Resolving 306 Center Street

In his July 20 decision on the Atkinson’s conditional use permit for their 306 Center Street project, hearing examiner David Lowell starts with a premise, that “the validity and potential applicability of the Contract Rezone [is] in question.” He cannot resolve it because his file is without needed “additional information in the Examiner’s record.” In remanding – sending it back – to the Town, he directs the administrative staff to pull the developer and his challengers into resolving the question by “allow[ing] the site owners and parties of record for file LU21-54CU (-56CU, actually) to submit materials relevant to the items remanded back to the Town.”

Meanwhile, Scott Thomas, the town administrator and its attorney, seeks to hire another attorney to resolve the validity of the 1986 Blades agreement with the Town. That will be a recommendation that perhaps the town council discusses and approves funding for, presumably. The costs and the length of time to sort through and have an attorney provide analysis and conclusions to council and staff is not yet known. But are there other options? There are.

What if a historian is the better suited professional to help the staff and council sort through the records of council minutes, planning commission hearings and signed agreements dating back to the 1985-1987 period? What if the validity – that is the legitimacy and legality of the agreement – is not the issue?

Why would it not be valid? The concern is that Town staff did not file the agreement with the county auditor. But on the before side of this missed filing, official meeting minutes show the town council approving the agreement with the Blades on Dec. 8, 1986. Town officials, the mayor and town attorney, signed the document on Dec. 21, as did the Blades.

The agreement states, above the signatures, “Owner agrees and hereby authorizes Town to record the original or a copy of this agreement with the Skagit county Auditor so that this agreement will become a matter of public notice to subsequent purchasers and shall become an encumbrance upon the land.”

So will the Town, as an institution, have its present officials, mayor, council and town attorney, honor and follow the document their predecessors signed?

Predecessor town attorney Dianne Goddard, now a judge on the Skagit County District Court, signed that document in 1986. The next summer, as town attorney, she had exchanges with a lawyer representing Vintage Oil over storage tanks on the Center Street property. In their respective letters each lawyer references the agreement, Goddard writing, “[i]n receiving that contract rezone, the Blades represented to the Town of LaConner that they planned to remove the oil storage tanks.”

The Vintage Oil lawyer responded: “Mr. and Mrs. Blades have furnished me with a copy of the Contract Rezone with the Town of LaConner dated December 21, 1986.”

The down time around the Christmas holiday might have been the fly-in-the-ointment factor and the reason the agreement never made it to the auditor’s office. But attorney Goddard plainly vouched for its legitimacy and legality in citing it the next July.

Instead of questioning the agreement with the Blades, the Town needs to accept it. It happened. It is history. The hearing examiner not having documents in his case is a poor reason for questioning the validity of that agreement.

“Government should be by the people, for the people – and we should continue to do a better job in terms of connecting to people," said Robyn Merrill, executive director of Maine Equal Justice Partners, in an article in The Nation this spring.

Every town’s government ought to be partners in seeking equal justice and connecting with its people.