 1990 to address the situation, but for many in Olympia it was already too late. Sylvia Smith of TCRC wrote a scathing letter to the WSRC in advance of the retreat stating, “Our annual meeting … was a great success … Thurston County has not ‘dropped out.’ We just stopped paying attention to you.”

To compound the frustration in Olympia, the statewide coalition had flopped on one of its major objectives coming out of the founding convention a year prior. The statewide newspaper, Rainbow News, had barely gotten off the ground. There was no editorial board and the entire publication’s committee was composed of just one person. Feeling frustrated with the WSRC and increasingly distant politically, Sylvia Smith and a few others in TCRC decided to launch a newspaper of their own. In May 1990, Works in Progress hit doorsteps for the very first time.

Works in Progress once presented itself as a project of the Thurston County Rainbow Coalition, but it was clear early on that Olympia felt the gap between them and Jackson was widening. In July 1990, WIP published an article by Alexander Cockburn titled “Don’t Run, Organize,” that criticized Jackson for being uninterested in “building a political movement capable of acting in any way independent of his own personal political ambitions.” Shortly thereafter, much to the chagrin of the TCRC membership, Jackson defended Operation Desert Shield, saying that the United States must be ready to “use military force, multilaterally or unilaterally” to defend its diplomatic partners (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Jackson endorsing military escalation in the Middle East inflamed statewide tensions and caused things to boil over. In September 1990, Dave Jette — who still maintained his position within TCRC and on the state executive committee — took the mailing labels from WSRC and helped WIP send its September issue to the entire state. Inside, he had penned an article titled “The Rise and Fall of the Washington State Rainbow Coalition,” where he criticized the WSRC for being overly bureaucratic. At the following executive committee meeting Jette sardonically asked permission to use the statewide mailing labels for WIP again in October. The committee rejected his request and suspended him for stealing the mailing labels.

In advance of WIP’s October issue, Jette once again stole the statewide mailing labels so that WIP could send that issue directly to every Rainbower in the state. On the centerfold he wrote, “The National Rainbow Coalition is now nothing more than an extended campaign committee for Jesse Jackson. The problem lies not with Jesse Jackson … The problem is with progressives who attach themselves to the Jackson campaign instead of tackling the far more difficult task of building a democratic, grassroots-based progressive political movement.”

Rainbowers in Olympia saw Jette’s antics as heroic and brave, but many elsewhere thought they were contrarian and irresponsible. In a recent interview, Cindy Domingo reflected that Jette’s defiance demonstrated a short-sightedness that did not take seriously the long-term project of building political power. As TCRC drifted away from the statewide organization, the Rainbow Coalition legacy manifested differently across the state. King County found electoral success in the 1990s and many of its members held office well into the 21st century. Thurston County continued publishing Works in Progress, which would go on to become one of the longest lived independent newspapers still circulating in Washington.

Critical Reporting by Works in Progress

For the next 36 years Works in Progress has published articles covering local land use, police brutality and surveillance, social movements, and international issues, just to name a few. In 2012, WIP published an open letter to Olympia City Council titled “Stand Up For The Plan: Reject the 7-Eleven at Harrison and Division.” It received a massive amount of signatures and led to the creation of West Central Park. WIP’s ongoing coverage of American imperialism, from Nicaragua, to Iraq, to Palestine bolstered the anti-war politics that is a hallmark of Olympia today.

In the early 2000s, the Iraq War came home, when it was uncovered that the Port of Olympia would be used to ship Stryker combat units (large military vehicles) to Iraq. In 2006, Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (OlyPMR) coalesced to educate the public about the war and organize direct actions to raise the social cost of using the Port of Olympia. OlyPMR’s goal was primarily to delegitimize the Iraq War, which had been propped up by years of manufactured consent by a hawkish, Islamophobic corporate media landscape. OlyPMR needed a news outlet that was willing to publish their anti-war message. WIP was the only game in town.

The high water mark for OlyPMR came in late 2007. Mass mobilizations on November 9 and November 13 completely blocked the Port for over 30 hours in total. In a WIP article titled “Two Weeks that Shook Olympia,” Evergreen Professor Peter Bohmer wrote, “Olympia resembled an occupied city with police spread out in riot gear and military convoys on the streets.” In later years it would be uncovered that an FBI informant had infiltrated the protests.

The Olympian sent reporters to the scene, but utterly failed to report on the excessive police violence, even against their own reporters. In a November 15 editorial titled “At the port: What happened and what did not happen,” then Executive Editor Vickie Kilgore smeared protestors as “whiners” and called for them to be prosecuted for property damage and disruption of traffic. Bohmer, in his WIP article, reported that just two days earlier the Olympia Police Department shot a bystander with multiple pepper balls and struck him in the face with a baton.

In her editorial, Kilgore also brushed off accusations that the police attacked one of her own journalists, Matt McVay, on the job. Brendan Funtek, a staff member at The Olympian took to WIP to publish his perspective. He wrote, “I’ll always remember the feeling of numbness and nausea that coursed through my body the day I read Vicky Kilgore’s editorial.” She “directed public ire at unaccountable protesters and dismissed McVay being shot [in the face with a pepper ball] by an accountable police department.” As Funtek wrote, Kilgore’s representation was completely contrary to how events played out in real life. The police brutalized protestors and bystanders. WIP’s coverage provided a counter narrative and legitimized OlyPMR’s direct actions against the Iraq War in an otherwise hostile media landscape.

In a recent interview, Sylvia Smith reflected that The Olympian’s poor coverage of OlyPMR was not the fault of individual reporters, but rather their for-profit structure. The Olympian has been tossed around by some of the largest corporate news outfits in the country for the last 50 years. It was most recently acquired in 2006 by McClatchy Media Company — owned by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. Chatham’s founder, Anthony Melchiorre, was invited to dine with Trump at the White House in July 2017 after wielding his hedge fund to help “Catch and Kill” negative coverage of Trump in the run up to the 2016 election.

Community and Legacy

Works in Progress is not only independent from hedge funds; it was forged in the hearth of community organizing and remains entwined in the social movements pushing Olympia forward. WIP itself represents the fight for local news, a resource that is becoming more endangered each year. Community institutions are capable of producing knowledge that can push back on hegemonic narratives and create a counter balance of power. Since the 1990s, the people of the South Sound have seen their story told in Works in Progress.

100 years ago, Benito Mussolini and the Italian fascist party took power. They killed and imprisoned the socialist, communist, and anarchist leaders of the time. Antonio Gramsci, a leader of the Communist Party, contemplated the ascendance of Italian fascism from his jail cell. What had allowed such violent and corrupt politics to take hold? Among his richest conclusions was that the Italian working class was organized by forces antagonistic to its own actualization. The Catholic Church, the press, Italian literature, and other social institutions that shaped the thinking of everyday Italians had become deeply entrenched in capitalist politics. When fascists pushed for power, they found it easier to tap into a political ethos that was already latent in the Italian public. Future movements for socialism, Gramsci concluded, would need to find ways to create their own history where they are the protagonists.

From his jail cell, Gramsci wrote, “To tell the truth, to arrive together at the truth, is a communist and revolutionary act.” That is, to tell it, to have an active role in creating it. The creation of history relies on protagonists. Works in Progress knows who the protagonists are. That is what makes us news for the movement.

For more stories from September and previous months go to our website, www.olywip.org.

This month we have a big announcement. On September 9, we are relaunching our print newspaper. Join us from 6pm to 9pm at The Brotherhood Lounge to celebrate the paper, meet the WIP team, and get a free newspaper. WIP ran a print paper from 1990 until 2023, when it switched to being exclusively online. We see a growing need for independent media and a strong desire for it to be print. We spend so much time on screens, we want to provide a way to engage with your community without opening another application. We are excited to be back in action, and we are excited to see you at The Brotherhood!

by Lalo Cuitzeo

Trump’s war against immigrants and solidarity organizers has increased in repression and violence, while communities live in uncertainty and rebellion. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was gunned down in a hail of gunfire, killed in cold blood by ICE agents. His murder follows the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, two community defenders active in the nationwide struggle against fascism. On June 16, 2026, The U.S. Justice Department filed charges against 15 Minneapolis people, accusing them of a “conspiracy” to “impede” U.S. immigration officers during the Operation Metro Surge ICE and Border Patrol winter siege of Minnesota. Eight pro-immigrant activists in Alvarado, Texas received prison sentences ranging from 30-100 years for attending a late-night demonstration with fireworks to show support for immigrants held captive at the Prairieland Detention Center.

On July 7, 2026, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — from Tlatlaya, Mexico — was on the way to his construction job in Houston, Texas, with three co-workers including his brother, Victor Salgado, when two unmarked SUV’s approached his work van. The passengers in Lorenzo’s van have written statements that Lorenzo had pulled over and stopped the van when ICE agents opened fire, shooting Lorenzo through the passenger side window into his abdomen. This contradicts ICE’s false statements that Lorenzo was somehow trying to crash into them with his vehicle. According to the passengers, an agent violently pulled Lorenzo out of the van after shooting him. The agent then handcuffed Lorenzo’s wrists and ankles before agents did the same to the three other men. Lorenzo yelled out “Ya me mataron,” which translates to “they killed me,” as his final words. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo died shortly after, leaving behind his community and family, including a wife and three kids.

On September 12, 2025, Silverio Gonzalez — from Irimbo, Michoacán, Mexico — dropped off his three-year-old son at daycare in the Franklin Park section of Chicago, Illinois. Security footage from just down the street showed two plainclothes agents approaching Silverio’s car which was blocked in by an unmarked SUV. A witness in a nearby apartment described the agents as wearing body armor with no agency lettering. Silverio eventually reversed away from the two men approaching his car, and began to drive away from the agents — not toward them, as the Department of Homeland Security claimed — when the agent on the passenger side fired shots into the back of Villegas González’s car. The witness described Silverio as having “blood all over his neck and head.” He was pronounced dead at Loyola University Medical Center. Once again, ICE used the same line that Silverio “drove his car at law enforcement officers … fearing for his life, the officer fired his weapon.”

