(Airdate: October 30, 2021) After a decade of working in the cramped quarters of a former portable classroom at the Mountain View Commons, KPTZ will soon be moving into a spacious new facility in what is said to be Fort Worden’s first building. This week on the Compass, we tour the new studios as the remodel nears completion, and talk about the importance of community radio and the opportunities the move presents.
On today’s program we speak with Doctors Kees Kolff and John Geyman, who are kindred spirits in that they are both current County Board of Health members for Jefferson and San Juan Counties respectively. Both have a thorough grasp of rural health care. Dr. Geyman is a noted author and Professor of Family Medicine, with 14 books on health care and the health care system to his credit. Kees, a former pediatrician, was also Medical Director for a group of rural health care clinics. We have an informative and stimulating discussion surrounding the state of health care in the United States, and challenges and solutions for reform.
On this week’s special live Compass, recorded on-air on Saturday, October 16, KPTZ host Tim Quackenbush talks via Zoom with candidates vying for two positions on the Port Townsend City Council.
This week on the Compass, in a reprise of a show we did in July, we talk with Benji Project founder Cynthia Osterman and child psychologist Lexa Murphy about the results of a survey of local teens on the psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and about things adults can do to help teens in crisis.
This week on the Compass we attend a fundraising open house at the Point Wilson Light Station and hear about plans to open access to the historic site. Then we talk with the director and a board member about plans for improvements at the Recyclery, the innovative local nonprofit dedicated to safely putting people on bikes.
Some fifty years before Black Lives Matter and March for Our Lives – before computers, cell phones, and Facebook — priests and brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan shook up the Washington establishment by engaging in nonviolent resistance against war, earning them the title of America’s Most Wanted fugitives. Joined in marriage to Philip as well as resistance, nun Elizabeth McAlister joined the brothers in protest against war, racism, capital punishment, and nuclear weapons. In this special Port Townsend Film Festival edition of the Compass, KPTZ’s Chris Bricker speaks with Susan Hagedorn, director of the feature documentary, The Berrigans: Devout and Dangerous.
In this special edition of the Compass, we with Shannon Kring, director of End of the LIne: The Women of Standing Rock, selected for screening at this year’s 22nd Annual Port Townsend Film festival. Shannon and her crew have woven together a significant chronicle of the grass roots movement that arose after it was announced that the Dakota Access Pipeline would be routed through the land of the indigenous people of South Dakota. The film tells the story of the five brave women who started it all, with four Mongolian yurts and four families camped on the grasslands overlooking the proposed pipeline route, as workers moved closer to the sacred sites of Lakota territory and the banks of the Missouri River.
It was like a straight-A student suddenly receiving a failing grade when at this week’s public health briefing before the Jefferson County Board of County Commissioners, Public Health Officer after Hospitalist after Chief Medical Officer told the same alarming story: the north Olympic Peninsula, which throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has slipped by with minimal damage, has seen its short-staffed health care system overwhelmed by a storm surge of mostly unvaccinated coronavirus victims arriving at its emergency room’s doors, leaving little or no space for patients with other disorders. This week on the Compass we bring you excerpts from that wrenching meeting.
This week on the Compass, KPTZ’s Larry Stein takes a look at the work of JCIRA, which is the acronym for the Jefferson County Immigrant Rights Advocates. And then Steve Evans talks with East Jefferson Fire and Rescue Chief Bret Black about stretched resources in a year much of the American west is on fire as the result of a summer with widespread drought and record-breaking heat waves.
The Community Build Project has worked to construct tiny homes as a means of providing temporary housing for our local homeless population. Peter’s Village was the first incarnation of this project, with 12 tiny homes (or “wooden tents) on the grounds of Community United Methodist Church in Port Hadlock. If you drive down San Juan Avenue in Port Townsend, you’ll notice the next nearly completed construction phase of the Project: brightly-colored, secure shelters, located on the grounds of Evangelical Methodist Church. On July 31, we visited the Community Build Open House and spoke with builders, organizers, and organizations about their work, their plans and their dreams on behalf of our unsheltered neighbors.
The annual All-County Picnic takes on a very different look while still emphasizing emergency preparedness, and then a Jefferson County UFO expert critiques the federal government’s new report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
This week on the Compass we talk with Bob Heinith, the leader of a campaign to halt an exclusive housing development that he says has been rubber-stamped without proper environmental review by county officials at the Discovery Bay Golf Course.
As a virulent new strain of the COVID-19 virus invades the Olympic Peninsula, this week on the Compass we talk with public health officials Dr. Allison Berry and Dr. Tom Locke about the particular danger the Delta variant presents to unvaccinated people, and the unprecedented threats public health officials have faced as they try to assure the safety of the community.
