Compass

(Airdate: October 30, 2021) After a decade of working in the cramped quarters of a former portable classroom at the Mountain View Commons, KPTZ will soon be moving into a spacious new facility in what is said to be Fort Worden’s first building. This week on the Compass, we tour the new studios as the remodel nears completion, and talk about the importance of community radio and the opportunities the move presents.

On today’s program we speak with Doctors Kees Kolff and John Geyman, who are kindred spirits in that they are both current County Board of Health members for Jefferson and San Juan Counties respectively. Both have a thorough grasp of rural health care. Dr. Geyman is a noted author and Professor of Family Medicine, with 14 books on health care and the health care system to his credit. Kees, a former pediatrician, was also Medical Director for a group of rural health care clinics. We have an informative and stimulating discussion surrounding the state of health care in the United States, and challenges and solutions for reform.

On this week’s special live Compass, recorded on-air on Saturday, October 16, KPTZ host Tim Quackenbush talks via Zoom with candidates vying for two positions on the Port Townsend City Council.

This week on the Compass, in a reprise of a show we did in July, we talk with Benji Project founder Cynthia Osterman and child psychologist Lexa Murphy about the results of a survey of local teens on the psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and about things adults can do to help teens in crisis.

This week on the Compass we attend a fundraising open house at the Point Wilson Light Station and hear about plans to open access to the historic site. Then we talk with the director and a board member about plans for improvements at the Recyclery, the innovative local nonprofit dedicated to safely putting people on bikes.

Some fifty years before Black Lives Matter and March for Our Lives – before computers, cell phones, and Facebook — priests and brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan shook up the Washington establishment by engaging in nonviolent resistance against war, earning them the title of America’s Most Wanted fugitives. Joined in marriage to Philip as well as resistance, nun Elizabeth McAlister joined the brothers in protest against war, racism, capital punishment, and nuclear weapons. In this special Port Townsend Film Festival edition of the Compass, KPTZ’s Chris Bricker speaks with Susan Hagedorn, director of the feature documentary, The Berrigans: Devout and Dangerous.

In this special edition of the Compass, we with Shannon Kring, director of End of the LIne: The Women of Standing Rock, selected for screening at this year’s 22nd Annual Port Townsend Film festival. Shannon and her crew have woven together a significant chronicle of the grass roots movement that arose after it was announced that the Dakota Access Pipeline would be routed through the land of the indigenous people of South Dakota. The film tells the story of the five brave women who started it all, with four Mongolian yurts and four families camped on the grasslands overlooking the proposed pipeline route, as workers moved closer to the sacred sites of Lakota territory and the banks of the Missouri River.

It was like a straight-A student suddenly receiving a failing grade when at this week’s public health briefing before the Jefferson County Board of County Commissioners, Public Health Officer after Hospitalist after Chief Medical Officer told the same alarming story: the north Olympic Peninsula, which throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has slipped by with minimal damage, has seen its short-staffed health care system overwhelmed by a storm surge of mostly unvaccinated coronavirus victims arriving at its emergency room’s doors, leaving little or no space for patients with other disorders. This week on the Compass we bring you excerpts from that wrenching meeting.

This week on the Compass, KPTZ’s Larry Stein takes a look at the work of JCIRA, which is the acronym for the Jefferson County Immigrant Rights Advocates. And then Steve Evans talks with East Jefferson Fire and Rescue Chief Bret Black about stretched resources in a year much of the American west is on fire as the result of a summer with widespread drought and record-breaking heat waves.