Civic Matters (and a Little Weather)

Yesterday, it was supposed to be rainy, but the late morning was pretty sunny, with big blue sky and big puffy white cloud.  And it was even pretty warm, relative to November and all that.  I came back from cross the border around 2 p.m. and suggested to Ed that we put the tree sweaters on the first two trees.  (There is about 35 meters of tree sweater currently waiting to be mounted upon the dogwood and maple tree.)  But I had a couple of other things to do, so he went up on the roof to sweep leaves, while I did the dishes.  And then, ten minutes later, it started raining hard.  I went outside and saw that the sky was very dark, overwhelmingly dark, and while I stood there, I saw a flash of lightning, quickly followed by thunder.  Ed came down off the roof, we went indoors, and the rain poured down and the thunder and lightning continued close by for maybe five minutes.  And then, out of the sky, but of course it felt like out of nowhere, big balls of hail started pouring down, quickly covering the porch and all the pathways.  Five minutes maybe, maybe more.  And then for the rest of the day, it was very, very cold outside.  I guess you drop a ton or so of ice in your yard, it chills everything down quite a bit.  A surprising day.  [Another view of how winter is coming at us here.]  [This is Ed's photo, not mine, though.]

Then, today, I went to the library, partly to do my tidying work on the magazine exchange cart.  Sadly, I found five catalogs (as compared to three last Saturday), and probably a dozen pieces of travel literature (clearly not magazines under the definition I’d think we’d be using).  I confiscated the catalogues and some of the travel literature that was clearly just commercial stuff.  But I’m open to ideas of how to communicate to magazine exchangers what we ought to be aiming for in order not to have this become overflowing with stuff that nobody wants.

Finally, this coming Monday, a couple of County Very Important People are coming up to hear us or probably for us to hear them talk about the septic system inspection program.  (Community Center, 7 p.m.)  The town is rife with various rumors about how this program is being conducted, mostly involving favoritism for low-standard inspections by the commercial inspectors.  The County’s failure to set fee standards/ranges makes this an almost inevitable rumor, of course.  Washington doesn’t have car inspections like many states do, so maybe this is how it learns the hard way how to do mandatory inspections.  It does seem like it would be obvious that you’d want to eliminate or at least minimize the obvious conflicts of interest.

The Taxpayers Association has come up with a list of questions that they have sent to the County Councilwoman and County Counsel person in hopes that they will have some answers.  Mark Robbins, who is heading up the TA right now, put together the list from a member discussion last week and I suggested to him that it might be useful to get the questions out to the public ahead of time, as well.  So here they are:

1.  Not enough time given to property owners.  Need blanket extension (not consideration of individual requests.  NB:  The notification by the Health Department was issued in October, a few weeks after most of the many part-time residents had already closed up their summer cottages for the winter.
2.  Annual inspections are too frequent and unnecessarily burdensome.
3.  The inspection  regime is not calibrated to usage or presence of inhabitants.
4.  There  may be conflicts of interest in requiring inspections by private inspectors, some of whom may be contractors with an interest in making repairs or replacing septic systems.  The County employs inspectors for other purposes; why not for septic system?
5.  If the system is to depend on private inspectors, the County should regulate the allowable fee schedule for inspections.
6.  Couldn’t older systems be grandfathered in, at least to some degree related to usage and severity of the deficiency?
7.  Isn’t it way past due to think about innovations that would reduce demand on septic systems, including composting toilets (are these allowed in Whatcom County?) and gray water systems?
8.  County ordinances and health regulations that, if really unavoidable, will require huge capital expenditures by property owners for new, above ground septic systems, ought not to be imposed prior to establishing a fund or mechanism for low interest loans and assistance to people who cannot afford the repairs that will be necessary to remain in their homes.  If there is a real environmental and public health problem, it has developed over decades; so why does it have to be fixed in months?
 9.  What is the experience of other Washington counties in meeting the state mandate on sanitary septic systems?
10. Can the county help Point Roberts (and similar unincorporated communities) to analyze the costs and benefits of endless individual investments in inspections and repairs vs community investment in a sewage and treatment system?

If we got answers/explanations from our visitors on all ten of those, I’d be impressed, but we can at least hope they will come prepared to address our concerns and not just to announce the wisdom of their previous actions.  A good turnout would be helpful.

Canada Is Different

There are a lot of small differences between the countries that one notices when living back and forth across the border.  Most Americans know the ‘Eh?’ thing, but that is actually not very common out here on the west coast.  In language, what I notice most is the short a that Canadians use in  lots of words.  Words where an American would use a broad a.  E.g., Canadians say pasta (like the a in cat), whereas Americans say the equivalent of pahsta (like the a in fawn).  Similarly, cantata, cantahta.  It’s especially common in French or Italian words that have entered the English language more or less unchanged.  I found myself saying pasta the Canadian way a while back and felt very embarrassed, as if  I were presenting myself under false pretenses.

