These are not happy times. The Timberland Regional Library has fallen on hard leadership times. Not a full complement of trustees, lacking an executive director (interim or otherwise) and navigating the rough waters that hopefully lead to a levy lid lift. This week looks back at the deep issues at play between the five counties that make up the library district and how we navigate our way out of here.

There’s also a new episode of The Olympia Standard podcast that deals with many of the same issues about our built environment around government services and how people feel about losing their part of it. Erika Lari looks back at the school closure process two years ago.

The Timberland Regional Library doesn't face a stand-off, it faces some sort of evolution

Dean Jewett should not be a library trustee. In our current political crisis around the Timberland Regional Library, though, I want to get that point out of the way quickly.

Right now, Timberland Regional Library has two open seats on its board of trustees. This might seem like a small detail compared to the massive budget crisis the library is facing, but it is worth dispatching why we are (probably) seeing a quiet, long-running standoff between county commissioners in Mason and Thurston counties.

Thurston County refused to approve Jewett for a seat. In response, Mason County refused to approve the candidate put forward by Thurston. Under the current rules, all five county commissions in the district have to agree to appoint a trustee. One disagreement can freeze the entire process.

After he was nominated by Mason County in 2024, Jewett was involved in a physical fight with a person experiencing homelessness. Police reports and video showed that the conflict started when Jewett got out of his truck and shouted insults about homeless people toward a man named Christopher Booth. Booth was just trying to dry a wet sleeping bag in the rain.

Jewett filmed the man and made derogatory remarks before things turned physical. While the resulting assault charges were eventually dismissed in 2025, it was only because the prosecutor could not find the victim to testify. The video evidence of the aggression did not go away.

To me, this is not the character of a library trustee.

If this was the basis of their decision, the Thurston County commissioners made the right call. Mason County has suggested bringing all five counties together to talk about his status, but the best move is to just put Jewett back on the shelf.

Broader Context of the Rural/Urban Stand-Off

I want to pull back the zoom from the drama of one board seat and look at the larger crisis facing Timberland, which is captured in how rural and urban parts of the district see and support library services.

The close-in facts are pretty stark: after closing out the 2026 budget, the library leadership suddenly found a $3.8 million hole in their finances. Their solution in February was to approve massive staffing cuts. This move left 40 percent of the public facing workers without a job. The public was rightfully angry. The executive director, Cheryl Heywood, ended up resigning.

I have a bit of history with this. I served on the Timberland board between 2010 and 2016. I started right after the library failed a levy lid lift in 2009. We were in the middle of a long and messy leadership process that eventually led us to Heywood.

I will be honest, and say I still do not fully understand where this $3.8 million hole came from right after a budget was approved. It has not been explained in a way that satisfies me.

Let's pull the zoom out: the general story of the Timberland deficit is very real. It is the same story for almost every local government in Washington that relies on property taxes. There is an unrealistic 1 percent cap on how much those funds can grow each year. This traps property tax dependent districts in an inflationary spiral. They cannot keep up with rising costs because their revenue is legally capped at a level that stays below the rate of inflation.

The last time things got this bad was in 2018. Back then, the library tried to roll out a new plan for its buildings. That plan was meant to address the fiscal crisis and a deeper structural issue with how the district is organized.

Timberland was created in the 1960s. Back then, the five counties involved were roughly the same size. They had similar economies. But since then, the timber industry has collapsed. The state government has grown. Thurston County has exploded in size and wealth while the other four counties have mostly stayed the same.

Population in 1968 vs. 2018

The building plan in 2018 was a necessary reaction to these changes. Rural communities were terrified of losing their local library branches. But the math showed a massive imbalance. Thurston County provides more than half of the tax money for the entire district. It only gets about 41 percent of the spending. This means urban taxpayers are essentially paying 1.4 million dollars a year to subsidize rural library branches. Many of those same rural areas are the ones that consistently vote against the tax levies needed to keep the system running.

It is much more expensive to serve a person in rural Grays Harbor than it is in urban Thurston County. It actually costs nearly twice as much per borrower. By trying to keep every single old building open, the district was preventing itself from reaching other rural areas that had no service at all. The choice was between closing some buildings to modernize the system or letting the whole district rot under the weight of budget cuts.

That imbalance is still there in the 2025 budget. Thurston County is putting in over $9 million but only getting $6 million back in local services. This urban to rural subsidy is not a new idea. It is part of how government works at every level. Providing services in the woods is just more expensive than providing them in a city. Research shows it costs about 39 percent more to serve a rural resident because there is no density. Maintaining miles of road or water lines for just a few houses costs a lot more per person than it does in a crowded neighborhood. Small towns also lack the ability to spread costs out.

And this is just the bottom line of the budget itself. This discussion doesn't address the fundamental disparity in providing capital costs across the district. The truth is (except in Yelm and Montesano), the cities own and keep up library buildings. But, outside cities, the district foots the bill. This creates a layer of further double taxation for city residents.

Stand-off between soul and money. We need both.

There are two different ways people are looking at this crisis right now. On one side, people like me see a data driven reality. We see a tax structure from the 1960s that is failing. For us, the funding cliff is a mathematical fact. On the other side, writers like John Hughes and Caelen McQuilkin see this as a man made disaster. They see it as cold hearted incompetence and a betrayal by a top heavy administration.