ICE started this year off by shooting and killing three people within the first month of 2026. In California, Keith Porter was shot dead by an off-duty ICE agent during a New Years Eve celebration in Los Angeles. Days later on January 7, 2026, Renee Good was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. ICE once again used the same false reasoning, that a moving vehicle made them fear for their lives, to justify the killing of Good that they had used against Salgado. Then on January 24th, Alex Pretti was shot to death by a United States Border Patrol Agent in Minneapolis. The two execution-style killings in Minneapolis occurred during “Operation Metro Surge,” when ICE and Border Patrol descended upon the Twin Cities to wreak havoc on immigrant communities and activists standing in solidarity. Community defenders mobilized to track the movements of repressive federal immigration agents, alert people to their presence, and step in when possible to stop abductions from happening. The mobilization from community members in Minneapolis inspired activists far and wide by successfully countering a belligerent and fascist paramilitary invasion.

Months after the Operation Metro Surge public relations nightmare, the federal government has retaliated by charging 15 Minnesotans with conspiracy charges. The Minnesota U.S. District Attorney has accused the Minnesota 15 of “violently oppos[ing] the enforcement of federal law,” by allegedly setting up blockades around government buildings, throwing chunks of ice at federal vehicles and “stalking” agents as they moved through Minneapolis. Newly released law enforcement files related to this case show that immediately after the murder of Pretti by Border Patrol agents, the U.S. government initiated an extensive surveillance campaign called “Operation Puppet Master,” targeting leftist protestors, labor unions, and organizations.

The Operation Puppet Master files reveal a detailed list of undercover agents infiltrating organizing meetings. One example mentioned was a Sunrise Movement meeting where an undercover posed as a construction worker and acted as an agent provocateur. The agent told someone in attendance that because he “works in construction,” he “could build items that might assist other groups with more direct-actions” and remarked that “going to jail did not bother him.” This was a clear attempt to entrap activists into illegal activity. Another undercover agent got added to Signal app chats to surveil activists and monitor their rapid response movements. Operation Puppet Master and the follow-up investigation “Project Whipple Shield” are drawing comparisons to COINTELPRO: the FBI infiltration, harassment, and surveillance counter intelligence program of the 1960’s and 70’s that targeted leftist movements in the U.S.

On July 4th, 2025, around a dozen people gathered for a noise demonstration in Alavarado, Texas at the Prairieland Detention Center to show solidarity with immigrant detainees. Fireworks were let off and police claim that a protestor exchanged gunfire with correctional officers and an Alvarado police officer on a nearby street. Afterward, police arrested everyone in the area and charged 10 people with crimes varying from terrorism to attempted murder. Two days later, an 11th person was arrested after receiving a phone call from someone in the jail. He was arrested by the FBI in Denton, Texas with a box of zines in their car. The FBI have since turned him over to ICE custody where he is now under the threat of deportation. On June 23, 2026, 8 of the Prairieland defendants were sentenced to Federal prison, with terms ranging from 30-100 years.

Immigration detention centers are sites of massive human rights violations. People are subjected to rotten food, unsanitary living conditions, abuse by guards, isolation, and more. Detainees, including those at the infamous Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA, often launch hunger strikes as a form of protest and resistance against these conditions, demanding humane treatment. Over 50 people have died in ICE custody since Trump re-took office in January 2025.

Brutality, repression, and disregard for human life by the federal government continues, but so does the resistance. When ICE rips families apart and shoots immigrants and solidarity activists alike, the people become more activated in the growing struggle against fascism. Immigrants are being held captive at detention centers for indefinite amounts of time, while activists are being rounded up on false charges and sent away for decades. The criminalization of protest and community defense escalates where anyone standing up to authoritarianism is subject to imprisonment or worse. The need for prison solidarity work is more important than ever to remind people inside detention centers, prisons, and jails that we continue the struggle in their name, and that we will never forget them. Honor the lives of fallen comrades by fighting with relentlessness and intelligence, so that we will not only slow down enemy forces, but ultimately defeat them.

by Carl Eugene Stroud

Lacey, Tumwater, and Olympia are cities of thousands, not millions. We’re not one of those places with masses of tourists and arena-sized events rolling into town every weekend. We don’t have a steady flow of random, new things. So, like any other small town, we’re susceptible to getting stuck doing the same things we’ve always done, not out of habit or tradition, but because there’s not necessarily a lot of other options. The local culture in these kinds of places has to be intentionally nourished and maintained.

In Thurston County, this is currently happening, at least politically. We have an active political culture, which, in addition to welcoming diverse positions, functions as an amplifier for politics as they reverberate back out of town, louder and sharper than when they first arrived. Sustaining this culture should be a community-wide objective and comes down to two important factors: clear political lines and committed militancy, neither of which is guaranteed.

Pluralism is a prerequisite for this kind of culture since that’s what creates the opportunities for collective action to be debated. It’s important that the enduring social spaces in town are never subsumed into any one camp and that multiple political organizations can compete for influence. But defending pluralism in shared spaces isn’t the same as taking a neutral position. Political ambiguity like that ends up denying smaller places a role in national and international debates because it confines their influence to the local population.

The competing political lines in town should be seen as essential tools for communicating a clear agenda to others. These lines always come from somewhere, but that history could easily be forgotten and those connections to other places lost. It’s up to the locals to ensure the longevity of their ideas, and it’s up to the people moving in and out of these towns to hold these same lines when they go back out to the rest of the world. That means online as well as in person. That’s how political education that takes place in one town can have relevance in other places too.

This is where militancy comes in. It’s the boots on the ground, where the rubber hits the road. In English, the concept is often assumed to mean radical or combative, so any tactic or organization is considered militant if it’s spicy enough. But I’m talking more about the committed responsibility to continue carrying the torch, to hold on to a particular vision for a different world and a clear proposal for how to keep working toward it.

Consider how effective the Republican Party is at creating a recognizable and unified political line. Every Republican that does an interview uses the same exact talking points. They receive them in a daily email from the party, and all they have to do is repeat those same lines over and over, making small towns into echo chambers. Their rhetoric is so pervasive that you could accidentally use their wording and immediately be mistaken for one of them. But Republican-style militancy isn’t the only way to go about promoting your agenda.

Some militants are technocratic, with a political practice that mostly consists of recruiting new people who are interested in their expertise. Other militants are more opportunistic, ready and eager to jump on the bandwagon of whatever’s popular. Still, there’s another style of militancy that’s based on maintaining relationships with others and committing time and effort to mutually beneficial endeavors. This could be in the form of a protest march, a union action, or a community newspaper. It’s about normalizing the presence of your political lines through trust and consistency rather than slick lingo and marketing.

When activism doesn’t go beyond a single issue, when organizing stops after one well-attended rally or meeting, it’s not clear where the politics are coming from or where they’re going. Without clearly defined political lines, a lot of vague and indefinite work gets put on local organizations, draining their capacity and leaving the individuals to defend their own boundaries without collective support.

The political lines running in and out of medium and small towns have the potential to increase influence by reaching even the most rural destinations. So, rather than being seen as sectarian ghouls that scare people out of working together, militants should be seen as necessary features of our diverse local culture. They ensure the continual movement of ideas in and out of town, and they help clarify where it’s possible and effective to work together and where it isn’t. Of course, the flip side is that militants from other places shouldn’t be aggressive, capacity-sucking know-it-alls if they want their political lines to get plugged into our local amp.

Carl Eugene Stroud is a member of the Center for Especifismo Studies.

By Kylie McQuarrie

In August 2024, with little publicity, Timberland Regional Library (TRL) announced that its Naselle branch was to become fully “staffless” and transition to an only self service library.

In a Facebook post, TRL explained that Naselle was “moving to a fully self-service model.” To continue receiving the library services their tax dollars paid for, Naselle residents would need to show proof of residency to apply for an electronic Expanded Access Hours (EAH) fob. They could then access the building from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., checking out books themselves.

Following the announcement, the surrounding community’s response was swift and unanimously severe. Some expressed disgust at their tax money being wasted on surveillance tech and superficial building updates as part of a plan to effectively eliminate service in Naselle.

TRL’s base union unit, AFSCME Local 3758, submitted an open letter to the board of trustees expressing similarly strong opposition. The union wrote, “Without library workers, Naselle can no longer be called a library.” They emphasized that in a rural library district, the library “[provided] a lifeline to places without many other services. Taking away library workers is devastating in those places.”

Thousands of Washington residents were poised to experience Naselle’s devastation for themselves when then-Executive Director Cheryl Heywood announced TRL’s catastrophic budget shortfall in January. Fortunately, massive public outcry triggered a long overdue change in leadership. Now, nearly two years after Naselle’s closure, a new administrative team has a plan to bring TRL’s trajectory in alignment with the public’s desires.

At a board retreat to discuss a levy lift last month, interim TRL director Andrea Heisel presented a draft of a staffing plan that showed exactly what would be done with the library’s first tax revenue increase in 25 years. In this plan, the Naselle branch would open its doors, host local programming, and (most importantly of all) reintegrate in-person librarians.

If the levy lift succeeds, TRL plans to increase open, staffed hours by 120+ hours a week across the district (31 of those hours belong to Naselle). Some money would likely go toward building repairs, but only to address safety and structural concerns. Funds would also be used to resume building the library’s collection; ideally, this would include putting books back on shelves in branches where residents have repeatedly asked for more books. Dozens of staff positions would be added to payroll, all of them frontline positions rather than administrative.