But what I noticed yesterday was that the Canadians still care about ‘Remembrance Day,’ whereas Americans have moved on to their many other wars since then and then pretty much past war itself.  We do it, we just don't remember doing it.  In Canada, older veterans, some of them very old (but not back from WW I) yet go out and sell the same red poppy pins that I bought (or more likely my parents bought) back in the forties, after WW II was over.  A 12-year-old Canadian of my acquantance was marching in a local 'Remembrance Day' parade yesterday, hoping for no rain. In the fourth grade, I won the city-wide contest for the best poppy poster in all of Pocatello’s elementary schools.  Okay, it was a small field, but I was pretty impressed at the time.

We made posters every year for that special day.  We all knew the words ‘in Flanders field the poppies grow, between the crosses, row on row,’ and we knew to what they referred.  All gone now south of the 48th parallel, but still alive north of the 49th  [Correction.  Ed's says 49th, not 48th, and I imagine that he is right about that.] parallel.  Don’t know why, don’t care to speculate.  Just observing.

But yesterday, November 11 (which to us is Veterans’ Day, not Remembrance Day), I went cross border to do some laundry and a bunch of other errands.  When I pulled in to the strip mall that contains the laundromat, my first thought was, ‘Wow, the economy is really hitting Tsawwassen hard!’  I’ve never actually seen the parking spaces this empty, even on Sunday.  But then, going about my errands, I realized that almost all the little stores were closed (fortunately for me, not the laundromat) and that not a one had posted an explanatory sign.  Well, I guess, in Canada, everyone would know right away what it was about; in America, we are relatively clueless.  I was surprised, as I probably am every year, to find that the U.S. Post Office and the Point Roberts Public Library were both closed for the day, as well. 

What was once a living memory embedded in real concern and historical warnings has, I fear, largely become nothing more than a government holiday for those who work for the government, and a surprise to the rest of us.  But there are yet a few veterans of WW I still alive who, if they remember anything at the age of 109 or so, probably still remember their experiences in that most terrible of all terrible wars. Remember.

Parks and Libraries Prevail

It’s been about a week since we voted and the two issues of considerable interest to Point Roberts have now been decided, although the totals are still unofficial.  The Parks Board request for a levy was approved, but that vote also required that  the turnout in this election be at least 40% of the turnout in the last general election and that of those voting, at least 60% had to approve the levy request.  Given that the last general election was a presidential election, these requirements could have been hard to meet.  Indeed, for the levy to pass, at least 278 people had to vote.  In fact, only 303 people voted, just 31 more than were required.  However, the ‘Yes’ vote was well over the 60% requirement—76+%.  This levy involves an additional $.07/$1,000 assessed value.

The other issue was the ‘Rural Library Proposition No. 1.’  Fortunately, this measure required only a 50% approval rate.  This applied to more than Point Roberts, so it was a much larger vote: a total of 34,581, and 51.41% voted to approve the additional rural library funding.  It's good news for the library, and only slightly more than ten cents additional tax per $1,000 assessment.  (Thus, a house assessed at $200,000 will pay an additional property tax of about $20.40 each year.)   Encouraging news for our services. 

Results for all the Whatcom County election results are available here.

The Elegiac Season

A month ago, the leaves were just turning yellow—a little late in the season—but now they have made up for lost time by departing quickly and completely, leaving us barren and gray and wet and cold and in November in the Pacific Northwest.  Thinking about times past, wondering why we have to say goodbye so soon.  We sit in the house and look out the window and listen to Casals playing the Bach Suites for Cello, which is music that accommodates but doesn’t drag you down into the melancholy face of fall.  It has other faces, as well, all that scarlet and orange and yellow riotous color, but it doesn’t have them right this minute.

I’ve been trying to become the kind of person who has a lot of horizontal surfaces that are not filled up with stuff.  That is what gray fall does to me.  I’ve spent the day cleaning out file cabinets (all those IRS returns and supporting papers from 1997, for example), desk drawers, just ordinary drawers, trying to clear out enough inside space so that all the objects cluttering the horizontal surfaces will have someplace to go.  I’m not there yet; there’s not even one entirely empty horizontal space in our main room.  But I can hope.

And also I can go to the transfer station to deliver 140 pounds of recyclables of various kinds, much of it the aforementioned paper.  Incidentally, it would be good if we could find something just a little lighter than paper which, when gathered into the thousands of sheets really does get heavy.  I suppose that’s what the computer is supposed to do for us, but we are mostly so afraid of the computer losing its mind with all our paper in it that we keep duplicate information on actual paper.  We’re a wary bunch.

