From the Auditor

Your financial services team published the Mason County Annual Report for 2023 per RCW 36.22.010(4) and submitted the preliminary budget for 2025 to the Board of County Commissioners per RCW 36.40.040. Both documents are available on the auditor’s Financial Services Department webpage. There will be public hearings in early December on the 2025 budget prior to formal adoption by the commissioners where you can provide comments and input. Next, we have started work with our certified public accountant to enhance internal controls and better ensure that your tax dollars are properly spent.

In licensing and recording, residents continue to subscribe to Fraud Notify service and we are now processing over 60 U.S. passports per month. Your licensing team is also conducting quarterly meetings with our licensing subagents, the North Mason Chamber of Commerce and WA Tabs & Titles in Shelton. We want to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to help our subagents deliver excellent service to you in addition to the great work done by your licensing “home team” here in the Auditor’s Office.

We were recently able to tour the Department of Licensing office in Lacey. It was a great opportunity for Mason County licensing team members to meet Department of Licensing staff in person and gain insights into “behind the scenes” licensing processes.

We are excited for the upcoming general election on Nov. 5. Your elections team has been working diligently since December to plan and prepare for this election with a focus on security, accessibility and integrity. We have made changes resulting from “tabletop exercises” on elections security with the Office of Secretary of State, Washington State Patrol, the Mason County Sheriff’s Office, the Mason County Department of Emergency Management, the Mason County Health Department and the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. We considered a variety of threat scenarios and developed contingency plans to maintain election operations continuity.

We now have surveillance video cameras on all the county vote-by-mail ballot drop boxes to provide additional security for elections workers and voters. We have also taken steps toward making the elections system more accessible. This includes work with Mason Transit Authority to set up transit services for voters. Call Mason Transit at 360-427-5033 if you are interested in this service. We want to make voting easy and accessible for every eligible U.S. citizen and will again have temporary Vote Center operations in Belfair as well as the lobby of the County Administration Building in Shelton.

To help keep the voter registration database current and correct, we’re supplementing the data we receive and process from the Office of Secretary of State with data from a private subscription service to obtain address information on voters who moved out of the county that may not have notified the Postal Service. I am also visiting voters whose ballots were rejected in past elections for signature mismatch to help get the voter’s signature updated and their ballots accepted in the future. Go vote!