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Declining numbers of international students coming to study in the U.S. hurts local economies, according to new data released this week. 

International students’ economic contributions declined by $1.1 billion this fall, costing the U.S. nearly 23,000 jobs, NAFSA and JB International found. Those figures are based on a 17% decline in international student enrollment. 

Much of that decline was among graduate and non-degree students, according to the data. A slight increase in undergraduate enrollment this fall bolstered the overall numbers. There are still more than 1 million international students in the U.S.

It’s been a tense time for international students at colleges in the U.S. In the spring, President Donald Trump’s visa revocation and sudden reversal left many reeling, as our Jessica Priest reported in Texas. Trump has also limited visa interviews, told some universities to cap their international student enrollment, imposed travel restrictions on visitors from 19 countries, and made H1-B visas — which allow educated foreign citizens to work in “specialty occupations” — more expensive.

The U.S. must adopt policies to attract and retain international students and realize that job opportunities for them after graduation “are essential to our standing as the top destination for global talent,” said Fanta Aw, NAFSA executive director and CEO. 

“Otherwise, international students will increasingly choose to go elsewhere—to the detriment of our economy, excellence in research and innovation, and global competitiveness and engagement,” Aw said in a release earlier this week. 

Our reporters have been detailing the declines in international students on the campuses they cover — including DePaul University in Illinois and IU Indianapolis. 

[Read more: Case Western Reserve, University of Cincinnati downplay international college student data online] 

A separate report on international students released this week by the Institute of International Education found that their numbers were decreasing even before Trump took office: International student enrollment dropped by 7% in the 2024 school year, according to the report. 

These declines matter — not just for college’s bottom lines, but for the broader economy. International students contributed $42.9 billion to the U.S. economy and supported more than 355,000 jobs last year, according to NAFSA. 

The pre-Trump slump “suggests colleges face other headwinds, such as a slowing global economy, growing competition from nontraditional education hubs, and lingering unease because of the China Initiative,” in addition to current political turmoil, Karin Fischer, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s international education reporter, wrote in her newsletter this week.

India remains the country that sends the most students to the U.S. Marcello Fantoni, Kent State’s vice president of global education, travelled there last spring to talk with prospective students, our Amy Morona reported at Signal Ohio. He told them Kent State is still welcoming — one of the few things he can control amid the broader federal policy changes. 

Still, he said Trump’s actions influenced how the students he spoke with viewed America.

“There is damage done there, and it will take a long time to be fixed,” he told Amy. “A long time.”  

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Elsewhere on Open Campus

From Fort Worth: McKinnon Rice at our partner Fort Worth Report visited students who received paid, two-year auto technician internships through a partnership between Autobahn Fort Worth and Tarrant County College. 

It’s a growing field in the area and offers opportunities to make good money without much college: “A technician hired after an internship starts out earning $24 to $30 per hour, based on their performance, and the wage grows as skills do — highly skilled technicians can make as much as $250,000 to $300,000 per year,” McKinnon wrote.

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The post A slump in international student enrollment appeared first on Open Campus.

Sowing Resilience: Rural communities across the country are grappling with food insecurity. Schoolchildren, seniors, grocers and even farmers face a food crisis compounded by government cuts and soaring costs. These 10 stories reveal how communities are navigating — and reimagining — the systems that have left them hungry.

News by Scott France

The bounty that the seas and network of small farms produce masks an omnipresent reality in Jefferson County — food insecurity. 

Nearly 4,960 county residents lack consistent access to nutritious food each day—just under 15 percent —a rate similar to the state average, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Feeding America data. 

However, people and organizations across the county are working to meet the needs of the food insecure by building upon and refining approaches as government assistance dwindles.

Farmers markets, food banks, small farms, a cafe providing food for recovering alcoholics and a program geared to feeding non-white People of the Global Majority (PGM) are pitching in to help fill the need and the bellies of county residents.

The Jefferson County Farmers Markets in Chimacum and Port Townsend participate in multiple federal food security programs: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Market Match (which doubles the value of SNAP purchases at farmers markets); Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP); and the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program. SNAP, SFMNP and WIC are funded through the U.S. Farm Bill. 

The farmers markets also partner with the Washington State University (WSU) Jefferson County Extension and Clallam County Extension offices. Sallie Constant, Farm to Food Bank Coordinator for WSU Extension says that she is “not only connecting people in food access, but also educating, as well as working on systems, environments and policy stuff that can make it easier for folks and food banks to more consistently access that produce.”

“We are reaching people who really need fresh food, and don’t otherwise have access to it,” Constant said “We’ve been a supporting partner helping source fresh produce from local farms to help fill the pre-packed box option for people who don’t have access to a farmers market, especially in the farther flung communities like Brinnon and Forks.We’ve gotten a lot of interest from the Brinnon and Forks food banks where they don’t have much supply of fresh produce,” Constant said. 

This year, the SFMNP is serving 1,070 seniors in Clallam and Jefferson Counties, a 62% increase over 2023. 

Many older rural residents live alone, with poor mobility, fixed incomes and limited access to grocery stores. SFMNP enables seniors to pick up a $50 benefit card at a farmers market in either Port Townsend or Chimacum, as well as an additional $30 towards farmers market produce courtesy of community donations and small grants. This $80 may be used to buy a fresh local produce share at the food bank nearest their home from July through September. The share includes six weeks of fresh, seasonal, local and Washington state produce, three weeks of fruit and three weeks of veggies. 

An alternative for Jefferson County seniors is to sign up for a program that allows them to pick up the equivalent value of a fresh produce share at a local food bank. The Jefferson County Food Bank Association (JCFBA) operates food banks in Port Townsend, Chimacum, Quilcene and Brinnon, as well as a pop-up site in the Coyle.

“I want to foster ways in which community members are empowered to buy from local farms, and bring home local food, regardless of their income,” said Amanda Milholland, executive director of the Jefferson County Farmers Markets.

As a result of recent federal legislation dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, SNAP recipients will see decreases in their benefits of between $25 and $146 per month beginning in September, according to Milholland. She noted that state and federal funding of the SNAP Market Match program will drop by 60% in 2026, and support for the program’s administration will end, leaving a gap of tens of thousands of dollars per year for staff time and printing vouchers, cards and tokens.

According to the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington, D.C. organization that fights hunger, “SNAP is not only a poverty alleviation tool — it also acts as a powerful economic multiplier. Every $1 in SNAP benefits generates up to $1.80 in economic activity. In rural America, where small businesses operate on thinner margins, that support is often the difference between staying open and closing down.” 

Nourishment Through Food and Connection

More than 20 seniors gathered outside the Port Townsend Food Bank well before the 11:30 a.m. opening time on a recent Saturday, the designated day for seniors. “The food bank is about food security, as well as socialization and survival,” said Ellen O’Shea, a regular food bank recipient. “We share resources with each other.”

“There’s such knowledge and understanding here that older people have lots of health issues,” O’Shea added. “So they can choose from fresh fruits and vegetables and protein. My husband and I find it hard to afford protein. It’s hard to be at this stage of our lives where we need good food, and if we can’t get it, we’re not going to survive.”

The food bank fills several rooms with tables and racks of food at the Mountain View Commons building, where clients can walk through and select what they want. The food bank dedicates one room for clients with special needs, such as those who are homeless and don’t have cooking equipment, or need some other assistance. A volunteer accompanies the individuals through the room to ensure that they are getting the food that suits their situation, as well as any other necessary items such as propane, utensils or personal hygiene products.

Toby Sheffel volunteers at the food bank and receives its food. “I have MS, which is debilitating, making it a big deal to go to the grocery store, and this is so convenient,” Sheffel said. “A lot of us get therapeutic benefits working here. It has helped my MS through the exercise, positivity and love everyone has.”

Jefferson County Food Bank Growers network provides huge support to the food bank association. The most recent data available indicates that the network supplied over 13,700 pounds of produce through the first nine months of 2024, according to Patricia Hennessy, executive director of JCFBA. Additionally, JCFBA receives fresh food from gardens tended by individuals, schools and local farms, including grocery stores, restaurants, bakeries, small farms and organizations including the PT Gleaners. The Gleaners are teams of volunteers who pick fruit from backyard sources to give to schools, food, banks, nonprofits and senior centers. Additionally, Hennessy estimates that 25% of food bank customers are proxy shoppers who collect food for homebound family, friends and community members. 

To reach the many seniors who are either homebound, unaware of the benefits for which they qualify or have been reluctant to take advantage of them, JCFM has developed a Food Access Ambassador Program. Seniors are trained and paid a small stipend to reach out to their peers and help them access the application or explain how the program works. 

“It helps reduce some of the stigma of food access programs if your friend tells you about it,” Milholland said. “Some food ambassadors have gone to low-income housing and signed up everybody in the building for the program.

“There are people who are living in remote areas or don’t have access to transportation that are able to get this fresh produce they couldn’t have before,” added Milholland. Although Clallam County has a mobile food service that goes to several senior low-income housing centers and community centers where food can be picked up, Jefferson County does not have the resources to provide that service, she said.

Emotional Element of Food Insecurity

For some people, food insecurity can prompt an emotional response. “There is a lot of stigma in asking for food,” said Joey O’Bryan, an advocate with the Recovery Cafe in Port Townsend. The cafe’s mission is to foster a beautiful, safe, warm, drug- and alcohol-free space for everyone, O’Bryan added. It serves approximately 65 meals a day, Tuesday through Friday, to people in recovery.

Brian Richardson, program manager at Recovery Cafe, said that the meals are an equalizer and an engagement tool to build community. “We’re getting a surge of seniors, and more women with mental health challenges,” Richardson said. He is appealing to community members for donations. 

Oceana Sawyer started Nourishing Beloved Community in 2024 to build food literacy through growing food and hosting Sunday potlucks for People of the Global Majority (PGM), non-white people of African, Asian, Indigenous, Latin American and mixed-heritage backgrounds. The organization purchases food from PGM growers and producers.

Sawyer says that food acquisition and the shopping experience are frequently not safe or comfortable for many of these people. “Our number one hurdle is getting people to take food,” she said. “There’s shame about receiving food.” 

