Reporter Central Kitsap
Time to spare? Don’t forget to ‘spring forward’ this weekend for daylight saving time
FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2013 | Vol. 28, No. 26 | www.CENTRALKITSAPREPORTER.com | 50¢
Kitsap barn added to state Heritage Farm Register By Leslie Kelly
By KEVAN MOORE
lkelly@soundpublishing.com
To Marilyn Holt, it’s always just been the barn. But last month it became a heritage barn. The large English Gambrel style barn, built in 1930, was added to the Heritage Farm Register by the Governor’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation. It’s something that Holt took on herself, in between operating the farm. “What’s special about this barn, is that it’s an actual working barn,” she said. “When we were at the presentation we saw photos of the other barns being added (to the register) and most of them had grass grown up all around them.” Holt knows the barn only too well. She was raised on the farm which is just east of Central Valley Road. Known to most as the Walker farm, Holt and her husband now operate their diversified family farm business named “Abundantly Green.” “We took over the family farm in the late 1990s when my father wasn’t able to run it any longer,” she said. “After he died, we inherited the farm in 2001 and became the fourth generation to have the farm.” The farm has been a working farm in her family since 1892. Her great-grandparents purchased it from the Cooksey family who homesteaded there in the 1880s. “They cleared about 10 acres and began an orchard,” said Cliff Holt, Marilyn’s husband of the Cooksey family. In 1892, the farm was sold to Marilyn’s great-grandparents, Frederick Walker and his wife Marian. Frederick was a land speculator and stayed in Seattle conducting business, while Marian milked the cows, sold eggs and tended to the orchard.
Mall, farm owners dropped from mud run lawsuit kmoore@soundpublishing.com
The Silverda le Chamber of Commerce stands alone in defending a lawsuit filed by four injured participants in last year’s chambersponsored Extreme K Mud Run. The owners of the Kitsap Mall, where overflow parking was slated to be available for the event, and Ron and Nadeen Ross, owners of the Royal Valley Farm where the race was held last October, have been dropped from the lawsuit. James McCormick, of the Tacoma law firm Messina Bulzomi
Christensen, originally filed suit late last year on behalf of Wendy Davis, a Poulsbo police sergeant and former deputy chief, and two other women, Jaclyn Brant and Germaine Szewezyk. Each of the woman suffered serious foot injuries in a course obstacle dubbed “Gravity’s Revenge,” a nearly vertical chute or slide with a rocky mud puddle at the bottom. A fourth plaintiff, Silverdale resident Troy Wysocki, who suffered back injuries, has also signed onto the lawsuit. “We still expect that we’ll see some more (plaintiffs) come forward as this progresses,” See LAWSUIT, A17
Sheriff loses track of vacation hours By WES MORROW wmorrow@soundpublishing.com
Leslie Kelly/Staff Photo
Marilyn and Cliff Holt stand at their barn that was recently named a Heritage barn. When Frederick died in 1896, the farm remained in Marian’s hands along with her second husband. The apples that they grew were taken by the jitney from Brownsville to be sold at Pike’s Place Market. Marilyn’s grandfather, Erford Walker and his wife, Carolyn, were next to operate the family farm. They began
to realize that the orchard was not going to make them a living because most the large orchards had moved to Central Washington where there were irrigation lines. So they removed the trees and began planting hay. They continued to modernize the farm and built the barn that recently was named a heritage barn.
In the 1960s, the farm was passed to Marilyn’s parents Mable (Walker) and Maynard Holt. Her father had retired from the U.S. Navy and decided that farming was next. They built a modern milk house with a bulk tank and operated a commercial dairy. Marilyn attended See BARN, A17
An accountability report released by the Washington State Auditor’s Office Monday found that the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office didn’t adequately control its employee leave system. The lack of control led to the misappropriation of 1,166 hours of leave for 110 of the office’s 115 employees. Some employees were given extra unearned paid leave and others were not credited enough. The report showed one employee received nearly 250 more hours of annual leave than that employee had earned, an equivalent of $8,700. Another employee received 43 extra unearned leave hours, or
the equivalent of $1,505. Auditors noted that the timekeeper was manually making leave adjustments without reason and was adjusting employee’s leave allowance without recording it in the timekeeping system. On top of this, the timekeeper failed to reconcile the timekeeping system and financial system. Prior to the audit, the responsibilities for this system fell on the shoulders of one employee, who was reportedly mismanaging the system. The auditor’s report stated the Sheriff’s Office failed to provide adequate oversight for the timekeeper to ensure leave was properly recorded. According to the Sheriff ’s Office, the employee who was in See vacation, A17