Of course, these changes are contingent on more than 50% of voters in the five-county system saying yes to TRL’s proposed increase.

If enough people vote no — which happened in 2009, the only other time TRL has gone out for a lift — the austerity-forward plan laid out by the ousted TRL administration will pan out after all. More branches will switch to an automated, staffless, EAH model, and the dozens of librarians whose jobs were recently saved will lose their livelihoods anyway. Communities in five counties will lose access to one of the last remaining “third spaces” where you have a right to exist free of charge, and everyone’s quality of life will drop as another democratic institution crumbles.

Whether you care about restoring Naselle’s community or preventing more Naselle-like closures, there’s one clear action you need to take by November 3: vote. And if you want to vote yes, a PAC supporting the lift, Yes for Libraries, is planning kick-off events this September. Sign up to show your support.

When we arrived to protest the Wenatchee 2026 AI Expo on August 11, someone was dumping water on the ground, trying to scrub away chalk messages that said things like “Sabey pollutes our air with diesel,” “Microsoft cloud + AI kills kids,” and “AI steals from YOU.”

The chalk had been there since that morning. In bone-dry Wenatchee, often the weather works in a protester’s favor. That day, we stood beneath sunny skies with a thin haze of smoke on the horizon. At least the air quality index wasn’t 285 like it was the week prior.

We could almost be grateful for it. The universe had granted us the perfect window to demonstrate how it all comes together: climate change, Big Oil, genocide, and data centers.

Sabey’s Dirty Diesel

People on the west side of the state might know Sabey Corporation as the company that leases space to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in Tukwila. This includes a facility that was slated for use as a detention center before the Tukwila community mobilized to pass a moratorium blocking the expansion of ICE detention centers in the city. King County community members have been giving Mayor Joe Sabey trouble at Hunts Point town hall meetings ever since.

Sabey Corporation also owns a data center in East Wenatchee. It has 170-megawatt capacity. In big letters, Sabey Data Centers’ promotional flyer proudly advertises: “Harnessing Hydro for Low-Cost Power.”

Chelan and Douglas County Public Utility Districts (PUDs) bristle when you try to say that the data centers are after our hydropower. The data center FAQ article on the Chelan Douglas Regional Port Authority (CDRPA) page on North Central Washington data centers emphasizes that “the majority of electricity serving local data centers is supplied through market-based power purchases from outside the region rather than relying solely on Chelan PUD’s local hydropower resources.”

It seems that the companies and the public utility districts don’t agree on this point. Or rather, the access to hydro is a selling point for Big Tech, and a dirty secret for the utilities. They know how it comes across to the public.

Douglas County — where East Wenatchee is located — doesn’t have an official statement on the CDRPA page, but they definitely are supplying at least a portion of Sabey’s power. Supposedly, Sabey will transition to getting their power through a third party in 2033.

But if the data centers’ power isn’t coming from hydro, then where is it coming from?

That is just one of the many questions we don’t have answers for because these companies are so resistant to transparency. We do know one thing: The power needs of these data centers are supplemented by fossil fuels.

Sabey recently made the news in Wenatchee after word got out that they had applied for a Notice of Construction Air Quality Permit for 15 new diesel generators in East Wenatchee, adding to 11 existing ones. The community mobilized, and after an Action Network petition campaign and a flurry of comments on the Department of Ecology website, the agency was forced to offer an online public hearing on August 18.

We were, at that point, several weeks into a particularly bad wildfire season, and the Wenatchee Valley had been filled with smoke almost the entire time.

None of the public comments at the hearing had anything positive to say about Sabey Data Centers effectively getting a license to pollute more. The Ecology representatives explained to us that cleaner alternatives were “cost-prohibitive.” When we asked why our community should be expected to sacrifice our health just to give Sabey more money, they could not give us a good answer. The Ecology representatives also acknowledged that their assessments for safe pollution levels for our area were done based on older research that did not factor in additional sources of air pollution like wildfire smoke.

As many people pointed out in their comments, an Ecology report identifies the Wenatchee and East Wenatchee community as overburdened and highly impacted by air pollution. Ecology’s own website says that diesel exhaust is the most harmful air pollutant in Washington.

The whole process demonstrated how the agencies that are supposed to protect us are signing away our future little by little. Sabey argues that these are just backup generators, but what gives them the unalienable right to expand their facility when our region is already beyond capacity? How much is too much? If climate change is a death by a thousand cuts, Sabey is one of the thousand hands holding the knife.

Ryan Vicente, from Ecology’s central region air quality program, spoke in defense of Sabey’s proposal. “What we’ve seen in the past, they purposely site these facilities close to power. It’s hydropower, it doesn’t go out very often,” he said. “It’s in their best interest, cost saving wise, to not be running the engines. Diesel, if you’ve seen the gas pump price.”

Hydropower "doesn't go out very often", but studies are predicting rolling blackouts within a few years. As one protester's sign read: "Who gets power when it's -15°F? You or Sabey?"

And what about when Sabey transitions off of hydropower and gets their power through a third party? What will be more cost-effective then? If they want to power their whole facility on fossil fuels, will anyone stop them?

Microsoft’s Gas Paid in Blood

Microsoft is the other major player in the data center industry in the Wenatchee area. They operate a 288 megawatt data center in Malaga and a large data center in East Wenatchee with a capacity that has not been made public. Columbia Riverkeeper’s estimate notes “213 MW existing / 203.5 MW planned.”

Douglas County PUD is currently providing transmission and distribution lines for Microsoft’s East Wenatchee data center, though unlike their agreement with Sabey, they require Microsoft to buy the actual electrical power it uses from a third party. Where exactly that third party power is sourced, we don’t know. Chelan County PUD’s contract does allow Microsoft access to hydropower for their Malaga data center, though most of the data center’s power will be from a “to-be-determined power source.”

Microsoft claims that they will supply their own power with Helion, a fusion power start-up that has yet to generate more electricity than it consumes. Experts are doubtful that Helion will be able to fulfill its promises. Seeing Helion’s track record, it appears to me to be essentially snake oil used to sell communities like ours on data centers.

In Washington state, Microsoft is constrained by pesky mandates like the Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA), but other parts of the country are lawless territory. For all of Microsoft’s attempts at putting on a climate-conscious act in Washington, the mask is fully off in Texas.

Microsoft just signed a gigantic 20-year deal with Chevron to power a data center in Texas. It is number 7 on the Environmental Integrity Project’s list of planned data center gas plants with largest potential greenhouse gas emissions. In early 2026, Stand.earth put out an open letter demanding answers from Microsoft on its climate and community impacts, calling out the company for abandoning their climate commitments. Over 150 organizations signed this letter. Wenatchee for Palestine was one of them.

For Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists, the Microsoft–Chevron alliance is a particular slap to the face because both companies are boycott targets of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for their complicity in genocide. Chevron operates Israeli gas fields and pipelines in Palestine, including off the coast of the Gaza Strip, and supplies almost 50% of Israel’s electricity grid. Microsoft provides the Israeli military with Azure cloud, AI, and storage services.

This is the reality of gas-powered data centers. It’s a very ugly industry.

And even if the data centers are powered by renewable energy like hydro, that has a knock-on effect of causing rate increases in Western Washington. Utilities like Puget Sound Energy have to compete with data centers eating up all the power in Chelan and Douglas Counties. It also sets us back on our energy transition goals because there is no “transition” happening, only energy addition.

All the while, climate-induced wildfire smoke chokes our skies, and, for once, we get a taste of the direct harms of extractive industries right here in the imperial core rather than exporting them elsewhere.

But by giving voice to the problem, we can begin to wake up our communities and inspire people to fight back. We can prove that none of this has to be inevitable.

Morgan Atwater can be reached at morganatwaterwrites@proton.me.

As the warming climate makes street-tree shade increasingly important for cooling urban neighborhoods, a long-running conflict is coming to a head along Thurston County streets, pitting the need for mature tree canopy against sidewalks buckling from the roots. In Lacey alone, two recent sidewalk projects have called for the removal of 455 trees.

Many of the trees now coming down are mature trees that provide the very canopy cities are trying to increase, but their roots have outgrown the spaces provided for them, lifting sidewalks and creating accessibility and maintenance problems.

At issue is whether trees and sidewalks really have to be in conflict. Urban forestry standards in cities such as Kitchener, Ontario are based on the premise that growing large, long-lived trees means designing streets to provide not just a place to plant them, but enough functional soil for their roots to grow and pathways to reach it.

Street trees in Thurston County are typically planted in strips of soil between the curb and sidewalk, their size and species selected to fit the space provided. Local standards allow those strips to be quite narrow. Tumwater, for example, tells developers to select species according to planting-strip width; in alternate street designs, those strips may be as narrow as four feet. Similarly, Lacey publishes a street-tree list organized by minimum planter width, with some species approved for strips as narrow as four feet. The City of Kitchener in Ontario reverses that equation: the mature size of the tree determines how much functional soil must be provided.

Jesse Brighten, a Board Certified Master Arborist in Island County, says treating trees as an afterthought in street design can dramatically shorten their lives. “Urban street trees have a severely limited life, because urban planning and infrastructure design treats them as disposable ornaments,” Brighten said. “Proper design and planting is more costly in the short term, but the tradeoff is drastically reduced long term costs.”

Those long-term costs are already showing up in Lacey. In 2025, the city awarded a $1.3 million contract to repair sidewalks and driveways damaged by tree roots and replace street trees at six locations around the city. The project involved about 45,000 square feet of pavement and the removal and replacement of 270 trees. Another Lacey sidewalk project followed this year, calling for removal of 185 trees in the Jubilee neighborhood.