Sawyer informed The Beacon that it recently lost its primary source of funding, a Washington State Department of Agriculture Food Resiliency grant. She is appealing to community members to think of NBC when considering organizations worthy of their donations. 

Cuts are happening across the US for a variety of reasons. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will stop collecting and releasing statistics on food insecurity after October 2025, saying the numbers had become “overly politicized.”

The decision comes in the wake of federal funding cuts for food and nutrition safety net programs nationwide.

A Relentless Need for Funding

Sixty percent of the food that the Port Townsend Food Bank receives is what Hennessy calls “food rescue,” which comes from supermarkets, restaurants, bakeries, etc. “My call to the community is, ‘Cash is king,” Hennessy said. “$250 feeds a family of four for a week.”

Milholland is concerned that the country is relying heavily on nonprofits to run vital programs. “How do we make sure that people have access to food? If we as individuals have enough, what can we do to make sure that our neighbors also have enough, and it’s not just on the shoulders of those who work at nonprofits to figure out how to get there?”

Associated Press data reporter Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report. This reporting is part of a series called Sowing Resilience, a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and The Associated Press. Ten nonprofit newsrooms were involved: The Beacon, California Health Report, Capital B, Enlace Latino NC, Investigate Midwest, The Jefferson County Beacon, KOSU, Louisville Public Media, The Maine Monitor and MinnPost. The Rural News Network is funded by Google News Initiative and Knight Foundation, among others.

Every spring, investors flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, where Warren Buffett holds court. Insiders call it Woodstock for Capitalists, and CNBC covers it with the fervor of Fox Sports on Super Bowl Sunday. 

Last year’s meeting held particular weight. Investors were watching closely to see if Buffett, the company’s 93-year-old CEO, would name Greg Abel, Berkshire’s vice chairman, as his successor, and how the company would weather the billions in wildfire lawsuits threatening its energy utilities. Buffett dodged the succession question, but the meeting revealed something just as consequential: the company’s strategy to avoid wildfire liability. 

Two months earlier, the Utah legislature had passed a law allowing utilities to charge their own customers to build a fund for future fire damages. The state also has a 2020 law on the books that capped the amount fire victims could sue utilities for damages. Combined, the two laws mean that if homes in Utah burn down due to a power company’s faulty electrical line, the financial damages residents can seek are limited — and they may already have been paying into the fund that covers them. For utilities, the result is reduced costs.

At the shareholder meeting, Abel singled out Utah as “the gold standard” of utility protection — a model he urged other states to adopt. “As we go forward,” he told the crowd, “we need both legislative and regulatory reform.”

Berkshire Hathaway Energy, or BHE, Buffett’s $100 billion energy arm, operates a vast power grid that stretches across the West. BHE subsidiaries such as Rocky Mountain Power and PacifiCorp are responsible for maintaining more than 17,000 miles of transmission lines that serve roughly 10 million customers across 10 states. In recent years, BHE has been slapped with lawsuits in Oregon worth nearly $10 billion for fires caused by its faulty equipment. For BHE, the Utah laws were a significant win, shielding the company from that kind of liability in at least one state. Across the West, BHE-owned utilities and their lobbyists are now trying to replicate that success, securing laws that both cap wildfire damages and shift costs onto customers. 

“It’s infuriating to me that they are creating these situations,” said Stephanie Chase, a research and communications manager at the Energy & Policy Institute and a former consumer advocate in the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. “They’re not doing a good job at maintaining their power lines. Then when they start fires, they don’t want to pay for them.”

BHE’s infrastructure is aging, and maintaining it is expensive. Climate-proofing measures, like running power lines underground, can easily cost more than $1 million per mile, according to the Institute for Energy Research, and would put the cost of sending all BHE-owned equipment into the ground at well over $17 billion. Other resilience measures, such as trimming branches that grow over power lines and inspecting equipment in rural areas, are also expensive. 

“Vegetation management is not one of the things that they receive a return on investment,” said Chase. State regulatory agencies typically set utility prices using a formula known as the rate base, which excludes routine maintenance like vegetation. By contrast, utilities earn a return when investing in new infrastructure, Chase added. “Utility companies have a much bigger incentive because they’re receiving a return on equity on any funds that they put into capital expenditures: building a new plant, building construction, building new lines,” she said. BHE did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Earlier this summer, the Wyoming legislature passed a law that limits damages that can be awarded to victims of a utility-caused fire, so long as the company followed its own wildfire plan. In July, Idaho also enacted a similar law, shielding utilities from negligence if they prove they adhered to their wildfire plan. According to state regulatory filings, at least one representative for Rocky Mountain Power and other utilities operating in the state lobbied lawmakers in March and April to get the law passed.

One state senator who voted against Idaho’s law, Bruce Skaug, told Grist that it leaves little regard for residents who may have legitimate grievances. “We don’t want to bankrupt utilities,” Skaug said. “At the same time, if they burn down your house, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting the claim through a jury trial.” Yet, the law could do just that, he said. Skaug hopes to tweak the law to better protect residents during the next legislative session, which begins in January.

PacifiCorp is also running the same playbook in Washington. The company has petitioned state regulators to start tracking the cost of insurance increases and wildfire liability, which Chase calls a “stepping stone to getting those costs included in customer rates.” From there, utilities could begin to press regulators or legislators for permission to pass those costs on to customers.

In Utah, Rocky Mountain Power’s lobbyists benefited from a friendly legislature. Carl Albrecht, a co-sponsor of the two bills, spent decades working for utilities — including 23 years as CEO of a small electric cooperative — and takes several thousand dollars in political contributions from the energy utility industry and Berkshire Hathaway each year, according to campaign finance disclosures. Perhaps most crucially, Utah hasn’t had any major wildfires in recent memory. 

That’s not the case in Oregon. In September 2020, fires enveloped hundreds of thousands of acres across the state, burning down 4,000 homes — including a state senator’s — and killing 11 people. In the aftermath, PacifiCorp became the state’s arch-villain — and a chance at the perks it won in other states vanished.

Soon the public learned that at least some of the half-dozen fires burning across Oregon that Labor Day stemmed from downed power lines owned by PacifiCorp. A subsequent investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an agency that oversees energy markets and transmission,  found that the distance between vegetation and power lines did not meet safety standards and that some of these violations were so severe that “at least 45 percent of PacifiCorp’s BES lines” should not have had any power running through them at all. 

Public outcry turned into class action lawsuits against PacifiCorp, which turned into a costly lesson for BHE. Since 2020, juries have awarded more than $300 million to several dozen plaintiffs. Yet the fate of thousands of other claimants remains unresolved as the lawsuits drag out in court. In the end, the company may be on the hook for around $8 billion more in potential damages. 

But the lawsuits may not bring much relief to the victims. 

“Warren Buffett is not just going to dump billions in to settle,” said Bob Jenks, executive director of Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. More likely than meeting the claimants’ demands, Jenks predicted that “the company will go into bankruptcy.” 

Despite its pariah status in Oregon, PacifiCorp has been trying to secure the same protections that it has in Utah. Earlier this year, when state representatives introduced utility-friendly bills in the Oregon legislature, they were dead on arrival. “I didn’t expect the degree of anger at PacifiCorp that’s out there,” Jenks said. “I understand. Your house burns down, and PacifiCorp is playing hardball and doing everything they can to prevent liability.” 

The notion of offering some financial support to utilities in the form of ratepayer funds isn’t inherently problematic, experts acknowledge. For example, utilities in California rely on wildfire funds to pay for damages caused by their fires. As in Utah and other states, ratepayers contribute to the pot. But unlike other states, a government entity called the California Earthquake Authority — and not the utilities — oversees the distribution of that fund when it’s needed. After a tree felled a PG&E power line in 2021 and sent the Dixie Fire burning across Northern California, the fund has provided $445 million in support to the utility.  As a result of the program, utilities like PG&E can avoid bankruptcy, but aren’t allowed to pass on the costs directly to their own customers.

So far, catastrophic fires haven’t hit states where PacifiCorp has won liability caps since they’ve taken effect. But with the track record of BHE subsidiaries and rising temperatures drying out Western forests, experts believe that it’s only a matter of time. 

“The risk is there,” Jenks said. “Climate change has made our forests so much drier than they used to be, and we don’t have the same June rain. Our forests weren’t designed for this.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who pays for wildfire damage? In the West, utilities are shifting the risk to customers on Sep 19, 2025.

Walking into master weaver Gail White Eagle’s cozy home on the Muckleshoot Reservation in Auburn, Washington, you enter a project workspace. White Eagles sewing machine sits at a table filled with an assortment of colorful beads. To the right hangs a beautiful weaving of hers with red roses, and in front of her is a fireplace used as shelving for an array of herbal medicines and works in progress. To the left are displays of White Eagle’s finished cedar baskets, hats, and a Seattle Sounders Salish Sea kit scarf.

“Everything you see here is everything I do,” said White Eagle, Muckleshoot Indian Tribe. “It’s my life. It’s not just a job. It’s my life’s work.” 

White Eagle, along with Connie McCloud, Puyallup Tribe, and Danielle Morsette, Suquamish Tribe, collaborated with the Seattle Sounders to create the new Salish Sea Kit, which includes a jersey, shorts, socks, and a scarf. The jerseys will be worn during the 2025 and 2026 Major League Soccer seasons as the team’s secondary kit. Underscore + ICT were unable to reach Connie McCloud for this story. 

In addition to collaborating with Coast Salish weavers for the jersey signs, the league donated the first $50,000 made from sales of the jerseys to local Native nonprofit organizations. 

The contribution to Seattle’s newest MJS jersey design was done in a way that White Eagle believes aligns with and accurately represents Coast Salish peoples by including deep blue and green traditional Coast Salish weaving patterns and color theme, specifically twilling and twining weaving techniques.

The jersey design includes other elements meaningful to the region with a wave, orca tail, and “S” symbol representing the Salish Sea and the Sounders and the phrase “x̌ax̌aʔ ti qʷuʔ” meaning water is sacred in Lushootseed, and also written in English. 

In 2022, White Eagle and Morsette were referred to the Sounders through Eighth Generation. McCloud was referred through the Puyallup Tribe’s partnership with the Sounders.

