With measles outbreaks occurring in several counties in Washington state this year, we wondered: what would happen if we had an outbreak in Olympia? How vulnerable are we? How do new state laws impact school-age families, and what more needs to be done to support public health? To answer these questions, we interviewed Jeanie Knight, division director for Disease Control and Prevention for Thurston County, and Dr. Rachel Wood, the public health officer for Thurston and Lewis Counties. Tune in to learn more about the local landscape for vaccine preventable illnesses.

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For more in depth look at the numbers behind the statistics for local schools, check out this blog post.

There are some upcoming clinics this August to help families be ready for the new school year under the new state requirements for the MMR vaccine. See this flyer for details!

On this episode, we explored the structure of city government, the reason we have the system we have, and what a different system looks like in a neighboring city. Olympia has a council-manager system of government, with a city manager to run the day-to-day operations of the city and a mayor that doesn’t have much more authority than the rest of city council. Tumwater has a mayor-council system, where the mayor has much more authority than the city council. We interviewed Holly Gadbaw, who served on the Olympia City Council for many years after it adopted the council-manager system, and Pete Kmet, the mayor of Tumwater.

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The Port of Olympia has new leadership and is undergoing a long-term visioning process. We spoke with Sam Gibboney, the new executive director, about the current status and future of the port. We talked about the nature of ports as local government institutions, what our local port does for the county, and what we can expect to see future. There is a critical seat up for election this year on the port commission, so we’d like our listeners to pay close attention to these issues!

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Here is our annual legislative update! As we did last year, we sat down with Representative Beth Doglio to talk about what Olympia brought to the recent session, and how the outcomes of the session will impact people in Olympia. We dove into homelessness and housing, climate change and the environment, the new code of conduct around sexual harassment, vaccine exemptions, and more.

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With all the talk about having a walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly city, what does it look like to get there? The city of Olympia is in the process of developing it’s very first Transportation Master Plan. To get a high level view of our local transportation system, the changing needs, and how we will be getting around in the future, we interviewed Thera Black. Thera is a former planner at the Thurston Regional Planning Council and now a local consultant on transportation systems.

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