Tanya Nozawa, a member of the Tumwater Tree Board, sees the problem in her own neighborhood, where mature trees are being removed as sidewalks buckle. “In Tumwater, street design comes first and then trees are selected based on the planting-strip width and constraints like overhead utilities,” Nozawa said. “We need to reverse the process — decide what mature canopy we want, determine how much soil those trees need, and design the street to accommodate them from the beginning.”

Some 2,500 miles away, the City of Kitchener, Ontario, has built much of that idea into its development standards. There, the size of the tree helps determine the design, rather than the other way around. A large-stature tree must be provided at least 45 cubic meters — nearly 1,600 cubic feet — of functional soil. A medium tree gets 28 cubic meters and a small tree 17. Kitchener also specifies minimum soil depths and maps what it calls “soil habitat zones” around street trees.

Notably, Kitchener does not prescribe a uniform width for the planter strip between the curb and sidewalk. The width can vary. What the city regulates instead is the volume of functional soil available to the tree. A planter strip can be relatively narrow if the tree’s roots have access to enough suitable soil elsewhere.

And Kitchener doesn’t leave the trees until the landscaping stage. During subdivision planning, the developer’s landscape architect works with planners, engineers and utilities to determine where large, medium, and small trees can grow and how their required soil volumes will be provided. Streets, sidewalks, driveways, utilities, and trees are planned together.

A Kitchener street tree may still stand in the familiar grassy planter strip, called a “boulevard” there. But its rooting environment need not end at the sidewalk. Engineered root pathways can connect the boulevard beneath the sidewalk to additional soil, including the front yard on the other side of the sidewalk.

The system cannot guarantee that a tree root will never lift pavement. Trees growing with virtually unlimited soil can still send large roots beneath pavement. But Kitchener’s approach changes the question designers ask. Instead of “What tree will fit in the planting strip we have left?” it asks, in effect, “how much soil does the tree we want to grow require, and how will we provide it?”

Kitchener’s rules also don’t simply count trees; they regulate how large those trees are expected to become. That matters because ten small ornamental trees with mature crowns 15 feet across provide nowhere near the canopy of ten shade trees with crowns 40 or 50 feet across. Yet a regulation that simply counts trunks can treat both as ten trees. Kitchener does not.

For new residential development, at least 30 percent of required street trees must be large-stature species and at least 50 percent must be medium-stature. This means at least 80 percent must be medium or large. No more than 20 percent may be small-stature trees. And because Kitchener also requires functional soil volume based on mature tree size, the rules provide not just for planting those larger trees, but for giving them the underground space needed to grow.

Brighten, the arborist in Island County, said the benefits of designing for long-lived trees extend well beyond avoiding sidewalk repairs. Mature trees, he said, “pay us back in dividends,” providing compounding benefits from stormwater management...to reduced traffic speeds. Among the most important as the climate warms is their ability to reduce the urban heat-island effect by shading heat-absorbing pavement.

Eight thousand miles away, Canberra, Australia, is confronting the same problem while planning for a hotter climate and a growing population. Rather than sacrificing trees to accommodate greater housing density, the Australian capital is requiring development to make room for both.

The result is somewhat counterintuitive. Multi-unit development in Canberra’s lower-density RZ1 and RZ2 residential zones must provide at least 15 percent tree-canopy coverage at maturity. In the denser RZ3 through RZ5 zones, the requirement rises to 25 percent. In other words, Canberra requires more canopy — not less — as residential density increases.

But requiring canopy on paper does not make large trees grow. Like Kitchener, Canberra’s standards address what happens below ground.

Canberra requires adequate soil volume and depth for trees and warns designers against surrounding roots with barriers that create what its municipal landscape standard calls a “pot in the ground.” If a root barrier is used, suitable soil must be available beyond it for the roots to grow into.

In the densest parts of a city, however, there may be no front lawn on the other side of the sidewalk for roots to reach. Canberra uses another tool: putting growing space underneath pavement.

Structural soil cells are load-bearing underground structures that support sidewalks, plazas, and other paved surfaces while preserving uncompacted soil beneath them for tree roots. Canberra’s standards also provide for structural soils, in which a stone framework carries loads while soil within the mixture provides rooting space.

At Canberra’s Jamison Group Centre, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government installed a structural tree pit beneath two rows of parking bays. The underground structure allows parking and pedestrian paths above while providing trees with uncompacted soil, more root space, and greater access to water below. The government says the system improves tree health and canopy coverage while helping prevent pavement uplift by tree roots.

Neither Kitchener nor Canberra has eliminated the competition for space beneath city streets. Water lines, sewers, utilities, sidewalks, roads, and building foundations still have to go somewhere. What their standards demonstrate is that the mature tree can be part of that engineering problem from the beginning, rather than something fitted into whatever space remains afterward.

That distinction could matter as Thurston County’s cities accommodate thousands of additional residents while also trying to increase urban tree canopy. The choice isn’t necessarily between housing, sidewalks, and trees. It can be a choice about how streets are designed to accommodate all three.

Olympia, WA— Join Works in Progress (WIP) on Wednesday, September 9, 2026 6-9pm to celebrate the relaunch of Olympia’s only independent print newspaper at The Brotherhood Lounge.

At the launch you will get the chance to meet the writers, reporters, and editors at the heart of this project. Additionally, you will be able to pick up a freshly printed issue to take home. This celebration also offers an opportunity to directly contribute to Works in Progress’s ongoing effort to sustain the newspaper. 50% of the bar goes towards keeping us and our print edition afloat. So bring a friend or two!

Works in Progress is a 100% volunteer-powered news outfit that has been committed to providing the South Sound with alternative news since it began in 1990. After a temporary hiatus, WIP relaunched online in Spring 2026. We are now reviving the physical newspaper.

Works in Progress offers activists and organizers a home for their stories, projects, and ideas. WIP covers a range of local and international stories often ignored by corporate media. With repression on the rise, independent journalism is important to protect, now more than ever. We believe that community institutions are a path to the world we want to live in. With your support and participation, getting there is possible.

Works in Progress, news for the movement.

Thank you for your continued support! If you’re unable to make it to our launch party but are still interested in contributing to the production of future printed newspapers, you can donate directly here or become a paid subscriber through our website.

Works in Progress will also be distributing our first print issue all over Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater the week of September 7th — be sure to look out for a copy to snag! Follow us on Instagram to get a full list of locations.

Too often, while talking with people about conditions at their workplace, someone tells me something along the lines of, “Yeah, well, we’re an at-will state, so there’s nothing we can do.” At times, they’ll say “right-to-work” in place of “at-will.” The two get conflated constantly and both get treated as the prevailing law of the land, under which employers have total control. My previous article looked at “right-to-work” laws, which govern whether the people a union represents have to pay for that representation. At-will employment is a different animal. It does indeed govern discipline and discharge, but it does not mean what most people think.

At-will employment does not mean your employer can fire you for any reason. It means your employer does not have to give a reason for firing you. That distinction sounds meaningless until you are the one cleaning out your locker. Even with an at-will employer, plenty of reasons remain illegal: You cannot be fired for your race, sex, age, religion, disability, or national origin; for filing a safety complaint or a wage claim; for refusing to break the law; for taking protected leave; or for organizing with your coworkers. Those protections exist, even if they too often go unexercised by the people being illegally terminated. At-will status relieves the employer of any duty to explain their decision, and in doing so, it moves the entire burden of proof onto the worker.

There is exactly one state that requires cause to fire you and it is Montana. Its 1987 Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act (WDEA) is often cited as proof that statutory just cause is achievable. The Montana legislature enacted the WDEA to replace a patchwork of unpredictable court rulings with a defined, bounded remedy — protecting workers from arbitrary discharge while capping what employers could be made to pay. It was a trade, and business took the deal.

Then, in 2021, Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, signed House Bill 254 and defanged the WDEA. [6] The default probationary period went from six months to 12, extendable to 18. This means a Montana worker can now be fired at will for a year and a half before the law applies at all. Additionally, unemployment compensation and early retirement pay now get deducted from any lost-wage award. Another seemingly progressive victory destroyed by a Republican party in total control of the Montana legislature.

Organized labor has experimented with other forms of industry-wide just cause. In 2021, New York City fast food workers won just cause as a condition of employment, a law Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) championed. Management-side lawyers described this as turning those workplaces into de facto union shops. It was a real win that provided new employment protections for thousands of workers. The idea developed in this experiment was the creation of a kind of poor workers’ union. A companion ordinance required employers to process payroll deductions to qualified worker nonprofits. An SEIU-funded nonprofit, Fast Food Justice, was positioned to use it, signing roughly 1,200 workers at $13.50 a month out of a covered workforce of around 70,000. It took about $1.2 million from 32BJ, shared an office with the local, and its website was dark by 2023.

That fantastic legal victory by SEIU in New York City has not resulted in a mass expansion of dues-paying members, even when the gains are real and the dues are very low. Montana’s law held up for decades, then was gutted beyond recognition by a MAGA-dominated legislature.

This brings us back to a recurring theme: Contemporary unions have become bureaucratic, complex, and staffed with capable people who have won real, great, sometimes even life-changing victories. But the servicing model (dues as fee-for-service; staff as the “service” you pay to “do the union for you”) creates perpetual vulnerabilities. Abstract legal protections won by professional staff, lawyers, and legislators, instead of by workers directly coming together, fighting, and winning, are easily defeated by a business class that owns nearly all the media and holds disproportionate power in the statehouse. As we see in New York City and Montana, if we have the protection but not the organization, workers’ rights are always up for grabs. Worker power is in the solidarity on the shop floor. It is what makes protections enforceable, and everything else is downstream.

