Will Stanton Settle In? Part II

I had expected that the tone of the P.R. Taxpayers Association meeting might be somewhat hostile, but it wasn’t. In part, that might have resulted from the fact that Stanton Northwest’s founder was at the meeting, ready to not create a bad impression for his company and its development. In fact, it turns out that he himself intends to move here and is, of course, already a property owner and taxpayer. He kept a low profile in the discussion and when he did speak, he was clear but not confrontational.

The Taxpayers’ current President--this meeting was his swan song—directed the discussion, responding to questions from the audience but making a concerted effort not to let things get out of hand. There was, e.g., no mention of the charge that Stanton had cut down trees with eagle nests. There was some discussion as to whether the kind of development that Stanton was proposing (and its founder obligingly brought a very nice, large, colored map of the proposed design) really fit in with the kind of community that Point Roberts has become—which I would describe as a simultaneously laid-back, crotchety, economically diverse, and individualistic place. Why a gated community within an exclave? Who/what were these future homeowners separating themselves from? And wasn’t it, really, an awfully big development for a place this small; and wasn’t it the case that similar—if smaller--developments here sit around year after year with unsold lots and houses?

There was some discussion of technical questions as to whether the design would make water runoff in the area more problematic because of the porous nature of the soil. Around the question of public access, the Stanton rep had no problems with the idea that people would be able to walk on the trails and streets of the development, as well as on the beach. I wanted to cheer when he spoke despairingly and disparagingly of signs on the beach ordering people to keep off. “Surely,’ he said, ‘the people here should be able to walk on the beach,’ and he promised that the public would be able to walk on the beach of his development. He also suggested that the term ‘gated community’ did not mean a walled-off community. There would be a gate at the entrance, and it would be closed at night, perhaps, but that would not keep people from walking into or on the open space sections of the property.

He also implied that he did not know about the 30% public access option that had previously been in the zoning but that he was not necessarily opposed to that idea. By and large, he was a reasonable voice. But when it came to the easternmost section of the development that the Taxpayers’ think should constitute the 30% public access, he was clear: that he could not and he would not do.

The Taxpayers’ President repeatedly moved back to the 30% public access zoning question, suggesting the possibility of legal action if necessary. But it was not clear to me that there was much to base a legal case on (although I’m not a lawyer nor providing legal advice). I would sum up the meeting as one in which there was a clear undercurrent of unhappiness about the development. Nevertheless, that undercurrent failed to find any focus. Those who opposed this development going forward were urged to write to County officials telling them of their concerns; those who supported it were also urged to convey their views.

Both sides seemed to believe that economic development of the Point is much needed. They disagreed as to whether the proposed development or expanding Lily Point Park would be most likely to provide the desired kind of economic development. No one offered the view that further economic development might not be the best way or indeed a way to keep the Point Roberts they want to live in. And in the face of the current financial collapse, it is very hard to imagine that any bank is going to be funding such an inauspicious development in such an unlikely locale. But that doesn’t mean that the county won’t issue permits: not their job to pick economic winners or losers.

At the end of the discussion, all questions asked if not answered, the Taxpayers Association elected six new members to its board of ten (plus one alternate). By my count, at least three of the six, are generally supporters of real estate/commercial development on the Point. Among these new board members is the founder of Stanton Northwest: the guy at the meeting . So now he will be able to negotiate with himself when the Taxpayers take on Stanton Northwest. I guess Stanton is settling in, for the moment, but come spring, we’ll be looking to see what happens. Honk!

Will Stanton Settle In? Part I

Today, in a brief outside time, I hear the snow geese flying overhead. They come in from somewhere farther north and settle in for a comfy winter in the northwest. Flocks of them have been flying overhead for several days. They call to one another, ‘Honk! Honk! What’s it look like down there? Should we stay there?’ And eventually they make a decision, stop honking and settle in to a temporarily unused agricultural field.

