Rob Richards commentary: Domestic violence victims left in the dark

There is a service window in the Thurston County Courthouse that has been dark since Jan. 20. The phones behind it go unanswered. The counter is closed.

Linda Myhre Enlow, our county clerk, did not close that window because she wanted to. She closed it because she had no choice. The Board of County Commissioners ordered her to cut $778,000 from her $5.4 million budget. That made her the most heavily cut elected official in the county. Over several years of successive reductions, her staff has shrunk from 48 full-time employees to 31. She eliminated the domestic violence support staff. She shuttered public-facing services. By February, 315 new cases sat in a backlog.

Those are not abstract numbers. The domestic violence staff had walked victims through protection order applications, stayed with them through the court process, and helped them build safety plans. That help is gone. Attorneys who have practiced here for decades said they had never seen anything like it. What used to take ten minutes now takes weeks. Constitutional rights to a speedy trial have been called into question.

Commissioners Emily Clouse and Rachel Grant cast the two votes against the budget. Clouse was the only commissioner to refuse to sign the letter sent to the clerk. She said it plainly: “We failed the community by allowing this to happen.”

She is right. But the failure did not begin this budget cycle. It began in 2001.

That year, voters passed Tim Eyman’s Initiative 747, capping property tax increases at 1% per year. The intent was to protect homeowners from rising tax bills. The effect, compounded over 25 years, has been to strangle the governments that deliver services to those same homeowners. When the Washington Supreme Court struck down the initiative in 2007, the legislature, despite a Democratic majority, reinstated the cap in a single-day special session. It was quickly signed by Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire.

The cap has been in place ever since.

In 2024, Senate Democrats tried to repeal the cap for cities and counties, but dropped it amid Republican-led pressure.

In 2025, both chambers passed budgets that depended on raising the cap to 3%, then abandoned the effort when Governor Ferguson opposed it.

The cap remains at 1%. The problem remains unsolved.

Inflation does not comply with arbitrary revenue limits. Housing and utility costs, gas and grocery prices, and the cost of providing services to the most vulnerable people in our community are all rising steadily while our capacity to increase revenue is not. Thurston County entered this budget cycle facing a $36 million deficit. The county held the line where it could. Final cuts totaled just under $10 million. That was the good news. The bad news was where the cuts landed.

Close to 70% of Thurston County’s general fund goes to law and justice services. That is not an accident; it reflects what counties are legally required to do. Courts, prosecutors, public defenders, juvenile services, and corrections are mandated functions. When you have to cut from the remaining thirty percent, you are cutting everything else. When you have to cut into law and justice, you close the window.

The commissioners who approved this budget were not villains. They were people working inside a structural trap that has been tightening for a generation. The clerk who closed her window was not failing in her duty. She was meeting her legal obligations with the resources that remained.

The window that went dark this winter is the most visible consequence of a funding model that has been failing in slow motion for 25 years. The counter at the clerk’s office is a symptom, not the disease. The 1% cap is the disease. The legislature can cure it. It has chosen, twice, not to.

Somewhere, as you read this, a victim of domestic violence is trying to file for a protection order on her own. No one is walking her through the paperwork. No one is explaining what the judge needs to see in her petition. No one is helping her build a safety plan for what comes next. She is alone in a process that is terrifying and isolating even with help, because we decided that help was a luxury we could no longer afford.

•••

Rob Richards is a Navy veteran and former congressional staffer who has been an active community member in Thurston County for over two decades. To submit an opinion piece to the Thurston Chronicle, email news@thurstonchronicle.com