This op-ed first appeared in the Oct. 6, 2025, issue of the Jefferson County Beacon. It applies to every community, large and small. I moved from Seattle to Port Townsend in 2015.
I drove on Saturday from the Kingston-Edmonds ferry dock to a restaurant in Seattle’s Fremont district for a family event. I took pleasant neighborhood streets instead of the busy freeway. And along the way (and later back to Edmonds on the freeway), I saw, passed by, and drove near and over memories of my 30 years of communications work for local government.
I worked for public transit and wastewater treatment agencies in the Seattle/King County area. My work involved news media relations, community involvement, and customer information. I (and my colleagues) helped people learn about, understand, influence, and use their local public services.
I drove by bus stop signs that were redesigned in a project I led to make them more informative and attractive. I drove over sewer lines running to pump stations and a treatment plant that were designed, improved and enlarged after we explained the projects and invited public comment on the impacts. And I drove near transit facilities serving multiple bus routes, all designed to meet the needs of riders, after we described what we were planning and got feedback on the plans.
But this isn’t all about me, though I am proud of the work I did with colleagues. Our government agencies plan, build, and provide services and facilities to benefit residents, workers, teachers, students, business owners, and other people, no matter their background or belief. Public transit and wastewater treatment help protect the region’s air and water.
More broadly, our public agencies connect our communities and region through not just bus lines and sewer lines but also through human and financial bonds. Those connections enable our society to accomplish things together that we can’t do separately.
That’s the real value of government at all levels—local, state, and national. And that happens only through a fair, inclusive, democratic process.
Government can and does benefit everyone. I’ve experienced it everywhere I’ve worked and lived, from urban areas like Seattle and Portland, suburban Edmonds, Redmond, Vashon Island and Vancouver, and rural areas like Kennewick, Whidbey Island, Jefferson County and Port Townsend.
If only more people would read between the lines of news that focuses on crises, controversies and criticism. After all, we’re all in this together—or should be—to make government work for us in small counties like ours and our own council debates.
That’s what President Abraham Lincoln was talking about in the Gettysburg Address 162 years ago.
We certainly should remember and act on his wise and still-relevant words, not the social media blurbs and inarticulate meanderings of a narrow-minded, short-sighted, ill-informed, and greedy wannabe dictator:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. …
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.