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The La Conner Town Council will hold a special meeting 5 p.m. Oct. 10 to hear 2024 budget presentations on the sewer/compost and general fund programs. Mayor Ramon Hayes called the meeting today, Friday, Oct. 7. The regular Oct. 10 council meeting follows at 6 p.m. Access the agendas on the Town of La Conner website through the calendar or at: https://www.townoflaconner.org/AgendaCenter/Town-Council-2/...
When the Washington State Salmon Recovery Funding Board and the Puget Sound Partnership awarded $81.5 million through 150 grants in 29 counties Sept. 18, they were sending $11,948,293 to eight organizations and institutions in Skagit County for recovering at-risk salmon species. In a news release, Gov. Jay Inslee said, "These are important projects that will help us restore our salmon populations. They also provide many other benefits. When we clean up our rivers, we not only help salmon, we...
The 2023 pattern for homes sold in Skagit County holds steady: Fewer properties are available in most of the county’s nine markets than a year ago. Considerably fewer homes are selling, about 25% below 2022, month over month, and prices are about the same as 2022, kept high by the ongoing either side of $800,000 for monthly median sold home prices in Anacortes. In August, $880,000 was the median price for the 27 homes that closed there, by far the highest price of the year. The median price of the 134 homes that closed in Skagit County in A...
Every September the Weekly News focuses an editorial on Banned Books Week. The Week starts Sunday, Oct. 1 this year. Visit the La Conner Swinomish library next week. Heck, go to a library every single day through Oct. 7. We are fortunate to have good libraries throughout the county. It is unfortunate that our county commissioners have not shown the dedicated, long-term leadership citizens need to be led into the countywide, single library district that living in the 21st century requires. But that is another editorial. Banned Books Week...
Harvey Cardwell from Oregon City, Oregon grew the winning pumpkin at the 13th Annual Skagit Valley Pumpkin Festival at Christianson's Nursery Saturday. The pumpkin weighed 1,460 pounds. It was the first time he had ever grown and weighed a pumpkin in a contest. He has grown vegetables before but this was the first year he grew pumpkins. Just how much water does a giant pumpkin need? Up to 600 gallons daily during the heat of summer said Cardwell when asked. He has two more growing at home also....
La Conner staff and the planning commission are updating the Town’s short-term rental regulations. These rentals are only permitted in the commercial zone – in commercial buildings. What purpose will changing these regulations serve? Whom will benefit? What is broken that has to be fixed? Google “short term rental critique” and this article is near the top: “Affordable Housing and the Impact of Short-Term Rentals.” Staff at the Municipal Research and Services Center wrote it for local officials. That is an in-state nonprofit organizatio...
Mark your calendars for a gourmet, connoisseur and fun weekend celebrating Skagit Valley grown, caught, brewed and prepared food and drinks Sept. 29 and 30. Genuine Skagit Valley is offering its first ever Tidewater Boil Friday evening at the La Conner Marina. Return on Saturday for the Skagit Farm to Pint Fest. You will meet Blake Vanfield, director of Genuine Skagit Valley and the event’s sort-of executive chef. She is all but bubbling over with excitement for the complex coming together of people, their skills, talents and the foods and drin...
The La Conner Town Council will hold a special meeting 5 p.m. Sept. 26 to hear 2024 budget presentations on public works, code enforcement and fire department programs. Mayor Ramon Hayes called the meeting today, Friday, Sept. 22. The draft 2024 budget estimates almost $7 million in revenue and slightly over $8 million in expenditures. The 13 pages in the packet lists only these programs. The code enforcement request is $73,616, up about 20%, and the fire department budget is $242,487, up about 10%. The special meeting packet, and the regular...
La Conner continues to dodge the bullets that so much of small-town America is getting hit by: loss of employers, employees and families moving away, empty storefronts and boarded up homes, loss of hospitals and school closures. No, instead the problems here are employers struggling to fill open positions, employees stuck with commuting long distances and the local government needing robust affordable housing planning, policies and funding. The school district reacts to a smaller student population, but the high cost of housing is a tragedy it...
