Last Friday, Sakai Middle School students packed the hillside meadow around their new – and two very old – blossoming cherry trees for the First Annual Cherry Blossom Festival, and to honor the school’s soon-to-retire principal, Jo Vanderstoep.
Housing experts say the affordable-housing market on Bainbridge Island is so depressed that people, most of whom are looking for one- or two-bedroom spaces, have written it off and stopped looking on the island. This is especially true for families because they often need three bedrooms, which means they’re searching for rare and very expensive rental houses.
I had to take a break from politics this spring. Cold turkey. I just quit.
It’s no secret, but let’s be very clear about this: During the next few years, the city’s financial health will…
Most people have accepted the fact that a helmet is a necessary safety item whether the wearer is operating a bicycle, motorcycle, a whitewater kayak or a board of one type or another. There are exceptions, of course, including a large majority of the bicyclists in Eugene, Ore., where going helmetless on city and University of Oregon streets is the cool thing to do. Those Oregon Ducks have a tendency to live on the wild side.
The unfolding financial crisis at the city makes it clear that we have failed the most basic tenets of local government. The value of government is to address common needs that cannot be met by individual citizens, such as life/safety and infrastructure needs by carefully spending the tax money it receives. It is important we learn how we got into this deficit position and how we get back on a responsible fiscal track.
I’ve never been there, so my impression of what Florida’s like is drawn entirely from books, films and the news stories that originate there. Among the places in Florida I’ve never been to is Melbourne, a city of some 78,000 people located midway down Florida’s eastern coast, about 60 miles southeast of Orlando. Melbourne, which served as a training ground for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, was named in honor of its first Postmaster, a gentleman named Cornthwaite John Hector. Hector was an Englishman, but he had spent much of his life in Melbourne, Australia.
Paul Ohtaki, who grew up on Bainbridge Island and served as an internment camp reporter for the Review during World War II, passed away on April 27 at his home in San Francisco. He would have been 85 in August.
In the past four years I’ve attended all the meetings for the Winslow Tomorrow visioning process, participated in the charrette and attended many city presentations on the possible designs that would grow from the results of the visioning process. Lately I’ve attended many council meetings, listening to why nothing can be done to apply any of the results of this process. Partially this is due to the economic climate and partially it’s the result of the gloom-and-doomers who, without attending any meetings or reviewing the possible designs that resulted from the process, have concluded that the whole thing was an attempt to “pull the wool over the public’s eyes” to allow large-scale development of Winslow Way.
Infrastructure is often referred to as the backbone of a community. We take for granted the streets we drive on, the water that comes from our faucets, and the storm drains that keep our streets from flooding. We rarely think about infrastructure until it fails.
Civil discourse, long a bedrock of our democratic society, appears to have suffered a stress fracture of late. It’s difficult to ascertain the actual cause of why so many people have begun to verbally assail their fellow citizens merely because they have a difference of opinion about one topic or another. Perhaps it’s because we, the people, are frustrated by our governance and some of us have a predilection to bluster when exasperated. Whatever the cause, the result may lead to boorish behavior that is often so ludicrous that it belongs in a comedy act.
There’s a community to which Bainbridge Island will forever be tied by history, a community with a message for every American. It’s as much a part of our island soul as Manitou Beach, Yeomalt, Restoration Point, Island Center, Blakely or Eagle Harbors, all of Port Madison, Strawberry Hill or Hermana Isla de Ometepe. I heard about Minidoka, Idaho sparingly as a student, more over the years. In 2007, I could not stay away.
A recent study found that the average American walks about 900 miles in a year. Another study found that Americans drink, on average, 22 gallons of alcohol per year. That means, on average, that Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon. Makes you kind of proud to be an American, doesn’t it?