Today was the Point Roberts Taxpayers Association Annual Meeting. The group has a Board that meets more regularly but the membership seems to show up only once a year. Today’s meeting was to inform the troops about the status of Stanton Northwest Properties plan to create the fabulous gated community of 100+ homes, each costing $1 million, next door to the Lily Point Park. Or maybe it was to incite the troops. Or maybe it was to confuse the troops since at the end of the meeting there was a peculiar coda about the urgency of global warming, which I’m pretty sure Stanton has nothing to do with.

Anyway, the current unhappiness of the Taxpayers is that the County government which, some 8-10 years ago wanted a new zoning plan that required endless meetings here in Point Roberts, somewhere along the way changed that zoning plan, after it had been formally accepted by the County Council, without notifying the people on the Point.

Here’s the history as I heard it today:
1. Originally, the zoning permitted only one house per five acres in areas of the Point that weren’t developed (i.e., large parcels).
2. The new zoning plan (which might have been called ‘The Character Plan'--I'm not sure about the name) that local people worked on and the county accepted created something called ‘Transitional Zones’ for areas involving five or more acres. In such areas, a developer could have one house per acre (instead of one house per 5 acres) if he clustered the houses and left 50% of the parcel as open space. A second option was also included: a developer could have one house per acre if he clustered the houses AND provided 30% of the parcel as open space, including community access and trails, as well as beach access if beach was accessible
3. Sometime after the acceptance of zoning plan #2, the County eliminated the choice involving the 30% open access. That is, the option that required public access to beaches, trails, whatever, was eliminated entirely. Only the clustered houses +50% open-space option remains. Strangely (?), the county does not seem to know how this change occurred.

The Stanton Northwest development is designed to meet the 50% open-space requirement. The Taxpayers wants it to meet the 30% requirements with public access, and are making vague noises about demanding #1 as a fallback position if they can’t have the 30%+ public access. Stanton has not yet received permits for this development and owns only one of the two parcels of land that it needs for this development. According to a Stanton principal at the meeting , the piece the company owns (about 30%) involves the company’s current investment ($4 million, involving bank loans). The company is said to have an option to buy the second, larger property. The 30% that the Taxpayers’ want set aside is the property that Stanton has already purchased. This parcel is next to the already completed Lily Point Park and that is why that is the part that the Taxpayers want devoted to community use. The Stanton group: not only not so much, but not at all.

That is the nature of the dispute. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll try to summarize the discussion at today’s 2.5 hour meeting. Honk!

Meeting, Writing, and Writhing in Coils

Another two-event day, or in this case a two-event night. The Community Center on Thursday evening hosted both the P.R. Community Association monthly meeting and the monthly meeting of the Point Roberts’ branch of The Regional Assembly of Text Letter Writing Club (whose main headquarters is in Vancouver). Unfortunately, both were scheduled for 7 p.m. Seeing as how I am the note taker at the Community Association, I concluded that duty required me to go there, rather than across the hall to the Letter Writing Club.

The Community Association continues to explore or maybe just to try to understand its potential role on the Point. The other main all-inclusive groups on the Point are the long-time Taxpayers’ Association and the Voters’ Association, both of which wax and wane over time. The former, of course, includes Canadians and Americans who own property here, and the latter includes U.S. citizens here who can vote in the U.S. Both these groups have, historically, been organized around political action, either with respect to actual elections or to dealing with government entities (federal, state, and, county). The Community Association, an organization less than a year old, is understood to be open to anyone who lives here for at least some part of the year and focuses on smaller scale projects to improve the community life, particularly projects that do not require involvement in any significant way with government agencies/entities.

Thus, its first task has been to rebuild the local Community Events sign, but it has taken much longer than anyone expected and has led to some discouragement. Nevertheless, the group perseveres, and I with it, hoping that its next task (putting out a questionnaire to residents about what kinds of projects would most interest them) will move a little faster and will provide it with a better sense of what people want or care about here in Point Roberts. But I continue to be puzzled about the actual process: how does a group without a clear sense of purpose move forward? I worked for years creating ethics committees in hospitals, and that was hard enough to do, given the severe institutional hierarchies involved. But at least I understood where those groups were trying to go. Not so true with this one, but then it is not my job to make it happen, either.

