Hey! Somebody Opened a Restaurant

The plums are excessively with us.  That's what comes from planting FOUR Italian plum trees in one backyard (along with numerous other fruit trees).  Maybe somebody gave them to the many back previous owners/planters.  Who knows?  In any case, each year I grieve the fact that we have too many plums and that almost everyone I know also has too many plums and that one can eat a certain number of them and make some jam and make a plum klafouti or two and even freeze a few bags, but there is no way that two people can use up all those plums.

This year, i decided to do a series of small quilted pieces all based upon one of  the plum trees.  I do one 4"x6" piece each week and, as I get enough done, sew them into rows.  By December, I'll have 49 separate pieces and a wall quilt about 3 feet by 4 feet, and also a much closer understanding and appreciation of at least that one plum tree than I have previously had.  (You can see the first 34 or so here.  The site includes the "quiltlet" and the photo that I took to work it from.)

So I find myself paying a lot of attention to the plum tree because I have to produce a different image from it each week.  In the interest of getting a feel for the quantity of plums, I put a blue tarp under it so I could actually see the plums when they ripen and fall.  If I didn't do this, I really can't see them because they fall into the somewhat long grass and, like dyed eggs at Easter, they hide themselves very well until you step on them and they go squash underfoot.

This afternoon I was looking out the kitchen window at the tree and 'what to my wondering eyes should appear' but a single raccoon, maybe one of last year's young raccoons, sitting on the blue tarp and systematically eating every single plum in sight.  I've never noticed the raccoons or the deer to pay any attention to the plums.  Similarly, they appear to be indifferent to apples.  But this raccoon had a taste for it; or maybe he just liked the idea of there being a tablecloth.  When the plums were pretty much all gone, she hustled off, perhaps to tell the rest of her family about the new restaurant that had just opened.

Raccoons!  They just never cease to interest and entertain me...

Just Bein' Peaceful

On Saturday, International Peace Day was celebrated by a small but enthusiastic band of folks at Lighthouse Park in the mid-day.  Maybe 25 or so people, little kids to elderlies, met up, displayed peace flags, sang some peace songs, danced, spoke about their own efforts to contribute to peace all round and peace in their own lives.  Then we all shared an extremely varied lunch and talked to one another about many things, not just peace or the world's lack thereof.

We are mostly all, of course, frustrated about the amount of violence that is ongoing throughout the world, pretty much regardless of whom it is directed toward.  There's a terrible human need to focus on who is to blame?, as if that, once settled, would mean that everything else would then work out just fine.  But that's pretty much a fool's errand outside of a courtroom, where the authorized task is to determine guilt and innocence.  Nevertheless, it is worthwhile, surely, to spend a couple of hours a year, down at the beach on a sunny day reminding ourselves that peace is our aspiration, even if not a realistic goal, in our own lives and in the whole world.  Be of good hope, my grandmother (born in 1898) would say.

Whoever broke the arm off the statue in the Seattle Peace Park surely was not of good hope.  What would bring about such an action...twice?  Some things I will never understand, never even be able to imagine, no matter how hard I try.

Next year, think to come to the Peace Day meeting here in Point Roberts.  It's an honorable event and deserves more attendance if only to remind us on that one day that we can try, once again, to be of good hope.

In Which We Discuss Transparency

Tonight's Fire Commissioner's meeting had a single purpose, to appoint a new Commissioner to replace Mr. Gellatly.   However, Chairman Meursing first offered a few bits of homely advice to the 20 or so attendees.  First, he was happy to see them there and hoped they would continue to attend in the future, though it was unfortunate that they had not shown up in the past.  This allowed him to segue into his main theme: "it would have helped with transparency."

Transparency, it turns out, is the Commissioners' hope for the future operation of the fire district.  They had, he said, never bothered much with it in the past, adding that that was probably because no one came to the meetings so there was no one there to be transparent to.  (I would like to add here how I understand transparency in this peculiar Washington format: it is to discuss and make decisions only in public session (with some exceptions for discussing personnel issues in Executive Session because of privacy concerns), and thus to establish a clear and publicly available record of the commissioners' actions.  It does not require the public to be there, although in most instances, the local news media represent the public's interests in the matter of transparency.)

Next, Mr. Meursing's desire for transparency led him to demand that in the future the All Point Bulletin's coverage of the Fire Commissioner meetings should no longer be slanted, subjective and inaccurate.  Such practices must be replaced by fairness and objectivity and presenting all sides.

