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Saturday gave people the real feel of small town America when more than 100 town residents gathered for the dedication of La Conner’s new boardwalk. The Skagit Community Band, featuring La Conner’s own Vince Fejeran and Amy McFeeley, provided rousing music, causing lots of toe tapping and even some spontaneous dancing. Mayor Ramon Hayes officiated the event and introduced a speaker lineup that included our state elected officials, Sen. Barbara Bailey, R-Oak Harbor, Rep. Dave Hayes, R-Camano Isl...
The Shelter Bay Community held the first of three meetings for homeowners last night to a standing room only crowd. People arriving at the meeting were met by a group of homeowners wearing T-shirts and carrying signs urging their neighbors to “just say no” to the new lease proposal. Two more meetings are scheduled on Thursday and on June 6. Residents were also given the option of listening to the meetings over the Internet. The Swinomish Senate has provided Shelter Bay Community with the tri...
La Conner has been hounding state and federal officials, and now the governmental gears seem to be starting to budge. Last week, State Rep. Norma Smith, R-Clinton, met with Gov. Jay Inslee to explain how a federal ruling caused La Conner area taxpayers to take a huge financial hit. It appears that a lobbying effort spurred by La Conner Mayor Ramon Hayes, with added muscle from the La Conner School District, could eventually prod the federal government into bringing relief to the folks who saw their property tax bills jump by up to 25 percent...
The candidate filing period for the Nov. 3 general election closed on Friday and left La Conner area voters with a few contested races to decide. Town of La Conner For the Town of La Conner, Mayor Ramon Hayes is running for his third four-year term unopposed. La Conner Councilman Jacques Brunisholz, who retired after teaching generations of La Conner High School students and who has served on the council since 2008, is being challenged by Charity Starkenburg for his position 1 seat. Starkenburg is the popular owner of Bamboo Coffee, formerly...
Candidates trying to file for November’s General Election hit a major snag on Tuesday morning. The state Secretary of State’s election website experienced a major outage, possibly due to “utilization spikes.” Gabrielle Clay with the elections division of the Skagit County Auditors Office said her department couldn’t even access local information on the administrative end. The problem was resolved early in the afternoon, and candidate filing week resumed. In La Conner, Mayor Ramon Hayes announced last week that he will seek another term, and...
While teachers in school districts across Washington were staging one-day walkouts to demonstrate their frustration with the level of state funding for education, La Conner educators took a different path. Instead of giving kids a day off and disrupting family schedules, the La Conner teachers took their message directly to the legislators, who might be able to do something about their concerns. Shortly after school was out on Friday afternoon, teachers and a scattering of students and community members gathered in the high school library,...
The Swinomish Senate has provided Shelter Bay Community with what the community calls the tribe’s “best and final proposal” for its terms to extend the land lease. Shelter Bay is a gated neighborhood of about 900 homes developed mostly on reservation land leased from the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community. The original lease signed in 1968 is set to expire in 2044, which according to a tribal attorney would cause the land that people built their homes on to revert back to the original owners. For the past two years Swinomish and Shelter Bay repr...
The old Potlatch Resort is turning into the new La Conner Marina RV Resort. “We’re hoping we’ll have it open Memorial Day,” said Harbormaster Kody Skvaril. Crews have been sprucing up the property, trimming trees and improving the RV spots. Last week the building demolition began, and on Monday, the old Potlatch structure had been reduced to a pile of rubble and what remains of the yet-to-be uprooted indoor swimming pool. Skvaril said there are plans to turn the old Potlatch building site into a...
La Conner town and school officials continued hounding state and federal officials this week as some residents prepare to shell out up to 25 percent more in property taxes by the April 30 deadline. On Tuesday, the town-school lobbying consortium met with representatives of U.S. Senator Patty Murray and U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell. “We’re reaching out where we can and trying to do what we can,” said La Conner School Board President Rick Thompson, whose own property tax bill went up by more than $1,000 this year following a federal decis...
La Conner School District and town officials are scheduled to meet today with a representative from the office of U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, to lay the tax disparity caused by a 2013 federal court decision at the federal government’s feet. The offices of U.S. senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray have also been contacted, and their staff members have promised to schedule meetings with local officials soon. Mayor Ramon Hayes, with other partners including the school district, launched the lobbying campaign last month. This came a...
The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community on Tuesday filed a lawsuit in federal court against BNSF Railway, alleging violations of terms in an easement agreement that allows the trains to cross reservation land. According to the complaint filed in the United States District Court in Seattle, the tribe and Burlington Northern were parties to a 1991 agreement granting the railway an easement, allowing one 25-car train per day in each direction to serve the refineries on March’s Point to cross the northern tip of the reservation. Train tracks run o...
A delegation of school and town officials traveled to Olympia on Tuesday to let state Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn know La Conner needs help right now. The meeting was set up by State Rep. Norma Smith, R-Clinton, who said “kids are at risk” because La Conner School District suffered a huge funding cut this year. What amounts to about 50 percent of the district’s property tax revenue was eliminated when 931 parcels were removed from the county’s tax rolls in January. As a re...
La Conner Mayor Ramon Hayes has launched a town lobbying effort to address a situation that has left a fraction of the taxpayers shouldering the lion’s share of the local taxes. In January 931 parcels were removed from the La Conner area property tax rolls following a federal court ruling that structures on Indian reservation land are tax exempt regardless of who owns the structures. That means homeowners in Shelter Bay and in the Pull and Be Damned Road area who built their homes on land l...