While worker power has dwindled, the cunning “innovations” of business leaders continue apace. The fastest growing arrangement in American work is the one in which you are not an employee at all. As an independent contractor, you fall out entirely from the hard-fought rights of employees. Gig-app workers don’t just get fired, they get deactivated. A single one-star review, and suddenly the algorithm shuts you out, with no appeal and no explanation. It is the concept of at-will employment taken to its apogee.

Gig apps sell themselves as the future of work while throwing workers back into the 19th century. You don’t have rights to overtime pay, workplace safety protections, or seniority rights. Paid piecemeal instead of hourly, you must provide all equipment and pay all taxes while not receiving any healthcare or retirement benefits. Importantly, you have no protection for collective activity. This “new” arrangement is touted as greater freedom: Set your own schedule and rates; be your own boss. They don’t mention that this forces a race to the bottom, pitting workers against one another for the same jobs. Establishing the worker as an employee was one of the first things organized labor ever fought for. That is the ground currently being lost to Silicon Valley C-suites.

To sum up: At-will employment does not mean employers can do anything they want. It does mean that if they violate the law, enforcement falls to you alone, and that’s the point. Here’s a little something that often gets missed: Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act protects concerted activity, and it does not require a union. Two or more workers raising pay, safety, scheduling, or workload issues together are protected right now, even in your at-will workplace. Let’s use it.

Nicholas Hefling is a longtime union staffer and local area labor organizer.

Towards the end of my last article I touched on the unexpected deflation that some residents experienced after securing housing and moving out The People’s House, a low barrier homeless shelter originally sited in the basement of First Christian Church on the corner of 7th and Franklin. I find my mind will often circle back to some variation of this topic, which in the broadest sense, I would describe as the tension between the human need for connection and refuge. Environmental psychologist Irwin Altman has called this “dialectical process of privacy.” I’m picking up that contemplation of the porousness between self and other, as well as the ways that tension extends into and emerges out of the built environment.

A friend of mine once detailed a two-day vow-making workshop at her Buddhist temple. During the closing ceremony, attendees spoke of their reflections and takeaways from the experience. While most noted how impactful it had been to feel witnessed and connected to others, the man sitting next to her, also expressed profound dread at the prospect over leaving to return to his family and “the crushing isolation of the nuclear home.”

Hearing this, I experienced an immediate flush of emotion. I felt defensive on behalf of his presumed wife, drawing in my mind an association with the misogynistic “ball-and-chain” marriage trope, through which many men have flipped the script to paint themselves as the true victims of entrapment through marriage. Allowing myself a more generous interpretation, I sensed the genuine pain and alienation his daily life presented, which his spouse likely shared. I felt a resonance with his sentiment even without having a nuclear family myself, aside from the one I was raised within.

The resonance I felt also spoke to a deep desire I maintain, along with many friends, to build an alternative kinship domain network, more spacious than a nuclear unit, queer or otherwise. And by build, I have at times really meant build, as in construct a home together, or if not a single home, a network of homes within a short walking distance. This stems from an understanding that even if one seeks to displace the couple form from the center of one’s life, the fact of a home with its particular borders and distance from whomever else one might call family reproduces the solitary unit, despite the intention and effort to challenge it.

And because, I’m wagering, this action takes place whether or not the relationship within the walls is a heterosexual one, the possibility of challenging this insularity is a profoundly queer challenge regardless of the identity of whomever participates. It’s my sense that the People’s House was, in some strange unexpected way, queering the concept of home and opening up some other mode of togetherness. It was also deeply imperfect and occasionally created its own distinct forms of violence, largely due to the pressures created by its failure to meet privacy needs. But the shelter’s mode nevertheless spoke to a deep human need that an individual taking residence in an apartment building where they otherwise don’t have a connection, and many residing in single-family homes alike do not adequately speak to. The question then becomes how can the home be a less insulated social sphere without sacrificing privacy and boundary needs.

In An Introduction to Environmental Psychology, published in 1974, William Ittelson writes, “...the house itself is undergoing a change of function to accommodate the nuclear family, as compared with the extended family of earlier generations.” Ittelson was of course writing at a time when post-war suburbanization was still a strong cultural trend. Today we’re on the brink of a very different phenomenon, informed by widespread economic precarity, record housing costs and subsequent inaccessibility of home ownership, and continued dissatisfaction with suburban culture that young people began articulating as early as the 1960s, even if many of them went on to build their lives in the suburbs as their parents had. Today with more millennials and zoomers living in group housing, it seems the typology of the home is once again under reconsideration and perhaps doubling back toward an extended family configuration, where “family” includes the possibility of one which is chosen.

When thinking of queering the housing arrangement I’m brought back to scenes from the film La chimera, released in 2023, in which a wonderfully quirky and indiscernible woman, Italia, begins squatting in an abandoned public train station in the Tuscan countryside.

We are introduced to Italia in another ramshackle situation, in which she is working as an “apprentice” of an aging but acclaimed vocalist, though mostly it seems she is merely the domestic servant of the vocalist’s increasingly dilapidated estate. It isn’t entirely clear whether singing is even a passion of Italia’s, or whether she simply stumbled into the arrangement and thought, why not? She has an air of someone utterly indomitable interpersonally, yet even still, the circumstances of her life seem to be living her, rather than the other way around.

In this first scene she is dismantling an old chair to use as firewood. It looks to be a frustrating affair. Toward the end of the film we get something of a bookend: we enter the train station infused with new life and see Italia, crouched once again by a chair, this time with hammer in hand, making repairs. There is an atmosphere of joyful effort.

Other women and children are there with her, without explanation. The station, it seems, becomes a kind of catchment system for those without other accommodations, or perhaps those who have defected from whatever they had; it seems that mostly women and children have opted out or fallen out of these arrangements. Sheets are hung to create partitions and an informal kitchen is erected from repurposed basins. The children’s drawings are clothespin-fastened to a line strung above the dining room table. Everyone sleeps in a dogpile in the main room, after a day of communal delousing along the train platform-turned-patio adorned with bikes, toys, and terracotta pots growing herbs or perhaps cherry tomatoes.

As I write this, I’ve gone back to review this scene, which I’d initially described from memory after a single viewing in the theater. It’s almost better the second time. My partner enters the room and hovers over my shoulder to get a second view too. “Reparbella, something to do with repair?” he speculates about the faded name I hadn’t noticed etched on the outside of the train station. Bella, something beautiful; repar, something repaired. A quick etymology search disproves this false cognate translation (it is rather to do with the tufaceous rock the town sits atop) but I like it nonetheless as it captures the rugged aliveness of this make-do aesthetic.

Earlier in the film, we notice Fabriana and Italia have some kind of undefined tension. Italia is disgusted by the happenstance grave robbing the group undertakes after a night of dancing. Grave robbing is the backbone of the film’s narrative, which traces a ragtag crew through their exploits, though somehow Italia has remained unaware of their grave robbing ways until this late stage. All the larcenists are men, with the exception of Fabriana. Fabriana is more or less one of them in the way that sometimes tomboys are allowed to hang out with teenage boys up until things get hairy, at which point she is sent away or given the marginal role in whatever clandestine activity the boys are directing. Fabriana’s masculinity, it seems, allows her the degree of access she is permitted. When Italia expresses her shock at their disrespect for the dead, Fabriana scoffs, as if to say, this is why we women aren’t allowed to play.

This makes her unaccounted for appearance in the squat later on all the more unexpected, as is her smile, which transforms her typically steeled face. The women exude a quiet solidarity towards one another that had seemed impossible in the earlier circumstances. Is it the absence of men that allows such peace and ease of cooperation? Yet the ease at which Italia’s love interest, Arthur, is assumed into the squat formation — what’s one more dog on the pile, after all — interrupts such simple conclusions. He does the dishes after dinner; he is tender to Italia; the children have created their own world around the adults, as children do. Everything has a position here, even if the overall tone is the pastel hue of dislodging outmoded roles based on gender and sexuality.

This dislodging doesn’t seem to come by way of explicitly politicized effort, as so many communal endeavors are motivated, one gets the sense, from an ideology being willed into the material (who’s to know though, everything in the film is delightfully unexplained). I’m aware I’ve let the faint virtuousness I feel in whatever is motivating the horizontality in this scene seep into my description of it, though I’m not exactly meaning to, or I’m not exactly committed to this position. It’s just that one longs for a possibility model for whatever this other way could look like and especially a model that seems to emerge and unfold and adapt rather than require the plan, the crane, the permit, and a lot of dough.

V Lane Hoy is an interdisciplinary writer drawing on observation, cultural criticism, architecture, and psychogeography.

Citations

1. William Ittelson et al., “An Introduction to Environmental Psychology,” accessed March 23, 2024, https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-environmental-psychology-William-Ittelson/dp/0030013461,10.

2. Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992).

3. Blake Bakkila, “The State of the Housing Market Has Forced Millennials to Get Creative,” Sunset, August 5, 2025, https://sunset.com/home-garden/millennials-sharing-homes-non-relatives.

4. “(21) Alessandro (@snarmph) / X,” X (formerly Twitter), accessed May 7, 2024, https://twitter.com/snarmph.

5. (17) “Riparbella,” Locali d’Autore, published January 5, 2011, https://www.localidautore.com/paesi/riparbella-1916.

Grocery prices have risen dramatically over the last five years. Federal cuts to SNAP and other welfare services have pushed increasingly expensive groceries out of reach for many. Food insecurity is a harsh reality for nearly 1 in 5 children in Thurston County and as a result, The Thurston County Food Bank is now serving more households than ever before.

While food insecurity is a serious problem, food justice indicates something beyond people simply having their dietary needs met. The movement for food justice is about fundamentally transforming the political economy of food. Food justice seeks to create a planet where the distance between farmers and community is closer and less mediated by corporate entities. The Olympia Food Co-op is making steps and developing a model for a worker and member-owned grocery store as part of a larger food justice movement.

