Puyallup Voters for Integrity

About PV4I: Vision for Puyallup

PV4I Logo in red with blue borders saying "Keep City Council Accountable" and website PuyallupVotersForIntegrity.org

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PV4I Board

Puyallup Voters for Integrity was co-founded in 2017 by Puyallup resident Chris Chisholm who has served as the organization’s treasurer since its inception. Multiple residents of Puyallup have helped with time and donations while working on various PV4I projects, including a still-unsuccessful push to get the Puyallup City Council to institute an ethics code and commission since 2017, a successful campaign opposing council candidates who were supported by warehouse PACs in 2019, a decision in 2021 to show city council see they couldn’t reach 60% in their proposition to build a new police station with jail, and a successful campaign in 2023 against another proposition to build a jail with police station. When it was clear that no candidates running for election in 2025 were focusing their campaigns on the tax increases imposed by council over the past year, PV4I launched a survey to see if voters knew about the tax increases and expenditures on a police station that was tens of millions of dollars more expensive than what a majority of voters rejected in 2023. Surveys showed voters were in the dark, and as a result, incumbents won re-election by a sliver.

Results in 2025 showed that, due to the lack of transparency on the part of City of Puyallup about the big projects it proposes (the city website still doesn’t even total up what the new police station costs), it’s important to stay involved between elections. That’s a big challenge for volunteers interested in civic participation. We have work, families, businesses to run, and prefer to enjoy life in the community rather than have to serve as watchdogs over council members we trusted to keep us informed on their proposals. But that’s how politics often works: back-room deals rule the day when people aren’t watching. Puyallup lacks an ethics code and commission where residents can go to find answers about what’s happening in City Hall, so back-room deals are unadvertised and often remain unexplained in our city.

If you are interested in keeping the City of Puyallup accountable to voters, and helping to keep PV4I going between elections, please email treasurer Chris Chisholm at info@puyallupvoters.org about serving a 1 year term on the PV4I board of directors. PV4I is required to register as a Political Action Committee (rather than non-profit organization) because we spend money on issues affecting candidates running for office. The Washington State Public Disclosure Commission regulates PACs, and in addition to Treasurer, it allows PACs to list a Chair and other officers of the committee. Again, please reach out if you like the mission and vision of PV4I, and would like to help guide the organization between elections.

PV4I Mission & Vision

The mission of Puyallup Voters for Integrity is to ensure that business interests, political parties, candidates and council members stay accountable and up-front with their identities, conflicts of interests, and motivations. We want to see a City of Puyallup that will:

Build participation in democracy rather than bring proposals to council without consulting the community, neighborhoods and stakeholders in advance. Significant council action must be vetted by independent legal review and standing committees like the planning commission (and an ethics commission when necessary – something Puyallup lacks and city council refuses to initiate) plus casting nets wide for competitive bidding when hiring project consultants. Over the past couple of years, city council has kept asking voters to spend tens of millions or more to build a Public Safety Building base on one consultant’s design, all without presenting feasibility studies for alternative solutions. Puyallup doesn’t even have its own ethics code (let alone commission) to help ensure contracts are not awarded based on conflicts of interest.

Spend tax money to actually solve problems, such as reducing crime and recidivism, rather than creating expensive, redundant projects that do nothing but raise taxes. Currently in 2025, city council is renovating a rented building for a police station at $114.5 million (Puyallup taxpayers contributing at least $73.5 million) over 30 years without building equity, when they could have just built a police station for $44 million on land we own. We need a new police station and a couple holding cells for misdemeanor arrestees awaiting court processing, but we’re already paying for space to sit empty at the Pierce County Jail where we can bring inmates who stay longer than 24 hours, just as we and every city must do for felony arrestees. Feasibility studies from all regional cities (i.e. Olympia, Lakewood, Fife and Buckley etc…) have found it’s cheaper and efficient to bring misdemeanor inmates to Pierce County and Nisqually jails instead of running city jails.

Make sure public infrastructure is smart and stays ahead of development, including the top priorities of well-maintained roads to handle traffic, finishing sidewalks to keep us safe, excellent utilities for healthy sewer service and water delivery, preparing flood catchment to handle future disasters, and maintaining community gathering spaces like sports fields, nature parks, youth centers and senior services.

2023-25 Projects

Wordpress AI line art of citizens watching city council, with headline saying "City Council Agenda Tonight: Raising Property Taxes ... Again!"

