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Tonight, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the San Juan Island Library Meeting Room in Friday Harbor, County Council Chair Justin Paulsen sits down with whoever shows up to talk about the 2027 budget. It is billed as a community conversation. It is really a reckoning, and the argument that has come to define it broke into the open this week over a single eliminated job: the director of the county’s own Environmental Stewardship Department.
The council voted earlier this month to strike the director position, folding its duties into other departments, as part of a broader push to close a projected $3.7 million shortfall in the 2027 current expense budget. County officials frame it as a narrow, reversible cost-saving step — $124,000 in current-expense funding removed, with the rest of the department’s staff and programs, officials say, staying intact. Saving on the position itself was pegged at $241,000 when the council first approved the broader restructuring on September 4.
Former County Councilmember Cindy Wolf isn’t buying the “narrow” part. In a Salish Current report published September 22, Wolf and other former county employees argued the move follows a pattern San Juan County has repeated before: when money gets tight, environmental work goes first. “It’s of course an age-old debate and should be an outdated way of thinking governmentally that whenever a budget crisis hits, the first thing that’s on the chopping block is the environment,” Wolf said. She also argued the county carries “a moral responsibility” to the Salish Sea that a dismantled department cannot reliably discharge, and she questioned whether the council can actually guarantee, on paper or in practice, that every function of the department survives the reorganization once the person overseeing it is gone.
Nobody from current county leadership is quoted disputing that the cut is painful — only that it is necessary and, they maintain, survivable for the programs involved. That’s a claim residents can only test over time, department by department, as the reorganized functions land somewhere else in county government or don’t.
The Environmental Stewardship director isn’t the only line item on the list. The same round of 2027 cuts trims Senior Services, including a reduced schedule for Meals on Wheels deliveries to islanders who depend on them; scales back county parks maintenance; cuts funding for the Guardian ad Litem program that represents children in high-risk family law cases; drops county support for the Islands Oil Spill Association; and ends the county’s arrangement with the WSU Extension Forestry program. Each of those had its own constituency at the microphone when the council took it up, and each will get its own reckoning as the 2027 budget moves toward final adoption.
The root of all of it traces back to April 28, when San Juan County voters rejected a levy lid lift that would have raised the county’s current-expense property tax rate from 54 cents to 85 cents per $1,000 of assessed value — an increase county officials said would have generated roughly $4.5 million a year. Voters said no by a wide margin, about 60 percent to 40 percent, on a final tally of 4,551 against to 2,950 in favor. That result left the county’s general fund short by an amount officials have pegged at close to $4 million heading into 2027, on top of $1.7 million in cuts the county already made to the 2026 budget — $1.1 million of it from staffing, plus reductions including $330,000 from public health, $338,000 from public safety, and $338,000 from Parks & Fair.
Paulsen, the District 2 representative and council chair, has also flagged a complication arriving from Olympia: state-level changes to how counties handle levies could add roughly $320,000 in costs the county did not budget for and cannot avoid, on top of the shortfall voters’ rejection created. That number alone is more than the entire savings the council is claiming from cutting the Environmental Stewardship directorship.
All of this converges tonight at the San Juan Island Library. The county’s own notice describes the session as a chance for residents to ask questions and weigh in on priorities before the 2027 budget is finalized — the county auditor’s office has already set an October 5 public hearing on the preliminary budget. For islanders who rely on Meals on Wheels, on the Guardian ad Litem program, or on the county keeping an eye on the Salish Sea’s health, tonight is the moment to say so directly to the person chairing the council that will decide.
What tonight’s meeting will not settle is the argument Wolf raised: whether a county that dissolves the leadership of its environmental program during every downturn can be trusted to rebuild it the next time revenue allows — or whether “temporary” restructuring, once it happens twice, stops being temporary at all.
Sources: Salish Current, Salish Current, EIN Presswire / San Juan County, Islands’ Sounder
