The Lakewood Examiner

Today we got a postcard from the City of Lakewood, telling us about possible changes to the tree code. If the recommendations of the recent Ad Hoc Tree Committee come into force, it will become more difficult to cut down trees on your property – particularly if the trees are Garry oaks.

I suspect the City was somewhat disappointed with the Ad Hoc Tree Committee. They tried to include members who were hostile to increased regulation, but overall, the Committee showed itself to be tree-friendly.

Matters were helped by the fact that members who were connected with real estate interests stopped turning up during the last few sessions. Maybe they had other commitments, or maybe they didn’t like the way things were going. Maybe they knew they didn’t really have to show up to all the meetings, since the Planning Commission would trash the recommendations later anyway.

And now the City of Lakewood is informing everyone in the City that the Ad Hoc Tree Committee has proposed stronger protections for trees.

That’s strange. The City never sent postcards to everyone in Lakewood telling them about proposals to create industrial zones. We weren’t told about plans to cut down hundreds of Garry oaks to make way for warehouses, and how we could register our opposition.

Maybe the City were just giving everyone a friendly warning. If you want to cut your Garry oaks down, you better do it now, because the rules are about to change.

Alternatively, Lakewood may regard those that care about environmental conservation as a lunatic fringe. They probably think that most Lakewood residents either don’t care about trees, or believe that property owner rights are absolute and God-given.

Then at the public hearing on July 6, the tree-huggers will be forced to wake up to the rude reality that they’re only a tiny minority.

Lakewood council members are chosen by the electorate, right?

Sometimes. Council members are elected for four-year terms, but if they resign, die or become ineligible for office there is no special election for a replacement. The remaining council members choose a replacement.

We saw this happening at the beginning of 2021. Council member John Simpson announced that he was moving out of Lakewood, and as a result he resigned from the Council.

The City asked for applicants to fill the vacancy. Anyone could apply, if they were a Lakewood resident and voter.

There were fourteen final applicants and in early February 2021 they were interviewed on Zoom. Each interview lasted for 15 minutes. Applicants made a statement about themselves, answered five questions, and gave a brief  summing up. These were the questions:

1. What skills, talent or diversity of background would you bring to the City Council?
2. How would the aforementioned attributes help you be an effective council member on day one?
3. What is your vision for the City of Lakewood?
4. What are the top three priorities you believe the City Council should focus on in 2021?
5. Why you? Why now?

The winning performance was from Patti Belle. Here’s her interview:

Patti Belle’s performance was beautifully choreographed, and she had the star quality of a gameshow contestant. Most importantly, she seemed to have just the profile the City was looking for:

I work in the mayor’s office in one of the largest cities in the State. I manage a national, awarding-winning communications team that produces and designs content for video, photography, online, and all of our social channels. We support the mayor, city council and ten City departments. My leadership…

A municipal bureaucrat who is used to keeping mayors and council members happy. Little chance of her rocking the boat or asking difficult questions.

Lakewood’s six council members voted for the fourteen candidates, in a series of rounds. In the final round Patti Belle was up against local architect Jeff Brown. Five council members votes for Patti Belle.  Jason Whalen was the only council member voting for Jeff Brown.

The council made a terrible choice, and they demonstrated that committee decisions can never replace the democratic process. Patti Belle made a good impression with the interview panel, but in the process showed herself to be the wrong choice.

This has been born out over the last year or more. Patti Belle tends to parrot the opinions of other council members, and seems to find it difficult if not impossible to act independently.

Worse still, we’re stuck with Patti Belle until 2025. In Lakewood, incumbents rarely get voted out of office, and in the November 2021 election she kept her council seat by a mile.

There’s more bad news. If Linda Farmer gets elected as Pierce County Auditor, I assume she’ll step down from the City Council. This means that at the beginning of 2023 the City Council might have to choose her replacement. So if you care about democracy in Lakewood, make absolutely sure that you don’t vote for Slippery Linda as Pierce County Auditor.

Linda Farmer, Democrat and Lakewood council member, has announced her candidacy for Pierce County Auditor.

But why would anyone want to vote for Slippery Linda, much less campaign for her?

