The Community Marches On...Or Not

There’s some stirring on the community level here in Point Roberts. That is to say, there is, once again, some group of folks who think we need more community than we’ve already got. Every time there’s a new batch of newcomers, a small number peel themselves off to join in an effort to reinvigorate the Point. Or perhaps to invigorate it for the first time in their sense of community politics. Their usual conclusion is that they need to pump up some old organization that has gone derelict. A year later, the effort is largely abandoned and the group in question returns to its semi-dormant state, with regular meetings attended by a couple of people. I myself have attended a few meetings of several of these organizations during such an invigorating process. Hasn’t worked yet as far as I can see. Largely this is because, I think, that such groups as do exist are largely at cross purposes with one another or are entirely indifferent to one another. It's like a chess game where either nobody wants to take a turn or two people want to move simultaneously, each to block the other.

This time, it is the organizations themselves that are taking the lead, or at least some of them. And therein lies the rub. There are a million organizations on the Point, depending upon how you define ‘organization.’ There’s the Chamber of Commerce, which requires only a very small chamber to meet since there is so little variety of commerce, and there is the Voters’ Association (people who can vote and may or may not own property), and the Property Owners’ Association (the reverse), and the Contractors’ Association, and the Parks and Recreation Board (which may or may not be an organization, depending...). And there’s the Wellness Clinic Board (not to mention the patients of the clinic), and the Volunteer Fire Department; the Quilters Group, the Book Club, the Library employees, the Walking Group, the owners/riders of Icelandic Ponies, Members of the Lutheran Church, a small dance band, the Historical Society, the golf course employees, the Food Bank, the Emergency Preparedness Committee, the group that reads to small children at the library on Tuesday evenings, the arts group that puts on an arts weekend in the summer, and six neighborhood associations, for starters. Well, you can see how this notion of community groups as representative members of the community could pretty easily get out of hand if you are thinking of them as a group.

But the ‘key organizations’ (as their presidents tend to refer to themselves) are thinking of getting together a little council that will meet to (and I quote) ‘prioritize problems in Point Roberts.’ They want to have action: this is not a group to just sit around and talk, they say; this is a group to produce solutions and to have deadlines. And who is to be on this council, I ask? Well, each group in the community can send a representative, they respond. I like to imagine this ‘democratically’ appointed group sitting around the table doing this prioritizing. Since I was at this meeting (largely as an interested observer), I continued to press a role for the quilters’ group as a community organization entitled to representation on this prioritizing group. Eventually, I think, they began to see that a representative from every community group might be something of a handful and might lead to more talk than action.

But, with no way to discern who should have a representative on this mythical council, the meeting was adjourned with a plan to invite anyone who thinks they represent a community group to the next meeting, a month from now. Such a plan certainly offers a strange possibility of legitimacy, but I’m not sure of the direction that this legitimacy would take. In any case, the Point Roberts Quilters Group, with 12 active members, will be represented by me.