Last week representatives of Good Cheer attended the Northwest Harvest annual conference. Part of the conference included a tour of the Maple Valley Food Bank. That food bank has always been one of our favorites. They have now converted to the choice/point model; though different than ours, they did use our model to help design their program.
Just when we thought Island County Commissioner Kelly Emerson was out of surprises, she delivered yet another shocker this week.
Public entities don’t have to get an appraisal before purchasing property.
That was news to a spokesman for the Washington State Auditor’s Office, a state lawmaker and undoubtedly many local officials who have been operating under the assumption that an appraisal was needed for years.
South Whidbey Harbor’s expansion, the long-planned, shaped and reshaped project that sustained too many set backs to count, is finally complete.
A ribbon cutting ceremony took place Friday afternoon and many a dignitary, from local officials to state and federal lawmakers, was in attendance. They played instrumental roles in making the project a reality, and their efforts should be congratulated, but perhaps the most important entity there was not a person at all. It was Whidbey Island Charters or, rather, what it represents.
I was raised not to use the world “hate.” My mother used to say, if you “dislike” something, don’t say “hate.”
Most of the time I’m conscientious of that little rule.
Most of the time.
Education is not an exact science. Yet, there are some surefire winners out there and the Salmon in the Classroom program is one of them.
The program, a partnership between the Whidbey Watershed Stewards, the South Whidbey School District and the Schools Foundation, tasked four fifth grade classes with raising 250 coho salmon, from egg to fry, over a four-month period in an aquarium at school. Students spent this past Friday morning releasing them into the Maxwelton watershed.
The right decision isn’t always clear. The road can be fogged with circumstance and variables that make things seem more complicated, or more simple, than they really are.
That’s why the Langley City Council’s vote to reinstate a standing ethics board earlier this month was so important. City leaders such as the mayor, who oversees employees at City Hall, should not be tasked with vetting claims of improper or dishonest action against himself or his staff. That job is best left to a third-party group not involved in the daily affairs of Langley government.
The first Earth Day in 1970 was quite a historical phenomenon.
Across the country, millions of people attended tens of thousands of community events, school and college teach-ins, all focused on putting the environment on the political map. More than a million people streamed into Central Park to attend their first ever eco-fair. And imagine this: Congress took the day off so that senators and representatives could get back to their home states and participate in that historical day’s events. American Heritage magazine called it “one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy.”