Save a Forest in Southworth, WA

Southworth Forest Update:

Appeal of Southworth Deforestation Permit Nearing Decision

Posted November 22, 2025 by Southworth Forest

In the first session of the hearing, Examiner Phil Olbrechts (upper left) swears in Kitsap County's Steve Heacock (lower right). Ashlynn Ota (upper center) represented the County, Peter Durland (upper right) represented the applicants, and Christian Clemmensen (lower left) represented the appellants pro se. Later filings revealed that Mr. Heacock's testimony contained significant errors.

The community appeal of the Kitsap County permit to legalize the troubling 2019 deforestation at 11090 SE Southworth Dr. in Port Orchard has passed through the hearing phase. It now awaits a decision from the County's Hearing Examiner, Phil Olbrechts, who has admitted that this forest violation and the County's handling of it are extremely unique.

As required by law, the community filed appeals of both the County's environmental (SEPA) decision and administrative decision in 2024. The appeals were delayed while neighbors attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate with developers Meghan and Clint Edwards. The hearing finally occurred in August 2025, and the Examiner requested an additional briefing in November. No other Kitsap County appeal hearings have occurred in the second half of 2025.

While the community awaits the Examiner's decision, the appellants are optimistic about the outcome of the appeal, as the County and developers did not attempt any meaningful defense of the decision and failed to refute the countless exhibits of evidence showing erroneous County handling of the permit and six years of significant environmental impacts already evident from the 2019 violation. The developers instead focused their defense as a personal attack on the credibility of the lead appellant, a neighbor most affected by the deforestation.

Several concerned community organizations in Kitsap County have reached out to the Southworth Forest group about this appeal process. The following timeline and filings can provide an overview of how a vigorous appeal of a neglectful County permit review can take shape. Note that the appellants in this case represented themselves during the appeal hearing and wrote their own briefs based upon legal precedent and past successful filings of a similar nature.

Appeal Statement/Letter

Upon filing an appeal of a permit with Kitsap County, an appeal statement letter is required. In the case of this illegal Southworth deforestation case, the County had withdrawn and revised its SEPA and administrative approvals multiple times, so the file below contains the final, consolidated revision of the appeal statement. The County and Examiner will allow a revision to the statement anytime the County revises its own decision in writing.

There is no length or formatting restriction to the letter, but you must be prepared to submit your evidence in support of your argument and explicitly request your relief. Here, the appellants supplied upwards of 300 exhibits consisting of photos, videos, emails, and other files via a Google drive share with the County's clerk and requested relief related to both the administrative and environmental sides of the permit. The exhibits were later renamed and resubmitted using the County's preferred naming standards.

Appellants are generally not required to supply such immense detail in the initial letter, but it must contain all the basics of the case. Some litigators will recommend that you not reveal the totality of your case as an appellant up front. In this instance, the Southworth Forest group had already sent much of this material to the County in an effort to dissuade a poor outcome prior to the permit decision, but the County largely ignored the evidence.

• Appellants' Revised Appeal Statement (4/30/25)

Preliminary/Pre-Hearing Briefs

In a schedule set by the Hearing Examiner, an exchange of briefs will occur a short time before the hearing itself. For this case, the appellants provided a condensed version of the appeal statement letter as the preliminary brief, as there was no reason to repeat all the extraordinary detail of the case that the Examiner was already well aware of. The original statement letter remained the focus of the argument all the way through closing briefs after the hearing.

The County (via Ashlynn Ota, Kitsap County Civil Deputy Prosecutor) and developers (via Peter Durland of Gordon Thomas Honeywell) provided mostly boilerplate language in their own preliminary briefs, though the developers' filing was soured by personal vitriol against the lead appellant. This tactic proved unfruitful for the developers during the hearing, as the Examiner was not interested in aspects of the case that weren't relevant to County or State code. The existence of this very website, for instance, was not the Examiner's concern despite Mr. Durland's protestation of it.

• Appellants' Preliminary Brief (7/30/25)
• Applicants' Preliminary Brief (7/31/25)
• County's Preliminary Brief (7/31/25)

Public Hearing

The hearing scheduled for August 2025 proceeded as planned and lasted for four sessions over that month due to extended testimony by the developers, their engineer, County reviewers, and the lead appellant. Other appellants opted not to testify due to the personalized attacks conducted upon the lead appellant to that point. The Examiner had additional questions for the County since there was no staff report or other presentation of information explaining the County's decision in greater detail, a significant detriment to their defense.

During the hearing, the appellants' case occupied almost the entirety of all the sessions as the other two parties were asked to explain and defend against the extensive evidence submitted. Despite errors shown in their work products, County reviewers Steve Heacock and Cecilia Olsen, as well as the developers' engineer, Rebecca Vader, were generally dismissive and condescending in their responses to the lead appellant, who was asking the questions while representing the appellants pro se (without an attorney present).

Mr. Heacock's testimony was alone nearly fatal to the County's defense. He was distracted, contradicted himself, and could not recall basic facts about the violated parcel or the history of the permit. At times, his answers devolved into inexplicable or incomprehensible ramblings that illustrated the appellants' argument about his negligent handling of the deforestation in 2019 and review of the permit thereafter. The appellants later detailed these discrepancies in great depth with countless citations of timestamps in the testimony.

