The $9.8 Million Deficit and What It Means for the Clerk's Office

Kitsap County commissioners project a $9.8 million countywide budget shortfall for 2027 alone, with reserves potentially depleted by 2029 if nothing changes. You may have seen it mentioned in the Kitsap Sun or heard it come up at a county budget meeting. It’s real, it’s significant, and it affects every county office — including the one I’m running for. I want to talk about what that actually means for the Clerk’s office specifically, because I think voters deserve a straight answer on this instead of vague reassurances.

What a structural deficit means

A structural deficit isn’t a one-time shortfall you can paper over with a reserve fund. It means the county is spending more than it takes in on an ongoing basis. That gap has to close somewhere — through cuts, through reduced services, or through finding efficiencies that should have been found years ago. In 2026, Kitsap County eliminated more than 25 positions countywide as part of the budget response. Two of those positions were in the Clerk’s office.

Most residents never heard about those cuts. There was no public announcement, no press release, no explanation of what the office lost and what that means for the people it serves. That’s exactly the kind of transparency gap I’m talking about when I say the office needs to communicate better.

What it means for the Clerk’s office day to day

The Clerk’s office runs on a combination of county general fund allocation and fee revenue from court filings and services. When the budget tightens, the options are limited. You can reduce staffing — which has already happened. You can defer technology upgrades — which has been the pattern for years. Or you can find ways to do more with what you have.

I want to be honest about what I can and can’t promise here. Staffing decisions are budget-dependent. Technology investments require capital the county doesn’t currently have in abundance. I’m not going to stand in front of voters and promise things that require money that isn’t there.

What I can promise is this: a Clerk’s office that communicates clearly about its constraints and gets after the things it can control immediately. That means auditing our vendor relationships and supplier contracts to make sure we’re not paying legacy rates that haven’t been reviewed in years. It means looking hard at inventory policies for the supplies and materials the office manages. It means revamping our legal kits — the self-help packets residents use to navigate court without an attorney — so they’re clearer, more user-friendly, and actually likely to be used rather than sitting on a shelf. These aren’t moonshot ideas. They’re common sense operational improvements that any well-run organization would have already made. And they don’t require a budget increase to execute.

What it also means is telling the public when services are reduced and why. The office quietly eliminated two positions and hoped nobody noticed. That doesn’t happen on my watch.

Why private sector experience matters here

I want to be direct about this because I think it’s relevant to the budget conversation specifically.

I spent over a decade as an e-commerce growth consultant managing relationships with some of the fastest-growing consumer brands in the country — Nuun, SmartyPants Vitamins, Olly, Organifi, Alpha Lion. Companies that were acquired by Nestlé and Unilever. I managed teams of up to 40 people and operated in rooms where hundreds of millions of dollars were on the line. In that world, you don’t get to miss a number and blame the environment. You find the inefficiency, you fix it, and you report back clearly on what happened and why.

I am, by any honest measure, overqualified for the administrative demands of this role.

I say that not to be arrogant but to make a specific point: the Clerk’s office doesn’t need someone still learning how to read a budget or manage a team under pressure. It needs someone who has already done it — at scale, with real consequences, without a safety net.

County government doesn’t always operate with that same urgency. I think it should. And a $9.8 million projected shortfall is exactly the moment to find out whether it can.

What I’m asking voters to consider

The deficit is a county-wide problem that requires county-wide leadership to solve. But every office has a role to play. The Clerk’s office should be leading by example — running lean, communicating clearly, and finding every efficiency available before asking for more resources.

That’s the standard I’d hold myself to. And it’s the standard voters should be holding every county office to right now.