Sen. Patty Murray’s visit to the North Olympic Peninsula last week took her from sea level to 5,000 feet and back again on a 10-hour, 200-mile trip to get a first-hand look at the remains of the Hurricane Ridge Day Lodge, survey coastal erosion at Kalaloch Beach and celebrate with Port Angeles officials and trail advocates a $16 million federal grant to complete the Olympic Discovery and Sound to Olympics trails.

Murray, D-Seattle, who is president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, visited the area Aug. 14 and Aug. 15 — one of three visits to the Olympic Peninsula in the past two weeks from legislators representing Washington state in Washington, D.C.

Murray, a six-term Democrat U.S. senator, said she had been devastated when she learned about the May 7 fire that destroyed the day lodge in Olympic National Park.

“As somebody who’s brought my family here, gone hiking from here, it’s where we bring visitors,” Murray said. “I want it to be back to where it was where people can use it again like they always have for decades.”

Park Superintendent Sula Jacobs, Acting Facility Manager Jeff Doryland, Acting Deputy Facility Manager Zach Gray and Project Manager Cody Manzer discussed with Murray short- and long-term strategies for replacing the lodge and maintaining visitor access to one of the park’s most popular destinations.

The investigation into the cause of the fire conducted by “a group of external parties” is continuing, Jacobs told Murray, but it hadn’t stopped the park from moving ahead with medium- and long-term planning.

Among the solutions it is working on, Jacobs told Murray, was how to keep Hurricane Ridge open this winter. The skiers, snowshoers and sledders who visited were passionate about maintaining access, she said.

“We are tremendously cognizant of that, which is why I pushed the team and they have kind of been jumping up and down to figure out everything, and there has been every kind of roadblock that you can conceive of,” she said.

Doryland explained to Murray the park was looking at a “bare bones” solution to providing toilets at Hurricane Ridge this winter as well as designing an interim solution for restrooms until a new lodge can be built.

“We need something that’s a little hardier than just a couple of trailers, so we’re looking at possibly some sort of modular buildings. Even if it’s trailers, they would have to be winterized and a lot more secure,” Doryland said. “We’d be looking at having sufficient toilets as well as storage for all the supplies.”

Gray said the park had started working on a concept design for a new lodge that would use the same footprint as the old one, possibly incorporate passive solar or other green technologies and balance the needs of both visitors and operations.

Between the design process and construction, park staff told Murray it could take five to seven years — a conservative estimate — until a new lodge could be opened.

Jacobs said the park had funds for design work, for basic demolition of the old lodge and to provide portable toilets, but not for constructing an entirely new building.

“We’re talking about clearly north of $50 million for this kind of size of structure, so this is clearly not insignificant,” Jacobs said.

“It doesn’t fall neatly into any one funding bucket, so we are just going ahead as a park and just preparing for everything all at once,” she continued. “It is really unusual to be working on five or six different alternatives simultaneously. But that’s what we’re doing because we recognize how important it is to rebuild this.”

Murray vowed to “do everything I can in my capacity as chairman of Appropriations working with the Park Service and what other partners come into this to get the funding.

“But obviously, we’re ways from knowing what that number is.”

Before her trip to Hurricane Ridge, Murray met with local officials and trail advocates at the 9/11 Memorial Waterfront Park to celebrate a $16 million federal grant for a multi-use trail that will eventually join the Olympic Discovery and the Sound to Olympics trails to connect La Push to the Bainbridge Island Ferry Terminal.

Murray secured the funding through the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) program.

The grant will fund the planning and design of 34 multi-use trail segments across both the Olympic and Kitsap peninsulas as part of the Puget Sound to Pacific Initiative. The City of Port Angeles acted as the lead agency for the grant.

Kilmer warns of possible shutdown

Though Congress has been able to pass some major legislation in the past two-and-a-half years, U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer said partisan gridlock may lead to a government shutdown at the end of the September.

Speaking to a meeting of the Port Angeles Chamber of Commerce on Aug. 9, Kilmer — who emphasized bipartisanship throughout his remarks — said some far-right Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have walked back spending agreements reached earlier this year in a bill to increase the debt limit, and were drafting spending bills that he believes have little chance of passing the Senate or being signed by the president.

