Too many cooks, budgets and boards | LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Published 11:56 am Sunday, March 15, 2015

To the editor:

Bainbridge is a wonderful place to live, but a place which suffers from too many separate components of government that more often than not find the complexity and compromise required to work together, far too much trouble.

We have a city government split into a city government, a parks department, a fire department, a school district, and a library. Five groups with five boards, five items on our property tax bills, five taxing authorities, five levies, all basically equal in power within their own mandated domain.

The result is that our policy (city) and fire departments can’t save us $2 million by building a joint headquarters. That is too complex, mixing two budgets and two boards, two too many sets of compromises.

About to be more wasteful is the schism between the city and parks which seems likely to clear cut city’s Suzuki property to serve a purpose far better served by park’s soon purchased Sakai property, and vice versa.

Imagine we had a single council running the city, and what is best for the island is rather clear. That council would be asking us to buy the Sakai property, for a mixed use of nature preserve (10-plus acres of wetlands), a community center, and a bit of much needed affordable housing. That council would see 22 acres of alder, 50 years away from regrowing into a forest as a reasonable place to expand the living space of Winslow. A location next to schools, a market, restaurants, banks and buses.

This council owning Suzuki, already a forest, a long walk from all those amenities, positioned to connect the high school with the middle schools, would be proposed as a new park, with trails for all to enjoy and its own pond to explore.

Back to reality, we instead have a parks department that makes a point of it not being part of the city, and a city which has repeatedly demonstrated that it has no desire to work with any of the other authorities on the island. The odds of these two groups working together to do what is best for the whole island today I’m told is exactly zero. Which is a shame, as when we vote for any of these councils, I thought it was understood that we all want the best island possible, complexities or not.

MICHAEL “LUNI” LIBES

Bainbridge Island