Thurston County highlights fair-housing work as auditor expands removal of racially restrictive covenants

The Thurston County Board of County Commissioners proclaimed April 2025 as Fair Housing Month on April 29, and county leaders used the presentation to describe an ongoing effort by the auditor’s office to help homeowners remove racially restrictive language from recorded property covenants.

The auditor’s office said an initial local outreach identified roughly 300 parcels with recorded restrictive covenants and that new research using the county’s digital recorded-documents archive and an outside review expanded the count to “more than 1,600” parcels across 35 subdivisions. Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall said the county offers a free modification service to clean chain of title for affected land records and that the outreach earned a national award.

“Racially restrictive covenants are a really painful legacy of discrimination,” Auditor Mary Hall said. She told the board the legislature changed state law “a few years ago” to allow owners to modify titles and covenants so the recorded chain of title no longer contains offensive language. Auditor staff also said the county provided its digital archive to the University of Washington for research that used automated methods to broaden identification of affected records.

Emmett O’Connell, who works in the auditor’s office, described the outreach and the community partnerships: the office mailed step-by-step guidance to owners, the county filed the first modification on behalf of an owner to demonstrate the process, and local organizations volunteered support. O’Connell said nonprofit and private partners provided free notary services and volunteer lawyers through the Thurston County Bar Association assisted residents with the recorded-document process.

Mark Yobayashi, president of the Thurston County Realtors Association, spoke during the Fair Housing proclamation about housing access as a broad civic goal. “Whether you’re buying a home or renting a home ... everybody should have an opportunity to have a roof over their head,” he said, noting the real-estate profession’s earlier history of exclusion and current support for fair-housing work.

County officials said the auditor’s office will continue outreach after the University of Washington analysis identified the larger set of parcels. No new funding or specific deadlines were announced at the meeting. The presenters encouraged owners with questions to contact the auditor’s office for assistance in filing modifications.

The board’s proclamation and the auditor’s remarks tied the county’s ceremonial observance of Fair Housing Month to concrete steps to remove discriminatory language from public land records and to community partnerships that assist landowners through the process.