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Thanksgiving is Thursday. Feasts will take place at dining tables across the country as family and friends gather in celebration and care for each other. There will be few masks and little social distancing. Everyone wants the coronavirus pandemic to be over and most Americans are acting like it is, not paying attention to the almost 100 million cases and over one million deaths the past three years. Our small individual gatherings bind families together. That is not the reason that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of...
Just like that, the La Conner Town Council is four weeks away from approving the 2023 municipal budget. Discussions started in September. Council has already approved $173,260 for tourism promotion, awarding $112,800 to nine groups and sending $60,450 to public works for restroom and landscaping maintenance. These are the mundane, specific line items in your – if you are a town resident – $6.5 million 2023 expense budget. At council’s Nov. 8 meeting Mayor Ramon Hayes said, as he does annually, that he is being cautious, saving for coming large...
Gov. Jay Inslee’s COVID 19 emergency declaration expired Oct. 31, fading away 31 months after he first declared a statewide emergency Feb. 29, 2020. Recall his TV appearances through March as the coronavirus spread worldwide and Inslee moved to expand public health measures. Reflect on the earliest dark days of the coronavirus pandemic when it was an unknown threat whose scourge seemed limitless. Increasingly, everything was shut down and we were all told to stay home. We locked ourselves up in our houses. Schools were shut, church services can...
In researching the 2018 water dispute between Shelter Bay and the Town of La Conner in the Weekly News, searching for “perpetuity” turns up articles from that winter, including an editorial. Perpetuity is a word not often used. The 2011 agreement between the institutions states: “This contract shall remain in force in perpetuity or until such date as the parties hereto shall mutually agree to terminate it.” Rather than write a new editorial, here is the March 2018 one, revised to edit out the now-past train wreck between the board of the Mus...
This is the last week of National Co-op Month, the annual opportunity to consider the importance and potential of cooperative businesses. The theme this year, “Co-ops Build Economic Power,” is, sadly, more hope than reality for co-ops, their member owners and our communities. It is definitely true that specific co-ops here in the Skagit Valley are economic powerhouses. The Puget Sound Food Hub, Skagit Valley Food Co-op, Skagit Farm Supply and credit unions such as BECU and North Coast are thriving, growing opportunities for their member own...
Ballots get mailed to all Skagit County voters Friday. No need to rush your voting. You have till 8 p.m. Nov. 8 to deposit the ballot in a drop box. If you mail it through the post office, do that by Friday, Nov. 4. It has to be postmarked by Nov. 8 to get counted. Warning: Ballots go to Seattle before getting postmarked. The Weekly News is making its annual endorsement of you, the voters, as the most critical people in the election equation. Taking former President Ronald Reagan’s mantra, “trust, but verify,” this paper implores every voter...
The election season is upon us. Ahead of your ballot arriving in two-plus weeks, are you contemplating a better voting system? The four candidates for District 10 State Representative positions were asked to get past two person primary elections. Read all their responses on page 8. We do make changes to our election systems, though slowly, over generations. Until 1865 African Americans could not vote. White women, mostly, gained the vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1919. The passage of the Voting Rights Act universally protected...
Good news. The new La Conner Swinomish Library is on the move, literally, as volunteer book brigades shuttle its precious cargo from the old library site to the new building at 520 Morris Street. A new library, what a wonderful idea realized. Take part in making it happen this week. Call to volunteer. With the library closed and the Weekly News concerned about its – and the public's – access to Town of La Conner documents, this editorial against censorship and for celebrating access to all reading material comes after September's national wee...
While everyone everywhere endorses the concept of truth and reconciliation, the little town of La Conner is fast becoming a tale of two cities – or two towns – as a cadre of residents are increasingly engaged, enraged and feeling isolated from the council members representing them and charged with governing. These residents want the council to stop a three-story condominium building from going up on Center Street behind The Slider Cafe. They want council to honor a 1986 rezone agreement approved by the council that year. Citizens want cou...
How can the La Conner community, residents, businesses and town staff, support the town’s council so they act more effectively? They have met three times in the last week, having special meetings Sept. 16 and 19 after their regular Sept. 13 session. Their meeting this Tuesday was to reverse a poor decision they made Friday. On a small issue – opening to the public a legal memo they paid for on researching the validity of a 1986 contact refund agreement – they made the wrong decision: they voted no. Council members Rick Dole, Mary Wohleb and A...
It is mid-September. The decision train – trains, actually – are boarding. It is time to get on if you do not want to be left behind as Town of La Conner governmental entities prepare trips into 2023 – and beyond. First on the schedule is a Sept. 19 town conversation for residents to come together and talk. It is organized by La Conner Town Council’s communication committee. They want to hear from citizens and listen for celebrations, concerns, trends, hopes and ideas. It starts at 6:30 p.m. in Maple Hall. Come early the next night for the pub...
