Give Me Money, Please

Point Roberts seems to be suddenly and desperately in need of money. Toward the end of last month, there was a dinner with an auction sponsored by the local Chamber of Commerce to raise money for the 4th of July parade. We’ve had a July 4th parade every year that I’ve been here, but I don’t recall that anybody ever raised money for it previously. It’s been getting a little less impressive every year for the past four years, I’d guess, so maybe money will take the place of lack of participant enthusiasm. Hard to know. In the years long gone when we had fireworks, there used to be a jar to put change in at the USA gas station to pay for them. But that didn’t work either and so we haven’t had fireworks for years.

This month, there was an auction to raise money for Lily Point. Today, there was a flea market at the Cannery (now to be known, apparently, as Pier Point or maybe Pierpoint—I’m not sure which—but why they are playing on the name Pierpont I can’t imagine) to raise money for the ‘Dollars for Scholars’ program which gives money at graduation to kids from here who are going on to college.

Unfortunately, there was another flea market two or three months ago to raise money for the Emergency Preparedness Program (to sustain us in the case of tsunamis or whatever else the universe has in store for us on this rather susceptible and easily isolated peninsula). It is probably the case that we have enough stuff to stock a flea market every week, but I don’t know whether there are enough buyers to make the stocking up worthwhile. I dropped by both events. The earlier one had an awful lot of stuff left over ten minutes before closing, and today’s didn’t have a large clientele at just before noon today when it as almost over, although others told me there were lots of people there in the morning.

Within the next few weeks, we have another auction+dinner to raise money for the Food Bank. And the Lutheran Church sponsors a concert almost every week in order to raise money for a generator for the aforementioned disaster. There’s some kind of on-going attempt to raise money to get a lighthouse for Lighthouse Park, and it’s possible that there’s a third parcel of Lily Point that somebody is raising money to buy. Doubtless more that I am not remembering, but it’s a lot of fund raisingfor a small place.

All good projects, but it’s beginning to seem like the world’s least efficient way to raise money. Maybe they could have one of those dinners where you pay not to go. I appreciate the idea that these are expressions of community, but if the community was so anxious to demonstrate support for these community projects, maybe they could just put up the money directly without having to have an event to go with it. How did ‘Community Chest’ work in Monopoly? Can we have one of those?