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I attended the meeting of the Skagit County Planning Commission Tuesday, July 25, along with scores of others to express concern regarding proposed increased regulations for local farm families, many whom are already struggling to keep their family farm businesses viable. It is being reported that many limits and restrictions could be put in place to prevent celebration events and would even block new farm stands from opening. Many of the good people in the room have been the backbone of preserving Skagit farmland over the years, leading the...
Fire Blanket saves lives Please share this with your readers! Several weeks ago, I nearly set my home on fire. I had a three-quart saucepan, with 2 tablespoons of cooking oil, on the gas stove, as part of a recipe in the making. I stepped away from the stove to take care of laundry. Let’s just say I was distracted. Suddenly the smoke detector went off. I rushed back to the kitchen to a pan on fire, flames nearly 20 inches in the air! Instinct kicked in, as I reached for a Fire Blanket hanging in the pantry. If not for this blanket, I would n...
When I started working on lithium-ion batteries, in 1993, Sony and Toshiba had introduced the first such commercially available batteries a couple of years earlier. They were mostly used in “the 4 Cs” of small consumer electronics – cassette players, camcorders, cell phones and computers. If anyone had thought about putting a bunch of lithium-ion batteries together into huge battery packs, for vehicles or utility distribution systems, they would have stopped as soon as they found out the cost:...
Next Monday, July 31, the La Conner school board will approve the school district's 2023-2024 budget. The vote will almost certainly be unanimous but it will not be an easy decision. Board members and staff have known about and been grappling with cutting millions of dollars and reducing teaching, support and administrative staff.. The ongoing decline in student enrollment and the district’s despair at the low number of families with school-age children has been editorialized here before. The difficulty of little available and increasingly e...
I just turned 77 years old, and as I write this, I feel older and wiser. Well, wiser in some ways as we can always learn from our own experiences, but also facing the challenges of short-term memory loss. As the son of Holocaust survivors, I thank God for every moment I have on this planet and when I sit in my rooftop hot tub and look out at the vast Universe, I thank God that humans are an incredible and extremely rare species. I was very close to Father William Treacy and he gave me a column t...
I read your editorial “La Conner needs to plan for more than just floods,” (Weekly News July 12) with great interest, and your words raised my eyebrows more than once. You see, you made a blanket statement, “No one in La Conner, elected officials, town staff, activists, or this paper, saw, much less grasped the opportunity and possibilities for working family housing when Dave Hedlin offered to sell his family’s Maple Avenue property in 2020.” Now, I think of myself as an activist, and I did see an alternative plan, even went out of my way to...
New solar and wind electric generators are being installed at increasing rates because their costs are declining and utilities are getting better at integrating intermittent generation into their grids. New renewable generation plants are more economical than new coal or natural gas plants. Renewable generators are, therefore, displacing fossil or nuclear fueled plants when the old plants are retired. However, generation from solar and wind sources doesn’t necessarily happen at the exact same t...
Summer is well underway. It is hot, but not as hot as others have it around the country. It is not as hot – yet – as we experienced in 2021. We are fortunate that Skagit summers come with little humidity and cool evenings. For those of us who can afford it – and that might mean having the time – the calendar is full of entertainment to see, listen to and create from Stanwood and Snohomish counties up to the Canadian border and across it and east into the Cascades. For the adventuresome and patient, there is the hope ferries will arrive in Frid...
Thank you, editor, for your continued support of Skagit County Clean Energy Cooperative. I am compelled to correct some of last week’s front page article, “Solarize Skagit to power 129 homes.” Solarize Skagit had 129 homeowners sign up for the program. A “sign up” means the homeowner filled out an on-line form. Once “signed up” the homeowner receives a site visit from one of the three pre-vetted installers and if their home is conducive for solar the homeowner receives a cost estimate. At that point they make a decision to purchase sola...
I oppose the use of cluster munitions. Cluster munitions do not always detonate when deployed and civilians in countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos have been killed and wounded by these explosive devices long after the end of the war. More than 120 countries have banned cluster bombs. The United States must do the same. I continue to stand with the Ukrainian people and for an independent and sovereign Ukraine. That is why I have consistently supported humanitarian, military, diplomatic and economic aid for Ukraine. That is why I have met...
About a month ago, I had to take my gasoline car into the dealer for routine maintenance. That cost about $2,000, and it needs more work. My car has been driven about 100,000 miles. It probably has at least another 100,000 to go before the end of its life. However, maintenance will be increasingly expensive from now on. I think $2,500 a year is a realistic estimate. My car gets about 20 miles per gallon. Even though I have a short commute here in La Conner, Jenelle and I visit family in Seattle...
CORRECTION / ADDITION The last sentence of the July 12 Musings was not printed. Here is the last paragraph: This musing is not about that history (the 1942 internment of Japanese-American citizens), as much as light shed on it and discussing it is needed. I was in Seattle in 2023 and was taken by all the colors and races of people on the streets with me. The city is a United Nations of blacks, browns, reds, whites and yellows. I have never got on an elevator or crossed a street in my life, in Seattle, La Conner or anywhere else – every s...
The Town of La Conner’ s emergency management commission will start meeting monthly after half a year of bi-weekly sessions. It has made some progress and is settling into a routine. The town council and mayor moved quickly to form the commission after December’s Swinomish Channel flooding got their attention. Maybe emergencies are required to form commissions and plan solutions to past problems. Will it take a flood of homeless people floating into taking up residency in Pioneer Park to engage town leaders to move toward significant developmen...
