Save a Forest in Southworth, WA

Southworth Forest Update:

Kitsap County Hearing Examiner Conduct Sloppy, Contradictory

Posted March 1, 2026 by Southworth Forest

Kitsap County Hearing Examiner Phil Olbrechts is shown in the first session of the hearing for the Edwards/Southworth deforestation permit in 2025. His sloppy pre-hearing conduct was followed a final decision of contradiction and illogic that revealed inherent bias in favor of the County, his employer. Legislation must fix the broken hearing examiner system in Washington State.

In the Southworth deforestation permitting case, Kitsap County Hearing Examiner Phil Olbrechts failed to meet professional standards and contradicted himself in his decision.

On December 5, 2025, the Hearing Examiner for Kitsap County, Phil Olbrechts, reached a decision on the community appeal of the County permit to legalize the harmful 2019 deforestation at 11090 SE Southworth Dr. in Port Orchard. That decision and his conduct leading up to it reveal a sloppy handling of the appeal. He handicapped appellants after the close of the hearing, contradicted himself within his analysis, and relied upon a questionable bias against all appellants in general. Residents of Kitsap County should have little confidence in his capabilities as a hearing examiner, though many of his failings expose larger issues with the examiner process in Washington and beyond.

Conceptually, hearing examiners are a backstop to government permit reviewers in the event those staff do not properly do their job. Unfortunately, examiners are also paid by the very government agencies they are meant to correct when necessary. Even in a case of severe, heavily-documented review deficiency by Kitsap County's understaffed and disorganized Department of Community Development, the examiner can show alarming bias towards the source of his income. An examiner like Olbrechts, an attorney from Granite Falls, WA, serves a government agency on a contract basis, and extensions of his contract can be refused if his performance does not satisfy the County. It is thus in his inherent financial interest to provide rulings favorable to the County and find reasons to diminish appeal efficacy.

For this controversial, long-running forest violation case, Olbrechts reinforced exactly why the entire examiner system is broken. Further, his own conduct was clumsy, reducing perceptions of his fairness and authority. Careless errors may seem minor on the surface, but they multiplied throughout his decision. Substantively, Olbrechts largely sided with his employer, the County, ignoring its neglectful review, praising reviewers despite erroneous and contradictory testimony, making stretched conclusions of law to minimize appellant chances, and failing to recognize or rule upon all issues and requests for relief raised by the appellants.

Sloppy Conduct Handling the Process

Long before the hearing and decision, public records showed that Olbrechts failed to provide timely orders and forgot basic aspects of the appeal. Emails reveal that he had to be redirected about County requests for procedures in the appeal by multiple parties. In the pre-hearing conference period, Olbrechts repeatedly mixed up the names of the parties, confusing those involved in the process. The County's history of retracting and then reissuing the flawed decisions related to this deforestation required the Examiner to be on top of the situation, which he was not.

At times during the appeal, Olbrechts sought to encourage the appellants to narrow their focus to environmental (SEPA) issues even though they were appealing issues relevant to SEPA and unrelated issues in the County's separate administrative decision. The appellants paid for both appeals individually. Still, Olbrechts continuously referred to the appeal as one of SEPA only (including at the top of his final decision) despite the extensive appellant arguments outside of the environmental aspect. By ignoring the aspects of the appeal of the County's administrative decision outside of SEPA, never ruling on some of them, he failed to provide the appellants due process.

"Those deficiency issues are irrelevant to the final adequacy of review and mitigation," Olbrechts stated after recognizing that errors were made in the initial review. How can the public expect an appeal of an administrative decision with or without a SEPA component to be properly heard if the hearing examiner decides it's not his job to consider such points of contention? Even within the area of SEPA, Olbrechts hamstrung the appellants in his conduct, promising during the hearing to send the appellants a copy of a decision showing what he was looking for in closing arguments but never doing so.

Throughout his written communication, including his orders and decision, Olbrechts also regularly misspelled the names of the parties and made careless grammatical errors. His decision file was also attributed to someone named Kristina J. Bowker rather than himself. While his embarrassing failure to adhere to spelling, grammar, and other aspects of language may not alone be disqualifying, such errors reinforce his poor performance when considered alongside even more important aspects of his questionable conduct below.

Examiner's Contradictory Statements

In the County's clumsy analysis of this permit, environmental reviewer Steve Heacock found only one adverse impact of the deforestation in need of mitigation (headlight glare) to legalize the violation by Meghan and Clint Edwards in 2019. In the appeal, neighbors successfully proved that many more adverse impacts were at play over the years since the forest's destruction. In fact, the County and violators made no attempt to refute most of those impacts. Olbrechts' decision thus found seven other adverse impacts: wind, heat, tree dieback, noise, deer damage, noxious weeds, and ambient light.

Even though the violation occurred on rural residential land, Olbrechts deduced that these impacts are at a level of "an incompatible land use similar to a commercial or industrial use." Despite these findings of fact, the Examiner stated that "Mr. Heacock, the County's SEPA Responsible Official, made a searching, well-informed and realistic analysis of the Edwards' development impact. In the end there's no question that Mr. Heacock had considered every material impact of the proposal." Apparently, Mr. Heacock identifying only one of eight adverse impacts constitutes a searching, well-informed, and realistic analysis. This contradiction alone disqualifies the examiner.

Part of Olbrechts' effort to bend over backwards to praise the deficient County review, aside from his own financial self-interest in protecting his employer, is owed to his misreading of one disputed Washington case, Moss v. City of Bellingham, to thwart appellants' rights to a fair, up-front review. He uses this case to excuse and thus encourage careless County permit reviews by suggesting that the reviewers' mere presence in the appeal hearing itself constitutes an adequate review that renders the whole prior conduct irrelevant. Olbrechts disturbingly ignored extraordinary appellant evidence showing that Heacock made pervasive erroneous statements about the project's site all the way through the end of hearing testimony and was constantly distracted by interrupting phone calls and even his pets.