“It’s really a beautiful thing that happened, because it was three generations of women, three different voices, from the tribes that represent the region,” Morsette told Underscore + ICT. 

The Salish Sea Kit

Together, White Eagle, McCloud, and Morsette got to work and created a storyboard that shared the story they wanted to tell, providing visual inspiration to the Adidas design team. The first design was great, according to Morsette, but looked completely twined — a weaving technique where two weft strands are twisted around each other to enclose the warp threads — so they sent the design back hoping to include twill weaving as well.

The second and third versions also missed the mark, prompting the weavers to send instructional videos to Adidas explaining their weaving techniques. They took a hands-on, creative lead throughout the process. Ultimately, the fourth and final jersey captured their vision.

“It was a lot of round table discussions, what direction we wanted to go, what colors we thought would be best suited,” Morsette said. “The Sounders basically listened and implemented. It was important for them to recognize that we were the weavers and the culture bearers who had the knowledge to execute this the best way it could.”

Morsette and White Eagle shared that traditional weaving designs often have different meanings for each weaver and are open for interpretation to the viewer, but the designs you see on the jersey are common for Coast Salish weaving style. 

“For me, Salish weaving is very interpretive,” Morsette said. “This process is choosing colors and the design to evoke a feeling. It’s really important to me that I come from a place of good intention because I want people to see in my work the beauty of Salish weaving. So while someone may look at this jersey and they’ll see water — however they want to interpret it, they may see mountains — I believe that when they see this, they’ll see our home, which is the Salish Sea.”

While the weavers are proud of the final design, it has also been incredibly rewarding for them to experience the positive feedback and excitement from their communities as well. 

“Fellow tribal members have expressed nothing but pride,” Morsette told Underscore + ICT. 

She works at the Suquamish Clearwater Casino Resort where they’ve added the new Sounders jersey and an article from the Suquamish tribal newsletter on display in the company suite where the Mariners and Seahawks jerseys are also on display. They’re even giving the jerseys away as general counsel prizes at community events and at the casino. 

“To see that kind of support where I work has been so amazing,” Morsette said. “I’m just really proud to be part of something where my tribe, the people, have something that represents us.”

Morsette has also received praise from Betty Pasco, a Suquamish elder who is a Salish-style wool weaver. 

“Anytime I see my elder Betty Pasco, she just tells me how important the work that I’m doing [is] and how proud she is,” Morsette shared, holding back tears. “She is an incredible weaver herself. To have that kind of support makes me feel like what I’m doing is a good thing.”

White Eagle has had similarly positive feedback. 

At the March 8 game, the first time the Sounders wore the Salish Sea jersey, White Eagle brought Tillie Jones’ kids, who White Eagle calls her “adopted soccer children.” Jones, Tulalip, is the vice president of the Coast Salish Wool Weaving Center where White Eagle serves as a board member. 

“They thought it was so cool,” White Eagle said. 

White Eagle went on to share that many people in her community went out and bought jerseys and people are still talking about how special that first game was. 

The Sounders players have sounded equally excited about the new jersey and the opportunity to learn more about the first people of the land that they play and live on now. 

“It’s one of my favorite secondary kits,” Cristian Roldan, midfielder for the Seattle Sounders, told Underscore + ICT. “I just love the mixture. It just looks so clean and it wraps up what the PNW is all about.”

Andrew Thomas, goalkeeper for the Seattle Sounders, agreed. 

“It was only at the start of this year that I saw the kit and kind of saw the entirety of the project come together and it is a beautiful, beautiful game,” Thomas said. “I think you’re gonna be very hard pressed to find a better one in the world. I’m a huge, huge fan of it.”

Roldan moved from California to attend the University of Washington, where he played soccer for the Washington Huskies before joining the Sounders in 2015. He shared that he was unaware of Coast Salish peoples when he moved here but as a student he began to learn. 

“This certainly wasn’t our land, and it’s still not our land, and it’s beautiful to be able to represent the culture and what the city is all about,” Roldan said about the collaboration. 

Thomas has lived in Washington state since he came to play for the Seattle Sounders in 2021 and said he feels lucky to have learned about Coast Salish peoples’ connection to the land and water and to become connected in some small way to the history and continued culture of the area. 

“It’s important to just keep feeling the power of those connections and hearing those stories,” Thomas said, “and hearing, kind of the way the culture that exists and has existed for a long time.” 

‘Water is Sacred’

Roldan and Thomas both shared how special they’ve found the partnership with Coast Salish nations and Major League Soccer and, along with their fellow teammates, applauded the addition of the message, “Water is Sacred.”

“For me, it means water is extremely important in our daily lives, and it’s the reason why we exist today and the way we’re able to survive,” Roldan said of his understanding of the phrase.  “Water brings a whole lot to not only us, but the things around us, trees, the atmosphere, animals. I think it brings everybody together.”

Much like the Bruce Lee kit in 2023 and the Jimi Hendrix kit in 2021, which included signatures on the bottom of the bottom corner of the jersey, the weavers decided this was an opportunity to include a message in Lushootseed. 

“I thought it was an opportunity to put a Lushootseed word or phrase in there to incorporate such an important part of the culture in the region,” Morsette said. 

She worked with Cassie George, a Suquamish language teacher who helped with the final “Water is Sacred” phrase.  

“I wasn’t expecting such positive feedback for that little detail,” Morsette said. “With the social and political climate, I was kind of worried. How is this gonna be received?” 

The phrase is meaningful for Morsette as a Suquamish citizen who comes from generations of subsistence fishermen and clam diggers who have harvested food from the sea and its beaches since time immemorial.

“When it comes to food and the seafood that we have, when it’s brought for ceremony, it brings people together,” Morsette said. “So not only is it nourishing for the body, but also for spirit.”

Stewardship of the lands and Salish sea are culturally and spiritually important to her as a Suquamish woman, Morsette explained, as well as to the health and survival of everyone who benefits from it. 

“Without water, we would cease to exist,” Morsette said. “It’s such a valuable resource that we need. Having grown up in Suquamish, we’re right here on the Salish Sea. So much has been provided by the sea. It’s something that we have to take care of. … It’s so valuable to my tribe and to the area, and to everybody who lives here.”

White Eagle is a retired skipper in Suquamish canoe journeys and plays an important role as the leader, teacher and navigator of the crew. 

“Spiritually, there is nothing like being out there on the water, being in peace, being able to be feeling serene enough to know that the Creator is hearing our prayers, and respecting the water and all that she has to offer,” White Eagle said. “Because not only is it spiritual, our food comes from it, our salmon, our clams, gooey duck, everything comes from that water that we need to survive.”

White Eagle echoed Morsette’s sentiments, explaining that as stewards of the land and Salish sea, she believes that caring for the land should be a bigger responsibility for everyone who lives in the Puget Sound. 

“The Sounders are right there on the Puget Sound, and it’s one of the things that we all talked about that needs more attention,” White Eagle said. “We need to bring everybody’s focus that water is sacred and that we need to treat it as such and so we need to be careful what we put into the water, how what we take from the water.

“We are only as strong as the weakest link so if we don’t educate everybody on how important it is to make sure that our water is considered sacred and we need to be careful with it, nobody knows, right?” White Eagle continued. 

Done in a good way

Morsette expressed gratitude for the good way the Salish Sea kit collaborations with the Seattle Sounders Major League Soccer team has been handled. 

“This was such a unique collaboration for a professional sports team to work with the local, Indigenous artists, weavers,” Morsette said. This could have been a hit or miss, but it was an absolute hit. The Sounders really let us guide the whole project, and the way that I personally felt seen and heard was something that I wasn’t expecting.”

One of the comments Morsette received was, “Wow, this was a true master class of how to collaborate and how to uplift Indigenous voices.” 

“We chose those places to receive that money to help them continue their work so everything that this jersey represented was done in a good way,” White Eagle said. “I still get chills thinking about it, because it’s a good work.” 

Morsette and White Eagle hope that this example spreads and other MLS teams will consider working with the Native artists in their regions. 

Sounders players are proud of the way the Salish Sea kit came together as well. 

“[It’s] very much a privilege to be able to share these spaces that people have such deep ties to that I obviously do not,” Thomas said. 

Thomas shared that friends back home in the United Kingdom will ask about the kit because they’ve seen photos of it, and it gives him the opportunity to share details about the first people of the land he is living on now. 

“We’re unaware of all the traditions that Natives have and so for us to be able to see that firsthand. … It gives us a little bit more perspective on things,” Roldan said. 

“We definitely need to do a better job of understanding each other,” Roldan continued. “We coexist so much in our communities. To get a better understanding of where people come from and their traditions is really important because at the end of the day, I think what everybody wants to do at this organization is be inclusive, right? And I think the jersey in itself displays that, but I think there’s also more that we can do.”

Medicine for the people

White Eagle is the collections and exhibits specialist for the Muckleshoot preservations department and has worked as an official cultural leader for almost a decade. But she wasn’t always as connected as she is now. 

In 1994 she felt like she was “the only Indian in the whole wide world that didn’t know about how to make a basket,” White Eagle shared. 

She decided then to learn about her culture so that she could share it with other people who were like her. 

“I grew up in a time where it still wasn’t okay to be Indian,” White Eagle shared. “Once I started learning, that’s what anchored me, and I started doing better in life, and here I am.”

White Eagle remains a devoted teacher and mentor who shares knowledge and traditional weaving techniques, and sees teaching as medicine. 

“If you really think about it, everything we do is ceremonial,” White Eagle said. “There’s a reason for it. We’re putting our prayers into an item or a garment, either praying for a person or we are praying for an area or for the people. I like to think that I’m medicine for the people, because I help people learn.”

White Eagle has been able to pass on these teachings since she had her first child. Her children and grandchild all know how to gather cedar, camas, and how to collect stinging nettle and as a master weaver she has taught her children and many others how to weave cedar bark.

“I used to always think to myself that if I could just affect one person to say, ‘Hey, yeah, I got what it takes. I can do it.’ Just one person. It makes our world better,” White Eagle said.

Morsette, who started out making headbands and purses and then doll regalia before moving on to adult regalia and blankets, echoed these sentiments.

“From wearable regalia to public art, I’m grateful that I get to leave an imprint for future generations to look at and be inspired,” Morsette said.