The dump was also gray and wet, but well populated with people bringing in washing machines and multiple garbage cans and countless dark green plastic bags filled with paper and plastic/glass bottles and aluminum cans, all of it with a faint odor of decay.  You come in and they weigh you and you go out and they weigh you again, and then you pay for the difference.  (Maybe restaurants could work that way, too, but payment would be reversed, of course, for increased weight, not for decreased as it is at the dump.)  It’s not the worst system in the world (which leaves considerable room for improvement, of course).  But it does remind me of the fact that I didn’t used to have much experience of the dump because the operators used to pick it up at our houses, and now we take it to, metaphorically, to theirs.

There is still no resolution in sight for this problem.  The company that applied for a new permit has not been selected; the company that used to have the permit has now applied for a new permit.  According to the WUTC internet site, the next meeting on all this is December 10.  And then it will be Christmas, of course, and the New Year, and nothing is going to happen then.  And then it will be 2010.  Maybe in the new year, we can bring ourselves to call off all the disputations and disagreements, can do what a friend referred to as ‘an Emily Litella.'  In the grand old days of Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner regularly inhabited a character named Emily Litella who would complain bitterly about some topic (I particularly remember her rant on ‘Soviet jewelry’) only to have, eventually, someone point out that she had got the whole thing wrong as a result of a simple error.  “Soviet Jewry,” they would say.  And Emily would get a momentarily stunned look and then say, ‘Oh. . . Never mind.’ 

It’s going to take something like that to get progress on the trash front, I’m afraid.  But Gilda Radner died a long time ago, alas, and it's possible we no longer know how to say, 'Never mind.'

Best Little Town in the World

Not, alas, Point Roberts.  But I also live half the time if not in, at least next door to/a mile down the road from, the best little town in the world.  Really.  Last month, while we were up on the Sunshine Coast, it was announced that the town of Gibsons, B.C. had been named ‘The Most Liveable Town in the World’ in the 'Communities Under 20,000' category.  The Mayor and a pair of Most Liveable Town Officials went to the Czech Republic to get what appeared in the photo of the event as one of those medieval necklaces of heavy golden chain that European City Mayors used to sport (like Dick Whittington, who if I recall correctly was ‘twice Lord Mayor of London Town’).

There is, however, something faintly suspicious about this whole drama.  The award, it is said, is a United Nations-Recognized International Award for Liveable Communities.  What does that ‘recognized’ mean?  (And why does 'liveable' have that first e?)  Further, according to the Coast Reporter, the local newspaper, the award was received largely because Gibsons has developed a neighborhood plan with a ‘geoexchange system’ (got me), which system will ‘be used to heat local homes and businesses with minimal carbon emissions and provide a source of revenue for the town.’  Now exactly how that makes Gibsons the ‘most liveable town in the world’ is pretty mysterious, I’d think.  The plan and the geoexchange, whatever it is, do not yet exist other than on paper. 

Much of the credit for the award should go to the Parks and Culture Director, said the Mayor, because it was her idea to apply for the award.  Next year, perhaps, she could nominate the town to receive a Nobel Award of some sort.  Then they could all go to Sweden to receive it.  It all seems a little goofy and a little risky.  This is an area which only a few years ago unelected pretty much all the Regional District Directors who thought it was a cool idea to have the District pay for them all to go to Central America to visit the District’s sister city. 

Nevertheless, the hard-working, dutifully-traveling Gibson’s Planning Director reported that the experience was ‘very rewarding,’ and concluded, ‘ I think it’s validation of everything that we’ve done and we’re on the right track in terms of the work that we’re doing.’

This story was on the top half of the front page of the weekly paper.  On the bottom half of the front page, the story was about the immediate resignation of a Gibsons (‘Most Liveable Town under 20,000 in the World’) Council Member (who didn’t go on the trip to the Czech Republic).  He’s leaving because  of his ‘frustration with how the current Council works.’  Apparently everyone doesn’t agree about the award and what it’s validating.  Maybe an award for most entertaining small town politics in a town under 20,000?

Loose Ends

The Magazine Exchange:  Kris, who runs the library, has made everything better.  She obtained a rolling cart from the main library and the magazines for exchange can be left on the cart and the librarians will take it in when the library closes and bring it out when the library opens.   That limits the exchange a bit I suppose since it means only during the library opening times, but better than nothing, and actually very good.  I told Kris today that I would check it at least once a week while I am on the Point to make sure that it is not overflowing and to prune if necessary.  This ought, however, not to turn into extra work for the librarians, so it would be a good idea for everyone who uses it to attend to the tidiness factor, as well. 

