WEEK OF 4/9/12 MEETINGS IN REVIEW

This Is Your Community,
If You Don't Own It, Someone Else Will

Submitted to Shelton Blog by Tom Davis Mason County Progressive

Not much happened at Tuesday's Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) meeting this week. Mostly, the usual suspects were being funded, appointed or thrown open for competitive bids. The lone public hearing was to establish a Lake Management District (LMD) for Island Lake, aimed at managing noxious aquatic plants. It wasn’t that I was uninterested in killing some weeds, I just thought our County’s unhealthy rating of 35 out of 39 should have been the larger topic for discussion.

Most of the real action took place on Monday, at a 1:30 meeting billed as: Community Development/Utilities Waste Management/State Agencies.
Subject: Mandatory sewer connections for new development.

Several departments from the County and State were represented in a gallant revisionary effort to reassign blame for the much maligned Belfair wastewater project. Tim Gates was there to speak for Ecology, and if anyone had it in their head to lay that dead dog on his porch, they had another thing coming. I sit on a city advisory committee with Tim, and the official hasn’t been born that can talk him into sticking his neck into a noose of someone else’s making.

Nevertheless, this political football went long and high, looking for a receiver, but by the time it came down, all the players had left the field. And so it is within this vacuum of administrative accountability, I offer the following:

There will be no – there can be no – radical change to the timing of Phase ll of the Belfair Sewer Project; too much money has already been invested and too many careers hang in the balance. It’s a good idea to have an advisory committee, but it’s a better bet that the sewer system will be built out as currently proposed; and that a newly elected Tim Sheldon will be right there to cut the ribbon on its completion.

Here’s why:

You don’t charge halfway up Pork-Chop Hill and then stop for lunch. And you don’t build the first Phase of a four phase sewer project and then start second-guessing what you should have second-guessed before you started. Residents of Belfair need to come to grips with the fact that they were conned, snookered, duped and piked, and now there’s no going back to that little outhouse on the prairie.

After being saddled with a monolithic sewage plant many did not want, citizens of Belfair need some financial relief. Fortunately, this is an election year and it is likely Commissioner Sheldon will take a run at a third term, providing, of course, Senator Sheldon can slip out of the Capitol before being tarred and feathered. Perhaps citizens should tie the Belfair sewer project around the Senator’s neck till he ponies up enough grant money to pay the connection fees of every single family residence in the Belfair UGA with a working septic system. Who-Ya!

There was no Port of Shelton meeting scheduled, but I did offer some written suggestions for consideration into the Port’s Forest Management Plan, as invited. In a letter that was wordsmithed not to offend, it was suggested that selling timber to fund capital improvement projects was unworthy of consideration. Also implied was that such a measure would likely be perceived as an act of desperation, rather than some new “flexible” business model, as one staff member had suggested. I could say more about this issue, but I’ve already had one flat tire this week.

Next Monday, there’s a County briefing at 9:00 AM, and a City Commission meeting at 6:00 PM. Tuesday the BOCC meeting is at 9:00 AM, and the Port meets at 2:00 PM.

Like my dear ole daddy used to say, “This is your community, if you don’t own it, someone else will.”

Later...

Graphic: kapyongkorea.com