By the time I got to the Writing Club meeting, everyone in that group was packing up and going home. What the ten or so people who had been there had done was to write letters on old-time hand-operated typewriters. They had a bunch of them there, ranging from ones like the old-time Underwood upright that I learned to type on in 1951, to smaller, ‘modern’ portable typewriters like the one I had in college in 1954. Although I actually made a small living in graduate school by typing Ph.D. dissertations, which means that I was pretty fast and very accurate, I am sorry to say that 25 years of computer use has rendered me actually too fast for a manual typewriter (the keys kept getting caught together as they rose to imprint the paper). Furthermore, I am also absolutely too weak in the little finger (both left and right hands) to get the a, q, z, and p keys to make even a faint imprint.

The first practical typewriter wasn’t invented until 1872. I remember years ago thinking about how George Eliot and Charles Dickens wrote their very, very long manuscripts by hand, with not quill pens, but stick pens. And then when they went back to edit their manuscripts, they got to write them by hand a second time. A book could take a very long time to write that way. It does make me wonder why they didn’t think about the possibility of shorter novels. Well, they missed the typewriter age. But now, although I actually did write a book on a typewriter in the early 80’s, I can barely remember how it would have worked to have to retype it every time I did an edit. Writing now is an easy four or five edit job, but all done within the text of the first draft.

The Writing Club is not encouraging the use of manual typewriters for manuscript writing. It is encouraging its attendees to write letters--personal letters--the kind we used to write to friends and relatives far away and put in an envelope and send with a stamp. I wrote such a letter to an old friend (with a pen, as it happened) four or five years ago. She wrote back (also with a pen on paper and in a stamped envelope) that receiving my letter made her feel like she was a character in a Jane Austen novel. That’s a gift to give to someone! You live long enough, all kinds of ordinary things become rarities.

Playing Catch-Up

Eagles. Jeff at lilypoint.org says that the list of eagle nests is not publicly available (wisely) because eagles and their parts are in great demand on the black market, even though satisfying that demand is definitely illegal in almost all circumstances. He adds, ‘eagles are the most monitored animal in the world. WDFW has GPS locations on every single nest in the State, and the program has a 30 year history. That is why people like Stanton NW can't get away with just removing a nest and think that nobody will notice or be able to prove that a nest was there.’ The lilypoint.org site has extensive information about eagles and their nests, so that's the place to go for it.

Pandora. Someone mentioned this site and it occurred to me that people might not know about it or how it works. If you listen to internet radio, this is a wonderful resource. Pandora.com is a music site where you set up your own music ‘station.’ You do that by giving the site the name of someone whose music you like. In the commenter’s case, it was Bonnie Raitt. So, let’s say you, too, choose Bonnie Raitt for your first station. Pandora then plays Bonnie Raitt’s music for you, but also other performers who are similar in various ways to Raitt. If you disagree about the algorithm’s assessment, you can say, ‘NO,’ don’t play that song again, and if you disagree twice more about that performer's recordings, then the algorithm never again chooses that performer. You can have many different ‘stations’ based on different kinds of music/musicians, and you can also have something called ‘quick mix’ in which music from all your stations (or all the stations you choose at that moment) plays randomly. It is a wonderful way to hear music you know and love as well as music you might love if only you knew about it. No cost. The only downside I know of is that it is available to you only if you and your computer are both in the U.S.

A similar site that does work in Canada is jango.com. Its music algorithm, it seems to me, is not quite as good as Pandora’s, but when I’m in Canada, it’s plenty good enough.

Music to Someone's Ears

A friend who lives on the other side of the U.S.-Canadian border urges me by email to write in protest to the CBC. It seems that the CBC2 program that he used to listen to while driving home, which played Mozart to calm his weary and presumably frazzled brain, has been replaced by a new CBC2 radio program which plays the music of the DHKS, which appears to be pronounced ‘ducks’ and which appears to be the name of a band out of Winnipeg. My friend is not happy.