The County and appellants rarely objected to any of the testimony, if ever, but the developers' attorney, Mr. Durland, interjected frequently with objections and attempts to flip the questioning back on the lead appellant during the appellants' case. These attempts to muddy the proceedings were not successful, however, as the Examiner recognized the unusual pro se aspect of the hearing arguments and discouraged such behavior during the first session. Almost all objections by the developers' counsel were overruled.

Also irregular in this hearing is that the County and developers did not utilize their allotted time to make any rebuttal case, instead cross-examining the witnesses, including lead appellant, during the appellants' case but not bothering to put forth any distinct witnesses or argument of their own. Because of this decision, the County and developers pushed their only real opportunity to refute the appellants' case to their closing briefs, at which point they barely did so anyway.

After the sessions, the Examiner will typically send the automated transcripts to each party. Be prepared for these transcriptions by artificial intelligence to choke on certain names and terms. For example, it could never determine how to interpret "SEPA" and consistently referred to Mr. Heacock as "Mr. Cock." Nevertheless, in closing briefs, the appellants extensively cited the transcripts with bracketed corrections as necessary to support their case.

• Video Files of Hearing Sessions (see August 2025 entries)
• Combined Transcript of All Hearing Sessions (9/11/25)

Closing Briefs

Two to four weeks after the hearing, closing briefs are typically due. The appellants used the entirety of the allotted space in their briefing to highlight the extensive ways in which the testimony reinforced their case. They also completely disqualified Mr. Heacock by outlining his repeated errors in testimony. This filing was a devastating summary of how the County failed to hold the developers responsible for their violations, both in the permitting process and in mitigating the impacts caused by the illegal clear-cutting.

The County and developers, meanwhile, again referenced boilerplate language for their closing briefs, repeating misguided arguments from their preliminary briefs despite their debunking in the hearing itself. No substantial defense was extended in their briefs, leaving the bulk of the appellants' arguments unanswered. Critically, neither defending party raised any answer to the environmental impact evidence, stating that the testimony and exhibits have little weight because no expert witnesses supported their entry. In reality, since the impacts have already clearly been shown occurring in the evidence over six years, no experts were needed, and examiners typically rule in favor of impact evidence if unrefuted.

Also of interest in the closing briefs is the continuation of the developers' personalization of language against the lead appellant. Once again, the Examiner is not interested in such distractions, and the developers did very little to diminish the credibility of the evidence and legal arguments being presented by that appellant. The appellants were very surprised that the developers' counsel, Mr. Durland, did not attempt a more robust defense, both he and the developers seemingly not understanding the mitigating conditions already placed against them by the County in their decision.

The only points the County and developers attempted to score in their closing brief related to a minor argument about screening buffers, stating that the appellants were misreading County code when in fact it was Mr. Heacock who himself cited that exact governing code about the required buffers. The appellants exposed this fact once more in their closing reply brief and reiterated their requests for relief.

• Appellants' Closing Brief (9/25/25)
• Applicants' Closing Brief (10/10/25)
• County's Closing Brief (10/10/25)
• Appellants' Closing Reply Brief (10/21/25)

Examiner Request for Additional Briefing

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Examiner requested additional information from the County a few weeks after the closing briefs were submitted. He needed more explanation about how this permit should have been handled in the first place, with or without the violation. The County had not put forth any significant defense of their argument or supply clear references to which County and State codes they followed when handling both the developers' violation of the original danger tree permit in 2019 and transition to a corrective SDAP permit in 2020.

The Examiner confessed that this was the first time in over 2,000 cases that he felt compelled to ask an agency for more clarification after a hearing, citing the County's lack of thorough rebuttal during the hearing and the highly unusual nature of this particular case. His questions showed, however, that he is concerned about the fundamental procedural issues with the County's handling even before he considers the action's environmental impacts per SEPA.

The County responded to only some of the Examiner's questions, attempting to render the others moot by claiming that the developers' parcel could never have qualified as forestlands as defined by State law, and a conversion permit was thus not required. Both the law and evidence in the record counter that assertion, as the parcel had indeed been classified as forestlands and thus should have been processed differently by the County when it was violated.

The appellants responded to the County's supplement brief with arguments of fact and law that negated the County's poor response, offering additional exhibits for the record since the County was raising a fresh defensive argument after the hearing. The developers' counsel objected to that prospect without filing any brief of their own, but the Examiner did not immediately rule on the admissibility of the additional exhibits.

• Examiner Order Requesting Additional Briefing (11/4/25)
• County's Supplemental Brief (11/10/25)
• Appellants' Supplemental Response Brief (11/14/25)

Conclusion

After witnessing the hearing and the filings associated with the appeal, observers expect the appellants to prevail at least partially. The existing environmental impacts from the after-the-fact action were never refuted, making it more likely their significance will demand extra mitigations of the developers. Legal requirements of permitting for a forest conversion conducted in 2019 will likely require additional steps for the developers as well, including a permit with the State's Department of Natural Resources and a more definitive site map and landscaping plan showing the type and location of required buffers.

More fundamentally, the response to the appeal by the County and developers shows that neither took the appellants very seriously, perhaps because of the relatively small size of this development. But the County was well aware of the offense the forest violation caused to the community, led by the timber trespass experienced by direct neighbors, during the entirety of the five years of this permit's review. Additionally, the fact that the appellants represented themselves in the hearing probably caused the defense to discount the whole affair.

Ultimately, this appeal shows that a concerned community can indeed execute a robust appeal of a controversial deforestation permit in Kitsap County without paying massive sums of money to an attorney. The effort will take time and careful coordination, but it can be successful, especially when the County fails to allocate its own resources to a convincing defense.