According to the U.S. Bureau of labor statistics, the “average price for food purchased for home use rose 33% from 2019 through June [of] 2026.“ Such an increase in prices indicates that food inflation is impacting far more than just the lowest income households. Millions of Americans are being forced to change their consumption habits. Highly processed foods are the only affordable option for many families. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy JR. has tried to make those very foods ineligible for food stamps. For some of the poorest families, the solution to rising food prices offered by the Trump administration is to simply not eat.

Furthermore, our food system is now dominated by large mega-corporations. Ten corporations control a majority of all the food products we eat. Only four corporations now control over 80% of beef and over 70% of total pork production. Some of the negative impacts of food system monopolization are higher prices, fewer choices, and environmental devastation. Another consequence includes oppressive labor exploitation. Unfortunately, the food system operates to exploit the very people that rely on it — whether farmworkers making below minimum wage or households trying to put dinner on the table every night.

In response to the ever-growing corporate control of our food system, a food justice movement across the world is sprouting. The food justice movement is a grouping of organizations, thinkers, and activists striving to create a food system where everyone has access to environmentally sustainable, safe, healthy, and culturally-appropriate foods. Additionally, the movement pushes for fair wages and safe working conditions for everyone working within the system, from grocery store workers to farm workers.

Earlier this year, the Olympia City Council unanimously approved a referral directing city staff to develop a local food system plan that would address the current food system, one that is inaccessible for far too many households. Council Member Dani Madrone introduced the referral noting that the city had not made much progress on this issue even though many elements of developing a food system with a food justice framework are in the city’s comprehensive plan. Madrone stated that the plan needs to “identify gaps…and support existing initiatives.”

The South Sound might have a good foundation for a more just food system in the Olympia Food Co-op (OFC). According to OFC Board member Andie Geron, “The Co-op has been delivering food justice for nearly 50 years.” Although the Olympia Food Co-op “has approximately 20,000 members today,” she hopes, “we can continue to grow awareness that the Olympia Food Co-op is far more than a grocery store.”

The unique thing about OFC is that, unlike corporate grocery stores, it is owned by its members. Its democratic structure means that it is more beholden to the community than your average grocer. While some of its prices are higher, you are not just paying for higher quality food; you are also paying for a more democratic food system. There are several ways that OFC is making itself more accessible to the community.

OFC recently launched a food justice campaign to address some of the most critical food related issues in the community. It recognizes five principles of food justice as particularly important:

1. Creating a food system in which everyone has access to nutritious food, regardless of income, background, or where they live

2. Achieve Economic, Environmental and Social Justice by cutting out harmful corporate food producers and distributors.

3. Supporting Local Small Organic Farms and Food Producers

4. Economic Fairness Means No Outrageous CEO Salaries and Billionaire Stockholders.

5. Advocating for Social Justice in our community

When we shop at Big Box grocers, the food that they sell is often from large corporate agricultural producers or international sources where environmental and labor rights are severely lacking. “The Co-op is the only grocery store in Thurston County that regularly researches and vets the food producers before we buy from them to avoid bad actors, assuring our community that the products on our shelves reflect the values ... our community expects,” adds Geron.

The Co-op has far more local, organic produce than any other grocer in Thurston County. Each winter, co-op staff members actually meet with local organic farms of the region to help coordinate crop selection and assure price stability. Unlike other grocery stores in Thurston County, the Co-op provides a 10% discount to low income households on every item. The Co-op is also the only grocery store that has a “Pay-it-Forward” program that feeds homeless people everyday.

Even more importantly, the Co-op actually implements a lower price mark for local produce and local food products to help our local organic farms and food manufacturers compete with Mega-Corporate brands offered by the Big Box grocers. Unlike other grocery stores in Thurston County, the Olympia Food Co-op provides financial incentives for people to buy local products.

Big Box grocers like Costco and Fred Meyer do not provide such incentives. The CEOs of those companies are incentivized by their own paychecks and compensation packages which range from $12-17 Million/year. The hard-earned paychecks of community members should not go towards something as meaningless as an executive’s ability to accumulate yachts and vacation homes.

The Olympia Food Co-op is the only grocer in Thurston County that practices social responsibility by speaking up and supporting social justice movements. Geron believes it’s important to recognize that, “over the last several years, the Co-op has publicly affirmed our support [for] Boycott Divest and Sanction (BDS), supported the Olympia for All tenants’ rights campaign, and was the only mid-sized organization to endorse the Workers’ Bill of Rights campaign.”

Partnerships Can Build More Food Justice

Providing access to healthy food is only the beginning of a long march towards a completely reimagined food system. Food insecurity is a multifaceted problem. Confronting it will require long-term collaboration between different community members and organizations. Co-operative storefronts, local farms, and mutual aid networks on the street all have a role to play in prefiguring a democratically controlled food system that builds food justice in the present and future. Our food should be controlled by the people that interact with it, not grocery store owners and investors.

Dave Toler is a board member on the Olympia Food Co-op. He can be reached at tolerd@gmail.com

A Historic Library Levy Lid Lift Will Appear on Ballots this November, Putting Timberland Regional Library’s Fate in Voters’ Hands

by Kylie McQuarrie

2026 has been a tumultuous year for the five-county Timberland Regional Library (TRL) system. With a new levy lift measure on the ballot, the library’s financial woes will continue until at least November, when voters could choose to solve those problems with a mild property tax bump.

But whether they’ll opt to trust Timberland after years of mismanagement (by Board members and library administrators alike) remains to be seen. If they want a lid lift to pass, the Board and admin have just under 100 days to rebuild public trust, connect with community members, support staff, and take responsibility for past actions.

Read the rest here

Read more TRL coverage here, here, and here.

by Ronda Larson Kramer

In December 2025, federally threatened Mazama pocket gophers played a key role in halting a plan to significantly expand the Olympia Regional Airport. Seven months later, the species and its Bush Prairie habitat at the airport have become part of a nationwide effort to stop a sweeping rollback of the Endangered Species Act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife and National Marine Fisheries Services — federal agencies that say their mission is to conserve species and and “their habitats” and “the ecosystems they depend on”— have finalized a rule that redefines “harm” under the Endangered Species Act to exclude habitat destruction.

At issue is whether governments, companies, and landowners may destroy habitat occupied by protected species. Tribes and conservation groups insist that protecting endangered species necessarily includes protecting the habitat they require to survive and recover.

Read the rest here

by Morgan Atwater

While we were tabling at a No Kings protest, a Palestinian man from out of town stopped by and said to us, “I can’t believe a group like this exists in Wenatchee. You expect to see this kind of thing in Seattle, not out here.”

We were handing out zines and flyers promoting our Apartheid Free Wenatcheecampaign and collecting email addresses for the Wenatchee for Palestine mailing list. Beside us, a Boycott Chevron trifold poster teetered in the breeze.

Read the rest here

Everyone knows that American-style democracy is a two party system. Whether red/blue, Democrat/Republican, or conservative/liberal, it all points to an either/or outcome. However, substituting this systemic fact for political analysis ignores what’s really going on.

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2026 has been a tumultuous year for the five-county Timberland Regional Library (TRL) system. With a new levy lift measure on the ballot, the library’s financial woes will continue until at least November, when voters could choose to solve those problems with a mild property tax bump.

But whether they’ll opt to trust Timberland after years of mismanagement (by Board members and library administrators alike) remains to be seen. If they want a lid lift to pass, the Board and admin have just under 100 days to rebuild public trust, connect with community members, support staff, and take responsibility for past actions.

How Did Timberland Reach This Point?

At the end of January, then-director Cheryl Heywood announced a massive budget shortfall that would require sweeping staff layoffs. After massive public pushback, Heywood resigned, and the layoffs were temporarily paused.

While 36 of the planned layoffs were eventually called off, more than a dozen employees still lost their jobs. Branch hours were rolled back at nearly all Timberland locations, and staff have been operating on a skeleton crew ever since.

After seven straight months of public, staff, and union demands for accountability and a clear path forward, the library’s Board of Trustees finally voted to place a levy lid lift on the November ballot. Voters will be asked to approve or deny a slight increase in property taxes. If the lift passes, the library will be able to restore dozens of jobs, add more than 100 hours per month to branches across the library district, and continue to expand the collection.

If it doesn’t, Timberland will more or less cease to function no later than the end of 2028. The library began the year with a $3.8M deficit. That deficit will increase drastically leading to lasting layoffs, closed branches, and — in a worst-case scenario — the potential dissolution of the entire five-county system. More than 200,000 people would lose access to social services, community gathering spaces, support groups, internet and printing services, games, activities, companionship, and (of course) books.

What Will a Levy Lid Lift Entail?

Right now, Timberland collects just over $0.22 per $1,000 of assessed property value. By law, it’s allowed to collect up to $0.50 — but Washington’s regressive tax code means the levy rate declines over time. Without frequent votes to restore rates, libraries can legally collect less and less money, leading to underfunded, overburdened library systems with exhausted, underpaid workers.

In an ideal world, Washington’s tax code will change at the state level. All regional libraries, not just Timberland, could benefit from stable funding. Until then, TRL will have to make do with the newly authorized ballot measure, which would increase the levy rate to $0.35. Homeowners’ property tax rates would hypothetically increase by $3.42 and $5.75 per month, or $41 to $69 per year.

Crucially, TRL has never had a successful levy lid lift — in part because it’s only tried once in the last quarter century. Its sole attempt, in 2009, failed by a margin of just 5%, which is notably small for a five-county region voting during the worst economic downturn in many voters’ memories.

