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He has alternately been a Port of Skagit manager, Town Councilmember, Mayor of La Conner, and Skagit County Treasurer. And a dishwasher and real estate agent. Plus a U.S. Navy captain. Now, just 16 months shy of his 90th birthday, Dan O’Donnell has embraced the role as La Conner’s man of letters. Refusing to make concessions to age, O’Donnell remains a frequent contributor to the La Conner Weekly News Letters to the Editor section, as he did previously with the Channel Town Press. O’Don...
La Conner bared its soul during Fourth of July festivities here on Thursday. Make that Souls. A string of Kia Souls, the hip boxy car designed for millennials, was among the highlights of a colorful, briskly-paced 15-minute downtown Independence Day Parade, which set in motion a full-day local celebration of America’s 243rd birthday. One of the Souls carried the company’s popular mascot – a hamster said to symbolize Kia’s goal of delivering motorists from the humdrum of life on an exerc...
CLARIFICATION July 17, 2019 Citizens planning or considering write in campaigns for La Conner Town or School District positions will file for the November election. There is no primary for these offices. Skagit County’s Election Office has write in candidate guidelines. No La Conner primary The 18 day primary voting period starts Friday. It ends August 6 across Washington for local offices where at least three candidates are running. There is no primary for the Town of La Conner’s mayoral or two council seats or the four of five La Conner Sch...
A school board and a town council walked into a bar. They had the usual litany of concerns and hand wringing: underfunded, under resourced, underappreciated, not understood. “They come to our meetings and hammer us with their complaints,” the board started out. “Right,” agreed the council, looking into their beers. “They not only question but criticize our decisions. It’s as if they don’t know what we are doing. They just don’t get it,” they said, nodding to each other in knowing affirmation. “Questions and complaints. Complaints and ques...
The Town Council gained $100,000 for the Town in less than an hour at its June 11 meeting: After months of negotiating, Council passed having Mayor Ramon Hayes sign an agreement with Crown Castle Cell Tower, a Texas-based company. The 42 year lease, with extensions, includes camouflaging the extension portion of the tower, annual rent increases, a percentage share of the subleases and the signing bonus. An agreement for terms of reimbursements between the Washington State Patrol and the La Conner Fire Department also passed unanimously. Hayes...
Town Council members have received their summer reading assignments. They’ll start with the next chapter in the ongoing saga on how to protect La Conner from potential catastrophic Skagit River flooding. Council will study design options for a proposed ring dike at the northeast edge of town. This after a field trip and sit-down Council session last Tuesday. About two dozen people met for a site tour intended to provide a visual perspective of where a new dike section would be located and its p...
Maybe the hardest thing for elected officials to hear is that they are wrong. That is especially difficult to take when strong, passionate criticisms are made at council meetings by long time neighbors and friends. Who would enjoy that? Our council members and mayor go into office to improve their community. They spend long hours in that effort. They make decisions for the long term benefit of the town. They don’t get thanked enough. Sometimes the best, most correct, decision is reached the wrong way. And great decisions might not be known f...
I would like to invite anyone with the energy and smarts to file for local offices in La Conner. I would do it, but I am too old. The County Auditor is taking applications until 4:30 p.m. Friday. There is a $36 filing fee. We have two council positions open, those of Jacques Brunisholz and Mary Wohleb. The mayor’s position is also open. Here are some issues that have been overlooked but need some attention. Maybe one of them interests you. Taxes. I believe that, when a county taxing district disappears, the taxes that it used to collect should...
The La Conner planning commission met with the Town Council as the last segment of Council’s April 9 meeting to discuss 2019 priorities, as they do annually. Initial topics were updates of the transportation element of the Town’s comprehensive plan, the critical areas ordinance and placing the park’s plan update as a comprehensive plan element. Councilmember Jacques Brunisholz asked about the dike. Planning Director Marianne Manville-Ailes responded that “concrete steps would go to the planning department” and not involve the planning...
Town Hall will be closed through April 18. That was the surprise agenda item at La Conner’s April 9 Town Council meeting. The closure dates were announced on the Town’s website April 10. Mold in the Town Hall bank vault has spread into the front reception area. It requires immediate maintenance to ensure staff safety. Signs were on the front doors before the end of last week. Closure started Tuesday. Administrator Scott Thomas did not yet have a repair agreement at the meeting. SERVPRO quoted $1...
A primary theme at last week’s joint Town Council-Planning Commission meeting was housing – densifying, increasing the housing stock and getting more units on lots. The subtext in the discussion was affordable housing: how to get folks on grocery and school employee wages into some of those additional La Conner homes. Town master plans allow 1,200 housing units. That’s a three-fold increase from today’s 385 units. Left to the “market” the unbridled hand of capitalism, very few homes will be built for the wage workers among us. Mostly we w...
Open letter to the Town Council: The recent vote of the council to sell the Kirsch property violates our codes and is a theft from future generations here. I have attached a letter that I wrote in 2015 with citations from these documents. Back in that year (2015) you tried to sell it to fund Conner Park – and look – it’s funded. The same is true in 2019. The ring dike will get funded as long as there is the political will to do so. Nowhere in the ordinances does it say that it is acceptable to diminish the total amount of public a...
I frequently question government decisions: federal, state, or local, to sell off public property and to place that property into the hands of a private party, with the very permanent result that forever and for all time the property is no longer available for whatever public uses there are now or that might be found or dreamed of in the future. I believe that public property and its uses define a community and that any change in its ownership should be part of a broad public planning process that a) takes account of who we are and of our...