“So what’s happening in appropriations right now is that we’re marking up appropriations bill at levels that were agreed upon in that bipartisan agreement,” said Kilmer, D-Gig Harbor, referring to the debt limit bill that was passed in June.

If we’re going to avoid continuing resolutions or even worse, government shutdowns, we’ve got to get serious and pass bills that aren’t designed to make a political statement but are designed to become law, and right now that’s not happening in the House,” said Kilmer, who represents the 6th Congressional District, which includes the North Olympic Peninsula.

A small number of House Republicans in what’s known as the Freedom Caucus is driving the legislation further to the right, Kilmer said, and the Republican leadership has not yet reached out to Democrats to draft bipartisan bills that might pass the Democratic-controlled Senate and be signed by Democratic President Joe Biden.

“They’ve also loaded them up with a bunch of issues unrelated to appropriations,” Kilmer said.

“Basically every bill has become an anti-choice bill, has become an anti-LGBT community bill,” he added, “all of these provisions that have nothing to do with the spending levels but are just trying to get some of their very far-right members to vote for the bills.”

Kilmer said the center-left New Democrat Coalition — of which he’s vice chair for policy — has sent a letter to House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., urging him to work across the aisle on bills that have a better chance of passing the Democratic-controlled branches of government.

Currently, Kilmer said, Democrats are not involved in the appropriations process in the House, as opposed to the Senate, where Washington’s Sen. Patty Murray, D-Seattle, chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee and is drafting legislation with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

Despite the partisan division in Washington, D.C., Kilmer said Congress has been able to pass historic legislation in the past two years, adding that much of which was directly impacting the Olympic Peninsula.

Using funds from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe was awarded more than $25 million to replace the Big Quilcene River Bridge and the Jefferson County Public Utility District has been using federal grants to expand its fiber optic network.

A bill originally drafted by Kilmer in 2021 — the Rebuilding Economies and Creating Opportunities for More People to Excel, or RECOMPETE Act — was included as a pilot program in the 2022 Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science Act, or CHIPS and Science Act.

That program will offer grants for up to five years for economically distressed communities to boost economic development and local employment.

In July, county commissioners from both Clallam and Jefferson counties agreed to collaborate on a joint application to the RECOMPETE Pilot Program, which could provide between $250,000 and $750,000 in grant funding.

Kilmer said he is hopeful that Congress can still be effective despite party divisions.

“I just think that we’ve got to get past some of the partisan bickering and get more focused on making progress and solving problems,” Kilmer said.

Cantwell conducts fentanyl roundtable in PA

Sen. Maria Cantwell heard about the myriad difficulties local officials face in trying to combat the opioid crisis including lack of funding, insufficient personnel, lack of supplies and complicated regulations around providing care to those suffering from opioid-use disorder.

Cantwell, D-Mountlake Terrace, was in Port Angeles on Aug. 17 to discuss with local officials what Congress could do to help combat the state’s ongoing opioid crisis, now dominated by the synthetic opioid fentanyl.

“We know that there have been 26 people who died in overdoses in 2022 in this county,” Cantwell said at a roundtable discussion with local health, law enforcement and county officials at Peninsula Behavioral Health.

This was the seventh fentanyl roundtable Cantwell has held throughout the state. She noted Congress had recently passed the Fentanyl Eradication and Narcotics Deterrence (FEND) Off Fentanyl Act, which targets money-laundering operations related to fentanyl.

“In general we think that the I-5 corridor has put our state in the epicenter of increases in the amount of fentanyl being trafficked,” Cantwell said. “And we want to do everything we can to stop that.”

Communities across the United States have been combating an opioid epidemic for almost a decade but in the past few years, the crisis has become dominated by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is up to 50 times stronger than heroin.

“Since about a year and a half, two years ago, virtually everyone coming in (for substance-abuse disorders) has fentanyl in their system,” said Dr. Michael Maxwell, CEO of North Olympic Healthcare Network (NOHN).

In addition to people taking the drug on its own, fentanyl also is laced into other substances such as cocaine and methamphetamine leading to many unintentionally taking the drug.

Local health and law enforcement officials have been given additional access to the opioid-rescue drug naloxone, which often comes in the form of the nasal spray Narcan.

However, demand for those drugs is high across the state and getting enough can be a challenge for authorities.

Chief Criminal Deputy Amy Bundy of the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office heads the Olympic Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Team.

