Act 3?

Act 1 may have been last Wednesday's sudden and surprise firing of the Fire Chief.  Act 2 was the unprecedented outpouring of comments on APB fire-chief-firing story.
 And, tomorrow (Wednesday at 7 p.m.), we will presumably have Act 3 in which all will be revealed at the Fire Commissioner's special meeting to explain what all this was/is/has been/and will be about.

For historical (at least brief historical) context, it is probably worth noting that these blow ups occur every few years in Point Roberts: there was the fight over the Transfer Station; the uprising over the mandated septic inspection permits; the campaign to rid Point Roberts of unsightly trailers and unused houses; the end of water permits, which ended by giving people water permits; etc.  It is, I suppose, always something.

I have tried to unearth some facts about the Fire Chief to-do, but they are hard to come by.  The minutes of the Fire Commission (posted on its website) are particularly opaque and a friend who used to attend these meetings once told me that she always felt she was attending the public meeting that was held after the 'real' private meeting occurred.  That's how the minutes read, too, although there aren't any minutes for the past 3 months.  Well, good secretarial help is hard to come by nowadays.  The County Council's minutes reveal that it did pay the $50,000 for Kiniski's paramedic training (which was matched by a scholarship from the hospital in Seattle where the training occurred).  And that Kiniski said he couldn't get into the Bellingham training program because he didn't belong to the union.  But I never found any verification of that claim or any explanation of the Bellingham EMT/paramedic MD supervisor to accept Kiniski after the finished the training program.

But i think it is just this absence of facts that makes all this so strange and so unsettling.  We don't need (or want) anything sudden up here.  Best to have things unfold leisurely.  One year they tell us about a plan for waterpipes from Blaine.  Maybe a reminder or an update a year or two later; but we are not expecting any actual pipes for a decade, probably.  It's what's crazymaking at the border: the tendency to have sudden changes: tomatoes, no tomatoes, cut open tomatoes.  No build-up and, as a result, never any explanations for decisions.

Well, tomorrow night may just be more explanations and facts after the decision which is usually the most we get.  But it would be nice if for a change we got to hear the facts and then we got some time to think about it, to talk about it as a community, and to shape our views about the decision.  So far, it seems to be all views, but no facts.

Let us go to the meeting Wednesday night to hear, to listen, to ask for facts/information and to keep our views to ourselves for awhile.