Probably none of us old folks is happy about this, even if we are not regular 5 p.m. Mozart listeners. The CBC, which in many ways is one of the crown jewels of Canada—even more than U.S. public radio is a crown jewel of U.S. radio broadcasting—has come upon hard times. The CBC is adequately funded by the government. It is not always having to beg listeners to give them money.

What the CBC is facing up to is a generational challenge. People who listen to CBC radio are old people. And if only old people listen to it, then the old people will eventually depart the radio scene in their grand departure from all scenes, and then the younger people will no longer be interested in funding the CBC. So the CBC embarked about eight years ago on a project to make its programming more relevant to younger people (and, alas, less relevant, to its long time and older listeners).

I have never been a big listener to CBC2, which is the classical radio channel that my friend is so unhappy about, but I surely have noted how the programming on CBC1 and 2 has changed. I used to listen to CBC1 much of the day, even though I could just as easily listen to U.S. public radio. But no longer since the Big Change. Programs about books and reading are replaced by programs about bands from Winnepeg; interviews and conversations with people involved in serious issues are replaced with interviews and conversations with singers and bands from the world of rock and contemporary popular music and people who blather about 'human interest' matters. I don’t even know the right words to categorize the bands. They’re not my mother’s music, for sure, and not mine, either; maybe not even my children’s, but possibly my grandchildren’s. Even a program that plays some of the best music on the CBC and hosted by a young-ish classical/jazz pianist who is a wonder in his knowledge of music and his ability to talk about it is cluttered about 40% of its running time with mindless babble that reminds me of Valley Girl talk. This program, ‘The Key of Charles,’ is one of the most schizophrenic radio music programs I’ve ever heard. I listen now and then and am always charmed by the actual music and appalled by the conversation. Maybe it’s the CBC’s attempt to keep both audiences attending. It does make me cringe, even as i continue to listen.

I heard someone talking on the radio a few months ago about some study showing that most people’s musical tastes solidify by the time they’re 35, and after that, they rarely buy CD’s or otherwise choose to listen to any one they didn’t listen to before that time. I mentally checked my own purchases and preferences and was pleased to identify quickly at least a half a dozen new people in my listening repertoire who showed up long after my 35th year. However, upon reconsideration, I realized that almost all the new people were actually old people: performers who were recording before I was 35 and I just hadn’t gotten around to listening to them until well after then. Miles Davis and Bill Evans, for example. And the few who didn’t fit that category? Well, Kristen Chenoweth who would have been the brightest star on Broadway if only she’d gotten there 20 or 30 years sooner; The Ahn Trio, whom I first heard playing Jimmy Hendrix’s ‘Rider in the Rain;’ and Eva Cassidy, who also is a singer of the 70’s who wasn’t born soon enough to have performed then. Madeleine Peyroux? Well, mostly she sounds like Billy Holladay, who was way before my thirties.

I guess the CBC is entitled, like the moving finger, to write and move on to the ‘DHKS.’ It’s just that us old ‘uns are stuck back at the beginning of the music.

Pie and Coffee from the Sky

With everything in the financial world going down, I thought I might spend the day hiding under the bed. On the other hand, perhaps a perfect day for going up. That was Ed’s thinking, so he went helicopter flying today. To fly the helicopter, he must cross two borders each way plus about 100 miles of driving each way. Unfortunately, Canada has no tradition of renting helicopters to licensed pilots. In Canada, if you want to fly a helicopter, you have to either own your own, fly one for your employer, or be a student. Not in any of those categories, Ed takes the long drive down to Skagit County, in Washington, to find an available helicopter. It’s about the size of a large dragonfly, but it holds two people, as long as his passenger doesn’t weigh more than 240 pounds.