There’s no reason to think a levy lift couldn’t pass during these similarly dire financial times . . . except for the fact that the TRL Board and administration have spent the last several years frantically trying to lose all credibility with the public. And with some notable exceptions, including interim director Andrea Heisel and Grays Harbor County trustee Dustin Loup, far too few of them have been willing to engage with the public and do the necessary work to restore the community trust that would make the levy lid lift a success.

Is There A Path Forward?

Time is undeniably short, but administrators and Board members still have time to get down in the dirt with the rest of us. They can choose to act as equal partners with the public in rebuilding the library, clearly detail what went wrong in the past, and prove that they’re committed to building the library back stronger. Or they can do what the old administration and several current Board members are committed to doing: retrench, blame the community, and talk down to staff and patrons — seemingly forgetting that they, not the public, lost $3.8M tax dollars and devastated the library system we were trusting them to protect.

The overwhelmingly positive public support for TRL already won back 36 jobs and demanded administrative change. We already know that communities in all five counties are desperate to save their libraries. This levy lid lift can succeed — but the battle will be much easier if the trustees can commit to working in concert with the public, not against it.

Kylie McQuarrie is the co-founder of the Patron Coalition for Local Libraries (PCLL), a grassroots organization committed to supporting a thriving, successful five-county library system. If you’d like to get involved in the TRL levy lift movement, sign up to volunteer with the PCLL and/or the adjacent PAC, which will support the levy lift effort this summer and fall.

In December 2025, federally threatened Mazama pocket gophers played a key role in halting a plan to significantly expand the Olympia Regional Airport. Seven months later, the species and its Bush Prairie habitat at the airport have become part of a nationwide effort to stop a sweeping rollback of the Endangered Species Act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife and National Marine Fisheries Services — federal agencies that say their mission is to conserve species and “their habitats” and “the ecosystems they depend on”— have finalized a rule that redefines “harm” under the Endangered Species Act to exclude habitat destruction.

At issue is whether governments, companies, and landowners may destroy habitat occupied by protected species. Tribes and conservation groups insist that protecting endangered species necessarily includes protecting the habitat they require to survive and recover.

The Department of the Interior and the Department of Commerce stated in a July 2026 press release that they disagree with the previous interpretation of “harm,” which they claim interfered with private property rights and imposed unnecessary permitting costs on landowners, businesses, and local governments. According to the press release, the system created by federal agencies under the Endangered Species Act improperly “punished people for indirect or speculative impacts never contemplated by Congress.”

Congress enacted the Endangered Species Act in 1973 to conserve endangered species and the ecosystems they depend on. Under the Act, it is unlawful to “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” an endangered species. For more than four decades, federal regulations have defined “harm” to include significant habitat destruction that injures protected wildlife. This interpretation has shaped permitting decisions and endangered species protection nationwide.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that interpretation in 1995. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority that the definition of harm “naturally encompasses habitat modification that results in actual injury or death.” He also explained that if Congress had intended “harm” to only refer to direct injuries, it would have been unnecessary to include in the Act, because it would have been redundant alongside words such as “kill” and “harass.”

Fourteen conservation organizations, the Squaxin Island Tribe, and the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community said in three separate complaints filed with federal courts that the federal agencies should not have rescinded the longstanding regulatory definition of “harm.”

“If you’re destroying habitat and, as a result, you’re injuring or killing wildlife, that is harmful,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in an interview with New Hampshire Public Radio. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Sierra Club, and Conservation Northwest are among nine conservation organizations represented by Earthjustice in the lawsuit involving Bush Prairie.

The nine conservation organizations argue in their complaint that changing the definition of harm “will upend the finalization of the draft Bush Prairie Habitat Conservation Plan,” which is being developed by the City of Tumwater and the Port of Olympia under the Endangered Species Act. The complaint states that the rule change would undermine habitat conservation measures in the plan, including those intended to protect the Olympia pocket gopher and streaked horned lark.

Olympia resident Betsy Norton is a member of the Center for Biological Diversity and is identified in the complaint as someone who would be personally harmed by the rule change because the species protected by the Habitat Conservation Plan bring her “great enjoyment as she regularly hikes and birds in the area.”

Norton helped South Sound Bird Alliance (formerly known as Black Hills Audubon Society) with its successful 2025 appeal of the Port of Olympia’s Airport Master Plan Update. That appeal resulted in the Port withdrawing its environmental determination and putting airport expansion plans on hold. Mazama pocket gophers featured prominently in the airport appeal. The hearing examiner devoted substantially more analysis to the gopher and other protected species than to issues such as aircraft noise or air quality.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Olympia Mazama pocket gopher is one of four federally listed subspecies of Mazama pocket gopher in Washington. Thousands of Olympia Mazama pocket gophers may occupy the Olympia Airport prairie, which is the subspecies’ core habitat. Elsewhere, populations number only in the hundreds or tens.

The primary threats facing the subspecies are habitat “fragmentation, degradation, and loss” due to development. Both the survival and growth of the subspecies depend on efforts to preserve and restore the prairie habitat.

That dependence on habitat is why conservation groups have enlisted the Olympia pocket gopher in the nationwide legal challenge over whether the Endangered Species Act should apply to habitat. In this lawsuit, as in the airport appeal, the gopher may be rescuing humans as much as humans are rescuing it.

Disclosure: Ronda Larson Kramer was an appellant in the appeal of the Port of Olympia’s Airport Master Plan Update.

While we were tabling at a No Kings protest, a Palestinian man from out of town stopped by and said to us, “I can’t believe a group like this exists in Wenatchee. You expect to see this kind of thing in Seattle, not out here.”

We were handing out zines and flyers promoting our Apartheid Free Wenatchee campaign and collecting email addresses for the Wenatchee for Palestine mailing list. Beside us, a Boycott Chevron trifold poster teetered in the breeze.

If you put a pin in the center of Washington state, you’ll probably land on Wenatchee.

As you cross over the mountains from the west side, the rain dries up, the lush forest becomes sagebrush, and the liberal political climate turns conservative and deeply bigoted.

“Wenatchee is a hotbed for Christian nationalism. Josh McPherson, an ultra conservative pastor who prayed for Trump inside the Oval Office during an official White House visit, leads the local Grace City Church. Grace City Church has successfully installed local Republican elected officials who are friendly to them, has a very close relationship with local police, and recently pulled off a coup to replace the City of Wenatchee’s Pride banners in June with Turning Point USA banners.

Wenatchee also has some of the cheapest electricity rates in the country thanks to our hydroelectric dams, and we are what people in the data center fight refer to as a “frontline community.” Cryptocurrency and AI companies have their greedy eyes all over the region, so we’re having to fight off Microsoft and Sabey Corporation, who are attempting to steal our hydropower to power data centers. This is in addition to the problems that every other city is facing: ICE abductions terrorizing community members, housing and food insecurity, worsening wildfires, and summers that are just getting hotter and hotter.

Somehow, in the midst of all of this, Wenatchee for Palestine was born.

Wenatchee for Palestine’s roots are actually somewhere in Olympia. Or rather, The Evergreen State College was where I first learned to talk about Palestine in terms of occupation and liberation. Years ago, I took a class on representations of martyrdom, not knowing that the course of my own life would be radically altered by the ongoing genocide that would follow in the wake of October 7, 2023.

When Wenatchee for Palestine started, it was December 2023, and we were just three people holding signs on the side of the street. For those initial months, we often stood out there in the snow.

At the time, my hard lines for participating in protests were the following: I won’t give any speeches, I won’t lead a march, and I won’t lead chants. I would go on to do two of those three things within the next year. I still haven’t led a chant though.

Wenatchee for Palestine’s membership steadily grew over the course of 2024. As national and international organizing around the genocide shifted, so too did our tactics. Our protests grew more focused. Rather than protesting the genocide in general, we zeroed in on priority boycott targets of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, like Chevron, which supplies nearly 50% of Israel’s electricity grid.

In early 2025, Wenatchee for Palestine decided that it would be beneficial to join the brand new local coalition that was just starting to coalesce around anti-Trump sentiment. Our primary motivation at the time was to counteract the erasure of Palestine taking place within the Democratic Party and Democratic-Party-adjacent national groups like Indivisible. We wanted to make “progressive except Palestine” untenable in the Wenatchee Valley.

We thought that if we could just get Wenatchee for Palestine into the coalition, then they would print our name on all of the No Kings rally flyers alongside groups like the NCW Democrats and Confluence Indivisible. This would make it clear that progressives on a grassroots level support Palestine and that the national organizations were ignoring the genocide at their own peril.

We strong-armed our way into that coalition with a lot of persistence.

At the same time, we expanded our BDS work. We joined the nascent West Coast Boycott Chevron coalition and participated in their first action, a coordinated highway banner drop, on August 29, 2025, as well as several more coordinated actions on November 22, 2025 and March 22, 2026.

In May 2025, we found out that the Chelan County Public Utility District planned to authorize a contract with Microsoft that would grant the software giant access to our hydropower for their data centers. We collaborated with Weapons Out of Wenatchee on a letter-writing campaign to block the contract. If nothing else, we figured our efforts would at least put additional pressure on Microsoft during a pivotal time for the worker-led No Azure for Apartheid movement.

We criticized Microsoft’s complicity in genocide at both the PUD public comments meeting and at the No Kings protest in June 2025. Days later, the PUD board of commissioners voted unanimously to authorize a large load service agreement and contract with Microsoft. It would be nice if we could win all our campaigns with just a few well-worded statements at a public comments meeting, but it’s never that easy.

But sure enough, that September, Microsoft caved under pressure and stopped the sale of a subset of its cloud and AI services to Unit 8200, the spy agency of the Israeli military. Even though we lost our local battle, we played a small part in a broader BDS victory by demonstrating to Microsoft that their support for genocide will not go unchallenged. We did have better luck with another local campaign, though.