The post Coast Salish Weavers Bring Meaningful Representation to New Seattle Sounders Jerseys appeared first on Underscore Native News.

Many communities have foods that define them: Los Angeles has tacos, Green River, Utah, has melons, while New Mexico’s Hatch Valley is famous for its green chiles. Historic power dynamics — from colonization to migration — have always influenced how and why people began growing, cooking and consuming these symbolic dishes and crops. Today, these foods and those who prepare, raise and sell them carry cultural power; people travel hundreds of miles to buy a juicy Crenshaw or sweet canary melon from a family-run stand in Green River. And yet the farmers themselves often struggle to stay afloat. They lose access to markets as large companies buy up smaller, locally run grocery stores. 

Most grocery stores across the West trace back to a few major corporations. Whether you’re visiting King Soopers in Colorado, Smith’s in Utah or Fred Meyer in Oregon, you’ll find the same Kroger-brand products. The original names of the once-locally owned grocers might remain, but the shops are now just part of one of the nation’s largest grocery corporations.

A handful of companies control the production and distribution of most of our food, and the West plays a leading role in that system. The U.S. headquarters for the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS S.A., is in Greeley, Colorado, while Driscoll’s, the largest berry producer, is headquartered in Watsonville, California. These companies rarely confront the riskiest parts of agribusiness, raising the cows and growing the berries. Instead, they produce, brand and ship them. 

This global food system has profound impacts on the West’s farmers, workers and consumers. It’s getting harder for family farms to turn a profit, and those who seek alternatives to the consolidated corporate market must navigate complicated policies and finances in order to sell directly to consumers. Berry-pickers and meatpacking workers — often immigrants — face exploitation and unsafe conditions, with workplace protections varying from state to state. 

Meanwhile, food insecurity has increased across the West, and yet Republican-led states, including Utah and Idaho, opted out of a federal summer grocery program for kids last year, in part because of anti-welfare politics. 

Beyond its connection to this international system, the West has deeply rooted myths and policies around water and land that create and sustain other layers of power. In the 1800s, settlers stole land from Native people and killed off bison as they drove tens of thousands of cattle westward. Ever since, the cowboy and his glorified cattle have held cultural power that politicians are rarely willing to tarnish. 

As “The Big Four” meatpackers have consolidated most of the beef industry, the economic power of ranchers has dwindled. Only 2% of U.S. beef comes from cows that graze on public lands, and yet multigenerational ranching families and large landowners continue to influence and benefit from antiquated federal grazing policies. 

Most land in the Eastern U.S. is privately owned, but the federal government owns nearly half of all land in the West. Ranchers graze cows on huge swaths of public lands, paying fees well below the actual cost of managing those lands. Over the past century, grazing policies have changed little even as cows destroyed native vegetation and degraded waterways. State and federal policies often put the health of livestock above that of the region’s arid soils or the lives of large carnivores like wolves and bears. 

Ranchers and Big Beef also intersect and overlap with those who control water in the West. Agriculture consumes nearly 80% of the water diverted from the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, primarily to grow alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops. An investigation by ProPublica and The Desert Sun found that most of the water consumed in California’s Imperial Valley goes to just 20 farming families, with one of them using more than the entire metropolitan area of Las Vegas. Only four of those families use the majority of their water rights to grow foods people consume, like broccoli or onions. The rest use their water to grow hay for livestock. 

Many of these families have senior water rights, and that increasingly means power in the arid and rapidly growing West. Together with livestock associations, irrigation districts and their political allies, they have sought to influence food and water policy. 

Yet in some parts of the West, other interests are gaining power. In the Northwest, years of advocacy from tribes and environmental groups led federal agencies to decommission dams on rivers like the Elwha and Klamath. The farmers might worry about their ability to continue irrigating, but tribes are reclaiming their traditional foodways as salmon return. 

And the Northwest’s rivers aren’t the only places where tribes are reasserting their culture and food sovereignty: Indigenous-run restaurants, farms and cooking classes are springing up across the West. 

Farmers markets, mutual aid efforts and community gardens are creating new forms of cultural, social and economic power, often led by and benefiting those who are excluded and marginalized, including queer, immigrant and Black farmers. Their efforts encourage people to take back intrinsic food traditions while they act in resistance to the global, capitalist food system. 

Still, the corporate structures of our food system are so deeply entrenched that they can be hard to fully comprehend or even notice. In this region, food is power, and that power is not equally shared. Before that can change, however, we need to understand the complexities of this system, tracing its roots to the growth of retail giants and the consolidation of Western agricultural production. 

The grocery giants

The illusion of competition

Farmers markets — a bright spot in the grocery landscape

Get big or get out: Consolidation in agricultural production

The small family farm holds a special place in the American imagination. Today, however, a modest and diminishing portion of our nation’s food is grown on smallholder farms. Production is shifting to larger-scale factory farms in every Western state and across nearly every commodity.

As a Native Hawaiian teenager growing up in West Maui, Mikey Burke couldn’t wait to leave. “All my life, I thought I was bigger than this town, bigger than the village, and I was going to go somewhere and make something of myself,” she said. 

Then she went to college in Los Angeles, where she was just one person among millions navigating the city’s crowded freeways and squinting through its smog. She would go entire days without anyone looking her in the eye, even if she held a door open for them or perused fruit next to them at the grocery store. Burke began to dream of returning home to Maui, where relationships felt authentic and she didn’t feel pressure to impress anyone. “Everything that I thought that I wanted, I had already had at home,” Burke realized. 

The summer after she graduated from college, in 2006, Burke flew home to visit before starting a new job in public accounting in L.A. On the flight, she noticed the man sitting next to her with salt-and-pepper hair was preoccupied with a videogame device. She had just finished her free mai tai and was feeling chatty and emboldened. “Are you going to put that thing away and talk to me?” she asked brazenly. He met her gaze with piercing blue eyes and set the device down. 

His name was Rob, and he was a commercial painter. They fell in love, and when he proposed a year and a half later, Burke had just one condition: She wanted to raise their future kids at home, to give her children the same upbringing and connection to family and the aina, or land, that she now couldn’t imagine growing up without. 

When their son was a year old, Burke took a huge pay cut from her L.A. job to work as an accountant at Maui’s local power utility. She thought she’d get back to her old salary in a couple of years, and that her husband would find work quickly. Instead, her pay stagnated, and Rob spent months struggling to find a job in construction before accepting a role as a host at Bubba Gump, a bustling tourist restaurant. 

Everything on Maui was more expensive: Their first water and electric bill was twice as much as their old bill in L.A., and Burke’s commute cost at least $100 in gas per week. “I could get maybe two or three meals for the price of a whole week’s groceries in L.A.,” Burke said.

Even after her husband finally got hired in commercial painting and her parents helped the family buy a condo, their living expenses ballooned. After their first son, the couple had twins, who were just 10 months old when Burke unexpectedly became pregnant again. Then a hostile malahini haole, Hawaiian for white foreigner, on their condo board commented on their growing family size, and Burke realized with panic that their soon-to-be six-person family exceeded the occupancy limits for their two-bedroom unit. 

The four-bedroom house they found in Lāhainā felt like the answer to their prayers. It was a brand-new, two story-home in a new development with two-and-a-half bathrooms and a two-car garage. It was closer to the center of town than Burke preferred, but she wasn’t in a position to be picky. They had spent a year getting outbid by cash offers, and had come close to bidding on a termite-infested home that would’ve required the whole family to bunk in the same room for months while they spent thousands on renovations. “The housing market for local people here was nonexistent,” Burke said. “When we did find a house to look at, we were outbid by somebody every time.” 

But this house in Lāhainā was $761,645 with a $3,300 monthly mortgage payment — affordable by Maui standards — and only available to them because they qualified through a workforce housing program that aimed to help local families like theirs. 

The first time they walked through the house, Burke was incredulous. “We were looking out at Lāhainā town and just in awe and disbelief that this was our life, and this was actually possible for us,” she said. It wasn’t until the day they got the keys and her two-year-old twins wobbled through the rooms in their tank tops and diapers that it felt real: Burke and her family were in Maui to stay. “We did this for them,” she thought. “Their future is secure.” Her boys would know what it was like to grow up Hawaiian in Hawaiʻi. 

That certainty crumbled the afternoon of August 8, 2023, when their home, and the town of Lāhainā, burned. 

The wildfire incinerated more than 2,000 acres, killed more than 100 people, and instantly made headlines as the worst wildfire in the U.S. in more than a century. In Hawaiʻi, the community was in shock: No natural disaster had been so deadly since before statehood, and the fire had ripped through the town so quickly that thousands of buildings and structures became ash, altering the landscape irrevocably. Burke was among more than 800 homeowners who were suddenly rendered homeless and are now grappling with whether, or how, to rebuild. For her, it’s about more than just her house — it’s her ability to raise her family in their ancestral homelands, and avoid joining a growing number of Indigenous people forced to leave and priced out of returning.  

A local nonprofit, Hawaiʻi Community Lending, surveyed 257 Lāhainā homeowners with mortgages affected by the fire and found their average balance was $696,983, more than twice the national average. That disparity reflects the sky-high real estate prices on Maui, where the median home price was $1.3 million in July. After the fire, the homeowners were able to delay paying their mortgage payments for months or years — but Jeff Gilbreath, the nonprofit’s executive director, said those forbearance periods are now ending, and for many, tens of thousands of dollars in back payments and interest are now coming due. As of early August, 78 of those 257 homeowners had missed mortgage payments and were at risk of foreclosure, largely because they are trying to pay rent while waiting to reconstruct their homes. 

“Ninety-eight percent of the homeowners who are enrolled in our program have lost income in the fire,” said Gilbreath. “Now their existing mortgage is greater than 31 percent of their income. They can’t afford the existing mortgage. They need help with the rebuild and the gaps they’re facing.” 

Two years after the Maui wildfires, Burke and other homeowners are experiencing an uptick in texts from investors wanting to buy their properties. A third of residents who were homeowners before the fire no longer own their homes, and more people are listing their properties for sale. “Whether you’re a visionary investor, a legacy builder, or someone who simply wants to be part of rebuilding one of Hawaiʻi’s most beloved communities, this lot is more than dirt and square footage,” says the description of an 8,000-square foot burned-out lot listed on Redfin for $1.8 million.

