Too much traffic, too few jobs top local issues

By JUDD SLIVKA
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

For all of its growth, for all of its small-town charms, the Sequim community has its problems.

Traffic is only the most obvious. There is very little industry in the area -- unemployment is just under 8 percent; statewide, the rate is at 4.6 percent.

There is very little money generated in Sequim -- the median income in 1990 was $17,278, significantly less than the $37,105 statewide figure for 1995.

"Most of the money that comes into this community is from retirement income, investment income," says Pat McAuley, the city's tourism coordinator and owner of InsideOut Marketing.

The wage-earners tend to make their money doing work the retirees don't want to do: yard work, transport, pumping gas, serving food. Some go to Port Angeles for work, although that city's Rayonier paper mill closed in 1997 and jolted the economy. Others just use Sequim as a place to get away from it all -- creating an hourslong commute.

"There are people in Sequim who commute to Silverdale," says Sue Anderson, owner of Lost Mountain Winery outside Sequim. "We have a neighbor who commutes to Boeing (in Renton). He leaves every day at 4 a.m. and gets home at 10 each night. We had some other neighbors who worked at Virginia Mason (Medical Center in Seattle) who outfitted a VW van to sleep in. One of them worked four days at a time and would take it into Seattle and sleep in it in the parking lot, then come back and they'd switch places."

When Wayne Uht moved his RV and boat-accessory manufacturing business from Issaquah in 1995, he helped relocate the families of his five employees with him. Two of them were related -- a daughter and a son-in-law. It was an influx of younger people.

"That's the only way younger people get up here," Anderson says. "They move up here to be closer to their parents when their parents retire up here.

"My children would love to come up here and live," she says. "My son was up here two years looking for work. He went down to Admiralty Marine, which is one of the few places that pays more than $10 an hour, and put in an application. And he was told 'Hang on, hang on, hang on, we're not hiring right now,' and then he got tired of waiting.

"Now he's in Alaska on a fishing boat."

Joe Cavitt's father was dying last year, and so the Portland businessman moved to Sequim. Last month Cavitt opened a store for antique prints on East Washington.

"I'd been commuting up here from Portland for the last 21 years after my parents retired," he says. "My dad got sick last year, and I came up to take care of him. He died, but my mom is still around, and I thought to myself 'Hmmm, what's more important?' "

So he opened Kismet Antique Prints. Cavitt's store is in the midst of