Jamestown Gets the Award and Hosts the Dinner. Alaska Has the Backstory.

This Saturday, the Jamestown Tribe will collect a healthcare award at its own resort. The same week, a new Substack author — the Grim Reporter — published the Ketchikan years of Brent Simcosky, CEO of Jamestown Healthcare, who oversees the MAT clinic and Salish Seasons. Read that piece, subscribe, and ask why Sequim is handing out praise before anyone here has examined the file.

On Saturday, the Olympic Medical Center Foundation will present the Rick Kaps Award to the Jamestown Tribe at Club NOVA — inside 7 Cedars. The Sequim Gazette is promoting tickets to celebrate a story of partnership: money for cancer patients at Olympic Medical Center, praise for the tribe’s clinics, and language about being “inclusive” and choosing “collaboration with other institutions rather than competition.”

Chairman/CEO Ron Allen said the honor “really goes to the team.” On that list he named Brent Simcosky, CEO of Jamestown Healthcare.

The optics are already strange. The recipient of the award is also hosting the banquet on its own resort property. Jerry Allen, CEO of 7 Cedars Resort Properties, is part of the same “team” the chairman wants credited; the Gazette notes he deferred to Simcosky for the interview. That does not make the fundraising illegitimate. It does mean Saturday is not a neutral room. It is the tribe’s stage, the tribe’s honor, and the tribe’s vocabulary.

But a new independent writer just published the part of the story Saturday is not built to tell. Read What Happened Under Brent Simcosky’s Watch? on The Grim Reporter Substack. Subscribe for free. The work is theirs. This is somethig no other local news outlet has touched.

The man on the program

Few people outside the MAT clinic fight can pick Simcosky out of a lineup. People who sat across from him during conversations about the MAT clinic remember a different temperature than the upcoming awards ceremony.

In April 2024, at the People’s Forum, Simcosky was asked about federal reimbursement rates at the MAT clinic. On the recording, at 1:24:00, he tells the room it is “none of your business,” says “you want to know, go look it up,” storms away from the table, and returns after being asked to calm down. [Listen here.] That was not a one-off. He has spent years batting the money question away. In 2020 he told legislators that critics’ dollar figures were overstated and that “any excess revenue will go back into health care.”

Others remember a heartfelt Q13 appearance in which Simcosky wept, saying he could take social-media attacks because he was “a big boy,” but that it bothered his family.

That is the contrast. At the People’s Forum he shut the money question down. On television he asked for sympathy. But neither appearance produced what happened years ago in Ketchikan.

What Grim Reporter reported

On Sept. 22, Grim Reporter published a documented account of Simcosky’s years as medical administrator at the Ketchikan Indian Community clinic — before Jamestown hired him as health services director.

The reporting, built from Alaska outlets and from Phoenix Johnson’s on-the-record interviews, is this:

In 2012, Johnson, a Tlingit and Haida lab technician and Air Force veteran, reported that her supervisor, Dr. Richard McGrath, had repeatedly touched her at work and slapped her buttocks. KIC human resources dismissed the complaint in a letter Johnson says Simcosky initialed and hand-delivered. She filed a grievance. Days later she was fired.

Eleven years later, McGrath pleaded guilty in Sitka to third-degree sexual assault after originally facing 13 felony counts involving female patients. He was sentenced to two years in prison. Those later crimes were in Sitka, not Ketchikan. Johnson’s argument, which Grim Reporter quotes at length, is that the 2012 complaint was treated as a misunderstanding — and that McGrath kept working in healthcare.

That is Johnson’s account and Grim Reporter’s article. It is not a court finding against Simcosky. There is no public Washington investigation of the 2012 HR letter. As of Grim Reporter’s publication, Simcosky has not addressed those questions in this state. Do not take CC Watchdog’s word for the documents. Open the Substack. Look at what they published. And subscribe so they can keep asking.

Why his title matters

Simcosky is not the nurse at the dosing window. He is the system executive.

He is the tribe’s longtime health services director and, in 2026 coverage, CEO of Jamestown HealthCARE — the enterprise that includes the Healing Campus. He led planning, partnerships, construction, and public messaging for the two buildings on South Ninth behind Costco.

Day-to-day operations are split. The Healing Clinic (the MAT program) has its own executive director. Salish Seasons, the 16-bed psychiatric evaluation-and-treatment facility, has another. Simcosky sits above both as CEO of Jamestown Healthcare. He is the official who said the tribe decided to own and operate Salish Seasons after an earlier plan to let Olympic Medical Center run it. Ron Allen sits above that structure as tribal chairman/CEO.

Salish Seasons is now taking voluntary referrals. The Healing Clinic treats hundreds of people for opioid use disorder. Those are high-risk populations. Grim Reporter’s question is the one the award ceremony will not ask: if someone reports misconduct inside those walls, what happens next, who decides, and what should our community expect?

The language of Saturday

The Gazette piece is the official script for Saturday.

Allen called Jamestown “an inclusive tribe.” He said the goal is “collaboration with other institutions rather than competition.” He and Simcosky both said the tribe aims to provide services “without duplicating efforts of other institutions.” Simcosky added, “We want to be part of the solution. We are all going to be stronger if we work together.”

That is the language of the award dinner. It is not the only language on file.

In public-records, Chairman Ron Allen has referred to local residents who raise questions as “complainers” and “whiners.”

Those emails do not prove anything about Ketchikan. They do show that “inclusive” is a stage word. People who ask how the clinics are paid or who runs them have not always been treated as partners.

The same gap appears outside the clinics. Allen and Simcosky say the tribe does not want to duplicate work other institutions already do. Recompete — the federal grant Commissioner Mike French chairs — is paying Jamestown’s JKT Development to buy a hydroseeder and a mini excavator and start a hydro-seeding business. Local contractors already do that work, on their own dime. That is not Phoenix Johnson’s story, but it proves a split: collaboration and a statement to not duplicate services is just a performance.

“Brent Simcosky… actually now works at Jamestown S’Klallam here in Washington at a larger Indian health institution as a non-Native. So he got to escalate his career, and I got fired… It’s a culture of misogyny… I’m an Indigenous woman and unfortunately, there’s a deafening apathy towards me and folks like me.” — Phoenix Johnson, Dear Katie podcast, quoted by Grim Reporter

What this is not

This is not a finding that Simcosky committed a crime. It is not a finding that a Jamestown patient was mishandled. It is not a claim that the Sequim clinics have an open assault case. It is merely a pointer.

A new writer did the work Alaska reporters started this spring and Washington reporters did not. Grim Reporter put Simcosky’s name, the 2012 complaint, Johnson’s voice, and the Jamestown title in one place. That is a public service.

If the Rick Kaps Award is going to mean “part of the solution,” the health CEO’s unanswered Ketchikan file belongs in the same conversation as the wine dinner. Saturday is not built for that conversation. The Grim Reporter Substack is.