Seattle Weekly

     Although one expects audacity from the leader of a rural secessionist" movement, John Stokes goes over the top. He calls his local state senator an "ignorant baboon". He dismisses state land-use laws as "communist". He warns us that the good residents of Freedom County, as he and his fellow secessionists already call rural northern Snohomish County, have been pushed frightfully close to revolt be environmental extremism. "You can't buy ammunition out here anymore," reports Stokes, seated in the living room of his Stanwood-area log home. "People are hoarding it. They want to be prepared."

     If Rush Limbaugh were to die and come back as Ross Perot, the result might sound something like John Stokes. Fortyish with a broad, open face and a disc jockey's voice and wit, Stokes is an irreverent populist, mining a surprisingly rich vein of rural resentment. Less than two years ago, when he first proposed turning Snohomish County's 1,052-square-mile northern half into a separate, less-regulated government, the notion was dismissed as lunacy. Yet by January, Stokes' petition-wielding volunteers had collected 13,000 signatures, enough to force the Freedom County question upon state lawmakers. "The fight for America," says Stokes, starts here."

     To be sure, state mapmakers aren't waiting breathlessly. Critics question the constitutionality of Stokes' campaign, and say his "property rights" rhetoric panders to rural angst. Yet not everyone feels so pandered to. When Freedom County organizers present their petitions in Olympia next February, they may be rubbing shoulders with as many as six other secessionist groups, from King, Whatcom, Snohomish, Pierce, and Thurston counties. And Stokes, says Darrell Hating, executive director of the Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance and a vocal secessionist proponent, "is the grandfather of the whole thing."

     "Spokesman" is the term Stokes prefers, although even this can seem ill-suited. The spokesman for the rural revolt lives in an expensive lake front log home filled with potted plants and elegant furnishings. He appears for interviews dressed the a broker on holiday--fashionably faded jeans, a pinstripe shirt, high-tech sneakers.

     And, unlike most spokes people, Stokes neither coddles the press (which he calls "common prostitutes pandering to the power of central government") nor makes any effort to smooth Freedom County's caustic image. Quite the opposite: in a bizarre, half joking tone, he makes repeated references to the consequences of ignoring rural discontent. "Before all the liberals in the city get all uppity about [secessionist campaigns], they ought to remember who controls the water supplies," he says. "One little 50-gallon drum of PCP in the reservoir out there and [city residents] are all fucked up."

     Still, the outrageousness of such comments, and the cartoonist, Idaho-survivalist flavor the lend to the Freedom County movement, seems partly balanced by Stokes' very real interest in land-use regulation. In 1992, he says Snohomish County denied hem a building permit because his lake front parcel contained a wetland. Stokes ways he spent $450,000 fighting county regulators, then began looking for a way to ditch the county altogether.

     And lo! in the state constitution he found a section on the creation of new counties. All he needed, it appeared, were signatures from a majority of voters in the proposed county, which Stokes drew up to include most of Snohomish County north on Maryville and the Tulalip Indian Reservation. "The biggest complaint I get from people," he explains, is that they aren't included" in the new county.

     Actually, the biggest complaint Stokes gets concerns his constitutional analysis. Though he insists that state lawmakers must enact Freedom County into existence, legal scholars and political insiders say the constitutional language is vague and that the Legislature can simply ignore Stokes' petition--just as past Legislatures have ignored all but five of the dozens of new-county petitions that have been attempted since statehood.

     Yet what legislators ought not ignore, and the issue Stokes has so clearly grasped, is the growing rural anger over land-use regulations, especially the Growth Management Act. Enacted to prevent LA-style urban sprawl, the GMA tries to channel development into designated "urban growth areas" while preserving the ecology and aesthetics of the surrounding countryside. Yet that, Stokes contends, is a wholly urban-centered agenda. Concentrating development in urban growth area simply export crime, congestion, rummy apartment buildings, and other urban ills to places like Maryville and Stanwood. Worse, Stokes says, policies to "save" the countryside, via bans on subdivisions or minimum lot sizes, violate constitutionally protected property rights and prevent rural landowners from realizing the full economic value of their acreage.

      In short, Stokes argues, rural residents pay for the sins of the cities. And, as the demographic minority in urbanized counties, they lack the political clout to do anything about it. On decision after decision, county land-use regimes are dictated by a liberal, environmentally obsessed urban majority with absolutely no sense of rural issues needs, or lifestyles. "We're an entirely different breed of animal than people in the urban areas,"he says. "And we simply will not adopt their philosophies."

      Intimate as the man seems with rural discontent, however, there is considerable skepticism concerning his plans to soothe it. Stokes claims to have lined up support for Freedom County from a majority of unnamed "stealth politicians," but several lawmakers say they've heard nothing of such a majority. Further, even if the petition were enacted (and, to be fair, a similar petition from Olympic Peninsula citizens did pass the Senate before dying in the House during the 1980's), Freedom County's most irritating regulations derive from state or federal statures, which state lawmakers insist would apply to any new counties.

      Then, too, comes the issue of actually operating Freedom County. Secessionists say a fair division of Snohomish County's debt and assets would give Freedom County a budget surplus of about $35 million. Yet their projections for the cost of providing county services leave ob servers aghast. Stanwood Police Chief Bob Kane says he's heard Freedom County organizers claim that law enforcement for the entire new county would cost $500,000-a figure he calls "insane." More generally, adds Gary Lowe, executive director with the Washington Stat Association of Counties, new-county proponents routinely underestimate the price of such items as courthouses and jails.

      Stokes seems impervious to such critiques. Asking state officials about the feasibility of Freedom County, he quips, is a lot like the American Colonists "asking King George for his opinion on the Declaration of Independence." He knows that critics view Freedom County as an economic fantasy. He's heard all the rumors and the campaign's "real" agenda, and happily rattles off the shadowy groups- "from huge Japanese investors to the Audubon Society to developers to right wing religious fanatics " -that Freedom County has been accused of fronting for. Indeed, even his own role in the movement, Stokes insists, has been vastly overrated: "I'm an average guy. I'm in charge of nothing, boss of nothing. People call me up and ask my opinion, like Rush."

      Ultimately, Stokes may best be viewed through the Limbaugh lens: an outspoken, politically incorrect provocateur whose words and deeds are meant as much for shock value as for anything else. Indeed, for all his talk about the fight for America and the rights of the rural minority--and despite the very real need to address rural-angers. Stokes has apparently had enough of Freedom County. He has sold his house and plans shortly to move to Montana. In what may have been one of his final acts of defiance, Stokes got the fellow from the moving-van company to sign the Freedom County petition.