But the post-disaster property ownership shift isn’t limited to Maui. It happened in New York and New Jersey after Superstorm Sandy hit in 2012. It’s happening in Altadena in the wake of the L.A. wildfire. A May analysis by the research firm First Street found that bank losses from mortgage foreclosures related to disasters — mainly flooding — are expected to nearly quadruple over the next decade, with climate change driving nearly 30 percent of all foreclosure losses by 2035. Foreclosures often don’t spike in the immediate aftermath of wildfires because homeowners have fire insurance, but that silver lining could disappear as insurance premiums spike to cover the growing cost of losses from natural disasters — just $4.6 billion in 2000 and now approaching $100 billion annually — as climate change drives stronger hurricanes, heavier flooding, and more frequent wildfires.   

In Lāhainā, homeowners are still short nearly $140 million in insurance payouts. There, as in many other places, climate change is colliding with a housing affordability crisis, said Carlos Martín, vice president for research and policy engagement at the think tank Resources for the Future. “If you can’t afford to rebuild, if you can’t afford your mortgage because of all the other financial bills that you have, where are you going to go?” he said. “We don’t have the spare housing that’s affordable to absorb all the people that are going to be affected by these twin crises.” 

The day that Lāhainā burned, a storm passed south of the island and heavy winds knocked over more than two dozen power poles, prompting widespread electric outages and school cancelations. “I was working the storm, but I could do it from home,” said Burke, who was still employed with Hawaiian Electric but working with commercial customers by then. 

She had a walkie-talkie in one hand, her phone in another, and was talking to her clients — hotels and local businesses — to triage the outage while juggling four children and her nephew who were home from school. 

In the mid-afternoon, she glanced outside and she noticed black smoke, which she knew meant homes were burning. She ordered her kids to pack four changes of clothes as a precaution. Then her husband ran into the house. “There’s a fire and it’s moving really fast,” he yelled up the stairs. “We got to go.” The smell of smoke filled the house through the open front door. 

Burke loaded her 6-year-old, her twin 8-year-olds, and her 13-year-old in the car, along with her 9-year-old nephew and their dog Nalu. She grabbed an envelope of cash, and then hesitated, her hand on her beloved Tahitian pearls. “This is going to be OK,” she thought. “We’re not losing the house,” and released them. Her husband got into his work truck, carrying their pet tortoise Flash and three other dogs, Blue, Murphy, and Toby. 

But when Burke turned the ignition, she realized she couldn’t pull out of the driveway. “Our street was already full of cars trying to evacuate,” she said. 

For a few, painstaking minutes, Burke’s family sat in the driveway as the fire approached, unable to leave. Then, a woman she didn’t recognize waved her and her husband into the line. “Typical Hawaiʻi,” Burke said. “We’re all running for our lives, and she’s like, ʻNo, come in,’ and she lets my husband and I get in line.” Similarly, every car sat in the right lane. The left lane was empty. “It’s crazy that none of us thought to just take that and cram the whole thing,” she said. “We were so orderly.” 

With traffic at a standstill, Burke watched embers fly into her yard through her rearview mirror and flames engulf the home of her next-door neighbor. If they didn’t move soon, she knew the fire would be all around them. She suggested as calmly as she could to the children, “Why don’t you guys unbuckle?” 

“Why?” the kids asked, alarmed. “Why are you telling us to unbuckle?” 

“No, nothing’s wrong,” she lied. “I just want you guys to be ready in case we have to leave the car.” 

Burke told the boys that if they needed to run, they should climb over a nearby fence and head straight into the ocean. “You’re not going to stop, you’re not going to look back,” she said, trying to speak as calmly as possible. “We’re all going to get to the ocean. That’s not going to happen, but if we have to, that’s what we’re going to do.” 

Unprompted, her sons turned to one another and began to say, “I love you.”

Then a bicyclist with a T-shirt wrapped around his face rode up and knocked on the passenger window, motioning her to get into the opposite lane and drive ahead. She did, and others followed. When she got to the next major intersection, she saw a police officer was directing traffic and had finally started to allow the line of cars she’d been waiting in to go ahead. 

Their family survived thanks to the kindness of others: the unknown neighbor that waved her in, the masked bicyclist, even the random dirt bike riders who broke through a locked gate on an old sugar cane road to allow drivers to escape. An hour and a half later, the Burkes found their way into a gated community on a hill overlooking Lāhainā.

“It was a little bit surreal, because nothing was happening there,” Burke said. “They were literally standing on their lanais or in their driveways looking towards Lāhainā, untouched, and here we are in our cars that are just full of silt.” Wealthy homeowners stared at their ash-covered caravan as they slowly drove through. Even though Burke was born and raised in West Maui, she had never seen the luxury estates with their ocean views, golf courses, and private clubhouse. 

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Hawaiʻi has a low homeownership rate — 61 percent, 47th of all states and Washington, D.C. — in part because land is so pricey. The rate for Native Hawaiians is even lower, 57 percent, as families like the Burkes are forced to compete with insatiable global demand for their land. After the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, the U.S. took 1.8 million acres of land — more than a third of the main archipelago — formerly owned by the Hawaiian Kingdom, and the Hawaiian people were never compensated. Lāhainā was once the royal capital, but the colonial transformation of the community into an American tourism destination meant that Lāhainā’s Indigenous population shrank considerably. 

“Across Hawaiʻi, it’s getting increasingly difficult to remain there, especially towns like this where the local population and the Hawaiian population have been marginalized and pushed to the sides so that the tourists can be center stage,” Burke said. “So to have infiltrated that system and been able to purchase something is like winning at the monopoly of life.” 

Before the fire, just 8.5 percent of Lāhainā residents identified as Native Hawaiian or another Pacific Islander identity. That figure could keep dropping if families like Burke’s are forced to leave in the wake of the fire. “Often the people who have been on the land the longest are the first to get displaced,” said Jeff Gilbreath from Hawaiʻi Community Lending. 

Most Pacific island nations have restrictions on who can own land, in part to protect Indigenous peoples from displacement. Some U.S. Pacific territories do, too. That’s not the case in Hawaiʻi, where most land is at the mercy of American capitalism. 

Some Native Hawaiians are eligible for property on land designated as “Hawaiian home lands,” a federal program set up by the U.S. Congress at the urging of Prince Kūhiō, a member of the Royal Family, in the aftermath of the overthrow. The prince wanted every Hawaiian to be eligible to own land, but was forced to accept a compromise to get the bill passed by limiting who could qualify by blood quantum. The program has fallen far short of his vision: More than 23,000 Hawaiians are still waiting for homes, and at least 2,000 have died while waiting for a homestead. The current process of building infrastructure, constructing homes, and finding homeowners who are qualified to obtain a mortgage is estimated to take 182 years for everyone currently on the waiting list to receive a home.

Burke’s mom has been on the list for more than 25 years. When Burke was a teenager, her mom was offered a plot of land in East Maui with no electrical or sewer hookups, and so decided to wait for an actual house where she could raise her family. She’s now in her 70s and still waiting. Burke isn’t hopeful; even if her mom gets off the waitlist, she is retired and would have a hard time qualifying for a mortgage. Burke, meanwhile, doesn’t have enough Hawaiian blood by federal standards to qualify to get on the list herself. “Like almost any Indigenous community, we still get the crumbs, and if you happen to not be 50 percent Hawaiian, it’s like you get the crumbs of the crumbs,” Burke said. “We’re just left to figure it out ourselves.”

The weeks and months immediately after the fire were a blur of moving and grief. For days there was no cell service, and Burke’s name was among more than a thousand people feared missing. No one knew exactly how many had died, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services flew in cadaver dogs to identify human remains. Burke had to figure out how to explain the destruction to her children while processing her own grief and continuing to work full-time. Work was exhausting, but she still had her job when thousands of her neighbors had lost theirs. For a while, her family of six crowded in with her mom and sister in their two-bedroom condo, then they moved in with a friend, then moved into a Red Cross shelter at the Hyatt, then a rental home, and then another. 

Burke began to make a list: Call her mortgage company. Cancel her internet and cable. Call her insurance company. Cancel her water and electric services. Apply for disaster assistance. In two weeks, their mortgage bill would be due, but they also needed to find new housing and pay rent there, too. 

“You qualify to be on forbearance for up to 12 months,” Burke recalls a customer service representative for her mortgage servicer told her in an initial call. 

“What happens after that?” she asked. She couldn’t get a straight answer. 

“That scared the crap out of me because I didn’t know if after 12 months I was going to have to pay that 12 months back in full, or if they were going to put me on a payment plan, or if they were going to just tack it on to the back of my loan,” she said. Two years later, she still doesn’t know what the answer is — and has been trying to save money in case she’s required to pay everything upfront. As of July of this year, she owes $71,000.

In the U.S., keeping up with your mortgage payments in the wake of a disaster is largely up to each individual homeowner. Mortgage companies might allow you to suspend your monthly payments for a few months, or years, during forbearance, but interest still accrues, and eventually every bill comes due. Mortgage lenders and banks have different rules about how lenient to be with homeowners and when to force them to repay their bills. Some will let homeowners add the bill to the end of their mortgage, delaying the payments until the end of their loan or until they sell the property. But other banks require homeowners to pay upfront, which can saddle them with a sudden bill of tens of thousands of dollars. 

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Autumn Ness, executive director of the Lāhainā Community Land Trust, a nonprofit established after the fires, is already seeing a handful of attempted foreclosures as banks resume collecting mortgage payments that they temporarily suspended after the fire. The community land trust has already spent more than $1.1 million to purchase homes from homeowners whose houses would otherwise have been auctioned off by banks. 

With the average mortgage for fire-affected Lāhainā homeowners approaching $700,000, Ness knows that it’s unlikely her nonprofit will be able to help everyone who wants to save their home from investors. “We don’t have enough money for it,” she said. 