In 2019, when Linda Farmer successfully stood for Position 6 on the Lakewood City Council, she was helped by a small army of Democrat doorbellers. However, one of these doorbellers offered me the opinion that she often left the hard work to others.

A year later, the Democrats were again on the campaign trail, trying to get Jani Hitchen elected to Pierce County Council, for District 6. Jason Whalen, Lakewood’s Republican Deputy Mayor, was her opponent.

So did Linda Farmer endorse Jani Hitchen, her fellow Democrat?

Slippery Linda back-stabbed her own doorbellers by endorsing Jason Whalen, as we discover from his 2020 campaign website:

This endorsement came despite the fact that Jason Whalen sent out a mailer accusing Jani Hitchen of having radical policies, and wanting to defund the police. Hitchen countered the accusation, by saying it was possible that the “division my opponent is causing is straight out of the Trump Republicans’ playbook”.

What Linda Farmer was thinking is anyone’s guess.

More slipperiness is what we see when surveying Linda Farmer’s performance on the Lakewood City Council. On one hand she talks up her progressive credentials – for example regarding the environment – on the other hand she almost invariably defers to mayor Jason Whalen and council member Donald Anderson.

I reported on this recently, when council member Michael Brandstetter proposed having the Garry oak as Lakewood’s official tree. Predictably Donald Anderson opposed the suggestion, and Linda Farmer followed his lead, saying

I would like a little bit more information about what it would mean to designate a city tree, to Council member Anderson’s point. What would happen if we needed to cut one down…?

Back in 2019, the Tacoma News Tribune endorsed Linda Farmer in her bid for Lakewood City Council:

In our estimation, Linda Farmer separates herself from the herd, in part because of her spot-on diagnosis of what ails the city: Lakewood, she told us, has “reputation issues.”

In 2019 Linda Farmer may have been the best of a bad bunch, but right now, in 2022, that endorsement rings hollow. Linda Farmer has not separated herself from the herd – indeed she has shown herself to be a pliant creature of the Anderson-dominated City Council.

If Linda Farmer had genuinely cared about Lakewood’s reputation, she would have posed some fundamental questions. For example, how was it that the City continued to employ three police officers who had been involved in the 2013 killing of Leonard Thomas? How could the City continue to employ officers who had had seven-figure sums awarded against them by a civil jury?

That’s the nature of collective responsibility. It doesn’t matter if Linda Farmer had only been a council member for four months when Said Joquin was shot dead by Michael Wiley, who was one of those three officers.

A grove of Garry oaks and a historic school were leveled to make way for parking lots and warehouses in Woodbrook on Linda Farmer’s watch, too. The annihilation of Lakewood’s Woodbrook neighborhood represents an indelible stain on Lakewood’s reputation.

Saying that the plans to destroy Woodbrook had already been decided, that there was nothing that could have been done, would be no excuse. As a self-proclaimed environmentalist, Linda Farmer should have moved heaven and earth to prevent this catastrophe from occurring.

Slippery Linda, through her behavior and track record, has shown herself to be unsuited for elected office.

Update: Lakewood mayor Jason Whalen is returning the favor and is endorsing Slippery Linda. Click here to read my comments on the matter.

Russell Garrison is buried in New Tacoma Cemetery, in the Veterans Honor Garden. During World War Two he graduated from Lincoln High School in Tacoma, and joined the 11^th Airborne, as a paratrooper. The unit fought the Japanese in the Philippines, seeing action in Leyte and Luzon. That’s quite something, for a family to send their only son, just out of high school, into a major conflict zone.

The teenage soldier became part of the forces occupying Japan. He was promoted to staff sergeant and ended his service as chief of a drafting section. He drew up many of the maps that were included in a book titled The Angels: A History Of The 11th Airborne Division, 1943-1946.

Russell Garrison’s time in Japan had an impact on him. We can see this in Lakewood Library, which was designed to bring us close to nature, and which originally had a Japanese Garden, on the Gravelly Lake side.

