SEQUIM — If a real estate agent rings your doorbell Saturday, it won’t be to sell your home.
He or she wants to sell you instead on opposing Proposition 1 in Clallam County — the real estate buyer’s excise tax — on Nov. 8.
Sequim- and Port Angeles-area real estate agents who are fighting the tax, earmarked to keep farmlands in farming, will ring doorbells in Sequim on Saturday and in Port Angeles on Oct. 15.
They hope to be joined by about a dozen volunteers from outside Clallam County, summoned by an invitation in last week’s issue of the statewide Friday Facts newsletter of the Washington Association of Realtors.
“We’re not expecting a whole lot of people,” said Ezra Eickmeyer, a volunteer for Stop Taxing the American Dream, on Thursday.
“I would guess like a dozen.”
Eickmeyer said another member of the group has offered to pick up out-of-county volunteers at the Kitsap and Bainbridge ferry landings and bring them to Sequim.
There’ll have no free lunch, though, said Mike McAleer, the Sequim Realtor who heads the anti-tax organization.
“I think they’re perfectly capable of feeding themselves,” he said.
‘A Clallam County issue’
Nash Huber, a Clallam County organic farmer and member of Clallam Citizens for Food Security, proponents of the tax, said busing in volunteers “disturbed” him.
“This is a Clallam County issue,” he said.
“The Realtors have been disseminating information in their favor, obviously, and for them to bring in their own people, I think, is unethical.”