Editor,

It’s alarming that Dean Enell has proposed a sewage treatment plant for Freeland in order to stop sprawl. Costly treatment plants treat sewage and rainfall runoff from streets, period. Sprawl is controlled by well thought out and enforced zoning ordinances by the County Planning Department. And those ordinances take into account the all-important factor of drinking water supply …which is a critical limiting factor for growth on South Whidbey. Finally, the location for discharging the treated effluent from a proposed wastewater treatment plant in Freeland has been studied for the last 15 years. The result of those numerous studies all conclude the same thing: There is no location to discharge the effluent.

The water bodies of Holmes Harbor and Mutiny Bay, the Trillium Forest drip irrigation solution, the expensive pipeline infrastructure to Langley’s existing wastewater treatment plant, tanker trucks to Oak Harbor and adjacent land areas around Freeland are simply not viable locations to discharge the forecasted million gallons per day of treated waste water.

Freeland is not Port Hadlock in Jefferson County that Mr. Enell is so excited to describe as a success story. Freeland’s geography, non-quantified aquifer structure and land use is unique and simply doesn’t support a sewerage treatment plant today, nor into the future. And it makes no sense to force Freeland to become a city once a sewerage treatment plant is plopped somewhere onto the landscape.

Richard Delmonte

Freeland

Editor’s note: Modern wastewater treatment plants generally do not treat rainfall runoff, or stormwater, although some rainfall can infiltrate sewage treatment plants, according to the Department of Ecology.

Editor,

In his recent letter concerning immigration, Terry Sparks makes some good points. He reminds us, for example, that President Obama deported many undocumented. That is of course true. Obama deported some 438,000 in 2013, coming close to President Trump’s figure of an estimated 527,000 in 2025. Mr. Sparks also notes that there was not as much opposition as there is now. That is also true.

But there is a good reason for this lack of opposition, and it comes down to a fundamental difference between the two presidents. Under Obama ICE acted legally, without violence, within the judicial system. ICE agents did not violate the 4th amendment by breaking into private homes without warrants or consent as they do now. ICE did not detain U.S. citizens based on ethnicity, accents or appearance including incidents where citizens are detained without cause for extended periods. ICE did not shoot and kill citizens.

ICE did not use fraud and deception, such as posing as police officers or using children to lure adults from homes to make arrests without warrants. ICE did not violate schools, medical facilities, courtrooms and places of worship. ICE did not violate the 1st Amendment rights of individuals trying to film or observe arrests, often using force to confiscate phones to prevent recording. ICE did not ignore dozens of court orders. And above all, ICE officers were held responsible for their actions.

Under Secretary Noem, we are faced with the spectacle of hastily recruited, undereducated, poorly trained, heavily armed paramilitary ICE units violently converging on our cities violated the rights of both citizens and non-citizens alike with, at least until now, no effective oversight.

It seems to me that Mr. Sparks’ call for local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE and its current tactics is tantamount to asking police officers to become complicit in lawlessness.

Dr. Bernd J. Fischer

Oak Harbor

Editor:

Regarding a letter to the editor from Terry Sparks: Mr. Sparks’ central assumption is that the Trump Administration “has removed thousands of criminal illegal aliens” from the U.S., as his letter states. That has not been the case at all, though Donald Trump wants the country to believe that.

Unfortunately, the most recent statistics show that 80% of those detained by this Trump Administration have no criminal record whatsoever. In addition, Trump has actually taken away the legal status of 1.6 million immigrants granted permission to be in the U.S. Mr. Sparks is correct that the Obama Administration focused on removing immigrants with a criminal record. President Obama removed 3.1 million people in the U.S. illegally, with the majority having criminal records.

We all want to see laws enforced. But please ask yourself, who is breaking our laws?

Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were American citizens. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of freedom of speech, assembly and petition, protecting our rights to protest, march, and demonstrate in public places such as streets, sidewalks, and parks. And by the way, this is a constitutional right of everyone, regardless of their immigration status. People in the U.S. also have the right to record law enforcement officers.

Mr. Sparks’ comment that “Americans do not get to pick and choose which laws they feel like following” is exactly true. So let’s focus on who is actually breaking our laws: Donald Trump, Trump Administration officials and masked ICE agents.

Joann Hamick Quintana

Langley