It’s also challenging to communicate with big mortgage lenders and servicers. According to data that Gilbreath from Hawaiʻi Community Lending has collected, the bulk of Lāhainā’s mortgage debt, more than $46 million, is held by Rocket Mortgage, a multibillion-dollar company based in Michigan. However, even this is an undercount, as Gilbreath surveyed just 257 Lāhainā homeowners with mortgages who lost their homes, out of more than 800. The second-largest mortgage servicer, Mr. Cooper, is based in Texas. Both Gilbreath and Ness have struggled to get in touch with real people at out-of-state mortgage companies to advocate on behalf of homeowners. Ness has had trouble even getting statements estimating how much homeowners owe so that the land trust can help them pay it off. “It’s just been extremely tough,” Gilbreath said.

A local analysis predicted that more than 20 percent of Lāhainā properties will have new owners within three years after the fire, or by next summer. That’s due to financial stressors and other factors like inconsistent employment, uncertain home rebuilding timelines, and emotional and mental health stress. 

“The entire system is set up so that, after disaster, we see an increase in distress-driven land sales and foreclosures, and that leads to gentrification and mass displacement of the community,” Ness said. “And then we wonder why people like us are left scraping in our worst moments to try to swim against this current.” 

One proposal in Congress would guarantee that disaster-affected homeowners with mortgages backed by federal agencies like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac could delay their payments for up to a year.  But not everyone has a federally backed mortgage, and that doesn’t solve the problem of what happens after the forbearance period runs out. 

“Forbearance is good as far as it goes, but it’s a temporary Band-Aid and it does kick the can down the road,” said Lisa Sitkin, a senior staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project. “It has to be coupled with long-term solutions.” 

The most straightforward solution, Sitkin said, is government funding to help homeowners catch up with their payments. California started such a program in June to give disaster-affected homeowners $20,000. Just this week, Maui County launched a federal program to help Lāhainā homeowners rebuild their homes. Demand for such programs is expected to increase as climate change fuels more extreme weather events. 

But every program has limited funding and specific criteria that may limit who can access it. And for disaster survivors struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and other disaster-induced health problems while frequently moving between temporary rental homes, staying on top of the patchwork of assistance programs is yet another burden. 

Even Burke — who keeps a notebook filled with dozens of pages and multicolored tabs documenting nearly every effort she has made to advocate for her family over the past two years — overlooked an email from a housing assistance program that gave her five days to respond and missed the chance to receive $30,000. “That is a huge amount that could be lifted off our shoulders,” she said. “I was really bummed about missing that.” 

Before the fire, like a lot of working moms, Burke was the CEO of her family, juggling her kids’ school performances and extracurricular activities and sports games and medical appointments. Now she’s doing all of that while remembering to call her mortgage servicer every few months to have the same conversation over and over. 

“I’m calling to extend my forbearance,” Burke will say. 

“Disaster forbearance is only up to 12 months,” the person at the other end of the line will usually respond. “We have other options available to you.” 

“Actually, my mortgage is owned by Fannie Mae and that’s not what Fannie Mae told me,” Burke will tell them, reminding them of the government-owned entity that owns her loan. “Fannie Mae said that I can be on disaster forbearance for as long as I’m not in my home and we haven’t rebuilt; we’re still in temporary housing.” 

“OK, let me do some research,” they’ll say. They’ll put her on hold, and then: “We’re not seeing anywhere that Fannie Mae has extended the disaster forbearance.” 

That’s when Burke will request to speak with a supervisor, who will agree to do more research and often tell Burke she’ll get a call back. Sometimes that happens, sometimes it doesn’t. In July, Burke found out her forbearance was extended because she just happened to check the website — nobody called her with the news.

Even then, she’s still on high alert. Last summer, she found out she was briefly in foreclosure from a random conversation with a Mr. Cooper representative who looked up her file — again, she said, the company hadn’t notified her. Michala Oestereich, a company spokeswoman, declined to comment on Burke’s case, but said that the servicer is required to comply with loan requirements that are set by investors. Some allow forbearance periods to last as long as 24 months, but others don’t.

It will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild the Burkes’ house, and insurance money will only cover a portion of that. But she is just as determined as she was 20 years ago when she decided to move home to Maui. To Burke, she’s fighting for more than just a house. 

“It doesn’t just anchor me,” she said. “It anchors my children and grandchildren. Because at the end of the day, whatever they choose in life, they will always have that piece of aina.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Two years after a wildfire took everything, Maui homeowners are facing a new threat: Foreclosure on Aug 12, 2025.

Brian Keeper doesn’t remember exactly when his family began spending holidays in Hunt, Texas, an unincorporated town on the banks of the Guadalupe River where they’d camp, swim, and fish. Sometimes they caught so many perch, bass, and catfish that it felt like his mother had the grill going all day long.

“We were just in love with Hunt,” recalled Keeper. “We were in love with coming up here and getting in the river.”

But he does remember the year he and his seven siblings helped their father build a one-bedroom summer house along the river. It was 1975, and the Texas Longhorns were on their way to winning the national collegiate baseball and football championships. Keeper was 18.

As Keeper and his siblings grew up, the house in Hunt only became more important to their family. His father added rooms and insulation, making it into a home that could accommodate all of them. The family celebrated birthdays, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and Thanksgivings on the river’s shore, stringing lights and setting up tables in the backyard. Kinky Friedman, the provocative satirist and musician, came over for Passover one year. When Keeper’s mother tired of city life in Houston, she often decamped to the Hunt property, where she learned to hunt wild animals and adorned the walls with the heads of deer and bighorn sheep. 

All along, the river was a comforting presence — and a looming threat. Keeper’s father, ever vigilant, had inquired with neighbors about the 1932 flood in Hunt, which killed seven people. When he built the house, he elevated it 10 feet higher than the 1932 flood levels. His foresight served the family well for 50 years. Even when the Guadalupe swelled and stretched over its banks during the 1987 flash floods, one of the worst disasters the area had experienced, it inundated the yard but never made it past the steps to the back porch. With almost 1,000 feet separating the family from the riverbank, other precautions — things like flood insurance — never crossed anyone’s mind.

That’s why Keeper was worried about little more than the aging house’s leaky tin roof as rain poured down on July 3 of this year, when he put down Tupperware containers in a closet where water was starting to find its way inside. But he was a light sleeper from his years caring for his father, who passed away in 2019, and he awoke around 4 a.m., worried that the small containers might have started to overflow.

The Tupperware was doing its job, but when Keeper glanced out of the window, he became disoriented; he couldn’t see the river. When he stepped out onto the deck, he found out why: The river had surrounded him. The Guadalupe had flooded the yard and was level with the back porch, higher than it had ever been. Fear rose in his chest. “As soon as I saw that, I knew we were up shit’s creek,” he said.

Without another thought, he grabbed a life vest, flashlights, and a leash for his poodle, Fidel, and tried to exit from the other side of the house. But when he opened the front door, water started lapping at his feet. Panicked, he ran up the stairs to the loft and called 911. They told him that his best shot was to find a way out of the house. Then he began calling his neighbors to try to wake them up. (His calls ended up saving the lives of two families on his street.)

Over the next several minutes — or was it hours? — Keeper ran up and down the stairs several times trying to identify a way out of the house. At one point, the doors and windows began to break and water rushed in. The refrigerator and furniture began floating. Somehow, the electricity never went out, and the house lights illuminated the whole scene: Tree limbs poked out from the waters, and the roar of the river filled the house. It was the loudest sound Keeper had ever heard.

The force of the river was so strong, it split the foundation in two and began flowing through a crack separating one of the bedrooms from the living room. The water swept Keeper’s feet from under him, and he found himself suddenly horizontal. He clung to the banister of the loft stairs, with Fidel still under one arm. “I guess this is going to be it,” he thought.

But one step at a time, Keeper managed to pull himself up the staircase. The current was so strong that Keeper estimates it took about 20 minutes to ascend the stairs out of the water and into the loft. “I just remember screaming over and over again, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’” he recalled.

Once he got to the loft, he sat at the top of the staircase. A strange calm came over him; his thoughts seemed to all have evaporated from this mind. The electricity had finally gone out, and the house was pitch dark. Eventually, Keeper noticed that the stairs below him appeared to be reemerging from the swirling water, one by one. The river was receding. When he finally came down the stairs, he found that the water had pushed the furniture up against the front door, blocking his exit. He crawled underneath a tilted bureau, pushed past a coat rack, and turned the handle to loosen the front door. 

Then he walked out into the world the river had left behind.

Now, Keeper and his siblings face the hard reality of rebuilding their family home. The house wasn’t just one important part of Brian’s life — in many ways it was his life, the place where he’d spent summers growing into adulthood, where he’d moved in 2011 to take care of his father before he died. He’d assumed he’d stay on to care for the house until his own time came. Suddenly, at 68, Keeper’s future is more uncertain than he ever expected. He could rebuild, or he could wait for someone to make him an offer to take the property off his hands — maybe even the county, if officials decide to buy out homes along the river to protect communities from future flooding. He could clean up and walk away.

In the weeks since the ordeal, people have repeatedly asked him if he’s grown fearful of the river. His answer has always been a resounding “no.” He wants to stay and rebuild — but at what pace and what cost, he doesn’t yet know.

Keeper is not alone in this situation. More than 2,000 structures were damaged by the July 4 floods in Kerr County, which suffered the brunt of the floods that devastated the Texas Hill Country, killing at least 138 people and causing an estimated $1.1 billion in damage. For inland counties like Kerr, where only about 2 percent of homeowners have flood insurance, navigating the piecemeal support offered by an array of public and private entities after the floods adds endless complexity to residents’ hard choices. Those who choose to stay must ensure their next home can withstand flooding of uncertain severity in the future. As the warming waters of the Gulf load the storms that move over Texas with ever more moisture, fewer guarantees can be assumed than in the past.

As residents begin to rebuild, county officials are trying to avoid costly missteps — like permitting rebuilding in flood zones without enforcing elevation requirements — that have set back recovery in other flood-prone regions in the country. In Fort Myers, Florida, residents rebuilt in high-risk areas after Hurricane Ian in 2022. Last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency found the county in violation of federal guidelines and revoked its access to subsidized flood insurance. Rates were projected to rise 25 percent, and more than 250 structures that were built in risky areas were required to be moved or demolished. 