Lakewood Library was the pinnacle of Russell Garrison’s career as an architect, and in 1964 it won the First Honor award from the American Institute of Architects and the American Library Association. I should also mention that in 1962 Russell Garrison was Lakewood’s Man of the Year.

Lakewood Library is special, and it is fitting that a City taking such pride in its military connections has a library shaped by the vision of a World War Two veteran, a vision which won a prestigious national award.

Two years ago, on May 1 2020, Said Joquin was shot dead by a police officer from Lakewood Police Department. Said was a 26 year old African American, stopped in his car for erratic driving. It was less than a month before the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, yet there were few mass demonstrations, no grovelling statements from city officials, and media coverage was muted.

There was perhaps a perception that Said was responsible for his own death. He shouldn’t have been driving erratically and he shouldn’t have had a loaded Browning pistol under his seat – particularly without a concealed carry permit. However, did his behavioral lapses mean that he deserved to die?

Said Joquin, with a passenger, was driving on Steilacoom Boulevard when he ran a stop sign and brought his car to an abrupt halt in the middle of the road. There were two police cars behind him, so it was inevitable that he would be pulled over.

The police car immediately behind Said was driven by Officer Michael Wiley. After all cars had stopped, Michael Wiley approached Said’s car on the driver’s side, and he noticed a gun on the floor. Reports say that it was under the driver’s seat, with the handle protruding.

Michael Wiley pointed his gun at Said, who was still in the driver’s seat, and said to him:

So real quick, I see there’s a weapon in the (unintelligible) in the car. If you reach for anything, alright, you will be shot. Do you understand? Put your hands on your head. Do you have a permit for the weapon?

The situation seemed under control. Said apparently complied with Wiley’s instructions, and said “I don’t want to get shot”. Then it all went wrong. The Cooperative Cities Crime Response Unit’s (CRU) investigation reported that

According to Officer Wiley’s statement, Mr. Joquin suddenly lunged
down toward the gun with his hands, which he believed created a
grave risk of the officers being shot.

Note the use of the word “lunged”. It’s a highly charged word, and according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, it is about moving or reaching forward in a sudden, forceful way. Contrast this with the more neutral way Wiley described the event on a public safety form, when asked in what direction Said fired the rounds:

He didn’t, he just reached for his weapon.

That was certainly Wiley’s view of Said’s action, that he was reaching for his weapon. But do we really know what Said’s intention was, if any, when he lowered his arm?

And it doesn’t appear that Said ever reached his weapon, because Wiley shot at him four times, mortally wounding him.  According to another officer’s account, there were

two gunshot wounds to left his left breast and one above his left clavicle…

and

Another gunshot wound was apparent to Joaquin’s left forearm and lower left abdomen.

Even if Said had reached the weapon, would he have posed an immediate threat to anyone? The CRU report said that the gun was a .22 caliber handgun. It did not mention that it was in a holster, and neither did the statements of the officers at the scene that I read. Yet the crime laboratory report stated:

A loaded Browning Arms Company Model Buck Mark .22 LR caliber semi-automatic pistol (SN: 655NM29208) in a holster was underneath the front driver seat.

The question of whether the gun was in a holster is important, because if it was, it would have added an extra layer of difficulty to its effective employment,

Regardless of whether the gun was holstered, Said’s lowering of his arm almost certainly did not present sufficient cause for Michael Wiley to open fire. After all, Wiley is a trained professional, who appears to have been in complete control of the situation.

There therefore seems to be grounds for criminal charges to be laid against Michael Wiley. Yet in March 2022 Mary Robnett, the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney, announced that he would not be facing charges, and that “[his] response was consistent with the applicable good faith standard”.

Good faith is covered by Washington State law, in RCW 9A.16.040(4):

A peace officer shall not be held criminally liable for using deadly force in good faith, where “good faith” is an objective standard which shall consider all the facts, circumstances, and information known to the officer at the time to determine whether a similarly situated reasonable officer would have believed that the use of deadly force was necessary to prevent death or serious physical harm to the officer or another individual.

Michael Wiley may not have known that the gun was in a holster, but deadly force, at that moment, appears unnecessary. Said’s hand was not touching his gun, and surely a trained police officer, in control of the situation, should not have pulled the trigger at that particular moment?