In Seattle in June I had an opportunity rarely considered, much less repeatedly realized: I went up in more elevators, stepped onto more escalators and craned my head up at more buildings in two days than I have in two years – indeed – ever, in La Conner. Wow. As Dorothy might have exclaimed, it certainly isn’t Kansas. I was staying on the 34th floor of the downtown Sheraton. Up and down I went. I took my friend Dick to the Smith Tower, for decades the tallest building in the country west of New York City and we went to the 35th floor obser...
In looking at the U.S. Supreme Court decisions at the end of June, it is heartening to see they are finally abiding by the Constitution and common sense instead of shooting from the hip regarding affirmative action. If today’s court had been in office in 1974 there would be no such thing as the George Boldt decision giving one percent of the population fifty percent of all harvestable resources from state waters. The backers of the Boldt decision pointed to the Point Elliot treaty of 1855 giving those rites to native tribes. The Point E...
In 2010 Christchurch, New Zealand was devastated by two magnitude 7 earthquakes only days apart. Buildings were shaken to the ground; roadbeds overturned; water pipes snapped, etc. Nearby, the hamlet of Littleton, a town somewhat larger but like La Conner, was similarly shaken. But Littleton had a secret: a neighborly system of sharing services hour for hour they called a “time bank.” When Littleton’s 300 time bankers heard about an elderly couple being left homeless by the quake, the time bankers found the couple a temporary home and tappe...
For a while I was googling for an engineer named Talmon for the 306 Center Street project. But now I see that the name of the project is the Talmon Project in drawings submitted by the developer to the Town of La Conner. Since projects are usually not named after engineers, I assume that the name is joke. Kind of funny. As is the project. It is still too big. Still lacks enough parking. Still has bad contamination on the western portion of the property. And it is still a design that is cookie cutter. It is an insult to the historic nature of...
News that President Biden intends to permit the release of cluster bombs to the war in Ukraine needs to be challenged on moral and legal grounds and I would ask that we reach out to Rep. Rick Larsen as a member of the House Armed Services Committee to ask him to oppose the cluster bombs transfer. Cluster bombs are some of the worst weaponry of war, especially on the citizenry. The cluster “bomblets” are designed to detonate in the air, but many fail to do so and fall to the ground leaving them especially vulnerable to children who are mai...
I recently had the pleasure of visiting La Conner for an impromptu girls’ trip. This was my first time here and it was so enjoyable that I booked another visit before I left! We came to watch our friend in the Pretty Woman polo tournament at the La Conner Polo Club. We had dinner that night at the barn with the other players and the tournament hosts – everyone was so kind and welcoming and the views were unbelievable! That night we stayed in a corner room at the La Conner Channel Lodge. From the moment we got there the staff was warm and wel...
Yesterday was July 4th, the 247th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, the colonies splitting from the most powerful country on the planet. Read again the Declaration of Independence. Start at the beginning. What did the colonies declare? First, it was a “unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America.” Second, it was a statement from “one people.” Third, they held “these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain u...
It is a strange business with an odd purpose, newspaper publishing. It is a business and earns its profits by selling the interest and purchasing power of its readers to advertisers. It attracts its readers with the news of the day, but that is more than just the facts that pop up in town. Reporting does start with, for example, news of water line breaks, whether on Channel Drive or Reservation Road. But that is the start of the story, both for staff and what appears on the page. Journalism occurs when the editor and staff analyze underlying...
Music, what’s it to you, does it shiver your timbers, does it cause you to snap your fingers and tap your toes or make you breathe more easily through your nose? Certainly, one person’s music is another person’s noise, yet even in rip tearing rap, can be found a soft slap. Yeah, in righteous rock and roll can be found smooth harmonics and rad riffs and then there’s the country twang, the nasty slide guitar, harmonica, sax, drums and bass, they all can bring smiles to my face. Heck, I even enjoy karaoke, again, more as a listener, than partici...
Just 20 years ago, a kilowatt of new photovoltaic solar panel electric generation capacity cost more than a hundred times as much as a new kilowatt of natural gas capacity (although the difference was less significant with ongoing fuel costs for the gas plant factored in). General Motors’ EV1 in 1996 completely failed to bring electric cars back. Technology doesn’t stand still. Today, solar and wind energy are usually the least expensive sources of new generation. Electric vehicles are clo...
Probably not even the most loyal reader of the Weekly News noticed that this issue is volume 10, issue 11. Every week the issue number advances one and on the paper’s birth-anniversary date the volume increases one. This is the 312th issue under my ownership, completing my sixth year editing and managing the Weekly News. Year seven, with issue 313, starts next week. News editor Bill Reynolds has quoted me, “I own it but it is the community's newspaper.” I do own it but my hope for and ask of readers has always been for engagement and parti...
Women, women everywhere. I noticed more women recently in places where we hadn’t seen them before, such as covering men’s sporting events on television and serving as governors and in the police and military. You can even watch all-women’s basketball on television – or attend and watch them play live. This gave me hope that we were making good progress in gender equality until I looked it up and found that the experts predict equality in gender will not be achieved for another 137 years....
