Copy, Paste, Present

What the Clerk’s office handed commissioners in the middle of a $9.4 million budget gap, and what they should have gotten instead.

Kitsap County’s general fund is projected to come up $9.4 million short in 2027. In September, every department and elected office presented its budget to the Board of Commissioners. The ground rules went out in July. Show the service impact of your cuts. Say how many positions are involved, who gets affected, and how service changes. The Board also asked offices to look for money, writing that it would “encourage increased fees to improve revenue projections.”

The Clerk’s office brought 12 slides. I read every one, along with last year’s version and the decks from other offices that presented the same week.

Maybe more was said out loud at the podium. But the deck is what’s posted for the public, and it’s what commissioners carry into deliberations. Here’s what’s in it.

The audit

1. The goals are last year’s goals, word for word

All three goals on slide 5 match the 2026 presentation exactly. Same wording, same order, down to the line about upgrading existing programs.

• Goal 1: use technology to streamline processes
• Goal 2: keep up with changing legislation and court rules
• Goal 3: improve community outreach and offer more offsite passport services

The technology goal also echoes what the current Clerk said he’d focus on when he was appointed in 2021. Five years later there’s still no timeline attached, no cost, no measure of progress, and no report on how last year’s version went.

2. The accomplishments are mostly last year’s accomplishments

The three passport bullets are copied from the 2026 deck. So are both jury bullets (continued use of the juror text option, and online check-in). Keeping the juror texting system turned on for another year has now made the accomplishments list twice.

The deck says passport wait times went down. By how much? It doesn’t say.

Worth noting: Superior Court’s own presentation reported a 98% juror satisfaction rate. The court gave commissioners more data about jury service than the office that actually runs jury administration.

3. The digital kit numbers go backward, and don’t match last year’s deck

This year’s deck lists 214 digital kits sold from August 2025 to August 2026, down from 258 the year before. That decline sits on the accomplishments slide, even after six new kit options were added.

Then it gets stranger. Last year’s deck reported that same September 2024 to September 2025 window as 386 kits sold. Same 12 months, two different numbers, one year apart. Either way you read it, the most recent year is the lowest figure the office has reported in either presentation.

4. The one financial table doesn’t add up

Slide 7 is the only page with spending history. Add up the 2026 budget column:

2026 Budget column	Amount
Salaries/Benefits	$2,236,232
Supplies/Services	$351,461
Interfunds	$619,922
Line items added together	$3,207,615
Total shown on the slide	$4,802,749
Unexplained gap	$1,595,134

Take the salary line at face value and the office had already spent 94% of its full-year payroll budget by June. That’s almost certainly a typo. County budget staff help build these forms, so it may not have started in the Clerk’s office. But it went in front of commissioners under the Clerk’s name, and the posted version still has it. The Auditor’s and Superior Court’s tables from the same week both add up.

5. Budget A: the savings were already in the bank

Budget A is the scenario where the county passes a small sales tax increase. The Clerk’s target was $34,808, and the deck reports $59,626 in total savings. Sounds like the office beat its number.

Look closer.

• $55,925 of that (94%) is credit for staffing cuts already made in the 2026 budget, when two clerk positions were eliminated
• The remaining $3,701 sits on a line that includes the elected salary freeze the Board required of every office. The Auditor’s deck shows the exact same $3,701.
• New savings the office identified on its own: none listed

Meanwhile the proposed budget grows by $382,692, about 8%. The deck doesn’t explain what’s driving that increase. To be fair, Budget A targets were small by design. Commissioners still deserved to know where an extra $382,692 is going.

6. Budget B: $212,026 in staffing cuts, and not one detail about them

Budget B is the no-new-revenue scenario, where the Board told offices it was open to reducing services and hours. The Clerk’s office hit its $210,349 target with $212,026, all of it from staffing. Zero from supplies and services. Zero from new revenue.

How many positions is that? Which units? Passports, protection orders, records, jury, the courtroom clerks? The deck doesn’t say.

Here’s the impact statement commissioners got:

“Hiring freezes or staff reductions can lower morale, reduce productivity, and create uncertainty.”

That sentence could appear in any department’s budget deck in any county in the country. The other bullets mention a change in service and longer wait times without saying which services or how much longer.

Now compare. Superior Court’s Budget B cut almost the identical amount from staffing, $212,667. Its deck told commissioners exactly what that means: 2.0 FTE out of Adult Drug Court, a specific participant-to-staff ratio, and the end of the Veterans Treatment Court program. Same dollars. One office showed its work.

Even last year’s Clerk deck said how many positions it cut. This year’s doesn’t.

7. Revenue: $0, in both scenarios

Plenty of Clerk fees are set by state law, so I’m not going to pretend there’s a dial in the office that turns up revenue. But:

• Last year’s deck found $10,000 in new revenue from additional record services. This year: $0.
• The office processed 3,900 passports and sells digital kits. Both bring in money, and Goal 3 is literally more offsite passport services. The revenue line still says $0.
• The deck never shows what the office collects at all, only what it spends. Commissioners can’t weigh the net cost of an office when they only see one side of the ledger.

Superior Court found $15,100 in state interpreter reimbursements. Small number. But someone went looking.

8. Burnout, with no numbers attached

The impact slide raises a real concern: burnout, turnover, and staff out on paid family leave. I believe it. The people in that office work hard, and they deserve a leader who fights for them in that room.

Fighting for them means numbers. How many vacancies? What’s the turnover rate? How much overtime? How far behind is anything? A concern without a number is easy to nod at and easy to cut.

One more thing. Slide 6 counts the passport walk-in day as an accomplishment for the second year running. Three pages later, slide 9 says staffing isn’t available for any more walk-in flexibility. That’s the closest the deck comes to telling commissioners what staffing levels mean for the public.

What commissioners should have gotten

If I’m standing at that podium next September, this is the minimum that goes in the deck:

• Workload numbers for every unit (filings, hearings staffed, protection order petitions, jurors summoned, facilitator appointments, passport applications), this year against last year
• Staffing by unit, tied to each budget scenario. If Budget B cuts two positions, commissioners see which two and what happens to wait times and counter hours
• A revenue page showing what the office collects, what’s fixed by state law, and what it can actually grow
• Goals with a date and a number on them, plus an honest grade on last year’s
• A financial table that adds up

None of that requires new money or anyone’s permission. It requires treating the budget hearing as the one hour a year the Clerk’s office gets to make its case to the people deciding its future.

Why this matters

The Clerk’s office is where people file for protection orders, report for jury duty, finalize divorces and get their passports. When the county decides what gets cut, the people doing that work need someone at the podium who walks in with numbers and walks out with a budget they can defend. Twelve slides of recycled goals and a table that doesn’t add up isn’t that.

That’s the job I’m asking for. Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. If your ballot is still sitting on the counter, this is your reminder.

Brien Kennedy

Next: Nothing to Rebuild puts the incumbent’s own interview answers next to this deck.

Sources

All documents are public and posted on the county’s Budget & Finance page.

• Kitsap County Clerk, 2027 Budget Presentation (Sept. 22, 2026)
• Kitsap County Clerk, 2026 Budget Presentation (Sept. 17, 2025)
• Kitsap County 2027 Budget Call Letter (July 13, 2026)
• Superior Court, 2027 Budget Presentation
• Kitsap County Auditor, 2027 Budget Presentation
• Bainbridge Island Review, appointment of the current Clerk (2021)