Letter to the Whidbey News-Times Back 2 List
08-02-06

Anyone wanting better entertainment than watching the barber give haircuts should have been at the city Planning Commission meeting Tuesday night at the city’s municipal shop meeting room. Talk about a mob scene, the place was jam packed with people crammed into nooks and crannies, standing in the aisles, craning in the doorways, and straining to hear. Tempers flared as some defied rules of order to protest inadequate provisions for responding to the needs of our citizenry. While people ducked and scrambled into their flack jackets, pandemonium was barley averted by the fire marshal’s appearance who declared the room to be overcrowded resulting in the meeting being adjourned to a later time for venue change.

Whew! A grand time was had by all. But where will the new venue be? Where can they get a room big enough for everyone who wants to have input into our future? Why not the Fakkema barn? The Fakkemas have said it would be a great place “for weddings or other events.” It would be ideal for a public brawl. Being on the tsunami scoop plain of the Juan de Fuca strait would make cleanup an eventual simplicity.

Tsunamis aside, no one can doubt that the Fakkemas beach view farm is a pastoral delight that any developer would salivate for. With the current ascendancy of military spending increases it is strategically located for access to the Navy base. But before the salivation itself becomes a tsunami, the experience of other military locales should be considered such as the Lancaster valley of California which was a boomtown when Lockheed and other aircraft developers were in their heyday. The town grew so fast that the waiting list for new homes was over a year long. But things changed in the late eighties and overnight Lancaster became a ghost town where even large homes were abandoned and taken over by federal agencies who gave them as subsidies to welfare recipients. Boom went to bust. Splendor went to slums.

Long-term residents are the big losers in these events not only in the long run but in the short run too. Besides the quality of life lost, think of the property tax effect on those living nearby. Their fair market value assessments bounce out of sight raising property taxes to prohibitory levels — a fact not lost on developers and realtors anxious to pick up neighboring property at forced sale prices. Those able to hang on are tossed around by the bouncing economy and congestion but their taxes don’t go down. The good life is replaced by crammed housing, angry traffic, stop signs and signals, crime and pollution. The sound of the sea waves and shore birds is replaced by the scream of police and ambulance sirens accompanied by the clang and grunge of trash trucks. But somewhere a fat cat developer sits back laughing at the fate of those who once enjoyed God’s country.

Al and Barbara Williams Oak Harbor
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