Former Swinomish Police Chief Thomas Schlicker entered “not guilty” pleas in federal court on Monday to six counts of wire fraud and four counts of theft. Schlicker, 57, was indicted by a federal grand jury on March 19 and stands accused of defrauding the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community of more than $30,000 by depositing money intended for the police department into a secret bank account and claiming reimbursement from the tribe for personal expenses, claiming they were job related. According to the court documents, Schlicker was arrested on...
Former Swinomish Police Chief Thomas Schlicker was indicted on March 10 by a federal grand jury for felony charges of wire fraud and theft of tribal funds. The indictment, filed in the U.S. District Court Western District of Washington in Seattle alleges that starting in 2008 Schlicker defrauded the tribe for more than $30,000 by depositing tribal money into a secret bank account and claiming reimbursement for personal expenses claiming they were job related. According to indictment, Schlicker allegedly put money into a Washington Federal...
The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community expects to send out tax bills to homeowners on the 931 parcels removed from the county’s property tax rolls by the end of this month. As with the county taxes homeowners are accustomed to paying, the Swinomish tribal tax can be paid in two halves on April 30 and October 31. For the 2015 taxes, the tribe intends to use the same assessment values Skagit County has set and will use the same tax rate – $14.28 per $1,000 of assessed value – as parcels on privately owned, or fee simple, land within t...
Like a recurring dream, La Conner’s bed-and-breakfast code governing home-based lodging establishments keeps coming up for replays. The Town Council on Tuesday held a public hearing on a recommendation from the Planning Commission that some residents fear would allow more commercial encroachment into the town’s residential code. This followed a public hearing before the Planning Commission last Tuesday, during which a last minute change in a fairly routine housekeeping item cleaning up the definitions of bed-and-breakfast and guest house est...
A man drove his black Audi into the water at La Conner Marina, and his car was spotted under water, five days later — on Thursday — when the tide went out. Skagit County Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Wade said a 32-year-old Bellingham resident’s car apparently hit a guardrail at high speed and was launched into the drink. The accident occurred just before midnight on Saturday, Feb. 21, at the north end of Third Street, where it makes a sharp right turn and becomes Pearle Jensen Way. Despite...
Over the past year, a horrible eyesore on La Conner’s southern waterfront has been quietly turning into something that will make the town proud. But it may prove too costly to save the property’s biggest structure, the 70-foot warehouse, from burrowing animals, substandard soil and the ravages of 117 years. Triton America took control of the old Moore Clark property last April and has already refurbished three of the five buildings on the three-acre site. Last week Triton CFO and Controller Ron...
This week government investigators were still trying to figure out what happened on Friday when an invisible cloud of noxious fumes descended on La Conner and Swinomish, causing some people to suffer respiratory problems. Apparently a maintenance operation went stinky at the Shell Puget Sound Refinery at March’s Point northwest of La Conner. On Monday the refinery had a recording on its phone line stating that it had “experienced a problem while doing maintenance work on the east flare which resulted in an odor issue.” The recording also has a...
The La Conner School Board and Swinomish Indian Senate will hold a joint meeting this Thursday to discuss tribal sovereignty curriculum. By law, since a quorum of school board members will be present, the meeting will be open to the public. It will be held at 5 p.m. in the Swinomish Senate Chambers, on Moorage Way across the street from the Village Chevron station on the reservation. Tribal sovereignty curriculum is a state recommended program, approved by Washington state tribes, to provide instruction in Native American history and culture...
Each year Skagit County Treasurer Katie Jungquist’s office mails out property tax bills to land right around Valentine’s Day. The goal is not so much to put a damper on the day, it’s just that the schedule calls for the bills to be delivered in mid-February. But this year, the county’s “Valentines” were still at the printer on Tuesday, and Jungquist said she expects they’ll be in the mail early next week. Even so, anyone anxious to know what they’ll be paying in property taxes this year can look it up on the county’s website, www.skagitcounty.n...
La Conner is about to embark on a green power project designed to cut the town’s energy costs and make money for investors. The Maple Hall Community Solar LLC plans to install an array of solar panels on the roof of Maple Hall this spring. Potential investors can hear about it at 7 p.m. on Thursday at Maple Hall. Kevin Maas is the principal of Glacier Energy, which has completed similar investor-owned projects on the roofs of Anacortes Middle School and Anacortes Public Library. Green energy is nothing new for La Conner. For years there has b...
A disintegrating over-water deck on the one-way section of La Conner’s North First Street has been a topic of debate in town recently. The so-called “Kirsch property” was the site of an old warehouse purchased by the town for $350,000 in July 2001. For nearly 14 years, the property has been waiting to become a park. Now the La Conner Parks Commission has asked the town to look into selling the property, which has an assessed value of $240,000, according to the Skagit County Assessor’s office....
Staff at the Skagit County Assessor’s Office worked through the holiday weekend to come up with the new levy rates for property taxes in the La Conner area. Under the state’s property tax calendar schedule, the levies were to be finished and provided to the County Treasurer by last Thursday, Jan. 15. But they weren’t. Removing 931 parcels from the tax rolls in the La Conner School District threw a big wrench into the system, and the Assessor’s Office had to stretch the deadline. On Tuesday, “I think we’re real close,” said County Assessor Dave...
