The August 15 Vashon-Maury Community Council meeting — moved to Vashon Center for the Arts (VCA) rather than the customary Land Trust building to accommodate a much larger than usual turnout — addressed a smoldering island conversation around the Seattle Indian Health Board (SIHB) and the county planning process.
The 2.5-hour event included passionate speeches around the future of Vashon, but ultimately, few questions were answered and fewer understandings were reached.
The raison d’être for the meeting’s move to VCA, which brought in roughly 150 in-person attendees and more than 260 over Zoom, was a vote over a resolution raised a month earlier by islander Katy Ballard.
But agreeing on which version of the resolution to vote on became fraught with debate and appeals to the Democratic Rules of Order — and procedural concerns over the vote tally ultimately left the council promising to hold the vote again.
Supporters of the Thunderbird Treatment Center cast the matter in a moral light: How can Vashon, an island which prides itself on its liberal values and on recognizing the history of the Salish people — and even begins its community council meetings with an Indigenous land acknowledgement — stand in the way of an Indigenous project to heal addiction?
Critics focused primarily on proposed changes in the King County Comprehensive Plan, arguing that their main concerns were with the possibility of radical zoning changes across the island, and not specifically with the Health Board.
Before the debate, board president Diane Emerson appealed to the crowd to listen to each other and remember “our shared goal of creating a healthy, safe and supportive community.”
She also acknowledged the flood of new membership the meeting had rallied in recent days. The council, she said, would easily reach 700 with the number of new applicants.
“It’s a new era for the community council, and we won’t be able to meet at the land trust anymore,” Emerson said.
Emerson also shared that she will step down from being board president of the organization at the end of this year, and the council will need to elect a new leader.
Zoning, rehabilitation and history
Prior to the vote on Ballard’s motion, another resident placed a motion on behalf of the Friends of Thunderbird for next month’s meeting (September 19) to have the council endorse the Health Board’s efforts to bring the Thunderbird Treatment Center to Vashon.
It took only seconds for the conversation to unearth the trauma and pain that defines addiction, substance abuse and this country’s historical mistreatment of Indigenous people.
“When this first came up … I thought, it’s going to be a rare opportunity for the community to talk about some of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) questions,” a supporter of the pro-Thunderbird motion said. “And when I read The Loop last week … one of the major arguments was … ‘do you want drunken Indians in your backyard.’ … Do we really live in a place that expounds our liberalness, or do we really live in a moated community?”
(Author Katy Ballard’s July article in The Loop does not use the term “drunken Indians,” an offensive phrase which is often used to trivialize members of tribes who suffer from addiction.)
The speaker shared the story of his own son, who had alcoholism and who, possibly, “might still be alive” had he had access to a treatment center on Vashon like Thunderbird.
“The land acknowledgment (with which the community council always begins meetings) said everything,” another speaker said. “Whose land are we on? Whose land did we take away? … I went into recovery 45 years ago. … This is a model that has worked before, and that is exciting. I feel very honored to have this center here.”
Another speaker recounted working with the SIHB for decades, and vouched for their work with the Indigenous population, such as at the former Thunderbird Treatment Center and Chief Seattle Club.
“How dare we speak against our own land [acknowledgement],” she asked.
Several speakers raised concerns over supporting Thunderbird before the zoning for the project had been approved — a complicated claim which The Beachcomber addresses in its page 1 story this week on the Thunderbird Treatment Center.
The gist: According to King County, the Health Board currently has a green light to pursue the treatment center project at the site of the former Vashon Community Care building as a Residential Treatment Facility, at least as it has laid out in its permitting applications.
“We are being asked to get on one side of the line or the other, and I think it’s wrong,” one speaker said. “Everybody in this room has been wronged … by King County not approaching the people of Vashon Island, and making promises to the [Seattle] Indian Health Board that they were not allowed to keep. If I was the Indian Health Board, I would be pissed at King County. … I think it’s time we had the answers to all our questions, and … there was a meeting that was actually only about this … and how we can either make it work, or how we don’t.”
Another speaker shared opposition to proposed changes in the comprehensive plan which would, she said, greatly change what is and isn’t allowed in rural areas like Vashon.
“It’s all top-down, King County telling us what to do for our island,” she said. “Vashon simply does not have the infrastructure … to support the needs of increased density in the town core.”