Also harming the legitimacy of Olbrechts' authority is his stunning argument that the many adverse impacts he ruled upon only affect every other neighboring parcel even if the ones in between were shown to suffer the same overall impacts. His reading of law postulates that only the appellants that speak up for the appeal are eligible to receive mitigating protections: "[The appellant] cannot litigate impacts to his neighbors because he is not the one prejudiced by those impacts." That's a truly ridiculous statement, as the death of trees and infiltration of noxious species on a neighboring property indeed affects those on either side of them. In fact, it already has. Olbrechts thus stretched himself to find a reading of law that defies common sense, reducing perceptions about his capability overall.

Explicit Bias Against All Appellants

As mentioned in the section above, Olbrechts relies heavily on the Moss v. City of Bellingham decision to effectively stack the deck against all appellants, providing him with an easy method of ruling substantially in favor of his employer, in this case Kitsap County. The quote from Moss applied by Olbrechts isn't even related to the text of his surrounding analysis. Legal counsel has examined that use of the Moss decision and believes it will eventually be struck down in court, as nothing in Moss actually excuses all ramifications of ineptitude or malfeasance by a government agency during initial permit review.

As a result, anyone challenging an environmental (SEPA) decision by an agency must know that Olbrechts will approach the appeal with inherent bias against the appellants. He even made that position known verbally within the hearing meetings. As he stated, "SEPA appellants often find themselves defeating their inadequate assessment claims in the process of proving those claims." In other words, it's fine for Kitsap County to do a terrible job analyzing a forest destruction, violating neighbors' rights to protection from impacts, because when the neighbors prove those impacts, the County is listening to the appeal and can essentially say, "who cares?" That response by itself thus qualifies for Olbrechts as a replacement review.

Not only did Olbrechts accept that flawed and damaging logic because of his misreading of law, he attributes impact research conducted by the appellants to the County and Mr. Heacock instead. He fully excused the County for losing public comments about the violation because he did not believe the outcome would have been affected, setting a dangerous precedent for future bad behavior by the agency. Olbrechts additionally excused Kitsap County stormwater reviewer Cecilia Olsen for ignoring County regulations in the format and review of the applicants' civil plans for the same reason, once again removing the teeth from the regulations for future violators. Like the County, the Examiner simply does not care if the process is followed properly up front.

The County's defense of the Edwards deforestation permit was so flimsy and incomplete that Olbrechts did something he admitted to having never done in thousands of cases he had heard: He gave the County a second chance to make their argument. Weeks after the end of closing arguments, he prompted the County to provide additional explanation for the lack of a state deforestation permit in this case. The County obliged with an argument that misled about the parcel's historical classification as "forestlands." The appellants were not allowed by Olbrechts to submit evidence easily countering that false argument. Instead, he ruled on that point in favor of his employer, the County, claiming to find the additional argument helpful.

Additional Lessons Learned From Olbrechts

Further punishing neighbors appealing a violation, Olbrechts credits to the developers those neighbors' attempts to protect themselves from the adverse impacts of the action during the after-the-fact permit process. If your neighbor breaks the law by removing a forest and causing eight separate classes of significant impacts against you, any effort you make to plant your own buffers or fence off the violation to stop those impacts will be used against you. As he stated, "existing vegetative buffering and fencing on the adjoining properties" can solve the issue even though the violation's impacts are killing that very neighboring buffer. Olbrechts' extremely poor logic ensures that impacted neighbors lose and violators win regardless.

Apparently, neighbors also have a responsibility for self-mitigating even though state law is meant to protect them from impacts. Requiring the developer to mitigate all SEPA-oriented impacts is, according to Olbrechts, "a very backwards entitlement argument." This statement about SEPA's core purpose makes no sense to the appellants, the community, or legal counsel, because it amplifies the argument made by the developers and County during this process: If you don't like the significant, adverse environmental impacts of a deforestation, then do something about it on your neighboring property or sell and move away. That's clearly not a solution contemplated by SEPA law because it is ludicrous.

While the Examiner did cite some appellant evidence in his decision, he opted not to address a significant quantity of evidence that supported both the SEPA and administrative (SDAP) appeals. For instance, he suggested that the appellants had provided no evidence of an old logging road on the project parcel even though historical topographical maps admitted as evidence show the cut and fill of that road in support of first-hand testimony. Because of his confusing position that this case only involved a SEPA appeal, he ignored evidence relating to the administrative appeal, too. No quantity of evidence or testimony showing the County's mishandling of the permit in the process of yielding a damaging administrative decision was going to be worth any consideration from Olbrechts.

A December 2025 article about the decision includes additional lessons learned from Olbrechts' questionable work. These include the Examiner's revelation that forest conversions in Kitsap County are not well regulated, that the County does not value rural tree retention, and that aerial photos are insufficient to prove clearing limit violations. Additionally in that article, read how the decision affirms that applicants should never tell the truth on permit applications to Kitsap County and how communities should approach a permit appeal with the expectation of court escalation.

Conclusion

In the end, the entire hearing examiner process in Washington State needs legislated so that biased free-agent lawyers like Olbrechts are not hired and paid directly by cities and counties to function as arbiters of permit disagreements. The examiners have an interest in being renewed for additional contracts, so they cannot side with appellants against the agency in meaningful ways. As for Olbrechts specifically, the conduct was sloppy and confusing at times as well, with promises not kept and a second chance at argument given to his employer, the County. Communities deserve better.

View all filings for the appeal and links to the hearing sessions.