0:00 / 0:00 Interview with Nick Timm
Thank you so much for this interview. I know you’re a busy guy. How has your life changed since you threw your hat into the ring?
It has not changed at all. We are involved in many different aspects of working in the community and working in the towns trying to rehabilitate the area and kind of just continue to improve what we need to improve and continue to keep it a wonderful place to live and grow our families. I get about four hours sleep a night. My phone is always ringing. Just a couple more calls, couple more people to direct around. You know, we have our teams out talking to people and canvassing and putting up signs and all that all the fun stuff with elections, you know, doorbelling and all that good stuff. So, it hasn’t changed. We’ve been very public figures for the last couple years. I’m very happy to share my life with the community and to be as transparent as I can when they ask something. So, I’m very happy to do it.
For those people that may not be familiar, what are some of the things that you’ve been involved in?
It’s mainly been centered around the city of Okanogan just because that’s where we live. We were slowly working out into the county to really good effect. My wife and I do a lot of building rehabilitation- getting old buildings fixed back up to a really nice state and then getting them back on the market for an affordable rate and working with not unique but very creative options for potential renters or lease holders to afford the payments. We’re very selective about the people we get in, the businesses that come in so we can kind of shape what’s going on.
And we can look and see in downtown Okanogan. It’s not just us though, you know, there’s so many other groups working and really amazing people working to make things happen. It’s really fun to be a part of. We’ve really worked hard to get the downtown core in Okanogan revitalized. We fixed up about a dozen buildings. There are housing units, there are office units, there are warehouses. We’ve got FedEx to come into town. We’ve got a restaurant to come into town. We’ve got this great new spot called After Hours. Gentleman named Larry runs it and it’s a fantastic program, getting kids into music and doing all sorts of fun things.
We also are involved in kind of volunteer philanthropic efforts. We found the mural a couple years ago behind the walls of one of our buildings. (Editor’s note- story of the mural can be found here.) We hadn’t really been involved in philanthropic affairs up to that point and so that was just an immediate springboard into it. It’s like, hey, we have this one of a kind piece of history. Nobody knew this existed. Nobody knows what it was. It was super fun to just kind of do a little bit of a mystery, kind of who done it, who painted it and the history behind it. We got that restored and saved and we’re trying to find a place to display it.
That really moved us into just the giving efforts of okay, it’s not just business that can make things happen. It’s also working with the community and giving back in amazing ways like this. That’s kind of been our last five years- just getting businesses spun up, getting people into the area, getting them into affordable, sustainable leases, rents; working with people to find plans that work for them and that can really help our community thrive. We’ve kind of been working on that model here in Okanogan and now that we’re moving it out, we can really see that it’s very successful and if we’re able to take it to the county level, it’s going to be amazing.
The campaign has kind of emerged. There’s a new slogan that came out that we’ve kind of been spitballing and we’re happy to announce it. It’s “Strong Roots, Bold Future.” We want to preserve what Okanogan is. That’s why we all live here, but we want to make it even more amazing and even more fun and give our kids as much as we can give them for the future.
When you said you lease these buildings, do you sell them back or do you maintain ownership?
Nine times out of ten, we retain ownership. We know what works at this point and we know the price that we need to keep the building up and make it sustainable and not just turn it back into a derelict spot. We also know what people are willing to pay in the area and we line those two points up. We make a successful, sustainable business for people and we make enough money that we can continue our other projects working. We put 95% of what we make back into the community. We are hardcore dedicated to just making Okanogan super cool, and then working expanding outward. So we generally retain.
What do you think is the biggest obstacle for businesses right now for local businesses?
Funding startup. Cash, It’s the age old thing. It’s like, I want to do this amazing thing but I don’t have the cash to do it. When people come to us, we work very creatively with them. They might not have the $5,000, $10,000 for all the improvements they need on a building, first month’s rent, last month’s and security deposit. We get creative and if it’s a good idea and we think it’s sustainable and we think the person’s solid, we’ll take a chance. And so far every single one of those has succeeded. And it’s just a testament to the amazing strength of the people of Okanogan County, that it just keeps happening and I’m kind of blown away.
How long have you been doing it?
We have done this for about a decade now. The last five years here in Okanogan. When I was in the military, still in the Air Force, we were over on the coast in Olympia and we did the same thing there. We kind of developed the plan of what we were putting into place over there. We were such a small player on such a huge stage at that point. We couldn’t make as much of an impact as we wanted.
