Community Government

Peninsula County? New group is the latest to consider seceding from Pierce County

Posted on March 9th, 2026 By: Vince Dice

A recent tragedy on the Key Peninsula renewed interest in an old idea: That the Gig Harbor area should secede from Pierce County.

Damon Townsend, a Gig Harbor resident and former Pierce County elections supervisor, helped give secession new life with a Facebook post on Feb. 25, the day after a mentally ill man killed four people at a home in Wauna.

Townsend linked that and other recent tragedies on the peninsula to low Pierce County Sheriff’s Office staffing levels west of the Narrows Bridge.

The post “blew up,” Townsend said.

“I just sat down at my computer at home and made a Facebook post,” Townsend said. “I did not expect to get 257,000 views of my Facebook post.”

Peninsula County Exploratory Committee

He subsequently created the Peninsula County Exploratory Committee to probe the secession idea. While it’s “currently a committee of one,” Townsend said last week, the idea is gaining traction on the Internet.

More than 200 people signed up via the committee’s website to get more information about the effort. A public Facebook group Townsend created for the committee had more than 130 members as of March 6.

The first step, he said, is to study whether the concept makes financial sense.

Damon Townsend

“The goal is first, let’s look at it from a real, clinical, administrative, nonpartisan type of look first,” Townsend said. “Let’s see, does it make sense?”

Robyn Denson, who represents the peninsula on the Pierce County Council, said she welcomes “the research, the questioning and a thoughtful analysis” by community members.

“This could be a very healthy exercise for our community. While this idea didn’t pencil out in the past, I certainly encourage people to dig into it again,” Denson wrote in an email to Gig Harbor Now. “At the very least, there will be a lot of understanding gained about the many responsibilities counties have to deliver services over big areas of land.”

Previous efforts

Because of its relative geographic isolation, separated from the rest of Pierce County by the Tacoma Narrows, peninsular secession has been a recurring idea. As recently as 2002, then-Pierce County Councilmember Karen Biskey studied the peninsulas leaving Pierce County and joining Kitsap.

Townsend prefers to study creating a new county, rather than joining an existing one. The boundaries would include the Gig Harbor and Key peninsulas as well as Anderson, Fox, Herron, Ketron, McNeil and Raft islands.

If the proposal is successful, Peninsula would be the first new county in Washington state since Pend Oreille in 1911.

The proposed boundaries of Peninsula County, which would include Anderson, Herron and McNeil islands.

How it’s done

The state constitution lays out the steps for creating a new county.

To create a new county, according to the Constitution, “a majority of the voters living in such territory shall petition” to form one. The county must then be “be prescribed by a general law applicable to the whole state” — in other words, the Legislature must act upon the petition.

“It is a very difficult process,” said Derek Young, the executive director of the Washington State Association of Counties. “There’s not much process, per sé, spelled out. It’s entirely encapsulated in the Constitution (and) the Legislature has never bothered to set up a statutory framework for the process.”

An estimated 88,000 registered voters live in the proposed Peninsula County, so a petition would need at least 44,000 signatures.

Even if they got those signatures, the Legislature still gets a say. Peninsula County organizers would have to convince the state that a new entity would be able to carry out its responsibilities.

“It is entirely discretionary for the Legislature,” said Young, a former member of the Gig Harbor City Council and Pierce County Council. “They get to make the decision.”

Information-gathering

Townsend, and many who commented on his Facebook posts, sees opportunities in the creation of a new county. Many people who responded to the idea on social media hope that a new Peninsula County would increase law enforcement presence here.

Townsend, who ran for Pierce County auditor in the 2024 primary and is a board member of the Cascade Party, emphasized that he’s not approaching the project from a partisan perspective. He characterized the exploratory committee as an information-gathering effort at this point.

Townsend had a lot of information on hand already, the result of private consulting work he did previously. The Peninsula County website is fairly comprehensive as a result, even though it is less than two weeks old.

He hopes to schedule a public meeting for discussion and reach out to elected officials in the near future.

“This looks like it’s a potentially viable option,” Townsend said. “Let’s do some deep dives, let’s do some real reporting. There’s thing you need to get out there and process properly.”

Challenges

Young, whose Washington State Association of Counties advocates for the leaders of the state’s 39 existing county governments, cautioned that a new county would need to create a lot of new governing structures out of thin air.

That’s in part because of county governments’ role in providing state services at the local level, Young said.

Upon its birth, Peninsula County would need to create a court system to handle everything from felonies to divorces; provide treasury services not only for itself, but for junior taxing districts like PenMet Parks and Gig Harbor Fire and Medic One; and create new departments to handle matters like emergency management and public health.

“It’s a very long list of duties that the new county would have to stand up,” Young said. “This would buck a trend. The trend has been going the other direction, toward consolidation. Not toward forming larger counties, but forming regional entities to serve multiple counties.”

Denson welcomed the public involvement and promised to continue serving her Pierce County Council District 7 “for as long as those geographic boundaries exist and so long as that is the will of the people.”

She also struck a skeptical tone about the financial upside of a smaller Peninsula County, however.

“Larger counties are typically able to spread the costs of those duties across a larger tax base, lowering the cost per resident,” Denson said in her email. “I know through my experience participating in the Washington State Association of Counties, that many smaller counties have financial difficulties meeting their obligations, particularly if their county is primarily rural and lacks a significant urban tax base.”