Here is a backwards rhetorical question: How do your improve on the town’s Tom Robbins celebration and day? Answer: You can’t. Don’t try. Do more and better by organizing something different. What is the necessary alternative roadside attraction? Let’s invent it by next summer. Hopefully this unexpected answer your just read will be embraced and accepted for the necessary challenge it is. More than one person has applauded the complete success of the Sept. 2 celebration, waxed on how wonderful it was to have a day focused on local people...
The $60,820 in August sales tax revenue reported to the Town of La Conner from the state’s Department of Revenue is the third highest June total ever, though down $9,563 from 2022 and $1,900 from 2021. The $399,898 total year to date is 65.6% of the forecasted revenue, almost matching projections. The special use fire tax total of $6,064, as always, tracked sales tax totals and was also almost 10% below the same month last year. People are still staying overnight in La Conner. The $19,848 collected in hotel motel tax revenue set another m...
Twelve carvers, 12 sponsors, 12 prizes and 12 carvings from 24 cans of Spam . Way too much information to get into this space. Briefly, the winners are, “not written in any kind of order.” Everyone got a Spam T shirt. Better than the Seattle carving contest Spam Dunk: Peregrine O’Gormley, “Roasted Pig.” Weird and Wonderful: “Playing with Fire (your brain on Tom Robbins).” Pearl Spam: Mandy Turner, “Hot Trash: Spam jewelry displayed on Spam.” YOWZER: Chris Theis, “Stacked geometric sculpture.” Spam for the Masses: Pieter VanZanden: “Tom Robbi...
The almost quarter inch of rain Sunday, like the 0.43 inch of rain that fell Aug. 29-30, with. 0.4 inches the 29th and 0.03 the 30th, may end Skagit County’s summer burn ban but is not alleviating the region’s drought. The 0.5 inch August rainfall total was 0.7 inches below the century’s average of 1.2 inches, making it the eighth driest since 2000 and one of 14 with less than an inch of precipitation. August rainfall was 0.7 inches below the century average of 1.2 inches, 57.8%. Seven of the driest years have been since 2014. Last year only...
The median price of the 126 homes that closed in Skagit County in July was $545,000, slightly down in the five months since March. Anacortes home prices continue to influence values county wide. The median sold home price in that market was down considerably from June and July 2022, over $100,000 and $150,000 respectively. Nine of the 10 homes sold in the La Conner market were in Shelter Bay or on the Fidalgo peninsula. Homes are generally selling at or within 10% of the list price, either...
Of course there is a Tom Robbins Fan Club on Facebook and of course King for a Day celebration organizer Gina McCarthy posted news of the Sept. 2 activities there and of course at least one Irishwoman came to La Conner Saturday. Gerri Roche of Wexford, Ireland took it as a sign. She shared fellow Irish native McCarthy’s post “a few weeks ago” and at least half a dozen fans traveled to participate. Kerry McGrath came from Palmyra, New York. “It’s been on my bucket list,” she said. “The universe opened a path for me and I took. it.” Jen Innc...
Saturday saw the residents of La Conner at their best, gathering for what we all love, a parade. It was made better in that it was organized by us, for us. On this day author Tom Robbins was heralded as a king. The world-famous writer has been living quietly among us for decades. Residents who have known him for a long time and those who have never met him gathered to celebrate, as did those – primarily women – who came from as far away as Ireland, upstate New York, California and everywhere in between, including Indiana and Missouri. Robbins...
Tulip Valley Farms proprietor Andrew Miller is back in Skagit County Superior Court, this time with farmer Larry Jensen, sued by Skagit County for Miller’s development on Jensen’s Bradshaw Road property last fall. The Aug. 8 lawsuit states that developments took place without “obtaining a single permit or necessary developmental review as required by state law and the Skagit County Code.” The County asks the court to confirm the violations are a public nuisance, to permanently enjoin them and order Jensen and Miller to abate them. When Tulip Va...
