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Dear town council, planning commission - and citizens: It has been mentioned on the council and planning commission recently that it would be a great idea (said they) to have all the traffic thru town exit on First Street along the water next to the blue building that would be removed for this to occur. They also keep toying with a one way First Street. This idea ignores some important realities: primarily, the Shoreline Master Plan. That land next to old blue (derelict blue building) and which is along the water does indeed partially belong...
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...
Pope Francis will release a follow-up document on the environment on Oct. 4, providing an update to his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si’,” “On Care for Our Common Home” – a landmark papal letter that offered a rallying cry for global action in the fight against climate change. Francis said the new document is an effort to help “put an end to the senseless war against our common home” and comes after a summer of record-breaking rising temperatures, wildfires and storms. The pope’s remarks came during his general audience at the Vatican on Aug. 3...
Mikala Staples Hughes spoke for her own interests as an agricultural executive, passionate about the preservation of farm operations, at the Skagit County hearing on agritourism. She is not with Hughes Farms as the Sept. 6 correction in the Weekly News stated. She is the wife of a fourth generation farmer. The editor regrets the error....
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...
So, Sept. 2 came and went, there couldn’t have been a finer day in La Conner spent. There was a “King” in town, complete with a crown, and a shiny white old fire truck. Yeah, mega author Tom Robbins was kinda awestruck. The town was full of its regular crew and then there were the curious and people who didn’t have a clue. Who’s this fella anyways, what did he write, what did he say? Well he wrote words that he turned into novels and one into a movie! Yeah, he wrote about eclectic characters and notions that could raise your eyebrows and maybe...
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...
Tom and I were touched and grateful for everyone who participated in Tom Robbins Day. The event uplifted our community and reminded us to play, imagine and create. The costumes and parade participants were truly delightful. The day emphasized what a great town we are privileged to live in. This event would not have happened without our committee. Gina Torpey (aka lead fairy), Meg Holgate, Betsy Humphrey and Cherie Ware worked tirelessly for three months to make this day possible. Big thanks to Mayor Ramon Hayes for his beautiful proclamation....
Thank you for printing the Tom Robbins graduation address article. I graduated at about the same time and spent my formative years in the Skagit Valley. Although I experienced a traditional high school commencement speech, not a word of which I can remember, I clearly recall soaking up Tom’s books. I moved away from the Valley for graduate school and a satisfying career studying insects that eat trees. I’ve never tired of asking questions of the natural world, a fascination I attribute to having spent so much of my youth pondering the lim...
On Sept. 2 La Conner got our soul back. In honor of Tom Robbins our town came out to honor one of its own. The energy was electric, the costumes outrageous and the best part of the entire day was the sense of community. Truly that is a feeling that has not been present in a very long time for whatever reason. The day was magical, La Conner sparkled in our uniqueness. So from one resident to another please let’s keep that spirit going. With joy and hope Marna Hanneman La Conner...
utheast of Lahaina on Maui with sticky-foot gekkoes and cockroaches for roommates and obnoxious rats as my nearest neighbors. As the embers cool and the tempers flair from the recent Maui wildfires, I can’t help admitting geologists are correct in calling this period of our planet’s history the Anthropocine. Humans not only lit the flames of Maui’s conflagration, Humans provided the fuel. When I first visited the Islands, non-native cane toads hopped through vast plantations of sugar cane that grew where venerable rain forests had been clear...
It’s peak season for food here in La Conner. Let’s start with seafood, crab, oysters, prawns and I tasted some locally caught smoked salmon the other day, yum. La Conner is wonderfully positioned between the water and the farmland. There are so many stands offering sweet corn in our orbit it doesn’t pay to grow it yourself. I will admit the six ears for a buck and the honor stands have gone the way of the Dodo bird, well we can always blame the politicians. Sill, in the grand scheme of things locally grown food is cheap and supports our local...
A typical home in western Washington uses about 10,800 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per year. If you add in an electric car, that will increase to about 14,400 kWh. Solar panels in western Washington produce about 1,100 kWh per year, per installed kilowatt (kW) of capacity. To fully power a house and a car, you’d need to install about 13 kW of solar generation capacity. Here in Washington, net metering utility rate tariffs allow you to feed excess power to the grid and be paid for it, s...
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...