All mayors love their towns and champion them. Surely that is the case in La Conner. The same with Langley, that “village by the sea,” a 90 minute drive from our town on the Swinomish Channel. Comparisons abound. There will be a side-by-side table in a future issue. Did you know their 1,200 residents fit in one mile footprint while La Conner’s 974 residents squeeze into 0.4 square miles? Those numbers come from censusreporter.org. While Mayor Ramon Hayes was first elected in 2007, Langley Mayor Scott Chaplin was appointed in 2021 when the t...
Monday is Labor Day, a holiday unique to the United States It is a day set aside to honor America’s laboring masses, a term – like class – that is out of favor. The rest of the world unites in solidarity May 1st, May Day, International Workers Day. That day masses of people in countries around the world gather and march. International Workers Day recognizes and remembers that in union there is strength That day affirms, yes it is true, we are all brothers and sisters working together to bring a better world into being for all our fellow broth...
August opened with the news that a federal judge ruled for Whidbey Island resident Paula Spina and the group Citizens of the Ebey’s Reserve for a Healthy, Safe and Peaceful Environment in their lawsuit against the U.S. Navy. The Navy's 2019 plans to expand the number of Growler jets at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island needs to be redone. Why did the Navy lose to these people and the state of Washington, also a plaintiff? The Navy failed to follow the law in its development of an environmental impact statement. The judge did not say the Navy c...
Poor John Cline; he seems to be unhappy that La Conner Weekly News isn’t in lockstep with the right-wing element of his preferred political party. I don’t know John, but if I did here are a few questions that I would pose to him. Each of these talking points is prefaced with the question; Are you proud of your affiliation with the GOP for any of these facts of historic events? George W. Bush’s fifteen year incursion into Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction, where nearly 5,000 U.S. service members lost their lives, began in 2003....
Monday is Memorial Day, the time this nation pauses to remember those who have died, as soldiers and in support of the many wars, declared and not declared, in the almost 160 years since our Civil War ended. “These honored dead “ Lincoln declared at Gettysburg in 1863. No one loses their life in war. Those are lives ended, snuffed out too soon, before their time, unexpected and not wanted to be sacrificed. Those lives were people loved, known, neighbors, friends, family, children and parents. These honored dead were doing their job, normal tas...
Monday is Memorial Day, the time this nation pauses to remember those who have died, as soldiers and in support of the many wars, declared and not declared, in the almost 160 years since our Civil War ended. “These honored dead “ Lincoln declared at Gettysburg in 1863. No one loses their life in war. Those are lives ended, snuffed out too soon, before their time, unexpected and not wanted to be sacrificed. Those lives were people loved, known, neighbors, friends, family, children and parents. These honored dead were doing their job, normal tas...
War. No one wants it, but the option – or possibility, or hope – is readily and easily bandied about. Now Russia has invaded Ukraine, unleashing the greatest military violence in Europe since Hitler’s attack on Poland in 1939. What does it mean? In the long run disaster for Vladimir Putin and disaster for the people of Russia. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 only to retreat in defeat nine years later. The U.S. loses war after war, from Vietnam to our own Afghanistan debacle, 20 years of lives and treasure lost there, o...
Family members of the La Conner High School graduating class of 2021 will attend this year’s graduation ceremonies Friday at 5 p.m in the football stadium. Teachers and staff will be there, but few others. Attendance is limited to keep people safe from the last vestiges of the coronavirus, not quite wrung out of our community or society at large. The 54 teens – the largest graduating class in years – will graduate together, sitting shoulder to shoulder, throwing their hats in the air en masse, getting to hug and kiss each other, a...
It is 2021, the year after the 2020 census and so the time when a Washington commission will – as by some method in every state – plan and determine district boundaries for state and congressional legislative districts. Boring, right? Did you know this happens? Voter, that is citizen, representation, is a key purpose of the census, part of the United States Constitution. In Washington, a bi-partisan commission, its members chosen by Democratic and Republican legislators, will hold public hearings before shaping existing districts...
“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” John reports Jesus telling his disciples that. Knowing and following the truth is good advice in all times from whomever is advising it. This is a time of people embracing truths shared among friends, neighbors and co-collaborators: “My truth” and “our truth,” are shared certainties between allies. But in the larger, civil society – in the realm of facts and laws and newspapers, what served as “your” truth or “our” truth does not always hold up where facts and measurements an...
Dear Greater La Conner Community, Welcome to the La Conner Weekly News. If you are getting the paper for the first time, I hope you will find your community newspaper an enjoyable and worthwhile read. Valued subscribers, I hope this issue meets your expectations and needs. Thank you, subscribers, for your ongoing engagement with the community through these pages. This newspaper exists for the community. That is you. Decades ago, when the local paper was The Puget Sound Mail, every issue said “Co...
This is it. Voting has started in Washington. People are taking heed and voting early. Great. Whether you have voted or not, neither the day you cast your ballot, nor Election Day, Nov. 3, nor the day when results are announced in our Washington state or nationwide will be the most important day. Not the day the presidential winner is declared nor Inauguration Day January 20, 2021 will bring peace to our sadly divided nation or local communities. Like the end of the coronavirus pandemic, we do not know what national healing, recovery from the p...