My dad got sick. He was diagnosed with multiple stage four cancers and I was able to do my last deployment and then come back. That was 10-11 years in and my wife and I were able to really divest from the coast and come back over here. I’m born and raised here. I’m from Okanogan and really apply the lessons we learned there to this area and it’s working. It’s really good.
Why do you want to run for the district one position?
I was born and raised in Okanogan. I was born and raised on a reservation. My family still has a big ranch out there. The reservation takes up a big section of district one. It’s where I live right now. I wouldn’t want to run in another district, if you know what I mean. Like if I had the choice to run in two or three, I don’t have the connection there that I have to one. You know, I love the people here. We’re all a little crazy, but in the best way possible, and I dig it and I’m with it and I think a majority of people are with me on that. It really takes somebody from one just like it takes somebody from two or three to recognize the unique problems of that area and to address them on the board of commissioners.
What are some of those unique problems?
Again, the reservation. Anybody that lives out on the rez understands drug, alcohol abuse, missing people. It’s a tough, tough spot and there’s so many good programs that are coming into effect now to address those like Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women is a fantastic group and I’ve been working with them more and more to try and one, identify the base cause of this issue and not just the symptoms, if that makes sense. And to address that base cause, through education, through business making, through grant making for all these different avenues of empowering people and getting them saying hey, I’ve never thought of myself as a business owner. But we work with them a little bit and they’re like, I could do this. This is exactly what I’m doing now but scaling up. And the amount of freedom, that switch goes off in people’s head and it’s just the amount of freedom, it just kind of brings them up. And we’re working very hard to make that happen out on the reservation, just empowering people to change their own destinies and to do what they want to do. And it’s having again very good effect. The tribe does a really great job of that already and we’re just hoping to add into that and just keep it rolling.
What is your position on the zoning?
It’s a huge debate. I am not a one size fits all guy. The zoning as it stands right now, as it’s written, it’s very just rubber stamp. And one size fits the entire county. This is the largest county in Washington State. It’s the most diverse county in Washington State. We have so many different people, so many different landscapes, so many different soil types. For overarching legislation, you need to have very, very general guidelines so that as it goes down through the different layers of legislation down to the cities and towns and municipal areas, they have the guidance of what they should be doing and then they can kind of tweak it to make it work for them. This is just a little too restrictive for me. I think we need to take a step back, really critically look at it and understand that we are a diverse county and we have to address the needs of the people of that diverse county really on a more base level, not just this whole top down management that never works. You need to go from grassroots up.
I’ve been doing some research on this. It turns out that the commissioners are basically following guidelines from the RCW. The judge has essentially agreed that Okanogan County has not been in compliance. It has been many, many years. I mean, we’re talking 2016, I think, was the court case and we’re in 2024 now. How do you propose to challenge something that comes from the state or from a state RCW and the second question is, there seems to be this concern about overdevelopment and water resources. You’re right saying that the county is different, but some would classify Methow Valley as a high desert where there isn’t a lot of water. How do you propose to maintain agriculture, maintain small farms, if that’s even a priority? How would you respond to that?
That’s a great question and it touches on a lot of very important aspects of what’s going on right now, and I appreciate that. Too many people don’t do their homework, so I’m like, right on it’s a great question. I am absolutely for the small farm. I mean, that’s about as American as you can get. Our food security relies on a very diverse base of many different people, many different farms, having access to the ability to bring their crops to market. We’ve all seen what happens when we have massive single farms. You have a bad year and that farm, they have the risk of not working anymore. They might go bankrupt, something might happen. So, I’m in favor of very decentralized, a lot of small people bringing their ideas to bear. It’s kind of a laboratory almost of seeing which ideas work and which don’t. And it’s amazing, it’s real time feedback for the scientific process, which I love.
So for the legislation and the RCWs, this is why again, RCWs are made to be really broad and as it comes down, we can kind of interpret it, hopefully the correct way. The judge came back and said, okay, we need to make some changes and we’ve been working on that for a lot of years because it is really complicated to say okay, here’s what the RCW says, here’s what the judge says and here’s what we need to do. And it’s this interplay of those three items, and it is so complicated and so difficult. You’re never going to make everybody happy. The best you can do is just try and compromise somewhere in the middle and just keep going forward and everybody is able to succeed and live their lives as they see fit.
On the aspect of now, there was one you talked about the Methow being a high desert.
Some people would classify the Methow as a high desert, meaning we are surrounded by mountains, but there’s not a lot of water.