And then we went on to the "transparent" act of appointing a new Commissioner.  Two individuals had applied for the post.  Each had sterling resumes, it was said by the Commissioners.  Each was "interviewed" which meant that they were asked whether they understood that "the Board acts as a unit, not as individuals" whatever that might mean.  Each was offered the opportunity to say what they had to offer to the position: one talked about the importance of listening to others; the other talked about applying his previous experience to this job.  We were offered brief summaries of their CV's.  At no point did either Commissioner ask either of the future Commisioners any insightful questions, or even how long they'd been in P.R., or whether they'd ever held public office of any kind, or had any comparable experience.  No questions were allowed by attendees.

And then: voila!  Mr. Riffle moved to name Candidate B as the new Commissioner and Mr. Meursing seconded the motion.  And lo, and behold, Candidate B became the new Commissioner.    Candidate A was the guy who irritated Meursing so much at the last meeting that he almost threatened to have him ejected.  But I don't know that that influenced the vote.

And then the public got to talk.  I felt the need to point out to Meursing that if you attack the newspaper for slanted, etc., coverage, you'd better have some examples of it because otherwise it is just his useless and loose opinion flopping around: and bad manners to boot.  The APB editor urged Meursing to write the paper anytime he had questions about the accuracy of its coverage, assuring him that his letter would be printed and any inaccuracies corrected.  Meursing, to my ear, seems to think that if HE thinks something is biased or slanted or inaccurate, then that's all there is to be said.  Meg Olson was only there for the last 5 minutes of the August 15 meeting, it was charged, and thus how could her coverage have been accurate?  Yet, the facts--based upon the minutes--were as I stated them in a blog post a few days ago: the meeting was in public session for only 3 or 4 minutes, so what would she have missed?  Well, said Meursing, she talked to Nick and she didn't talk to me so she got only one side.  Would you have talked to her about why you fired Nick, Meursing was asked.  No, he replied.  So....?????

Another run around about the re-paving of the fire station parking lot followed:

Q: At a July meeting, they had made one of those 1-2 motions to have Riffle contact somebody to prepare a request for bids for this $91,000 job.  Had that bidding request ever moved forward?
A:  No, says Mr. Riffle.  We decided not to go ahead with it because of the cost and not knowing how much money we'd be having this year.
Q: Ah, but in the interests of transparency, when was that decision not to go ahead made, since there is never any mention of it in the minutes after that July record?
A:  We didn't make a decision; we tabled it.
Q:  Well, to table it, don't you have to make a decision to do that?
A:  No, insisted Meursing.  We didn't make a decision.  We just tabled it.  That's Washington State rules.
And with that, the meeting ended.

I'm hoping that the new Commissioner, Jeff Wilmot, is going to get a quick lesson in "Washington State Rules" and share them with the rest of us.  Really soon.  To help the Transparency, at the very least.

An Open Letter to the Fire Commissioners

I received a copy of a letter to the Fire Commissioners today and, with the author's permission, am posting it here for wider distribution of what seems to me an extremely reasonable request:

After several special meetings and a regular meeting with more sturm und drang than is good for a community of mostly retired people, I have a suggestion.

We've had little real information about what necessitated actions that got us to all this … hints that if we "only knew", we'd understand, or that at some point in the future the whole story could be told, on to Mr. Carleton's saying that he wanted to "take the department in a new direction".  None of the foregoing is particularly enlightening, not so much about past decisions and actions but what it is we are moving toward and the necessity of it.

My suggestion is that at the next regular meeting we begin a dialog between the commissioners and the citizenry who show up about what new direction the department is headed toward, why we needed a new chief to implement that direction, and what is in it for us taxpayers, residents, and voters … how will we benefit from this new direction?  Are we in agreement with this new direction?  (Here is where the commissioners shift into salesman mode.)  Do we have suggestions to enhance this new direction?  How long before we realize any benefits from this new direction? 

Finally, I would hope with real information instead of the many rumors AND instead of being given little to no information at all from our elected (or appointed by our elected) representatives, we can make informed decisions instead of decisions made in haste, anger, uncertainty, and fear. 

We live in a democracy.  You are our elected representatives, but we do, after all, have the ultimate say-so in whether we agree with your decisions and whether we're willing to pay for what it might cost.  I often tell my cats that I am in charge because I have opposable thumbs; fellows, we voters are the opposable thumbs here.  Best to remember that.