For $337,500 the former Kirsch property on North First Street across from Swinomish Yacht Club can be yours. The Town-owned property went on the market Friday. Public access to the water is no longer an issue, Mayor Ramon Hayes stressed Friday in a phone interview. “Now we have a tremendous amount of access for our citizens,” he said, citing the pocket park immediately north of that lot, the Conner Waterfront Park and, most prominently, the boardwalk running the length of South First Str...
Small town newspapers in rural America serve as a portal into the life and times of individuals who live in these communities. These newspapers are precious documents that celebrate the lives, activities, tragedies and relationships that these communities value. These papers also bring domestic and global news to residents and link these events to their own lives. The Puget Sound Mail was a key part in La Conner’s history and my great-grandfather was the owner, publisher and editor. Before cell phones, computers and satellite news, n...
Much has happened in La Conner over the past dozen years, from completion of the popular waterfront boardwalk to a series of major street and infrastructure upgrades to creation of new public recreation and park areas. Yet more remains on the drawing board. Which is why three-term Mayor Ramon Hayes, a trained classical pianist who has been conductor of the Town of La Conner’s Council for those aforementioned projects, is seeking re-election. “I’m very pleased with what all of us over the past...
Town Councilmembers were like surprised cats suddenly learning of 100,000 available canaries at their Feb. 26 meeting. The agenda item: “presentation Crown Castle, cell tower lease and tower point” was completely different from September, when Councilmembers admonished company representatives for being in arrears on an existing lease. Mayor Ramon Hayes made the introduction, saying the company had paid its bill. He later stated the new terms: “Crown Castle will write a check to the Town of La Conner for $100,000 to the general fund.” There is a...
Aaron Reinstra was born to be a fire chief. The La Conner Fire Chief, to be exact. As a kid he would sneak along when his dad was called from home to the fire hall for emergency runs. Reinstra was just eight or nine at the time, but it only seemed natural to catch those rides given that multiple generations of his family have served as La Conner firefighters. Reinstra’s own service dates to 1991. Today he is La Conner Hook & Ladder’s new chief, succeeding Josh Morrison, who stepped down fro...
Before we had newspapers and journalists, we had poets. When all communities were small and tribal, poets were sometimes leaders and prophets. A prophet is a poet naming out loud the community’s pain. That is what some of the books, psalms and words of the Old Testament are. In today’s paper is a Bob Skeele poem about KeyBank closing their La Conner branch in April. It is his response to the letter they mailed customers saying that to provide better service they are moving to Mount Vernon. Skeele’s poem asks, “How are the users better served...
As snow piled up in La Conner, so did meeting agendas. A rare extended winter storm, which blanketed the local area with an estimated eight inches of white, led both La Conner Schools and the Town of La Conner to shelve regularly scheduled meetings this week. La Conner Schools cancelled budget and board of directors planning meetings Monday, plus that night’s Tri-District ‘B’ basketball game between the Lady Braves and Orcas. Campus classes were nixed on Monday and Tuesday, the latter cance...
In a one-hour meeting Jan. 22, the Town Council heard three presentations, consented to the reappointment of four parks commissioners, set 2019 sewer rates with the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and agreed to a contract for fixing the elevator in Maple Hall. The last had a rare dissenting vote, by Councilmember Jacques Brunisholz. Council agreed to have Mayor Ramon Hayes enter into a contract for $83,709 with thyssenkrupp Elevator Corporation “to modernize the elevator equipment” as described in the company’s proposal. The Maple Hall eleva...
Tiny Bubbles was a big hit for singer Don Ho in the 1960s. But his feel-good signature tune was about tiny bubbles in wine, not water, as was the case for some La Conner-Whitney Road residents when their homes were recently connected to a new water main between Young Road and McLean/Downey roads. Short of turning water into wine, the issue was addressed last week by flushing lines to rid them of the air bubbles that can cause tap water to appear cloudy, said Town Public Works Director Brian...
In the La Conner Town Council’s and administration’s modest way, they held their first 2019 meeting without mentioning that the town’s 2018 fiscal year ended with general fund revenues for 2018 totaling 97 percent of projected income. Sales tax income was almost four percent above projections, 3.67 percent, $17,565 to the good. Hotel/Motel receipts were $24,520, 19.3 percent above projections. Property taxes came in 2.5 percent high, at $7,621 and the fire truck sales tax income was $1,955, 4.25 percent above projections. Income from sewer...
Our La Conner area colleagues and neighbors have accomplished amazing successes and made invaluable contributions while quietly doing their work, paid, unpaid or under paid this past year. Mayor Hayes Ramon Hayes recognized Ollie Iversen at December’s Council meeting. Hayes has provided strong, quiet leadership himself. Heather Carter started 2018 with a grand slam home run, creating the Birds of Winter event, packing Maple Hall with residents and tourists. Susan Macek has spent 2018 raising funds to gain La Conner a new library. Library D...
His work often goes unseen but never unnoticed. Or unappreciated. At least by those who occupy offices at Town Hall. After two decades on the job, Town Public Works Director Brian Lease knows every inch of La Conner’s underworld yet has also played an integral role in development of key high-profile landmark projects here as well. “Every infrastructure and capital improvement project – seen or unseen – has his stamp on it,” La Conner Mayor Ramon Hayes said of Lease as 2018 prepared to give way to a new year. Hayes spoke from his d...