2025 Project: PV4I Survey on City Council Tax Increases & Expenditures ran Oct 14 – Nov 4 to find out if Puyallup voters were aware of new taxes and fees imposed by city council over the past year, staffing cuts and spending on projects like the police station which will cost us twice as much as the failed 2023 ballot proposition.

The Puyallup City Council, city manager staff, and the police department spun their wheels for over 3 years regarding our outdated Public Safety Building. The current building doesn’t have room for the nearly 100 officers now on the police department staff, as most of the building space is used to house misdemeanor jail inmates. However, the jail is rarely full (currently running with an average of 25 inmates and about 30 empty beds – click search with nothing in fields, copy to spreasheet and sort by release date) with almost 10% of bookings from near-by jurisdictions which have contracts to place their inmates in our facility.

The building itself is only part of the problem. The other part is the system itself: its not fiscally responsible to continue running our own misdemeanor jail. All other cities in the county have found it’s cheaper and more efficient to bring their inmates to our Pierce County Jail and/or the Nisqually Jail. As an example, Lakewood, which is 50% larger than us, spends well under a million dollars per year on all incarceration expenses. We spend over $2 million to run our old city jail housing an average of 20-30 inmates, and that cost would potentially rise to $4 million per year, including building costs, with a new jail.

Here’s what we proposed. Streamline the system, then build the Public Safety Building we actually need. The system change is simple: secure a contract with our Pierce County Jail to take misdemeanor inmates who need to stay incarcerated longer that a few hours, and consider an additional contract with the Nisqually Jail to take our misdemeanor inmates who might stay the maximum one year. The new Pierce County Jail even has a medical wing so inmates with physical or mental health issues or high on drugs don’t have to be turned out onto our streets before Good Samaritan Hospital can take them.

2017-19 Projects

Exposing candidates funded by out-of-state warehouse PAC

In 2019, it became clear that some candidates for Puyallup City Council were in the pockets of out-of-state developers trying to avoid an environmental impact statement (EIS) on riverside farmland they wanted to cover with warehouses.  Some had blatant conflict of interest, like being on the board of directors of a state builders PAC that gave thousands to the political action committee which in turn was spending money on behalf of the candidate.  When called out, those candidates made no effort to stop the out-of-state independent expenditures. Due in part to the work of Puyallup Voters for Integrity to expose the money trail, all those candidates lost their election bids despite unprecedented outside money supporting them.

Exposing parties wanting top-down forms of government

The Facebook page of the 2019 warehouse PAC was originally Fix Puyallup NOW, promoting the idea of changing the City of Puyallup into a “strong mayor” form of government. When the strong mayor idea failed to get even a few hundred initiative signatures of 5,000 required, the parties involved took an unprecedented move to run a slate of candidates for Puyallup City Council in 2019, the same who later became supported by the warehouse PAC. The change to a strong mayor system (actually called mayor-council rather than the current “weak mayor” or council-manager system) would be advantageous to them because of their deep pockets, with money from developers, so to more easily dominate a city-wide mayoral race. Puyallup Voters for Integrity spoke out and helped keep city council from wasting time on the idea.

Keeping elected officials accountable who waste time and money on ill-conceived ordinances

Although every council member during the late 2010’s voted for and supported ordinances which lost in court, most “evolved” on their positions after gaining knowledge and experience. For three years, council defended an illegal high-impact business license costing taxpayers almost $1 million in court and some voted for another legally questionable move to wrestle control of the Puyallup Farmer’s Market away from the private, non-profit Puyallup Main Street Association. The City of Puyallup also spent hundreds of thousands in city tax dollars to campaign for its three failed 2021-23 Public Safety Building bond proposals which PV4I feel violated state campaign finance laws. We think these ill-conceived, time-wasting management decisions occurred because Puyallup has no ethics code or other oversight of its own that encourages transparency and accountability from people in positions of power in the city.

Please consider a donation of any amount, and invite your friends to like our Facebook page. Sponsored by Puyallup Voters for Integrity, PO Box 42, Puyallup WA 98371. No candidate or party contributes to, authorizes or controls this Political Action Committee which is registered at the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission. 2025 campaign season contributors over the $100 threshold so far include Chris Chisholm, PV4I Treasurer. When facts are presented, we want them to be accurate. If you find any errors, please email us with original-source evidence for correction.