After an announcement that drew much applause from both the business and environmental communities, Dr. Paulette DeGard announced her withdrawal from the Kitsap County Commissioner (District 3) race. She would have opposed Patty Lent in the Republican primary, and represented a creditable threat to incumbent Commissioner Tim Botkin.

However, after barely a week in the political arena, DeGard cited a series of personal financial setbacks that would prevent her from focusing exclusively on the campaign — including the inability of her husband, an engineer, to find work in Kitsap County, as the reason she was quitting. Ironically, the extreme lack of family wage jobs available in Kitsap to skilled professionals was one of the lynchpin themes of her campaign

“A number of people unselfishly gave their time and energy in the belief that there is a leadership void in Kitsap County that needs to be filled,” DeGard said in a prepared statement. “If it were not for these family issues, the campaign would have been a challenging and exciting series of events for me, in which I’m convinced I could have prevailed.”

Although a political novice, DeGard appealed to what appears to be quietly emerging as a new political group in Kitsap — a loose-knit coalition of forward-thinking environmentalists, business and technology professionals from both parties who view technology and telecommunications infrastructure as a large part of the answer to the job problem while not requiring a lot of land development. Her campaign was to be their coming-out party.

With the filing period now over, Lent will face off with Botkin in November.