The vast majority of homes in Kerr were built decades before the county issued a rule requiring that new construction in floodplains be built at least a foot above flood levels as determined by engineering assessments based on FEMA data. As the structures are rebuilt, homeowners like Keeper will need to bring them up to code, adding cost and complexity to an already difficult process.

Kerr County has historically been able to approve floodplain permits on an ad hoc basis — permits have been so few and far between that the county still accepts paper applications. But with hundreds of homes needing to be rebuilt, county officials are bracing for a flood of applications. And while the county has received substantial support from state agencies, the federal government’s ongoing role in disaster recovery isn’t entirely clear.

FEMA was initially slow to respond as a result of a new rule requiring Kristi Noem, the secretary of its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, to personally sign off on all expenses above $100,000. The agency also didn’t send search and rescue teams for the first 72 hours. Thousands of calls from flood survivors to the agency went unanswered the first few days, since contractors who operated the lines were fired after Noem missed a deadline to renew their contract. The Trump administration has also cut funding for hazard mitigation programs, endangering funding for buyouts, which are provided to local municipalities, and other measures that FEMA typically provides after major flooding. 

“The floodwaters in Texas rose in hours. FEMA can’t take days to respond,” said MaryAnn Tierney, who spent 15 years in executive positions at FEMA until May, when she quit as the agency came under fire from Donald Trump. “But that’s where the agency is: short on people, tied up in approvals, and potentially late to the moment when they are needed most.” Tierney said she worried about the agency’s ability to respond once hurricanes begin making landfall along the Gulf Coast in the coming months. 

Residents in Kerr County are more preoccupied with immediate concerns.

In the days after the flood, Keeper was shattered. As the reality of everything he’d lost — not just practical things like his car, but also keepsakes like the canoes he’d built and painted himself — and what he’d been through sunk in, he couldn’t stop sobbing. And without the ID that was swept away with his wallet when the river first burst into his home, he realized that even buying a new cell phone would be a struggle. Without the brothers and sisters who’d helped build much of what he’s now lost, he doesn’t know what he would do.

“I’ve kind of looked to my siblings to help me find my way forward,” he said.

The Houston Astros saved RickyRay Robertson’s life.

The night before the flood, instead of staying in the riverside cottage where he normally slept on his family’s property in Kerrville, the 62-year-old pastor had decided to stay in his larger house across the street so he could watch a rebroadcast of the Astros game. He awoke to police sirens around 4:30 a.m. and found that his cottage had been swept away. Like Keeper, Robertson feels lucky to be alive.

“When you live on a river, rivers rise. And when you live in the Hill Country, they rise fast,” he said.

Despite the close call, Robertson wants to rebuild the cottage and repair the main house. Like Keeper and most others in the county, his family did not have flood insurance and will have to figure out repair costs on their own. His mother, who owns the property, had put it up for sale before the floods, but Robertson wants to stay — and now he’s not sure they’d find any buyers anyway.

But because local governments sometimes offer to buy out homes at high risk of flooding — often with the support of state and federal funds — there’s a chance Kerrville or the county itself will emerge as a potential buyer. Robertson’s family home is one of three residential properties along the Guadalupe River in the town bordered by city parks and a popular hiking trail. The property also lies within the 100-year floodplain, meaning it faces a 1 percent chance of flooding each year. If the city or county were to acquire it, the land could be absorbed into the park, mitigating flood risk not just for the properties themselves but for the surrounding area, since the parkland could be designed to better absorb rising floodwaters.

Some of Robertson’s neighbors believe a buyout would be a good idea. Matthew Stone, a retired navy officer, bought a house across the street from Robertson’s cottage about two years ago. Though the flooding just reached his family’s doorstep and didn’t damage the home, he thinks it would be best for his neighbors to take buyouts.

“My hope is that they bulldoze all this and turn it into a park all the way around,” Stone said. “If the city could acquire this, then they could continue the river trail all the way through.”

Robertson isn’t entirely opposed to selling to the city or county — if they’re able to meet his mother’s expectations for a reasonable price. 

“If those guys came in here and said, ‘We’re just going to take your land,’ that’s not going to happen,” he said. “But if they came and said, ‘We’re going to pay the retail price that you’re asking,’ what would Mom care?” 

But Daniel Olivas, who owns the home adjacent to Robertson’s, isn’t interested in a buyout. Olivas, a retired civil engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, was at his full-time residence in San Antonio at the time of the floods and learned about the damage from Robertson. The water reached more than 6 feet inside his house. He was hoping to air out the house and renovate it, but the smell of rotting fish and the river was so bad that he has decided to demolish and rebuild. Like Robertson’s, his home is in the 100-year floodplain. As a precaution, he’s rebuilding the house on piers to a height above where floodwaters rose on July 4. His wife has been inquiring about flood insurance costs and has received quotes in the range of about $5,000 per year.

Olivas has already contacted an architect and a builder to design and rebuild the home. He’s secured a demolition permit and expects to need a range of other permits, including one for  floodplain development, to begin construction. The city of Kerrville has required permits for building in the floodplain since at least 1998; Kerr County has had similar rules on the books at least since 2011. According to an analysis by Cotality, a property intelligence firm, of the nearly 6,000 properties within FEMA flood zones in the county, more than 1,300 are within the 100-year floodplain. Both the city and county require that homes be elevated 1 foot above the level to which floodwaters are expected to rise during a 100-year flood. Olivas expects to do more than meet that requirement. 

Top: Daniel Olivas points to the height reached by the flood that struck on July 4, 2025. Bottom: The exterior and interior of Olivas’ home, which he is now planning to rebuild on piers. Naveena Sadasivam / Grist

Enforcing Kerr County’s development rules for flood-prone areas has fallen to Charlie Hastings, the county’s floodplain administrator. To say Hastings has been overwhelmed in the weeks since the floods would be an understatement. At a public meeting about two weeks after the floods, Hastings was visibly shaken.

“I’ve had one cup of coffee in three weeks,” he told county commissioners. “We’ve been running on adrenaline.”

Hastings oversees development in the county’s flood zones, including reviewing and approving floodplain development permits. So far, that process has been done manually.

“Right now the [permit] that we have is four pages long, and you fill it out by paper, and you walk it to my office, and shake my hand and we go from there,” Hastings told the commissioners. “That’s not going to work if I’ve got 2,000 [applications]. So, that is something that I need help with.”

It’s a problem that Tierney, the former veteran FEMA official, has seen repeatedly. 

“After disasters, people want to rebuild,” she said. “A lot of communities are not prepared for the influx in permitting that happens after a big disaster. When 500 people all of a sudden decide they want to fix their house at the same time, it totally overwhelms the permitting office, and then they can’t properly enforce their flood code.”

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Hastings, who was not available for media interviews in the days after the floods, has long known the importance of a robust flood code. When he was Kerrville’s city engineer in 2002, heavy rainfall inundated parts of the Texas Hill Country, causing 12 deaths and damaging about 48,000 homes, including 200 homes in Kerrville. As city engineer, Hastings helped assess the damage and developed a plan to reduce the city’s future flood risk. With the help of FEMA funds, the city ultimately bought out 23 properties and restricted construction on them, a condition of using federal funds for buyouts. In 2004, he helped organize a survey of floodplain standards adopted and enforced by Texas cities and counties, which has grown into an annual effort to encourage municipalities to adopt stricter floodplain management rules. 

It’s unclear if the city or county will opt for buyouts again. FEMA typically provides 75 percent of the funds required for buyouts, with certain conditions attached. A key requirement is that the properties be converted to open space and left undeveloped in perpetuity.

But what works in better-resourced urban communities — Texas’ Harris County has bought out roughly 4,000 parcels in the Houston area since 1985 — doesn’t necessarily apply to rural towns like Kerrville. Since homeowners move after selling their properties, buyouts can shrink a small municipality’s tax base if residents don’t relocate in the immediate vicinity. FEMA also uses a strict cost-benefit calculation to determine whether or not a property qualifies for a buyout. In rural areas with lower land values, homes often don’t meet the threshold required to qualify.

Anuradha Mukherji, a researcher at East Carolina University, has studied how the rural town of Tarboro in North Carolina navigated buyouts after repeated flooding left residents “completely exhausted, financially and mentally.” The town is agriculture-dependent and resource-poor. But Mukherji said that with the help of FEMA funds and local leaders with strong ties to the community, residents were ultimately persuaded that moving out was economically better for them in the long run.

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It’s unclear whether residents in Kerr County will be similarly convinced. Like Keeper, many have strong ties to the area and are reluctant to grapple with the idea of moving away. And even if they are convinced that it might be in their best interest, there may not be funding available. Under President Trump, FEMA has been making major changes to emergency response management, increasingly shifting responsibilities to state and local authorities. The agency typically includes an automatic hazard mitigation grant, which is used for funding buyouts when a major disaster declaration is granted. But in an effort to cut costs and to push states to utilize other unobligated funds available to them, the Trump administration has not provided these grants to states, including Texas, after flooding. 

There’s a chance that the state could step in to provide funds, or Kerr County could choose to raise money independently. While the Texas Legislature is currently considering funding for siren systems and other emergency preparedness, there haven’t been any bills to provide funding for buyouts. The chances of the county finding the money itself also seem slim. County commissioners and Kerrville city leaders have been discussing increasing property taxes by up to 8 percent to fund relief efforts, but those discussions have been met by protests.

“It’s bad timing,” Robertson said. “All hell will break loose.” 

For years, Keeper lived up to his family name. He was the keeper of the house, the caretaker of his parents. Keeper’s father had created a trust for the Hunt house and made him its sole beneficiary. Since he’d spent years caring for his ailing father, he was to live on in the house and utilize proceeds from the trust to pay for upkeep and property taxes. But his father did not plan for a catastrophic event like the flood. 

Now Keeper and his siblings have to decide if they want to use the remaining funds in the trust to rebuild the house, leaving little to pay for expenses, or else liquidate the property and help Keeper find a new place to live. Whether or not giving up the land is the wisest decision from a public policy perspective — fewer people living in high-risk areas can reduce the burden on local and federal governments and save lives — the decision ultimately rests with Keeper and his family.

