COVERING PUGET SOUND NAVAL NEWS FOR BREMERTON | BANGOR | KEYPORT
NAVY NEWS Kitsap
VOLUME 1, NO. 17 | 22 JULY 2011
www.kitsapnavynews.com
SEALS swoop in on Satsop About 30 members of SEAL Team One were briefly deployed to western Washington late Thursday as part of a training exercise lasting only four hours. As part of the night-time exercise, the soldiers arrived and departed at a never-completed nuclear reactor complex near Satsop, Washington, via helicopter, swooping in around 10 p.m., and departing at 2 a.m. While part of the center is occupied by a Bussiness park and occupational training facility, the reactor complex itself sits mostly empty. The reactor building, as well as a maze of tunnels and surrounding acres of forest “lends itself well to certain scenarios,” said Kathryn Fredrick, project coordinator at the Satsop Regional Education and Training Center, a non-
SEE SEALS | PAGE 8
Will Buss, a homeless Marine Corps veteran, distributes meals from Bremerton Rescue Mission meals truck several times a week in exchange for transitional housing at the mission. Next week Kitsap County Commissioners will consider sending a human services levy to county voters for the November ballot. TOM JAMES/STAFF PHOTO
Veterans counting on levy Advocates for homeless vets present tax hike to Kitsap County Commissioners By TOM JAMES
tjames@soundpublishing.com
Will Buss is a normal guy. He likes Dr Pepper, helps the old janitor where he works change a lightbulb now and then, and wouldn’t mind if his commute were shorter. Back in ’96 he got out of the Marines, and less than two years ago he was living on the other side of Puget Sound, with a job at a self-storage facility and having just about payed off a few old debts. Today, Will ranks among Kitsap’s homeless veterans, a group that stands to benefit from a levy proposed Wednesday by social workers and veterans’ advocates to Kitsap County
Commissioners. Modeled after a similar funding measure approved by King County voters in 2005, the proposed levy would add $0.05 in property tax for every $1,000 of real estate value, or about $12.50 per year on a $250,000 home. The levy would be temporary, lasting six years before needing to be approved by voters again. By Washington State law, any tax increase of more than 1 percent must be approved by public election. Wednesday’s proposal marked the first official step toward that. At a meeting on July 25 the county commissioners will officially decide whether to accept the proposal. Part of the proposal’s acceptance would be an advertised public comment period, the commisioners indicated Wednesday. The levy was jointly proposed by the Kitsap County Veterans Advisory Board, which administers the statemandated Veteran’s Assistance Fund, and the Kitsap Continuum of Care Coalition, a group of organizations including the Kitsap County Health District, the Bremerton Rescue
Mission, and Kitsap Mental Health. In documents submitted with the proposed levy, the Continuum of Care Coalition cited statistics from the Washington State Department of Social and Human Services indicating a 48 percent increase in all “homeless households” in Kitsap between 2009 and 2010, and a 524 percent increase since 2001. Also cited were reports from the Salvation Army of a 24 percent increase in the average number of free daily meals being served since this time last year, and from three of Kitsap’s six school districts reporting neardoubling of the number of homeless students since 2006. “In our meal program we saw a 25 percent increase in the first quarter of this year alone,” said Walt Le Couteur of the Bremerton Rescue Mission, “so it’s definitely getting worse. We’ve seen an increase in the need on an ongoing basis since we started back in 2009.” For Buss, things got worse in March 2010, when he abruptly lost his job as a
SEE LEVY | PAGE 8
THIS EDITION Stennis departs Monday for Mid. East mission...pg. 2 Navy News grows ...pg. 4 Sarah Smiley ..........pg. 4 Nashville, kamakaze carnage in Pacific pg. 10