We dive into a sewer system controversy in Port Hadlock … and come up smelling like an ecological rose.
A “Good Idea” has taken legs here in Jefferson County – namely, the creation of a dozen transitional Tiny Houses (or Wooden Tents) now occupied by some of our County’s homeless neighbors. It has become a community where its temporary residents can now have an address, a comfortable place to sleep, and doors they can lock behind them. This seminal effort to construct a group of transitional housing units was transformed into a village called Peter’s Place, named after one of the catalysts for the first “Community Build,” Peter Bonyun. Since then, a much bolder undertaking has taken place. With additional expertise, collaboration, relationships and contributions, a new batch of homeless shelters have been constructed, to be placed as a Village called “Pat’s Place,“ within the city limits of the Port Townsend community. On this week’s Compass, we learn more about “big picture’ solutions for the homeless crisis, and about a very special “Open House” on July 31.
We offer you a chance to make a positive difference in people’s lives … and their deaths. Would you be interested in volunteering to help?
This week on the Compass we attend the Independence Day Chillin’ & Grillin’ Picnic/Potluck/and BBQ held on Monday, July 5 at HJ Carroll Park in Chimacum by the Jefferson County Progressives, where we talk with a number of progressive activists, including supporters of Ballot Initiative 1362 for Universal Health Coverage in Washington State, one-man peace movement Doug Milholland, and longtime stalwart housing activist Julia Cochrane on the subject of immediate terms for caring for the homeless.
This week on the Compass we talk with Benji Project founder Cynthia Osterman and child psychologist Lexa Murphy about the results of a survey of local teens on the psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and about things adults can do to help teens in crisis.
On May 6, 2020, Port Townsend was named Washington State’s newest creative district by the Washington State Arts Commission. This designation is the culmination of a successful application submitted by the Port Townsend Creative District subcommittee last fall. The Port Townsend Creative District encompasses the Downtown and Uptown Historic Districts and the historic campus of Fort Worden. This week, near the entrance to Fort Worden, we join Creative District Sub-Committee member Dominic Svornich to tell us more. And then sculptor Jonah Trople joins us for the unveiling of one of five Art Marker sculptures that now grace our community’s Historic Districts.
For years now, Port Townsend and Jefferson County have recognized a housing crisis that has threatened not only its most vulnerable population, but even those who have secure well-paid jobs. This week on the Compass, we talk with cohousing pioneer Charles Durrett, an architect who for more than three decades has made community the central focus of his practice, including not only in the design of local retirement community Quimper Village, but now in creating village-style housing for the homeless.
We talk about a problem that many of us have been experiencing lately … yet few of us know why we have it, how we got it, or what we can do about it. The problem is called cognitive impairment, and a local doctor has some insights and suggestions for us.
Before the arrival of settlers in the nineteenth century, the original people of the North Olympic Peninsula tended a vast prairie landscape to produce the food, medicines, and plant-based materials their culture depended upon. Today, those original prairie ecosystems have all but vanished. But now, on a few acres adjacent to the Dungeness River Audubon Center, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe is seeking to re-establish a traditional prairie. This week on the Compass, we visit the site with the two young tribal members who are leading the project.
The pandemic has upended the homeless shelter system, and even before COVID-19, the lack of availability of affordable housing and the homelessness crisis were in need of both urgent and long-term solutions. Jefferson County has its eyes on a 14.4-acre parcel in Port Townsend to build out a campus that would include housing for the homeless, transitional tiny houses, a shelter, and a full array of wrap-around services. In this edition of Compass, we speak with County Commissioner Greg Brotherton about the process, community input, and consideration of available alternatives.
Although medical experts agree that the coronavirus that touched off the COVID-19 pandemic is all but certain to be with us for a long long time, for the vaccinated the epidemic came to an official end of sorts on May 13, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control gave new guidance saying that those who are fully vaccinated can safely go about their lives without wearing masks or worrying about social distancing, indoors or out – essentially resuming a semblance of normal life. As it happened, the news came the day before KPTZ celebrated its tenth birthday. This week on the Compass we talk once again with Jefferson County Public Health Officer Dr. Tom Locke on that doubly happy day about the science behind the new CDC guidance, and the implications going forward.
After a decade of working in the cramped quarters of a former portable classroom at the Mountain View Commons, KPTZ will soon be moving into a spacious new facility in what is said to be Fort Worden’s first building. This week on the Compass, we tour the new studios as the remodel nears completion, and talk about the importance of community radio and the opportunities the move presents.
In a year in which three Port Townsend leaders have decided not to run for re-election, and with candidate filing week coming right up, this week on the Compass KPTZ Reporter Lily Haight talks with three Port Townsend city council members about what the job entails, and how they juggle their work load with the responsibilities in the rest of their lives.