Of course it may be argued that a criminal case would have never got very far, because of the high burden of proof. In a civil case it may be a different story, and one can look further afield for evidence of negligence and mismanagement.

In 2013 Michael Wiley was part of a police operaton that led to the killing of Leonard Thomas. The killing was widely reported, not least because an unarmed Thomas was shot by police while holding a child.  A jury awarded Thomas’ family $1.5 million dollars against Michael Wiley (and larger sums against two other officers), yet his employer, the City of Lakewood, was unhappy with the verdict. Not only did the City indemnify Michael Wiley, but it kept him on the payroll. This is shocking, not least because Michael Wiley responded to Thomas’ shooting by calling it a “frickin’ million dollar shot”.

One might expect a jury in a civil case to accept that Said’s behavioral lapses were not sufficient cause for Michael Wiley to shoot him. It could be further argued that the City of Lakewood was fundamentally negligient in having a police officer on its payroll who had cost them (or their insurer) $1.5 million. After all ordinary working people, many of whom don’t earn the six-figure salary of a police officer, would be fired on the spot if their actions had cost their employer over a million dollars.

The City of Lakewood is proposing to up-light the Garry oak trees adjacent the Colonial Plaza. This means putting lights under the trees, so as to create a cool, night-time effect. Unfortunately those making the proposal seem mainly concerned with surface appearances, and haven’t fully considered the science.

As we know, a major problem of modern living is light pollution. It is not just about not being able to see the stars, but it is also about the disruption of natural rhythms.

William Chaney, from Purdue University, wrote an article titled “Does night lighting harm trees?”. He pointed out that light effects both photosynthesis and photoperiodism – photoperiodism being the role of day length in growth and reproduction.

Chaney discussed some of the variables. Clearly the negative impact of the light is going to be worse if it is on all night rather than some of the night. You also have to consider the type of light – fluorescent, mercury vapor and metal halide lights have low impact, while incandescent and high pressure sodium are high impact.

There is also the question of where the lights are, and up-lighting should definitely be avoided. In fact, Chaney states “In all cases, up lighting and shining light over great horizontal distances should be avoided”.

So the City needs forget the up-lighting, because it is no good for the trees.

I should also mention the animals, including nesting birds, that would suffer because of the light pollution.

Finally, I think that there is something quite perverse about the idea of lighting up the Garry oaks. The City wants to give the impression that it cares about this special tree, yet in the process of signally its virtue it is damaging the very thing it is claiming to love and protect.

Former Lakewood mayor Donald Anderson is an unpleasant bully, but that doesn’t excuse the spineless fawning of three of the City’s council members.

On April 11, 2022, the Council had a study session, at which members discussed council member Michael Brandstetter’s proposed resolution that the Garry oak become Lakewood’s official City tree. This would have been an acknowledgement that the Garry oak has a special importance to Lakewood, and perhaps it would have made people think twice before cutting Garry oaks down.

David Bugher, the assistant city manager and general éminence grise, made a few comments, and then Donald Anderson jumped in first to give his opinion. This was typical Anderson. Go in first, push his opinions on everyone else:

I’m a bit hesitant about this because I don’t see how it can be decoupled from having a tree committee looking at what we should do. And if we’re… As innocuous as it may seem, if we vote and say that the Oregon white oak is the city tree, then next thing anybody is going to say is that you can’t cut any down because it is the city tree, and it’s going to come right back in our face.

Naturally, Mary Moss, the low-key new deputy mayor, agreed with Anderson:

Based on what we are dealing with, I have to agree with Council Member Anderson. We don’t want to make… Let the other group help us make this decision.

Council member Linda Farmer followed suit:

I would like a little bit more information about what it would mean to designate a city tree, to Council member Anderson’s point. What would happen if we needed to cut one down…?

Note how Linda Farmer has added a new concept to the argument, the need for more information. This leads to council member Patti Belle’s view:

Thank you, Deputy Mayor. I would also like to agree with Council Member Anderson, and it seems like the majority, that I would like more information, too, and I agree that we’d get ourselves into an interesting situation if we did have to cut down a city tree. So I would love a lot more clarity on that.

