At the recent Town Meeting at the American Legion Hall, a citizen suggested that I institute a column in the Review to address citizen questions – to “loop back to the people that are paying the bills” – from you, our taxpayers. This is the first of a series of columns that will address commonly asked questions, and I want to use it to respond to some of the questions about the city’s financial well-being that I heard at the meeting.
In case you didn’t already know, the city has begun updating the 2025-30 Comprehensive Plan, its first priority being the creation of a stratagem for the future of the island’s open spaces. It’s essentially another plan within a plan, but it’s fortuitous that city leaders realize the judiciousness of protecting the island’s most valuable commodity against the threat of urban sprawl. They fear that if they don’t plan now and stick to their guns later, the almighty dollar will turn this Seattle suburb into an enlarged version of Mercer Island.
“It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. “
I was in Spokane one day this past week helping my son pack up his dorm room for the summer. Adam is now a sophomore at Gonzaga University majoring in Afternoon Classes. That’s not as bad as it sounds. In another year, I’ll have a second child in college who quite possibly may be studying Advanced Tanning and Quantum Shopping Mechanics.
Last Friday, Sakai Middle School students packed the hillside meadow around their new – and two very old – blossoming cherry trees for the First Annual Cherry Blossom Festival, and to honor the school’s soon-to-retire principal, Jo Vanderstoep.
Housing experts say the affordable-housing market on Bainbridge Island is so depressed that people, most of whom are looking for one- or two-bedroom spaces, have written it off and stopped looking on the island. This is especially true for families because they often need three bedrooms, which means they’re searching for rare and very expensive rental houses.
I had to take a break from politics this spring. Cold turkey. I just quit.
It’s no secret, but let’s be very clear about this: During the next few years, the city’s financial health will…
Most people have accepted the fact that a helmet is a necessary safety item whether the wearer is operating a bicycle, motorcycle, a whitewater kayak or a board of one type or another. There are exceptions, of course, including a large majority of the bicyclists in Eugene, Ore., where going helmetless on city and University of Oregon streets is the cool thing to do. Those Oregon Ducks have a tendency to live on the wild side.
The unfolding financial crisis at the city makes it clear that we have failed the most basic tenets of local government. The value of government is to address common needs that cannot be met by individual citizens, such as life/safety and infrastructure needs by carefully spending the tax money it receives. It is important we learn how we got into this deficit position and how we get back on a responsible fiscal track.
I’ve never been there, so my impression of what Florida’s like is drawn entirely from books, films and the news stories that originate there. Among the places in Florida I’ve never been to is Melbourne, a city of some 78,000 people located midway down Florida’s eastern coast, about 60 miles southeast of Orlando. Melbourne, which served as a training ground for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, was named in honor of its first Postmaster, a gentleman named Cornthwaite John Hector. Hector was an Englishman, but he had spent much of his life in Melbourne, Australia.
Paul Ohtaki, who grew up on Bainbridge Island and served as an internment camp reporter for the Review during World War II, passed away on April 27 at his home in San Francisco. He would have been 85 in August.
In the past four years I’ve attended all the meetings for the Winslow Tomorrow visioning process, participated in the charrette and attended many city presentations on the possible designs that would grow from the results of the visioning process. Lately I’ve attended many council meetings, listening to why nothing can be done to apply any of the results of this process. Partially this is due to the economic climate and partially it’s the result of the gloom-and-doomers who, without attending any meetings or reviewing the possible designs that resulted from the process, have concluded that the whole thing was an attempt to “pull the wool over the public’s eyes” to allow large-scale development of Winslow Way.