Y'all might want to begin to mend some fences.  That starts with a dialog and hard information being disseminated.  It's been a very long while since most of us have been told by our parents/minders to sit down, be quiet, and do as we're told.  I think you might agree that tactic has not been sitting well with those who take the time to attend the meetings.  While no one can know the feelings of the entirety of residents here, I've certainly heard more negatives than I have positives.  And I've had to tell a great many would-be opinionated writers that I cannot put their opinions in Interface. 

I hope you will give hard consideration to beginning the dialog with us … and the sooner, the better. 

Patricia Turner Birchall

The Lives of Raccoons

Last night, the raccoons blew through, removed the clothespin bag from the clothesline, dragged it around the yard, removed all the clothespins, spread them around independently of the location of the clothespin bag, and then went somewhere else to cause some other dislocation.  The lives of raccoons are an endless mystery to me.  It's not easy to get those clothespins out of the bag even when you want to hang up the laundry if the bag is not hanging on the line.

What do raccoons want with clothespins?

A friend replies:

What do raccoons want with clothespins?  To play with them.  That is surely the only answer.

I have several of the soft vinyl sprinkler hoses in different places of the garden.  Once, a young raccoon took a strange passion to one of them.  He managed to drag it from the front yard to the back yard, up a tree, and on the roof of my neighbor's shed.  She called me to come see something I would not believe.

The young raccoon had the 50-foot hose laid out on the roof of aforementioned shed.  He/She was scuttling around on said roof, picking up sections of it, rubbing it all over his/her face and even standing up and rubbing it all over his/her belly.  He did this for a great long while until it became too dark to watch.

The next morning, we retrieved the 50-foot green vinyl sprinkler hose.  It was useless, of course … raccoons have very nasty claws, and this young raccoon had done a real number on it.

Clothespin fetish.  Sprinkler hose fetish. 

We do not know the secret life of any of the creatures we share space with.

Added, 9/17:  More on raccoon life.  Last night, the raccoons showed up and unlooped a house HOSE that was stored on the tree.  I assume they read the blog and remembered how much fun that hose had been previously.  I don't know whether to be more surprised that they use computers or that they read....

Starting Over

I do think that if the remaining Commissioners would just stand up and apologize for having created such a mess that it might be possible to stagger on until the next election with a little less animosity.  But that is probably asking too much of guys who haven't really spent any previous time on the political circuit where you learn, if only the hard way, that the worst action is not the deed but the obscuring/hiding of the deed.  As Nixon learned the hard way, it's not the crime that will get you; it's the cover-up.

Nonetheless, I found myself poking around on the net last night looking for the crime.  One place I looked was at the minutes of the August 15 meeting, the meeting where Kiniski was fired.  The Fire District minutes are always written with an economy that is bracing.  They are short, to the point, and missing all sense of human interaction (as is appropriate, of course).  But to read, say, the minutes of the August 22 meeting (during which there was great drama of hissing, booing, threats, etc.) is to make one doubt that the minutes had anything at all in common with the actual meeting as experienced by those who attended it.

So, too, with the August 15 meeting minutes.  This is the meeting attended only by Meursing and Riffle.  It begins at 7:01 and goes into Executive Session at 7:03 for discussion of personnel matters.  At 7:12, Chief Kiniski joins the Executive Session meeting.  The Executive Session ends at 7:23.  Thus, by simple arithmetic, the executive session lasts 22 minutes.  The Commissioners return to Public
Session (where business is supposed to be conducted in full view of the public) at 7:23 and vote to fire Kiniski.  They also discuss four additional items including paying Shields $500/month for equipment maintenance, interviewing for a clerk position, and approving some procedure for the volunteers.  All this 'Public Meeting' takes two minutes.  No attendee apparently speaks or is allowed to speak.  No discussion of the motion takes place. The meeting adjourns at 7:25.

Now aside from not understanding how you could possibly do all that open session stuff in 2 minutes (!), the critical part is the 7:03 to 7:23 period: that is when we find Mrs. Scarlett in the Library with the Gun.

You can then read the minutes of the meeting before and the meeting after, but nothing will help you to understand how we got from there to here .  And that is why the Commissioners need to either explain or apologize.  The community's distress, confusion, anger, etc., are really not going to go away if the Commissioners just turn off the lights, pull the blinds down, and pretend they're not at home.  Hope is not, really, ever a plan.