For them, it will likely come down to the cost of rebuilding, and that cost will be largely determined by whether or not they will need to secure a floodplain development permit. To complicate matters, the house is in the most dangerous part of the Guadalupe River’s floodplain, its so-called floodway, which typically has the strictest construction restrictions. Living in the floodway is so dangerous that some local engineers refuse to assist homeowners with rebuilding plans. 

The Keepers haven’t filed for a floodplain development permit with Hastings’ office yet, but when they do, they’re likely to at least be required to elevate the house on piers. Their house and those of their neighbors are prime candidates for a buyout, should one be on offer, and Keeper himself isn’t entirely opposed to selling to the county. 

Either way, he’s looking forward to living in a new house. After his father passed away, the never-ending repairs and maintenance on the 50-year-old building began taking a toll on him, even though he still enjoyed his daily swims in the river. Despite nearing 70, Keeper was still climbing up trees on the property to saw off overgrown limbs, and every month, he’d get on top of the house to clean off the roof with a broom and a hose. 

For the last few weeks, Keeper has been sleeping on friends’ couches and at the La Junta camp across the river. He petitioned FEMA for a trailer he can stay in, but his initial application was rejected because he couldn’t adequately prove his residence in the destroyed home, thanks to the vagaries of his family’s trust. Friends and strangers have been keeping him afloat. One of the neighboring families he woke up during the floods set up a GoFundMe page for him, and it has raised nearly $30,000 so far. Last week, a donor gave him a trailer. (It will take a few months before it can be hooked up to water and electricity.)

Keeper misses what he’s lost, but he’s found that he’s ready to move on.

“Taking care of this house was like taking care of another member of a family,” he said. “I’m about to embark upon a rebuild of a house that’s much more appropriate in size for me and my little friend Fidel.”

Grist has a comprehensive guide to help you stay ready and informed before, during, and after a disaster.

Explore the full Disaster 101 resource guide for more on your rights and options when disaster hits.

Are you affected by the flooding in Texas and North Carolina? Learn how to navigate disaster relief and response.

Get prepared. Learn how to be ready for a disaster before you’re affected.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After Texas’ catastrophic floods, families face a daunting question: Rebuild or let go? on Aug 7, 2025.

News by Nhatt Nichols

When you think about the Port of Port Townsend, you probably think of boats. Maybe you’ll even think about airplanes. But that isn’t the whole picture of what the port does.

“The port’s got this broad economic development mission, so anything that’s related to creating jobs can be within the port’s portfolio,” said Port of Port Townsend Director Eron Burg. 

And that’s why the port bought Shorts Farm in Chimacum, miles away from either a dock or an airstrip.

Burg said the decision may seem strange in some ways, but it completely fits the port’s mission. 

“Other ports in the state are heavily engaged in ag[riculture], although for many of them, that’s by owning terminals. So they’re there where the freight moves: They own trains, they own shipping terminals. So they’re bringing their ag to market.”

Ports were created to help protect Washington state’s economic interests and support land preservation. In the early 1900s, railroads and other corporate entities were acquiring Washington’s waterfront property.  That trend concerned the state and led to the creation of ports to protect public access and the economic viability of the state’s waterfronts.

Returning to the Early Days

In some ways, getting into agriculture is a return to the early days of the port in Jefferson County; in 1927, one of its first projects was to build cold storage to help support local farmers.

Burg believes that buying Short’s Farm embodies the spirit in which ports were created.

“Ag land is in that same boat where you see rich people aggregating thousands of acres of what is necessary for people to live. That’s a little scary,” Berg said, before acknowledging that Jefferson County’s problems are a little different; we simply don’t have as much agricultural land as other rural counties. 

“But I do think that there’s a compelling overarching public policy,” he added, “behind making sure all your farmland is not gobbled up by a gazillionaire somewhere.” 

For Berg, the decision to buy Short’s Farm comes from watching the rich agricultural land of his home county, Skagit, disappear under shopping centers and housing development. 

Thanks to the Land Trust easement on the Short’s Farm property since 2016, it wasn’t in danger of becoming developed. But the port was worried it would stop being a working farm and would no longer contribute to the county’s agricultural economy.

New Uses for the Short’s Farm Property

The port bought the Chimacum property in 2023 and assembled a team of local farmers and land experts to advise it on the best way to use their new acquisition. 

In a Land Trust blog post, Erik Kingfisher, Jefferson Land Trust’s director of stewardship and resilience, referred to the Farm Steering Committee as being “like a supergroup of local expertise in farmland and habitat management. The thoughtfulness and intention they’re bringing to the process is a real gift to the port and to the land.”

Today, the port has taken on the suggestions of the steering committee. It is primarily leasing the property for grazing, as that is what the soil is best suited for. 

One Straw Ranch leases 75 acres for cattle, and Chimacum Grain also leases 17 acres to support grain production. Both entities have operations next to the Short’s Farm property, so the port felt their operations were a natural fit. 

Berg said the Short’s Farm property has some land with soil better suited to growing vegetables, which the port plans to divide into smaller lots to lease at a low cost to newer farmers struggling to buy land for themselves. 

He encourages anyone interested in leasing from the port to contact them, though the port isn’t interested in only supporting agricultural business.

Community Boat Project Landing at the Farm

On Thursday, July 31, colorful bunting, the smell of barbecue, and live country music greeted guests who had come to visit the old milking shed, now home to the nonprofit Community Boat Project.

Wayne Chimenti, one of the founders of the Community Boat Project, loves how the program has grown organically since it began in 1993.

“For 15 years, we just did kids and boats on the water, and then it evolved into building boats with kids, and then building tiny houses,” Chementi said. “It just was responding to community needs.” 

Chimenti stepped down as executive director last year, and the first task for new Executive Director Brent Bellamy was finding a new workshop space. The Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building wanted back the space the Community Boat Shop had been using. 

Bellamy was up to the challenge of finding that space. 

“Hey, welcome to the organization. Find us a new place to live,” Bellamy said.  “I invited [Berg] over to the shop. We were doing a lot of stuff with the Food Bank growers network and building garden sheds and compost bins and things to support that part of the ag community. And he was like, ‘oh, wait a minute. Oh, this works.”

“It just seems like it fits our world,” Berg said. “Their program isn’t really boats, it’s a mentoring and training program for kids to learn woodworking. They build greenhouses for farmers. It’s a pretty cool program. We took a tour, liked it, and thought, that’s a good group to have at the farm.”

News by Scott France

Do you have an opinion about the condition and safety of the roads in Jefferson County and want your viewpoint regarding its funding to be heard by County voters? Well, read on, because Jefferson County wants you.

The County is seeking volunteers to serve on “For” and “Against” committees for a potential Transportation Benefit District (TBD) ballot measure. These committees will draft the official voter statements that appear in the local voters’ pamphlet for the November 4, 2025 General Election.

 The proposed measure would add an additional 0.2% sales tax in unincorporated Jefferson County, or twenty cents for every $100 spent, for county road system preservation and safety..

 “At least two-thirds of the money raised would be used to fund chip sealing and paving projects, which are the difference between roads that are drivable and roads that degrade to the point they look like the streets in the City of Port Townsend,” said Monte Reinders, Public Works Director for Jefferson County.

“The remainder of the funds would be used for a variety of activities, including roadway pavement markings, purchasing reliable equipment to perform road maintenance activities like sweeping, brush cutting, mowing, snow and ice control, and grading gravel roads.  It would allow us to continue to acquire grants which pay for essential road upkeep like replacing failing steel culverts (most of which are well over 60 years old and rusted through),” Reinders said.

Funds may also be used for safety-related items such as guardrails, pavement markings, and signage on the county’s 400-mile road system as well as for bridge maintenance and repairs, and drainage repairs. This revenue could be used to provide matching funds for transportation projects and to help fund emergency repairs. 

 The Board of County Commissioners is expected to consider a resolution on August 4 to place this TBD sales tax measure on the November ballot. The current TBD sales tax of 0.1% was established by resolution in 2024. This proposed ballot measure would add another two-tenths of one percent, bringing the TBD sales tax to the full 0.3% authorized by statute.

Reinders said that the County’s Road program is “in a hole at least $3 million deep (or more) trying to maintain service levels equivalent to those in 1998”

“We’ve cut 25% of our staff, reduced the available equipment fleet, let much of the fleet age to the point where it is unreliable, and cut the chip seal program in half,” Reinders said. “Further reductions will jeopardize the continuation of many of the already reduced road maintenance activities that are essential to keep roads from falling apart.  People might also appreciate the perspective that Jefferson County operates with just about the lowest revenue available per road mile compared to other western Washington counties.  For example, we operate with 60% to 70% less revenue than Clallam County while having nearly the same road system to maintain.”

Reinders said that more than 90% of the County’s funding for projects such as building the Larry Scott Trail and the new Olympic Discovery Trail to Anderson Lake comes from grants. The county would be largely ineligible for these grants without funds to match them.

“The biggest risk, though, is the continued reduction in our regular road maintenance program,” Reinders said.  “It is already very small and to the point where further cuts may mean we just cannot even field a crew to chip seal or patch roads or do the other many, many things we do.”

To qualify, you must:

• Be a registered voter of Jefferson County

• Have an email address and the demonstrated ability to communicate promptly by email

• agree to work collaboratively with co-committee members

In a press release, the County states, “By state law, the county appoints both a pro (For) and con (Against) committee before the measure is placed on the ballot. This is your opportunity to ensure the community’s voice is heard. The committees are responsible for drafting statements and rebuttals per the following schedule:

• Committee statements (max 250 words) due: August 12 by 4:30 PM

• Optional rebuttal statements (max 75 words) due: August 15 by 4:30 PM

Once formed, each committee may recruit additional members. If you’re passionate about transportation, public policy, or civic engagement, we encourage you to apply! Please communicate your interest as soon as possible by email to cao@co.jefferson.wa.us or by phone to 360-385-9100.”

 For more information about ballot measures, visit the Elections page on our website: www.co.jefferson.wa.us/1275/Jr-District-Information.

 The 2025 Election Guide for Jurisdictions provides additional information and instructions related to ballot measures and committees: http://www.co.jefferson.wa.us/DocumentCenter/View/19812/2025-Election-Guide-for-Jurisdictions.