Patti Belle is the newest and youngest council member, originally appointed rather than elected. Her day job is in some other municipality’s city government, and perhaps she’s used to telling city politicians what they want to hear. We can observe how she takes Anderson’s point about the problems of cutting down City trees, and tacks on Linda Farmer’s request for more information. So she’s behaving like a vacuum cleaner for other people’s opinions. And by expressing her view last, she can follow the majority without sticking her neck out.

We can see how Donald Anderson has pushed the council into line. He also gets the last laugh, when he finished the exchange by making a comment about Douglas firs:

I would note that the State tree of Oregon is the Douglas fir and they make a business of cutting them down as quickly as they can.

If you watch the video of the exchange, you’ll see that the bully ends this comment with a chuckle. In this instructive display of his modus operandi, Anderson concludes the tidy process by which he killed Michael Brandstetter’s proposal with ridicule.

Victoria Woodards is the mayor of Tacoma, and she has  a theory of leadership that comes straight out of the playbook of the Soviet politburo. When justifying the unanimous votes that had come to characterize the Tacoma City Council, she remarked “A 4-5 or 5-4 vote is politics, a 9-0 vote is leadership”. If you look at the video, note the self-satified smile when she’d made her point, as if she has just elevated political craft to a new level of excellence. Thank you to Tacoma activist Melissa Knott for provoking Victoria Woodards into making such a ridiculous comment.

Lakewood’s new mayor, Jason Whalen (with the scissors), has initiated a “Community Coffeehouse”, which meets every other month. The last meeting was on March 24, at Fort Steilacoom Park’s pavilion, and its subject was public safety.

The meeting was well attended, and there was a big effort to make everyone feel welcome. Both Jason Whalen and Heidi Wachter, the City attorney, greeted me as I arrived, and there was plenty of food and coffee. This was not the place to make political points – you would have had to have been very brave to ask questions about the shooting of Said Joquin when everyone else wanted to talk about burglary and car theft.

Which brings us to the main speaker, Michael Zaro, Lakewood’s police chief. Some might say that he shouldn’t be commenting on public safety, given his involvement in the Leonard Thomas killing, and the multi-million dollar award to the Thomas family that followed it. However, the City loves Michael Zaro, and there is no doubt that he is highly intelligent and very articulate.

Michael Zaro reassured Lakewood that overall, there wasn’t much to worry about. The group of crimes that most people are afraid of, crimes against the person, are not going up. He also pointed out that crimes against the person tend to involve people who know each other, rather than strangers. And here are the numbers, in a quarterly graph put out by the Lakewood Police Department:

Where there is a problem is property crimes, and in particular, the theft of motor vehicles. This happened to my neighbor, who lives across the road from Jason Whalen.

At around 6.30 am a woman walked into his house while his family was sleeping, grabbed his keys, and took off in his car. He tried to stop her, but the woman told him, as she drove off, that she needed money to feed her kids. Fortunately the gas tank was nearly empty, and the car was found abandoned in University Place.

Here’s the graph for property crimes:

And motor vehicle theft:

Michael Zaro suggested that one of the reasons for the increase in motor vehicle theft, and other vehicle-related crimes, was state law – specicifically, the passing of House Bill 1054 in 2021.

As a result of this law, passed by a Democrat-dominated state legislature, police can only pursue vehicles in the gravest of circumstances. This means that people who have stolen cars, or being interrupted in the middle of a burglary, can drive off without any fear of being chased.

To illustrate this, Zaro showed a video taken in the Safeways parking lot. A suspected thief had passed out in a car, and as he was sleeping, the police had to barricade the car in, with patrol vehicles in front of him and behind him. Otherwise, he could have driven off the moment he woke up.

House Bill 1054 was not just about vehicular pursuit, and it covered a range of police behavior – for example relating to choke-holds and the use of military equipment. However, it has clearly encouraged certain types of crime, as Lakewood residents are discovering to their cost. And I suspect that over the next few years Washington Republicans are going to hold up House Bill 1054 as evidence that the Democrats are dangerously weak on law and order.