The Community Events Sign:  Well, the roof is not yet there, but there are an awful lot of trusses for something that is only about a five-foot span.  I imagine the roof will be made of granite or marble or something like that in order to bear down sufficiently on those trusses.

Economic Development Plan #3001:  I had seen this  For Sale sign frequently, but somehow never quite focused on the hotel plan possibilities.  A few years ago, there was talk of a race track on this property, I believe.  How much more interesting even would a hotel be, right there across from the post office and the USA gas station, and adjoining the community events sign!  Lots of lots and buildings for sale in Point Roberts right now.  Perhaps many hotels as well as B and B’s, motels and maybe even boarding houses.  Transitory Housing R Us. 

Economic Development Plan #3,000

On the schedule today was a visit to the monthly Taxpayers’ Association (TA) here in Point Roberts.  I don’t often go to their meetings because I think they must meet when I’m not here.  But they met and I’m here.  And there is news, of sorts.

When I got there, a tad late, one attendee was waxing—well, not rhapsodic, but perhaps the opposite of rhapsodic: frenentic?—on the topic of Whatcom County’s desire to kill us all by urging us to get H1N1 vaccinations, even though the County doesn’t have many doses with which to target us, and even though we are feeling deprived about not having them.  Just the gentleman’s point, though: the County was encouraging us to have shots that would risk our lives, and he wished the Association to protest this County action.  If anyone produces minutes of the meeting, I imagine the gentleman’s views will be accurately recorded, if not in full detail.

It is very hard, I find, to know quite what to do when people up here—and not just a few of them—wish to convey their somewhat unusual views at considerable length to others.  You nod (that’s the yes-yes nod), and then you think about responding but decide ‘not a good idea’ very quickly, and then you begin to nod (as in the dropping off to sleep nod).  The only honest response I could make would be so profoundly impolite that I could not probably make it.  So there you are.  You just put it in the minutes.

And then we talked about trash (that is, trash collection or more specifically no-trash-collection) a bit.  Is there light at the end of the tunnel?  ‘None whatsoever,’ was the reply of the TA Director most attuned to the topic.  But we talked about it some more anyway.  One of the things I like about the trash collection problem is that we are stuck with a problem which appears to be so profoundly unique and complex that it can never be solved.  Everyone wants to solve it but no one is able to solve it; not even the people who appear, more or less, to have the power to solve it.  Perhaps it is actually insoluable; perhaps there is no actual trash collection anywhere else in the world and that is why the problem is so hard.  I seem to remember that we used to have it, but then I get things wrong in my memories now and then.  Perhaps it is only a dream; perhaps we have never had and thus very probably never will have trash collection.  First, let us focus on going to the moon, say, or requiring people to have their septic systems inspected.

And thus did we segue into the TA's final topic of the evening.  Some time ago, the County, along with other counties in Puget Sound, I was told, passed uniform enabling legislation requiring that everyone in those counties with septic systems be required to have a septic system inspection from a certified inspector beginning this year.  Presumably, they’ve spent the last year getting those inspectors certified.  They’re employees in the private sector and the County did not establish fees for this service, so you pay what they charge which, according to the street, is in the vicinity of $200-$250, which is a little steep for a simple inspection. 

Up here in Point Roberts, there are no sewers; there are only septic systems, so every house and business on the Point must have this inspection.  In mid-October, we got a letter saying we had till early December to get the inspections done and if we didn’t do it by then, our moms were going to be very disappointed and our dads were going to be very angry, and so just get it done.  It also sent us a list of local certified outfits: four of them in Point Roberts.  Now, there are maybe 1800 water hook-ups (at least that’s the number I got from the Water Board in 2004, and more have been added since then).  I assume if you have a water hookup, you are likely also to have a septic system.  Which means that in about sixty days, 1800+ inspections are to be conducted by four companies/individuals (none of them employ even tens of inspectors, certainly).  That's going to be a scheduling nightmare, I'd think.  And if you figure an average charge of $200 (which is underestimating, from what I've heard), that looks to me like almost half a million dollars of new spending in Point Roberts and on Point Roberts businesses in only two months.  Merry Christmas, indeed!

Now that’s an economic development plan if I ever heard of one.  Although it’s a little narrowly focused, I’d think.  It will have spillover, of course, because if systems fail, then systems must be repaired or replaced.  Good economic times in 2010, as well.  This, I’d think, is an issue with very long legs.  We have not heard the end of this.

And if the letters to us from the County were the first act, in two weeks we are going to get the second act when a member of the County Council and a member of the County Counsel’s office come to explain this to us in one of those big community meetings.  Monday, November 16, 7 pm, Community Center.  After that event, everything will be illuminated.   If I were a betting person, I might believe we'd be illuminated, but I doubt if we are going to be pleased.