PORT ANGELES — Clallam County voters had two countywide measures on which to decide as they filled out their general election ballots this week.
One was passing while the other was failing after the initial count of ballots Tuesday night.
A charter amendment that would remove coroner duties from the elected prosecuting attorney passed with 81.6 percent of the vote to 18.4 percent. There were 10,247 votes cast for the measure and 2,304 votes against it.
“There’s basically a change in state law that prohibited our prosecuting attorney from serving as coroner,” Clallam County Commissioner Mike French said. “I’m assuming we will have a traditional hiring process that we would go through for any director-level candidate.”
Clallam County District Court 1 Judge David Neupert has served as the interim coroner since Jan. 1.
Proposition No. 1, a levy lid lift for county essential public services, was failing Tuesday night with 58.7 percent of voters rejecting the measure and 41.3 percent in favor. There were 7,646 votes against the levy lid lift and 5,370 votes in support.
“I feel there’s times when elected officials need to be leaders and times when we need to be listeners,” French said. “We honestly wanted to hear from our community what’s the direction we should go, and I think we’ve heard it.”
If it had passed, the proposition would have raised the county’s general property levy rate from the current $0.7598 per $1,000 of assessed value to $0.95 per $1,000 of assessed value.
“I believe that we have a 2026 budget that was not dependent on the levy lid lift to function,” French said. “We haven’t had our final adoption yet. We have a budget I think we can live with in 2026, but we may need to amend it.”
For coming years, however, the county will have to really look at some cuts, he said.
“I think that we need to be creative,” French said. “We need to find ways where our departments can work together, we can find efficiencies. I think we’ve been trying and we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit, and this will be a difficult task, but that’s our task.”
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Reporter Emily Hanson can be reached by email at emily.hanson@peninsuladailynews.com.