Some of us are quicker than others, have our priorities in better order, are more in tune with the rhythms of the season. Partly, too, it is a matter of location and timing. For me, confined to a narrow course of home and office, it has only been since last week, Monday, Aug. 21 that I have heard and seen Canada geese returning to the Skagit. That first evening the sound of their honking followed me home. I did not see in the evening haze and smoke but heard the telltale sound somewhere over Hedlin farm fields. Honking brought me out of my offi...
The 0.06 inches of rain last week, 0.03 inches Aug. 7 and again Aug. 9, measured at Washington State University’s Memorial Highway Mount Vernon station, was not drought-breaking precipitation. Far from it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture national crop and livestock map shows all of Skagit County in drought for agriculture. The drought area is based on U.S. Drought Monitor data. And the U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook by the National Weather Service shows the drought persisting through October. According to Washington State University’s WSU...
Better weather in May is probably why tourists again made La Conner their destination. The $55,179 collected in sales tax revenue is the first record high collection for its month in 2023, topping July 2022 by 2.3%. The state’s Department of Resources reports on a two month lag. The special use fire tax barely reached its record, $29 over the July 2022 report, at $5,393, tracking sales taxes, as it does. Most healthy, as it has been all year, was the hotel motel tax revenue, at $16,442, another record, 9% above July 2022. The $9,874 in REET (...
More than 500 people crowded Mount Vernon's Riverwalk Plaza last Wednesday, Aug. 9 in response to the Skagit Valley Food Co-op invitation to its 13,000 members and the general public to celebrate its 50th anniversary. There was food, of course, as staff served up bounty from their kitchen and deli, ending with cake and ice cream. The line to their food booth stretched out 30-people long for three hours, until by 7 p.m. the last of cantaloupe and watermelon was lonely in their trays....
Some readers, surely, were among the over 500 people crowding Mount Vernon’s Riverwalk Plaza last Wednesday, raffle tickets in hand, as Skagit Valley Food Co-op General Manager Tony White called out winner after winner, giving away prizes donated by local businesses and the Co-op in recognition of the 13,000 members who make the Co-op the amazing success it is today. Residents from Samish Island and Sedro-Woolley came and others from perhaps as far away as Vancouver, B.C., and Seattle. It may be possible and is certainly true that pound for pou...
August started with 100% of Skagit County in drought, the federal government reported. Severe drought hangs over the bulk of the county, 86%, while the borders – a slice of southern Fidalgo Island and southwestern Skagit Bay and the Cascade Mountains on the eastern side – 14%, is in moderate drought. Rainfall measured at Washington State University’s Memorial Highway Mount Vernon station is 9.9 inches for the year, 7.2 inches or 42% below the January-July century average of 17.1 inches. Monthly precipitation has been from 16% to 70% below...
Anyone can be a part of the La Conner Rotary Club 2023 Harvesting Hope annual auction and dinner at Maple Hall Aug. 26, 5:30 p.m. The theme this year is “Hope Springs Eternal.” Community participation is invited to support literacy and education programs. This is the club’s biggest fundraiser of the year. La Conner Mayor Ramon Hayes will be honored as recipient of the Paul Harris Award to acknowledge his commitment to the community and the strong working relationship with town leaders the club has enjoyed during his tenure. Hayes stood out a...
First to last, for 50 years the Skagit Valley Food Co-op has been about its member-owners. That, and the international principles embraced when the cooperative was founded as a buying club in a Presbyterian church basement in Mount Vernon in August 1973. "We would not exist without our members," said Nicole Vander Meulen, the Co-op's marketing and outreach director, Friday. "Let's start at the beginning ... YOU," the 2022 annual report proclaims next to the winding path of milestones depicting...