The last studies I really was able to find, critically digging down and looking at the amount of water in the area, was I think it was 10 to 15 years ago and they did a really go survey. They understood what was going on the aquifers, the deep crevasses, where the water might be stored, the underground creeks and rivers. At the time, it was very valid. They looked at the population trend and the industry trend of the area and made their projections 10-15 years out and then based their legislative suggestions on those projections. What we need to do is update those. So, I’m a data scientist. That’s my education. You have to have good data in to get good results out and as it stands, those studies overestimated the amount of people that would be moving to the area and the amount of industry that would be consuming water in the area. So, this isn’t a political answer, in my mind. This is simply the science that says this is what’s going on.
Back in the day, they said this is what we think is going to go on and we’re going to base our legislation off that. Great. That’s all you can do. Now, we need to update that and critically look at how much water do we have? What kind of development can we do? Do we want to do that development? There’s a lot of different questions when we get to that point and there’s a lot of very passionate people, as there should be, that love Okanogan for what it is and we all want to keep Okanogan Okanogan. We don’t want to turn it into a mega city like Seattle. We don’t want to just suck the land dry of all its resources like somewhere else in the world. We want to be able to sustainably use those resources to benefit our friends or families in our state and keep those resources going in a positive direction for the future. I can’t give a you a yes or no answer on that just because it’s such a huge issue.
I think the process is continuing. There’s a lot to learn. There’s a lot to discuss. In talking to representatives of the Farm Bureau, who are in the Okanogan County Property Rights Coalition that recently formed, their position is, just from talking to the leaders there, that people should be able to sell their farmland. There was a woman there that had 300 acres, and she may want to sell 300 acres to a developer. There are a lot of implications for that in terms of, you know, resources, water, schools, traffic, the community, everything. I was speaking to a former president of the Farm Bureau who said it’s very difficult being a farmer these days. They feel unappreciated. It’s easier to just sell and like give the proceeds to their family. How do you envision maintaining property rights on the one hand versus people that just want to, like you said, keep Okanogan Okanogan in terms of the way that it looks, in terms of small agriculture, because once that land is developed, it’s never going back to agriculture. It’s just too expensive. So, how do you envision Okanogan in that area, in that regard?
Again, that’s a really good question, really big question because we’re dealing with so many different aspects. I, for one, am never going to tell somebody right off the bat, knowing nothing else, if they just said, I want to sell my property, I’m not going to tell them no. It’s their property. I’ve been involved in farming my entire life. I’m a fourth generation farmer. I understand the struggles. I really, really do. I mean, it is brutal. One bad winter or one bad spring like we had this year. I mean, the honey crisp crop and the gala crop and cherries are bad right now. I mean, there’s not a blossom on a lot of trees, or there wasn’t. A lot of them had petal fall at this point. I mean, this was one of those years that’s really going to define the future of farming in Okanogan. Crop insurance doesn’t cover costs. The federal programs that are out, don’t cover costs. I think, you know, I’m very hands off on government being in people’s lives. If they want the help it should be there. You know, If you need the help, it should be there, but this is one of those things, I really think that the government should step it up. We need to have control of our food in the United States of America. We need to be able to be entirely self sufficient. We need to be able to supply our population with all the food they need at any given time, anything extra, nice that comes in. Wonderful. But to do that, you have to help small farmers get by and to do that we have to really look at okay, how are we going to protect these folks? And I think the way we do that is to make sure that the federally backed crop insurance doesn’t just cover the bare minimum, or you’re still going to go bankrupt. You don’t have a crop, you’re still going to go bankrupt. You need to be able to have the ability to say hey, I had a really bad year I gotta get through. This is how much we would have made given any other year. I need this much money. And if the data backs that up, and if everything looks right, they should be able to get that money. If we can give money out to folks that are coming across the border and looking for help… If you’re coming to look for help, I will most likely be like hey, come on, let’s go. What would we need? What can we do to help?
Our farmers have been neglected in that respect. They are right to feel that people aren’t really looking at them anymore. They’re not appreciating them for literally feeding the world. This is what we do and it’s really hard. I think our federal government needs to have a really robust program to ensure we can continue to feed ourselves. On a county level, that’s tough to do. We don’t have a lot of the resources available to do that. We can’t make the weather better. I mean, we wouldn’t have this problem if we could do that. The best thing we can do is just…. One thing that I would appreciate and I know other farmers would is just having people know that they’re there and they’re working and they’re, you know, just working their lives away to make sure that food is being created. I think that’s the first step we could do as a county, as just everyday citizens, is thank a farmer. I mean, we ate today. We’re still alive because of a farmer.