Never actually boring

H.L. Mencken, the great critic of American political life, had this to say about events like the Fire Commissioners' meetings:  

"Herein lies the chief merit of democracy, when all is said and done; it may be clumsy, it may be swinish, it may be unutterably incompetent and dishonest, but it is never dismal-its processes, even when they irritate, never actually bore."

Which is what makes writing about them so difficult.  When you attend a meeting like last night, you are struck by all those qualities.  If I were a New York Drama Critic, "Irritating But Not Boring" might be a good headline for my review.  If I were an investigative reporter for a particularly aggressive newspaper, "Swinish, Unutterably Incompetent and Dishonest" would be the more likely running head.

But, the thing is, to get either or both of those judgments, you'd have to have been there. The major issue of the meeting, as a result of the previous meeting on Sept. 5, was the Fire Chief's contract.  To do justice to the meeting, it really does not suffice simply to summarize what the posted contract says.  Nevertheless, that's what i'll be doing next.  

(The posted contract, signed September 5 is located here if you're inclined to read it.  Sections A and B (section B was under discussion last night is here.)  Section B is where 'errors' were 'corrected' and it is at the bottom of the linked pages.)

The changes were made in Section B which primarily addresses benefits.  The original Section B (from September 5) provoked a lot of irritation from residents, especially because it provided pretty much full-time benefits (e.g, 10 hours of vacation for each month's work) for a half-time job.  The new Section B offers only 3.3 hrs. per month, which means that for half-time work he is getting 1/3 time vacation.  He is still being given a bunch of accrued vacation hours at the beginning of his contract, but now it is 40 hours and in the earlier Section B it was 120 hours.  Similarly, sick leave is reduced, and all pay for holidays has been eliminated.

This is rather a worse deal for the new fire chief, but the real question, of course, is why a contract vetted by legal counsel for both parties and read and approved by the commissioners ever included such hyper-generous benefits.  This would seem to fall under the 'incompetence' headline rather than, say, 'swinish'.  If the public had not objected strongly, the earlier version of the contract would have doubtless been a done deal and the district's lawyers would have billed for their apparently useless or worse advice.

Beyond that, the posted contract provides some clarification on other issues:

1.  If fired without cause, the Chief will receive 1 year's severance pay.
2.  If fired with cause, mediation and arbitration are somewhere between required and available, but the costs involved could surely keep the chief from entering into it since, if he loses, he must pay the district's costs (and vice versa, but the District has the deeper pockets--Us!).
3.  The Commissioners must give 180 days notice if they plan not to renew the Chief's contract.
4.  The Chief must give 30 days notice if he is going to quit.

The rest of the meeting (and there was a long agenda) involved any number of issues that illustrated the public's difficulty in understanding what the Commissioners are doing and the Commissioners' inability to respond meaningfully to public questions.  This general confusion is multiplied by the State's requirement that virtually all business be conducted ONLY in public meetings, which means that the commissioners are not supposed to be discussing and making decisions outside of those meetings.  This is a very difficult standard to meet, but I didn't ask for these guys to take this job, so they need to meet the standard....it's sort of like the conditions of an employment contract.

Meursing demonstrated several times that he still has a short fuse and at one point seemed to be about to eject a community member from the meeting with the assistance of the sheriff's deputy when he suddenly remembered that he'd failed to bring a sheriff's deputy to the meeting.  The "critical" issue under discussion that led to this unseemly behavior was whether having an additional special meeting on September 20 whose sole purpose was to approve the minutes of the meeting of September 19 was, in fact, a redundant meeting.  The underlying issue was their intention of appointing a new commissioner at the meeting on the 19th and then approving the minutes ASAP/September 20 (requires a public meeting to do so) so the new commissioner could attend the next regular meeting as a duly appointed commissioner because they need two Commissioners to constitute a quorum and Meursing won't be available for the October meeting, but anyway the October meeting is being re-scheduled so that Meursing can attend the October meeting (next agenda item), and aren't you glad you've read to the end of this paragraph?

What can I say?  Echoing Mencken, I'd say "never dismal," adding oftentimes hilarious in its stupidity and its smallness.  But I appreciate that it loses a lot of its 'not boring-ness' in translation.  Remember: Both Riffle and the new Commissioner will be up for election in 2013.  Vote early and often...

And in the meantime, a lot of Wednesday night meetings are available for your dining and dancing pleasure...