She applied for a state grant for naloxone but was told that because of high demand a committee was being formed to figure out how to distribute the medication.

“At the time, our sheriff’s office could not receive naloxone from our Health and Human Services Department due to their grant funding,” Bundy said. “They could give it to community members but not to law enforcement.

“However law enforcement and the community paramedics are doing more overdose reversals than I can count. That’s why I have deputies running out of naloxone in short order and I’m telling them to go in in plain clothes and get some at the community center.”

Local officials asked the senator to do what she can to reduce regulatory barriers to providing substance abuse treatments and to ensure funding to law enforcement remains consistent.

“When you look at an investigation at the federal level we have to realize that most of these informants and most of the intelligence comes out of these local communities,” Clallam County Sheriff Brian King said.

“You have to have these local task forces working in partnership with your federal task forces in order to really be able to make a difference.”

King said local law enforcement personnel across the state are concerned about continued access to the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants which provide funding for a range of programs. Without those and other grants, King said local task forces which provide critical information to federal partners will no longer be funded.

“Next year we don’t have a grant to continue our local task force and if we really want to affect that supply chain from an enforcement perspective, then we need to fund our task forces,” King said.

Health officials said the process of providing opioid-replacement drugs such as methadone is still bogged down in regulations.

“Help needs to be easier to get than fentanyl,” said Molly Martin, executive director of the Jamestown Healing Clinic in Sequim.

“It’s harder to get help because there are so many state and federal regulations that go into being an opioid treatment program that were put in place in the ‘70s and every time we try to change them what it actually means is another layer of rules going up,” Martin said.

Martin said there are four different regulators for opioid treatment centers and their rules don’t always align. There’s also a lengthy and complicated intake process for patients which can be a deterrent for those suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

Furthermore, once the intake process is completed, the doses of opioid treatment drugs are too low to combat the strong effects of newer drugs like fentanyl.

“When that dose was approved years and years ago, there’s a ceiling on how much we can give on the first day,” Martin said. “That dose was approved back in the era of fairly mild heroin, not in the era of fentanyl, and it has not been adjusted since then.”

Dr. Linsey Monaghan, lead physician for NOHN’s opioid treatment program, said if the administrative burden around Medicaid reimbursement requirements were removed it would increase access to care.

In 2016, the Clallam County jail became the first on the West Coast to offer the opioid-treatment drug buprenorphine or suboxone to inmates. But that program is grant-funded, Monaghan said, because federal regulations require a person’s Medicaid to be deactivated if they become incarcerated.

Offering treatment in the jail leads to a decrease in people attempting to smuggle opioids into the jail, and keeps people’s tolerance up so there are less fatal overdoses upon release.

“Any time you take opioids away for a period of time without any treatment, especially incarceration is a big time for that, then you release people to the street, the overdose rates are 10, 20 times higher,” Monaghan said. “Since this grant which we’ve had for the past year our jail has had zero overdose deaths post-release.”

Cantwell said later that Congress is working on a budget that may be able to provide funding for grant programs.

“The Byrne JAG grant, which is our support for these organizations, we’re going to be passing a budget, this is what we could be doing to help them now and that’s something we could do in the next few months,” Cantwell said.

Cantwell said she believed there was bipartisan support for combating the fentanyl crisis, noting the FEND Off Fentanyl Act was supported across the aisle.

Kilmer requests include Olympic Peninsula projects funds

Five of U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer’s 15 Community Project Funding requests are for projects on the North Olympic Peninsula.

Kilmer said he and his staff received and reviewed more than 80 applications for consideration.

Clallam County

• Port Angeles Waterfront Center; requested amount $4 million; purchase of equipment needed to support completion of Field Arts & Events Hall.

• Habitat for Humanity, Sequim; requested amount $2 million; development of affordable/workforce housing.

• Makah Tribe, Neah Bay; requested amount $3,750,000; construction of new housing for essential health care staff outside of the tsunami inundation zone.

Jefferson County

• Jefferson Healthcare/Jefferson County Public Hospital District; requested amount $2 million; support construction of new clinic offering speciality care in neurology, pulmonology, ENT (ear, nose, throat) and geriatrics for seniors facing geographic barriers.

• Port of Port Townsend; requested amount $6.16 million; repair section of failing breakwater at Boat Haven.