They mostly ignore the tax disparity between the counties. Instead, they focus on the idea that administrators kept their high salaries while cutting the people at the front desks. They see the move toward automated kiosks and unstaffed branches as an abandonment of the library as a sacred community hub.

The problem is that the current cuts are hitting the rural areas the hardest. Even if those branches are expensive to run, they are also the most fragile.

Looking back at the 2009 levy data, we can see the problematic political nature that this rural/urban split clearly has on the district. Urban areas supported the library at about 51 percent. Rural areas were only at 38 percent. That is a huge gap. In Thurston County, that gap was even wider. The only place where support was higher was in Shelton, where people were voting to join the district at the same time.

The core of the argument is that rural services are being reduced. But these are often the same places where voters did not support the library in the first place. I am not saying this as a punishment. I am saying that if the trustees want to pass a new levy lid lift soon, they have to face this reality. The current levy rate is about half of what is legally possible. We obviously need a new campaign for a levy lift as soon as possible. It is really the only way forward if we want to save these libraries.

One thing I have realized from reading research by groups like OCLC is that there is a disconnect in how we talk about this. I have spent years focusing on efficiency and data. But most people value the library because of its transformational impact. The push for branch closures and kiosks failed because it ignored the human element. A passionate librarian is what actually drives financial support. When you automate the building, you strip away the soul of the community.

The OCLC research presents a paradox that strangely points out that the people most likely to use the library are not the same people who are more likely to vote for funding. In places like Lewis County, the library is a lifeline. People still vote against tax increases there. Many people do not even realize the library is in trouble until they are about to lose it.

The love people feel for their library usually stays quiet until the building is about to disappear. To put it bluntly, the best time to ask for help is before you cut the budget. But you have to make sure everyone knows exactly what is on the chopping block first.

Epilogue: The Breaking Point

Next year, we’ll know a lot more about the future of Timberland. We’ll see how they address their current leadership vacuum. We’ll find out if the talk of a levy lid lift is real and possibly if it has passed. We’ll finally know if Timberland is going to continue its death spiral in terms of both services and its levy rate.

It's worth noting that right now, it's very hard to close a library district or for a county to withdraw from one. Gathering enough signatures across five different counties to put a shuttering initiative on the ballot is a massive task. It’s probably harder and more expensive to manage than a levy lid lift itself.

The legislature could do something about the fiscal cliff facing this district. They could do the same for every other local government in the state. They hold the sole authority to adjust that 1% growth limit. The political realities of that are difficult, but there is another, darker path the legislature could take.

As the levy campaign was failing back in 2009, two bills were introduced in the legislature. They didn’t get a hearing, but they offered a different vision for governance. These bills would have significantly simplified the process for a county to exit an intercounty rural library district. They would have allowed a county’s legislative authority to trigger an election just by passing a resolution. If the voters approved, that county would immediately leave the original district and automatically start its own.

To address the fairness and representation issues between counties like the ones in Timberland, the bills included a specific mandate. If one county has more than 50% of the total population but fewer than 50% of the trustees, the district would have to be divided into subdistricts of equal population. This would ensure that trustees actually live in the areas they represent. It would provide much more equitable governance for the most populous counties within a shared district.

These bills didn't get a hearing, but they addressed fundamental issues surrounding how Timberland has changed and grown. That means someone was working and thinking about this issue enough to put it together, if not gathering the political will to bring change.

The fundamental structure of Timberland has not been addressed in decades. We haven't changed how these regional libraries work since the mid-twentieth century. We might finally be reaching a breaking point, if the tides and organizational will shift one way or the other.

One way or another, the current system will not hold forever.

The Olympia Standard #149: What do we think about when we think about closing schools

As we enter budget building season for the Olympia School District, Erika Lari sits down with veterans (both students and parents) about the debate just a couple of years ago over closing some elementary schools.

What else you should be reading or watching this week

1. The Olympus (The Olympia High School student paper) covers the No Kings Rally last week in Olympia:

   Still, given current events, young people’s involvement may not be optional. “It’s your generation that’s going to have to clean up this mess,” Finnegan said. “It’s our generation that didn’t do enough… Find a cause you strongly believe in, and when your time comes to vote, do so, because your life depends on it.”

2. Read this if you must. As cell phone moral panicking goes, this one at least acknowledges that being digitally literate is a key skill. I'm glad a statewide ban didn't pass. Device rules should be balanced and as local as possible. Blanket rules remove agency and drive us into the moral panic that is framed on the parents’ rights campaigns that are more about controlling than allowing discovery.

3. In a recent critique, Jason Rantz offers a surprisingly sharp framework for identifying "journalism-as-advocacy," calling out KING 5 for crossing the line from reporting to organizing by soliciting legal complaints against ICE agents. It is an ironically compelling argument, because while Rantz targets a traditional outlet for "norm enunciation," he remains conspicuously supportive of figures like Brandi Kruse and Jonathan Choe, who recently sued the State House for press passes despite their documented roles as political activists, keynote speakers at partisan rallies, and "ambassadors" for advocacy groups.