What will 2022’s records be?

Anyone paging through a stack of 2021’s Weekly News will find the obvious bright spots: the Fourth of July parade, concert and fireworks, an absolutely stupendous Halloween Parade and the lighted boat parade. The most wonderful record, set month after month, was the over-the-top Town of La Conner sales tax revenue collections. Facing year two of the pandemic a year ago, the town guessed it might collect $328,202 in 2021. Way too conservative. Sales tax revenue is likely to exceed $630,000, 62% over the forecast.

That surprise sales tax revenue note played alongside a year of staggering events, none of which were wanted. The weather outside was frightful, first to last, from wind and snow storms in January and February to record summer heat, drought, November rains and ending with, yes, record snow and cold.

We experienced minimum temperature records set the last six days of December at the Washington State University Extension Mount Vernon weather station. November’s record 8.1” of rain was 0.3” more than the previous high set in 2015.

Last year’s headlines listed on this page are many, but not all, of the top news stories for weather and COVID-19.

Cases of the novel coronavirus cases in Skagit County are equally bad – and sad. At 2020’s end there were 3,105 COVID-19 cases, as the headline reads. That number more than doubled, to 6,868 after the delta variant led to 1,353 cases in August alone. Alas, that number has doubled again, with 13,886 cases reported at the end of 2021.

There are almost certainly over 14,000 COVID-19 cases in the county and yes, bad weather kept some people from getting tested.

The pandemic prevented people from meeting in person, which kept citizen involvement in their government from being as robust as many wanted. A year after the La Conner Town Council first heard that the Hedlin family offered to sell the town its almost two acres on Maple Avenue used for decades as a ballfield, the town sold the property the same day they purchased it in April 2021. Those that wanted vigorous discussion of the issue joined the debate too late to halt the sale.

There is not a formal debate, but a large faction of county residents are actively declining getting vaccinated. Their coronavirus infections are the vast majority of the hospitalizations and deaths in the county and nationally. Here, 151 people have died and 805 have been hospitalized. Each number is around four times higher than the county’s 2020 year-end statistic.

Universal vaccination would have greatly reduced all the grim data – preventable deaths, avoidable hospitalizations –experienced in neighboring households in this county.

Does it seem like yesterday that we were entering 2020, with a choice to project ahead to a visionary and sustainable future? Or, conversely, have the last two years dragged on forever, a never before drudge through the novel coronavirus pandemic? It has been two years of a never ending hall of mirrors, where one turn of the corner brings not a clearer look at ourselves and our neighbors but what must be a distortion, as reflections of ourselves and each other too often show us farther apart, not closer together

At the heady start of projecting a 2020 vision it was still true that we were living through a time of tremendous uncertainty, change and possibility. That is as true now, but conditions are objectively more difficult on all fronts than at the start of 2020.

In Skagit County, as nationally, we are more polarized, less able to join together in political and policy common purpose. The very concept of public health – protecting the health of the community – is debated, as people value their beliefs ahead of science, policy and their neighbors, or even their families.

While the future is uncertain, it will certainly come. If we, as a people, do not jointly agree on the direction, we will certainly not get there together and perhaps not arrive at our hoped for futures at all.