Letters to the Editor — Sept. 17, 2025
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Display of ignorance
At the recent 9/1/25 Indivisible rally in Sequim there was a short-body truck with big wheels jacking the truck up. The passenger was a lady giving people the finger while the driver was yelling f- you to me and the crowd, who where peacefully protesting the Trump administration policies.
The driver was going from roundabout to roundabout. I am sure this style of driving made you dizzy. Why else would you act so disrespectfully and display your ignorance so completely?
James Armstrong
Sequim
Westbay issues
The developers who hope to build up to 650 residences on 160 acres near John Wayne Marina must believe that Sequim’s city planners are a bunch of country bumpkins. The 500-plus page Master Plan application for Seabrook Holding Company’s “Westbay” project was so “technically incomplete,” devoid of details and littered with typos, the sharp-eyed city planners sent it back to the drawing board.
The July 30 Sequim Gazette reported that the city said, overall, the plan “leaves it to the reader to try to determine the actual project scope, its impacts and proposed mitigations.”
The Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) said the Westbay project descriptions vary between documents. The scale on civil drawings and street names are inaccurate. Buffers in critical shoreline areas are depicted inconsistently. Westbay’s 9.5 dwelling units per acre is incorrect, and the acreage/square footage breakdown on the entire site is inconsistent. The traffic impact analysis also was insufficient.
Seabrook’s plan included no reports for water, sewer or stormwater utility or mitigation. Sequim’s Public Works Department said additional infrastructure may be required, adding: “The proposed connection point is to a private water system that does not have the capacity to service the development as proposed.”
The Gazette previously reported that the Westbay homes will sell for over $500,000 and lots will go for $2 million. Is this another case of large companies buying up properties and renting them out as Airbnbs or letting them sit idle while so many people struggle to find affordable housing?
Westbay is not being built for our local families and workers, as with the other home-building projects going on around Sequim.
Seabrook gushes that they are “excited about the vision for Westbay and the opportunity to contribute to the future of the Sequim community.” But their analysis is insufficient to determine any positive benefits, wrote the DCED. And while Seabrook claims that Westbay will be open to the public, DCED pointed out that it “does not mention what features are intended for public access, where they are located, or whether that is the only benefit provided to the broader Sequim community.”
A public hearing is expected to be held within the next 60 days.
Elaine and Steve O’Brien
Sequim
‘Good old days’
As I listen to right wingers describe the “horrible” condition of the United States today and listen to the hyper-Christians talk about the moral decay of our country and that we are living in the end days, it makes me yearn for those “good old days” that many of these same people seem to long for.
You know, those simple, more agrarian times of the 1800’s, 1930’s and the Ozzie and Harriet life of the 1950’s. Those were the days. In fact, those were the days when the marginal tax rate was 63% (1935) and 91% (1955) as compared to today’s 35%. When the infant death rate was 450/100,000 (1935) and 23.6/100,000 (1955) compared to today’s outrageous 5.7/100,000.
I mean, who can deny the appeal of those “good old days”? In the good old days of 1935 there were 12 lynchings of black men, seven in 1955 and one in 2010. War deaths as a percentage of population in 1865 were 1.9%, .11% in 1918 and .00002% in 2010. Yup, things sure are a lot worse these days.
Industry was on a roll with the manufacture and sale of “iron lungs” for the outbreaks of polio in the 1950’s. Of course, not many folks from those simple, idyllic early days are here to remember them as the average life expectancy in 1935 was a whopping 61.7 years as compared to today’s of 78 years. The only bright spot is that church attendance is down by the mythologists.
I think I’ll just pack it in.
Thom Foote
Sequim