I love birds. I have feeders in the front and the back of my house and my office and I refill them every day so that I can continually enjoy watching them in large numbers. Which brings me to a very sad fact that the numbers of birds are severely decreasing. Since the 1500s, birds have been declining both in terms of species numbers (by about 500 species) and numbers of individuals (by about 20-25%). The numbers are staggering – three years after 3 billion birds were lost, America’s birds are...
There is order in the establishment of frontier towns like La Conner. Religion usually precedes law enforcement and the saloon precedes either religion or law enforcement. Opportunity is the single lure of the frontier, though opportunity is not the same for all. Some come to make a new life for themselves and family. Some come for a quick buck, however it might be acquired. Some come to escape and remake themselves. No two pioneers are the same; neither are they different. They want to get ahead and make something of themselves. Some succeed m...
In mid-August Bob Raymond and I met with Rep. Clyde Shavers over coffee. Wow, what an impressive guy! He thinks five years ahead. Green hydrogen. Agritourism. Affordable housing. Financial education in our high schools. Investing in our rural communities. Services to our veterans. The environment. Electrification of school buses. He is working on 13 bills right now that he will push forward in the next session. He knows how to get things done in Olympia. Where does he get the energy? When he asked for input, I handed him my study of the tax...
Electricity and natural gas are very unusual products. The end-use customers, homeowners, use these products without knowing how much they’ve used, or how much the products will cost, till they get the bills. In our state, retail electric and gas prices don’t change quickly when wholesale prices change. Instead, wholesale price changes are absorbed by the retailer (the utility) in the short term. High wholesale costs do eventually get passed on to the customer, in increases that the uti...
Monday is Labor Day. That is a quaint, almost 19th century holiday, a time when the picnics and lawn games came after boisterous downtown big city marches, the streets filled with row after row of salt-of-the-earth common men, Labor literally on the march. And, it was mostly men for most of the 20th century. Alas, the days of a powerful labor movement is a black and white newsreel out of the 1950s, when one in three workers belonged to a union and almost every one of them worked for companies, large and small. Today, unions in the private...
Since 1990 Skagit County has protected farmland with good planning and county codes. The current Skagit County code prohibits non-agricultural uses on the 90,000 acres of farmland zoned Agriculture-Natural Resource Lands (Ag-NRL). The proposed code changes strengthen farmland protection and do not affect farming and agricultural activities. The code permits farmstands, CSAs, U-pick, farm stays, farmers markets, farm to table meals, processing and sales of value added products, nursery sales, farm tours, hayrides, public education programs and...
This year’s tribal Canoe Journey brought sacred tribes to the shores of Swinomish from distant lands with their final landing at Muckleshoot, Alki Beach. The canoe journey is a tradition that has taken place for generations. The canoes were most often crafted from a single log that may have been several hundred years old. There is much honoring around the wood used, as their use has been integral for the tribe’s survival. This was their way of travel, their way of life was upon the water. It was relied upon heavily. Many of their resources cam...
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...
Finally. A witch hunt exposed, captured on the front page of newspapers all across the country and blaring from TV screens. Yes, corrupt law enforcement staff exist, backed up by a law-breaking judge willing to bend the law to punish those nipping at their heels. Cronyism run amok, on steroids! Kurt Batdorf’s story, below, sums up the unprecedented-in-our-time attack on a Kansas newspaper, the Marion County Record, gone after for doing its job. Small town cronies tried to out-muscle the 69-year-old publisher and his 98-year-old mother, the c...
Affordable housing is the issue nearly every city and county in our region is struggling with, including La Conner. And, with the town considering new code changes, it seems the situation may only get worse. Over the past few years, I’ve attended many planning commission meetings and at every meeting, the urgent need for affordable housing is discussed. Yet, instead of pursuing policies that will produce more affordable permanent housing, the town is considering encouraging even more short-term rentals by expanding the rules for short-term r...
I am at this moment (early August – ed.) watching these heartbroken Moms testify about their beloved sons and daughters who lost their lives, needlessly, at the hands of the U.S. Government. They are asking for the truth about who made the decision to pull out of Afghanistan in a deadly, foolish, coldly calculating, absolutely horrendous method. It was a complete failure. Shame on this administration. Disgusting and unforgiveable decisions that cost 13 lives needlessly. Also, other questions that need to be answered, which this government seems...