Usually, small agriculture, they make up over half of the agriculture in the United States at this point, still. Legislation wise, there’s not much we can do on the county level. We’ve got to look at each case very critically and say, okay, this is why we have a planning department. This is why the coalition group exists. This is why the county wants to put planning guidelines into place. It’s a conversation. It can get a bit [heated] at times, which is great. People are passionate. They want certain things, but all we can do is just keep talking and keep working through this and see how it develops and really figure out what is best for Okanogan county, what’s best for the individual, and hopefully find a compromise somewhere in the middle that works.
You’ve been a business owner, you’ve been in the military. What branch of the military were you in?
I was in the Air Force.
What kind of pivoted you to run for District One at this time?
We’ve been planning this for a long time. This has been in the works for a couple of years. At the time, we were living up in Conconully when Jim DeTro’s spot came up and we were seriously looking at it. We’d put it to people and you know, it just was like okay, it’s not quite the right time. Give it a couple more years. Let’s really work on the community and see if, at our level, if we can make a difference, learn [a lot] and then we moved to where we’re at now a couple years ago and we just decided, okay, if we’re ever going to do it, this is the time to do it. It was a long thought process. We love the county and I feel the connection to District 1, and I just want everybody to succeed and again, have great lives. That’s the whole goal is live the life you want to live and you shouldn’t have people telling you no, you can’t, outside of hurting somebody, destroying the environment, or, you know what I mean? You should be able to live your life as long as you’re not harming anything or anyone. It’s like you do you and we need to make sure that continues to happen and we empower [people] to do that.
Are there any other issues that you feel like will be on your plate or things that you look forward to tackling?
The zoning, Chris, he’s retiring commissioner here, Chris Branch. He was the lead on planning for the commissioners. I want to take his spot on the planning commission and really work closely with our county planners and figure out plans that work. We need to keep having these conversations. We need to sit down with the Property Rights Coalition. We need to sit down with the folks in the Methow. We need to sit down with folks in Tonasket and we need to see what is it they want. What shape do they want to take the county in? What direction and how that forms up in years to come. I’m really looking forward to working with people on that. That’s one of my very strong suits is working with different groups of people and making good things happen.
What do you want to share with people in the valley, if anything?
I spent a lot of time in the Methow growing up. It’s a really unique spot. You’ve got hippies. You’ve got farmers. You’ve got folks that come there for vacation. You’ve got people there skiing. I love the Methow. It’s a great spot. It’s so unique. I’ve rarely seen in places just fun and quirky as the Methow is. If you want to sit down and talk, you give me a call. Send a message to my Facebook page. I’ll gladly go have a cup of coffee with you. I want to hear your concerns. I want to hear what you’re thinking. You know, it’s an open invitation. I want to hear what you say and I will listen and we’ll have a great discussion. And so far, you know, I’ve had a lot of discussions in the last couple of weeks with folks across the political spectrum. At the level we’re at now at the county, we agree on 95% of the issues about what’s going on. We might have different ideas of how to tackle it, but if we can agree on the issue and then talk about how to fix it, that’s the way to do it. And so far, that’s what we’ve seen. An open invitation, send me a message, talk to me. Let’s talk. I’d love to. I’ll make time. That’d be great.
How do you work with other commissioners? How do you envision working on issues?
I have a very good working relationship with Commissioner Hover. At this point, we’ve worked together numerous times. I had a really good working relationship with Commissioner DeTro and I’m looking forward to developing a working relationship with Commissioner Neal. I think that they’re both very levelheaded guys. They want what’s best for the county. I can work with about anybody. Give me a group of people and I can make sure things happen.
Commissioner Neal, Commissioner Hover, it’s very difficult to do what they do and they’re looking to the future and they’re trying to make decisions based on the data we have and to make good decisions for the county, and I’m looking forward to working with them because they’re both very positive gentlemen. And they want what’s best for the county, and I look forward to working with them and adding to that energy.
Is there anything that I didn’t cover? Anything that you want to say or anything that you want to leave the interview with?
I’m the only candidate running right now for District 1 that’s born and raised in Okanogan County. I know this place like the back of my hand. There’s no other place. I’ve been to seven continents. I’ve been to 100 plus countries. I love Okanogan. I’ve seen the world and there isn’t a place I’d rather be. I love the people here. I love the area. The landscape is, I mean, you could drive two hours, three hours and go from you know…. If you want to go outside the county, you can literally go to a subtropical rainforest, you can go see a glacier, you can go hike on a mountain, you can go jump in an ice cold alkaline lake. This place is cool. People want to live here and they want to experience that and I understand it and I’m going to make it so that we all continue to love and experience Okanogan in the best way possible.
For more information, visit https://www.electnicktimm.com/
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