San Juan County’s budget cuts forces hard choices

Published 1:30 am Monday, June 22, 2026

San Juan County Council members spent much of Tuesday’s marathon budget session sorting through reductions that ranged from the trivial — $100 left in the food budget for Council meetings — to the genuinely painful. Two items on the same agenda captured just how painful: a proposal to close the heart of Orcas Island, the Eastsound Village Green, and a presentation showing how a handful of community volunteers are saving the County hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by keeping children out of custody.

Parks and Fair Director Brandon Andrews told Council that the Eastsound Village Green — home to the Saturday farmers market, the Orcas Center’s summer concert series and the town’s only public restroom — costs the County roughly $68,000, with the cleaning contract, utilities, septic service and trash pickup running far higher than what the green brought in. His recommendation: Drop the custodial contract and trash collection to save about $50,000, while keeping roughly $20,000 in the budget to mow the grass and keep the water and power running. “I’ve not been part of closing a park before, or proposing it,” Andrews told Council.

Council chair Justin Paulsen, an Orcas Island resident, didn’t dispute the math, but he knew exactly how the idea would land back home. “This is like dropping a bomb in the middle of Orcas Island,” he told fellow Council members. “I’m gonna go home, and my house will be egged and TP’d … for even entertaining this conversation.” He also warned of more practical fallout: Without a managed restroom, he said, farmers market crowds and visitors would end up in the nearby wetland or in the doorways of downtown businesses. In an interview after the meeting, Paulsen told the Sounder, “If we can’t provide basic sanitation and a place to use the restroom, we got no business bringing them [tourists] here,” and called the Green “the physical heart and … the emotional heart of our community.” He also pointed out why the Green is on the table at all: unlike most of what the County funds, parks simply aren’t mandated by law.

Orcas Island Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Carey Eskridge, in a separate interview with the Sounder, said local groups — the Chamber, Orcas Center and the farmers market — have quietly discussed for years how they might take over management of the Green if the County ever stepped back, much as Lopez Island’s chamber maintains a similar green and restroom building, with cleaning and mowing funded through the Tour de Lopez fundraiser. Orcas has no equivalent revenue stream yet. “It’s a huge asset,” Eskridge said, calling it critical to Orcas as a year-round community, not just a tourist draw.

Tender testimony

That same day, Council heard a very different kind of presentation — one with no comparable revenue gap to close. Linnea Anderson, Superior Court Services director, who oversees the County’s juvenile probation and child welfare functions, reminded Council that nearly everything her department does is legally mandated; she has no authority to eliminate it. County Clerk Lisa Henderson made a related point about her own mandatory court duties, warning the Council that “any budget cuts to any of our partners really affect the whole” system.

The exchange turned personal when Council member Kari McVeigh — noting that one of Anderson’s 10 volunteer guardian ad litems is a friend of hers — called the unpaid work “incredibly dedicated and time-consuming.” Anderson said the volunteers stay “with the entire life of the case,” sometimes seven years, traveling across the state once a month and “being in contact with some of our most vulnerable young people in this community.” When McVeigh admitted the topic nearly brought her to tears, Anderson kept it brief. “It’s just … enough said,” she told the room, before returning to her point: “We try to show up in this space the best we know every day, [mindful] not only of the financial cost to our taxpayers, but also of the social cost to those that are court-involved.”

Anderson also described the human stakes behind the minimum staffing levels she is fighting to protect. She recalled a recent case in which a probation officer, having just finished a shift at 6 p.m., was called back to duty at 10:30 that night and stayed on the job for 25 straight hours until relief arrived. “I cannot deliver this safely,” she said, “and these are people’s children.” Asked about a $75 million liability judgment recently issued against another Washington county in a child-welfare case, Anderson was blunt: “Taking care of people’s children who are not ours has a responsibility to do it correctly.”

The savings she described were just as striking. Anderson said the County’s volunteer guardian ad litems — who represent children’s interests in dependency cases — save the County at least $140,000 every two-year budget cycle compared with hiring paid advocates. Citing a 2024 Washington State Institute for Public Policy study, she said diverting a juvenile case away from prosecution saves roughly $4,900 per case in downstream costs. The County spent just $6,100 on in-custody detention combined across 2023 through 2025. “We’re really saving a hundred and nine thousand dollars,” Anderson told Council, comparing that figure to the $9,000 budgeted for next year.

Anderson continued, “We filed no cases in juvenile court. We diverted everything,” she told Council, before adding, “the sad part is we’re talking about this from a finance perspective.” She reframed a 50% drop in juvenile incarceration as something other than a budget line: “This is what the people want. We want our kids to be local. We want our communities to be healthy. And this is how we do that.” She said she isn’t afraid to draw a boundary: “Not on our watch.”

“Children are still children,” McVeigh said. “We sometimes forget that they’re still children.” In an interview after the meeting, Paulsen told the Sounder it was hard to sit through talk of closing a park “in the same breath” as a department that keeps kids out of custody. Asked to choose between the two, he didn’t hesitate: “I’m picking that over a park.”

Paulsen and the rest of the County Council have made it clear that they will fight to save valued parks and services, but going into this budget and into 2028, they expect continuing inflation, increasing insurance and liability costs, as well as maintenance, infrastructure, etc., to weigh heavily into the future. On several occasions, the Council has emphasized that the budget cuts are not punitive and are real, and that the line in the sand at this time is state-mandated services as well as health and safety. Everything beyond that will be considered for cuts or reductions in service levels.

The Council is trying to close a roughly $4 million gap in its 2027 budget and has so far avoided new taxes, including a law-and-justice sales tax and a public health property tax, both available to it. Anderson closed her presentation with the philosophy that guides her office: “We work for you. You don’t work for us.” Paulsen said the conversation, uncomfortable as it was, needed to happen in public. “People hopefully are watching,” he said, “so that they see that these are real cuts.”