Messenger House Care Center was fined $9,000 this week by the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, for violating state and federal care standards.
The state’s unannounced inspection in January of the island nursing home – a 90-bed facility licensed and operated by Seattle-based Soundcare Inc., and serving Medicare, Medicaid and private residents – resulted in seven citations, for “deficiencies related to the use of chemical and physical restraints, to prevention of abuse and to quality of care.”
From the standpoint of sheer physical capacity, the Bainbridge Island wastewater treatment plant at the foot of Donald Place has a lot of life left in it.
But to comply with ever-tightening regulations, changes are needed. The city has hired a consulting engineer to look at the operation with an eye to upgrades, and wants to get neighborhood input right from the start.
“We want to make sure the neighborhood is aware of the efforts that are under way, and to get their input into the process before it becomes final,” said Lance Newkirk, city maintenance and operations supervisor.
“We expect feedback concerning odor, noise, lighting and perhaps even traffic,” Newkirk said. “The input we get from the neighborhood may help in siting new equipment, for example.”
Like the students crowded around him, naturalist Stan Rullman listens to the beep of the radio receiver as if he is hearing it for the first time.
He is.
“We’ve never been able to detect Grace’s signal from here before,” he tells the group of Island School fourth-graders gathered for their first full day of camp at the Puget Sound Environmental Learning Center.
The salmon farm in Rich Passage is located on a maritime highway, but the only land access is over Fort Ward Hill Road, a narrow, winding street through a densely populated neighborhood.
So it makes sense logistically and economically to bring in food for the salmon by water, rather than land.
“Bringing in the food by barge saves costs dramatically, and mostly eliminates the big trucks going over the hill,” said Arve Mogster, on-site operations manager for Cypress Island, Inc., the present owner of the operation formerly known as Northwest Sea Farms.
Cypress wants to eliminate daily truck runs over the hill and through the Fort Ward neighborhood, replacing them with one monthly over-water barge delivery.
It’s not easy to make it in the restaurant business.
For not just surviving, but thriving for two decades – and, in the process, helping build up the island community around them – San Carlos restaurateurs Lee and Marianne Jorgenson have been named Bainbridge Business People of the Year for 2002.
The award was announced this week by the Bainbridge Island Chamber of Commerce. The Jorgensons will be honored at a luncheon, at 11:30 a.m. May 16 at Wing Point Golf and Country Club.
Should they spend the money all at once? How important is public access? And, if it means saving even more land, might a few houses go up as well?
The city Open Space Commission wants to hear from the public on these and other questions, as an $8 million program for local land preservation gets under way.
“We’re calling this ‘a progress report from us,’ and we need to know what people think,” commission chair Andy Maron said this week. “It may be, ‘Don’t bother us – get going!’ Who knows what they’ll tell us?”
When Karen Beierle’s children started taking shop classes, she asked them to teach her how to use a band-saw.
Once schooled, she started making hand-painted puzzles. Before long, the former schoolteacher realized that wooden animal cut-outs with a magnet on the back could make useful teaching tools for preschool kids.
“The wooden manipulatives are easy for a child to handle,” she said. “They are a wonderful way to bridge non-reading into reading. When children learn a story like ‘The Three Bears,’ then retell it using the figures as props, they learn language, sequencing, characterization and the other elements you have to have for reading.”
Beierle started selling her figures to schools. And suddenly, a business was born.
Step onto the deck or into the back yard of the Virginia Villa apartments, and enter an oasis of wooded tranquility, a sharp contrast to the bustle of High School Road out the front door.
For some of the federally subsidized complex’s 41 elderly and disabled residents, that sanctuary is a big part of their lives.
“We have people who don’t go out at all,” said manager Linda O’Neil. “Their lives are sitting on the deck, watching the critters.
“Don’t take that away.”
In concept, the charge seems to be a simple, rather dry accounting problem:
To determine how much it costs the city to issue permits for building and development, determine what proportion of those costs to charge to builders and developers, then develop a fee schedule to recover those costs.
But when a citizen committee assembled for the first time this week to look at those issues, the focus was less on cost and more on city action, or lack thereof.
The Meridian development was a new concept for Bainbridge Island – luxury condominiums on the top floors, hotel-like concierge service to the residents, and medical offices on the ground floor, possibly even a clinic to rival Virginia Mason.
Since last July, that vision has been nothing but a hole in the ground, an interrupted excavation on the north side of Knechtel Way next to Helpline House.
But the project will go forward, according to Bruce McCurdy, CEO of Bainbridge-based developer Malibu Corporation.
“We’re ready to get started,” McCurdy said this week. “Our financing stopped after the 9-11 attacks, but we’re set to move forward.”
Tuesday, City Planning Director Stephanie Warren agreed that construction may resume shortly.
Fueled by continued low interest rates, the Bainbridge Island housing market remained surprisingly strong in the first quarter of the year.
While fewer homes were sold in the first three months of 2002 than in the same period a year ago, the time needed to sell a home actually decreased slightly, and the median price showed a modest increase.
The picture is not entirely clear, according to local real-estate professionals.
Cars and pedestrians, sidewalks and streets. Plazas, benches, storefronts, trees.
Somewhere in the tangle of sometimes-competing components that make up an urban area, there lies a formula for a “livable” Winslow. How to find it – that’s the challenge.
“We study things to death here,” architect Peter O’Connor said, at a roundtable on Winslow planning Tuesday at city hall. “It’s time to stop studying, and get on with it.”
Sounding the Republican themes of overspending and over-regulation, Bremerton auto body-shop owner Don Large announced Friday that he will seek the 23d District legislative seat held by Rep. Phil Rockefeller, (D-Bainbridge Island).
“I’ve never seen government run anything really efficiently,” Large said in an interview Friday.
“When I look at the state the state is in, I don’t think there is a lot of leadership.”