On May 18, 2025, we helped arrange a film screening of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land at the First United Methodist Church. After the screening, we spoke to members of the church and informed them about the Apartheid-Free Pledge, which invites communities of faith, congregations, and other organizations to take a stand against apartheid. The members of the church were moved by the film and receptive to the pledge. They wanted to act in solidarity with Palestinians.

And on October 12, 2025, after months of dedicated work from church members, the First United Methodist Church voted to take the Apartheid-Free Pledge. In doing so, it became the first Apartheid-Free Community in Wenatchee, and the first in Central Washington as a whole. Then, less than two months later, on December 2, 2025, the Sunnyslope Church voted in favor of taking the Apartheid-Free Pledge, making them the second Apartheid-Free Community in Wenatchee.

Both churches would go on to do significant work on their own in solidarity with the people of Palestine. That December, the First United Methodist Church hosted a Boycott Chevron caroling event which was the first BDS action in Wenatchee arranged by an organization besides Wenatchee for Palestine. Then in March, the church hosted a book club for Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible Through Palestinian Eyes by Palestinian Christian theologian Mitri Raheb.

The Sunnyslope Church has a big sign out front promoting the Apartheid-Free Pledge. Individual members of the church are working diligently to spread the word and encourage other organizations and congregations to take the pledge.

Slowly but surely, we’re growing our Apartheid Free Wenatchee map.

Organizing in a rural area has its challenges, but it has some advantages, too. There is less institutional power, but less institutional obstruction as well. Some advice I was once told is: “Organize where you’re at.” We are most powerful in the communities we are already embedded in, where we have preexisting connections and are participants in a society that can’t function without us.

All over the country, there is important work happening in rural areas that never makes it into the news but is nonetheless helping shift narratives and broaden the window of what is possible. What people should take away from this is that you can just do things. You can just start a group called “[Your City] for Palestine.” What that group looks like will depend on your specific location and what opportunities are available to you.

Here in Wenatchee, the local struggle against data centers has been reenergized by support from Washington AI Resistance, a statewide organization, and a brand new local data center opposition group called No Data Centers NCW. Unlike with other BDS targets, we have actual leverage over Microsoft because we have something they want: our land, our water, and our hydropower. And we are bound and determined to keep those resources out of Microsoft’s hands as long as their technology is used to surveil and kill Palestinians.

Morgan Atwater can be reached at morganatwaterwrites@proton.me.

Everyone knows that American-style democracy is a two party system. Whether red/blue, Democrat/Republican, or conservative/liberal, it all points to an either/or outcome. However, substituting this systemic fact for political analysis ignores what’s really going on.

Today, the Republican Party’s coalition combines edgy cultural movements with the “free” market policies of the capitalist class. This extremist tendency filled a void created by the party’s conservative and centrist tendencies after they failed to propose any convincing alternatives.

On the Democratic side, as a reaction to this right-wing coalition, the centrist tendency has defined its project as an attempt to maintain old norms. At the very least, they want to slow down change. But like what happened on the other side, when centrists and conservatives refuse to advance a new position, they leave space open, and other tendencies look to fill that void.

In American politics, populism is a very comfortable third wheel to the two major parties because it fundamentally opposes old leadership, aka “the establishment.” It has an inherent affinity for insurgent candidates. Depending on the specific thread, and whether it’s coming from the right or the left, populism might position itself against the elites, the oligarchs, the technocrats, or the 1%. Recently, in the context of the rising cost of living, populists have gained support by making their brand synonymous with cost-reducing reforms.

This election season has already had a lot of buzz about socialists and their embrace or rejection by the Democratic Party, raising the question of why news anchors and podcasters are suddenly so interested in socialism, right in the middle of the democratic primaries, and where’s their curiosity the rest of the year?

Intrigue is one of the main reasons. It makes great clickbait to frame one of the established parties as undergoing a shakeup. Candidates that embrace an “outsider” or radical identity are interviewed more than candidates that fit the party mold. And this works both ways: an incumbent defending their seat from “socialism” is guaranteed more invitations to Meet the Press than one having to convince people of the same old thing for another term. That’s why it’s important to remember that, in a primary, all the candidates are running to represent the same party, and in a general election, they’re all competing to run the same government.

Populism itself is another reason there’s so much interest in so-called radical candidates. The framing of the elites vs. the non-elites, of the establishment vs. the upsurge, helps justify the presence of a candidate whose policies don’t fall in the “center” of the party’s political spectrum. Combine that with spicy rhetoric about landlords and capitalism, and you have the potential for a viral candidate that could get a lot of votes. The problem is that this never advances beyond blue vs. blue. That’s what makes the whole discussion a reformist debate about how to steer the ship, not a revolutionary debate about how to get to a different society, free from class domination.

Electoralism is part of the strategy of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). For them, that means using the Democratic Party as a vehicle. That’s a big part of why they’re getting so much media coverage. If you run for office calling yourself a socialist, you’re putting a target on your back. It invites opponents, supporters, and sometimes the whole internet to follow every detail of your local campaign. A socialist candidate isn’t hard to understand. In an election, they come off as being just like any other candidate, only more radical or progressive or whatever. I don’t think that’s a useless take because it’s relevant that, in order to get elected, they have to be “just like any other candidate.”

I’m not saying their proposed reforms aren’t better than the alternatives or that revolutionary currents should actively work against them. I’m not questioning their socialist vision or their commitment. But running for office is different than governing is different than building popular power. If the success of a political strategy relies on the outcome of a single tactic, like winning an election, it’s precarious; if it relies on the dominant political class allowing the election of their own gravediggers, it’s misleading and energy zapping.

I say all of this as a proponent of a revolutionary current that rejects the right-wing’s dominance and the former status quo defended by the centrists, arguing instead for an advance toward a new system, based on popular power rather than state power. While the revolutionary tendency is far from the most influential force today, there were decades when it was imperceptible due to repression and demobilization. But in the wake of Trump’s rise, people are starting to get familiar with revolutionary politics again.

Like populism, the revolutionary tendency has many currents: anarchist, Marxist, indigenous, abolitionist. But unlike populism, it sees reforms as the result of the self-managed power of the people, not as lures to attract voters to a certain side in an election. There’s undeniably a fight in the government over who gets to promote state policy, but there’s also another, equally valid fight taking place against the whole capitalist system, promoting the policies of the people and working to increase their power outside of the state.

It’s naive to imagine the future being the dream of any one single ideological source. You can’t just ignore everyone else and get on with your own thing. On top of that, there’s no empty space in politics. When one set of ideas and theories for explaining things fails, there’s always another way, another tendency ready and willing to fill the void. This doesn’t happen in an even and balanced way; it’s a struggle. There are winners, and there are losers. That’s why it matters which tendency you’re promoting and which one you’re resisting.

Carl Eugene Stroud is a member of the Center for Especifismo Studies.

Excerpt from Clare Follmann’s Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong

by Clare Follmann

A caste of plants and animals, labeled “invasive species,” are charged with being a key cause of habitat degradation that must be eradicated at any cost — an ethically questionable and often futile approach. While some invasive species cause great environmental damage, recent developments in the study of ecology have found that intervention efforts themselves have frequently proved more harmful than helpful to their local ecosystems. Yet the outdated narrative of “species management” persists in both public belief and conservation policy, distracting from and even justifying a far greater threat to biodiversity: the global capitalist system that is destroying our planet.

***

(Abridged excerpt, slightly edited)

Although this book isn’t a story, it’s certainly about a story. It is full of many different stories, and it also begins with a story. So, for the sake of tradition (which this book at times will at length disavow), let it begin this way.

Once upon a time, there was a group of fishermen. . .

Read the rest here

Right to Work, Reconsidered

In order for organized labor to overcome the anti-union political right, it must shift focus from simply using collective power for meager pay raises, towards taking back power.

by Nicholas Hefling

As a union rep, I hear a lot of confusion about Right to Work (RTW) — a term that the left should reappropriate. RTW is the norm in most states (though not in the State of Washington) and the entire public sector since 2018. Where RTW exists, most workers in a union-represented workplace only pay dues voluntarily. RTW is an attack on a hard-won contractual provision called the union security clause, which requires that everyone a union represents pay their share of the cost of that representation.

At first glance, RTW can sound fairer to workers; why should anyone be forced to pay union dues? Here’s the catch. Even when a worker pays nothing, the union is still legally required to represent them: to bargain on their behalf, file their grievances, and defend their rights on the job. That costs significant resources. When the share of workers paying dues shrinks while the represented workforce doesn’t, the union is squeezed. This strain pushes unions to raise dues (which drives more people to drop out), cut staff, or scale back external organizing efforts. That, of course, was the dream anti-union activists pursued in Janus v. AFSCME.

Read the rest here

Captive Consumers!

Within prisons, exclusive contracts with private vendors leave incarcerated people with no choice.

by Tomas S. Afeworki

The prison industrial complex has always been rooted in profit, and it’s a well-oiled, self-feeding operation. And it will continue to grow during this new AI era as the citizenry loses jobs and the middle class becomes more nonexistent with each passing year.

Olympia Joins International Kite Festival to Resist Israeli Occupation in the West Bank

by Nicholas Kohnen and Michelle Ryder

On a sunny summer Sunday afternoon, some 25 Olympia families gathered near the Heritage Park Fountain to build, decorate, and fly kites alongside organizers across the world to show solidarity with Palestinians facing settler violence in the West Bank.

Laughter mingled with the sounds of classic Arabic music as bubbles floated past smiling faces, and children ran freely, compelling their kites to take to the skies. It was an afternoon of deliberate celebration and unbridled joy, part of an act of global solidarity coinciding with the 13th annual Burin Kite Festival.

Read the rest here

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