98% Said Their Local Officials Aren't Transparent. That Tracks.

A KOMO News reader poll (https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-mayor-talks-about-shooting-initially-rejects-speaking-about-city-policy-change-yesler-community-center-gun-violence-katie-wilson-city-policy-mmaritza-rivera) asked 5,241 people a simple question: how would you describe the transparency of your local elected officials?

One percent said very transparent. One percent said mostly transparent. Ninety-eight percent said not transparent.

That’s not a scientific survey. It’s a reader poll, self-selected, still open as of this writing. I’m not going to oversell the methodology. But I’m also not going to pretend the number surprises me – because it doesn’t. Not after a year of working inside a county government office. Not after watching how little most residents know about the offices that serve them every day.

The poll is attached to an article about the Seattle mayor who deflected questions about a shooting near a community center. The specific politics of that story aren’t mine to comment on. But the number – 98% – reflects something real that goes well beyond any single official or any single incident. What transparency actually looks like – and what it doesn’t

I’ve spent most of my career in environments where transparency wasn’t a value, it was a survival mechanism. In the private sector, if you hide a problem from a client long enough, you lose the client. If you hide a problem from your team long enough, you lose the team. Sunlight wasn’t idealistic – it was practical. It was how you caught problems before they became crises.

Government offices don’t work that way. Not because the people in them are bad – most of them aren’t. They work that way because there’s no competitive pressure to be different. When an office runs unopposed year after year, when no one is asking hard questions from the outside, the institution gradually optimizes for its own comfort rather than for the residents it’s supposed to serve.

That’s not corruption. It’s entropy. It happens slowly, without anyone deciding to do it. And it stops when someone finally asks: what does this office actually do, what does it cost, and what does the public get for it?

What that question looks like in practice for the Clerk’s office

The Kitsap County Clerk’s office has an annual operating budget. It has staffing levels, technology contracts, and operational procedures. Most residents have no idea what any of those numbers look like. That information is technically public – it’s in county budget documents if you know where to find it and how to read it. But it has never been presented clearly, publicly, in plain language that a Kitsap resident could actually use to hold this office accountable.

That ends with me.

One of my four day-one commitments is an annual public report: where the budget went, what the office delivered, what changed from the prior year, and what I’m planning to do differently. Not buried in a government archive. On our website. In plain English. Every year.

A second commitment is monthly public office hours – live Zoom sessions open to any Kitsap County resident. I answer questions on camera, on the record. If I say it, I stand behind it. That’s the point. These aren’t radical ideas. They’re standard practice in well-run organizations. The fact that they feel ambitious for a county office tells you something about what the bar has been.

The 98% number is a signal When 98% of people say their local officials aren’t transparent, they’re not all talking about the same incident or the same office. They’re talking about a pattern. A feeling – often correct – that the people making decisions on their behalf aren’t telling them the full story. I’m not going to fix that feeling for every office in every county. I’m running for one seat in one county. But I can commit to running that one office differently – and I can be specific about what differently means. Ninety-eight percent is a lot of people feeling left out of their own government. Our county deserves better than that. So does every other county in Washington state.

The way it gets better is when people start demanding it. I’m one person who decided to do more than demand it.

August 4, 2026.