📢 Cascadia Voices 06/27/26

Cascadia Daily News’ readers and others marked the days leading up to the nation’s 250th anniversary by exercising their First Amendment rights; but then that’s what they’ve been doing every week since CDN’s launch five years ago.

This week’s debates continued on the thorny issues of affordable housing, proposed closures of two Bellingham schools, what size jail fits Whatcom County’s criminal justice needs and more.

Plus, our poll asks newsletter readers to weigh in on the county’s moratorium on permitting federal immigration detention facilities. Plus, we report on last week’s poll on phones in schools.

Finally, consider two recommendations on U.S. history and a tip for Wordle players.

Enjoy, and be careful with the other fireworks this week.

Kerri Burnside, board president of the nonprofit Future Homebuyers Organization, in her commentary “Bellingham’s work on housing affordability is far from over” (CDN, June 21, 2026), notes recent achievements — including the city’s ordinance eliminating minimum parking requirements for housing — as helpful tools, but writes that the city needs better metrics to measure the effectiveness of its range of policies. She writes: "How many units are produced because of parking reform? At what income levels? Benefitting whom? What impacts might occur in neighborhoods most vulnerable to redevelopment and displacement? Without measurable outcomes and public reporting, we are left hoping a policy works rather than knowing whether it does.”

Susan Gribben, a Bellingham resident whose adult children attended Bellingham schools, is joining others objecting to a proposal to close two elementary schools in “Before closing Bellingham schools, take closer look at growth, boundaries and funding” (CDN, June 24, 2026). Gribben, noting population projections for the region, suggests it might make sense for the Bellingham School District to consider the city’s plans for growth and development, including changes to the Civic Athletic Complex that could help anchor Carl Cozier Elementary to the neighborhood. But Gribben also notes the state’s lax responsibilities for funding education: “In 2019, the Washington state Legislature came closest to funding the cost of education mandated by the state constitution with its response to the state Supreme Court’s McCleary decision. However, that moment passed. A widening gap since has driven the state’s constitutional 'paramount duty' to amply fund education into the dust.”

I work remotely on justice and safety issues in Memphis, Tennessee. I was struck by how we’re having almost identical conversations in both cities.

While Washington and Tennessee are very different politically, we face the same challenge: whether to continue pouring money into increasingly expensive jail systems that react after harm has already been done, or invest in the services that prevent harm before it occurs.

In Memphis, I’ve seen how easily communities become trapped in a cycle of relying on incarceration instead of prevention. In both Shelby County (Tennessee) and Whatcom County, the majority of the jail population is made up of people awaiting trial who have not been convicted of a crime. That overreliance on pretrial detention drives overcrowding, rising costs and inhumane conditions while housing, mental health, treatment and other proven supports remain underfunded. If we want jail to be a last resort, we must reduce unnecessary detention and invest in those supports that prevent incarceration.

As Whatcom County moves forward with building a new jail, we still have a choice. We can continue investing primarily in reactive systems, or we can invest in solutions that address problems before they reach a crisis point. I’ve seen where the first path leads; let’s have the political courage to choose the second.

Makenzie Graham
Bellingham

Read more letters to the editor here.

Submit a letter to the editor (250 words max) or guest commentary (500–800 words) online at cascadiadaily.com/submissions.

Whatcom County Council voted Tuesday, June 23, to set a one-year moratorium on permits for construction or expansion of federal immigration detention facilities (CDN, June 23, 2026) in the unincorporated county, following an hour of public testimony, most of it in support of the moratorium and opposed to the actions of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies. Similar actions have been taken in Seattle, Spokane, and King and Pierce counties.

Sample comment: "Results of banning the phones have been good. It might be best to leave the matter up to local school boards, but I do see a possibility that statewide score improvements would give the other states a good example."

Would this work in real life? Wordle players may want to take note of a recent analysis by The New York Times’ Upshot team’s recent statistical analysis of some 730 million games of the word-guessing puzzle. Turns out that players using the puzzle’s “hard mode,” in which players must use guessed letters that are correct hints — either in terms of correct letter but wrong placement or correct letter and placement — are more successful than those in “standard mode,” which allows players more freedom in guessing words. Hard mode users had an average failure rate of 2.5%, compared to 4.3% in standard mode. Hard mode, the article theorizes, helps players avoid poor choices.

Add these folks to your U.S. history knowledge: In the run-up to the nation’s 250th anniversary, the New York Times Magazine, in “Visions of America,” asked seven historians to profile “everyday founders,” lesser-known men and women who contributed to the nation’s early years. Introduced with graphic novel-like illustrations, the histories — uncovered only in recent decades — recount their contributions to the nation’s founding. Among them: Good Peter, a leader of the Oneida nation who saw the colonists’ cause as the best chance to secure the interests and land for the Oneida people, urging its warriors to assist the patriots. And Lemuel Hayes, a free Black militia member, who heard the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” and after the war became the colonies’ first Black ordained minister and wrote an essay, “Liberty Further Extended,” that denounced slavery and urged the new nation to fully follow Jefferson’s ideal.

'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together': For a peek at the American Revolution from across the pond, PBS, on its Passport service, offers the two-part documentary, “Lucy Worsley Investigates: The American Revolution.” Worsley, the English historian, author and former chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces — she of the slight but endearing lisp — provides new perspectives, some more sympathetic to England and its colonial loyalists regarding the revolution, calling the Declaration of Independence “the ultimate break-up letter” and suggesting that things “could have gone a different way with couples therapy.” Perhaps, but what would we do on the Fourth?