He left early this morning with a long list of other things to do (Home Depot, Trader Joe’s, etc.) after the flight; during the flight, he was going to visit a friend up on the Washington border who actually does own a helicopter. But his friend’s helicopter has been in Los Angeles for about six months having itself rebuilt. This rebuild has to be done every 2200 hours and it is a very pricey activity; definitely enough to make you think very carefully about actually owning one of these machines. But apparently it is not a very rapid activity. Obviously, it doesn’t take six months, but I guess there are some people who get priority in the line to have one’s helicopter rebuilt and our friend is not one of those people.

When I realized that a futon bed frame actually doesn’t have enough room for me to hide under, I went to the quilt workshop to entertain myself, to detract myself, and to get something done—primarily making fabric portraits of financial titans of our time for a spring show (portrait 1 above). Around 2:00, there was a knock on the door. Almost nobody comes knocking on the door of my workshop except the quilting students and it wasn’t time for one of them. To my surprise upon opening the door, there was Ed--who had landed in our neighbor’s field--asking whether I’d like to join him in a cup of coffee. Not even Valentine’s Day, but a pretty lovely day when one’s spouse flies up to have a cup of coffee. Not really possible to land a helicopter in your neighbor’s yard in Los Angeles, unless you have a neighbor with a very impressive estate. But here in Point Roberts? Easy as pie. Also, it almost made up for that additional 500 point drop.

Art/Life/Art/Life

A Point Roberts real estate agent said to me once, ‘You never know what you are going to find when you knock on a door in Point Roberts.’ She was talking about the fact that although the outside of a house may be simple cottage, inside it may be startlingly sophisticated design. Other contrasts also happen, as today demonstrated.

Friends had invited us to visit the home of a local artist who did assemblage. Nobody was quite sure what this translated into in this particular case, but I was thinking something like Louise Nevelson. Instead, more something like Andy Goldsworthy by way of a really good thrift store, and both indoors and outdoors. And certainly not what I expected when we arrived at the house. It’s an ordinary looking house about 2 blocks from us, a house that I’ve walked by a thousand times, always admiring the peach trees that grow so vigorously behind the front fence. I spoke with the older, Canadian owners some years ago when I was out on a walk but they sold the house some three or four years ago and I had never run into the new owners.

We entered into a typically old-time kind of Point Roberts house, 4 or 5 small and crowded rooms and a yard also crowded with fruit trees and plants. But the rooms of the house--all the rooms--were filled not only with the required furnishings, but also with arranged pieces: dozens and dozens of them. Many small containers, often with their lids closed, all to be opened and investigated. A box filled with other boxes, each bearing one or two small pieces of old-fashioned jewelry, each with a story that the artist/gatherer could tell, but each reminding me of a similar piece I own or had once owned with a story that I could tell. A checker board with pieces that were never part of any checker game I’ve ever played, but clearly a game I could play if only someone would help me to find out the rules. Kitchen objects arranged carefully on a tray, drawing attention to qualities they share other than their practical purpose, although also including that. A small, old-fashioned travel case inhabited by a few, well-worn stuffed animals. I had a travel case like that 55 years ago when I went on a train trip, and beloved stuffed animals even longer ago. They would love to have lived in such an elegant home.

Outdoors, the yard was filled with many fruit trees, including a gorgeous pear whose fruit seemed as carefully arranged as the pieces in the house. In addition, every otherwise available area of the yard was filled with arrangements similar to those in the house, but here using rocks, shells, driftwood, metal, gravel, the objects of the earth, rather than the objects of human making. A small rock whose shape accommodated another and much smaller rock in only one precise location. Carefully arranged bird feathers gathered from the beach. Everywhere I looked, I saw the owner’s/artist’s hand at work, bringing together pieces/objects that had not previously met but that he imagined could benefit by the introduction. Such a great deal of thought and concern in this matchmaking. Too much to see in an hour or two, but the work easily conveys an attitude toward being on this earth that is genuinely inspired. We are here; other things are here; pay attention to them: see them as well as use them, respect them, enjoy them, take time for them.

No small surprise to find that the author of all this is a physician who lives here only part of the year and otherwise travels the world. He is, he says, an arranger of things. Right behind the doors of a perfectly ordinary little house. You can see his work here.