A question of intent
The main event of the evening was the original motion raised by Ballard over county zoning concerns.
The initial text of Ballard’s motion asked the council to agree “That the Vashon Community Council inform King County Council members, and the executive, that Vashon residents must be given their legal right to a public forum about this new zoning that would allow drug rehab and psychiatric hospitals in any residential neighborhood on Vashon.”
But Ballard asked the council to consider a revised version, which asked “That the V-MCC issue a letter … that the King County Council members and the Executive come to Vashon within the next 45 days … for a public hearing and conversation with interested community members … to gather input from the electeds and the citizens on the proposed changes of zoning laws and rules to the comprehensive plan, and the striking amendment that may impact Vashon-Maury property owners.”
“I think there’s a lot of people in here (who) think this is only about Thunderbird,” Ballard told the audience. “It is not. There’s a lot of extreme zoning in the striking amendment, and people need to be aware of it. And I’m even hearing tonight there’s confusion about the zoning. And there’s also a theme tonight, about this island being ignored by the county.”
A public meeting on the comprehensive plan will be held November 19 in downtown Seattle, which Ballard said is a tall ask for an island with a population that is elderly, working and constrained by ailing ferry access.
”I’m asking council members to come to the island and listen to the people, no matter where you stand on these issues,” Ballard said. “At the end of the day, all of our voices should be heard.”
She later accepted an amendment to the motion that would allow county officials to attend the proposed meeting virtually.
Islander Scott Harvey told the audience that the motion only seeks to reaffirm the rights of Vashon residents to engage in a public forum about the county’s zoning process: “Just because something is a good idea doesn’t mean we should ignore due process.”
But another speaker raised concerns that opponents of Thunderbird “really are just raising procedural issues to try and delay it. … This has been going on for a long time. We’ve had a discussion about Thunderbird several months ago. There have been several meetings.”
The motion, in principle, sounded very reasonable, said islander Rob Crawford.
“But why now?” he asked. “When the original motion was re-read … the real intent of this motion became very clear … which is to stop Thunderbird.”
“Islanders are being lowballed and misled by the Seattle Indian Health Board, Friends of Thunderbird and certain elected officials, and we are being pressured to be silent or compliant, based on colonizer guilt — messaging by those who require these zoning changes to pursue their own agenda,” March Twisdale said. “Once given the facts, many of us do not consent to the many proposed zoning changes, as they will drastically change our island for the worse.”
A scramble over procedure
Debate also swirled around the changing of the motion itself — some islanders said the new motion was too different in substance to be fairly considered with such short notice. A majority of the community council board of directors agreed it was close enough.
But ultimately the council voted on the original version, because the revised version had been rejected by at least two members of the council and there was never a motion to amend it, Emerson said.
Ultimately, the vote was 153 against, 97 for. The motion failed.
Then, it got even more complicated. An attendee on Zoom shared that she wasn’t able to vote on the motion — which raised concerns from some in the audience that the vote had not fully captured the will of the audience.
As a result, Emerson said, the Democratic Rules of Order require the council to hold a new vote. She said this would be done using an online voting system, which will send ballots via email.
“I’m prepared to make that happen, and I don’t expect that the results of the vote will change one bit,” Emerson said. “I will make that happen, within the next week or so.”
The meeting concluded with a community council member moving to place a slightly revised version of Ballard’s revised motion — the one which does not include explicit reference to drug rehab and psychiatric hospitals — on the block for next month’s community council meeting.
That means the next community council on September 19 will revisit the topics of Thunderbird and zoning across two separate motions — one asking the community to support Thunderbird, the other asking King County to speak to islanders about proposed zoning changes.
The meeting may be held again at VCA if necessitated by crowd size.
Also on Aug. 15, the community council…
• Heard from King County representatives about road and utility power pole management, with islanders sharing concerns that Vashon residents haven’t been fully appraised of clear-zone tree removal projects — and that many trees are being removed inappropriately and unnecessarily.
• Voted 117-23 to make Dr. Steve Nourse a board member of the community council. Nourse is a long-time islander, an advocate for those with disabilities, a consultant and the holder of a Master’s in Social Work and a Doctorate in Special Education from the University of Washington.
• Voted 155-27 to oppose Initiative 2117 on the November ballot, which would repeal the 2021 Washington Climate Commitment Act.
