They Should All Take A Sick Day

At this morning's citizen access time, there was an appearance by Shireene Hale, former head planner in charge of our CAOs, and David Dehlendorf, current head of the San Juan County Democratic Party and persistent supporter of Shireene Hale. You can watch their appearances on video at this link.

Now, before we talk about the Hale/Dehlendorf appearances of today, let's walk down memory lane for a moment. When heading up the CAO effort, Hale frequently claimed that the public intimidated her. She referred to some of our CAO public participation meetings as "awful". She even asked sheriff's deputies to show up at public meetings. When a former Planning Commissioner jokingly suggested that she might want to take a "sick day" as a means of avoiding one potentially contentious meeting, Hale accused him of (wait for it) ... intimidation. She also accused a former County Commissioner of intimidation, because of comments he made during a CAO meeting.

The County didn't abandon the "intimidation" angle after Hale left. It was adopted by Gibboney and Mike Thomas in their recent efforts to dump former Building Head John Geniuch. When contractors and other islanders supported Geniuch, the County claimed an angry mob was being organized (yes, Gibboney really did use the words "angry mob" in an administrative law hearing ... but the judge was not persuaded). Gibboney and Thomas took the "intimidation" melodrama so far as to send out an email instructing employees to call the sheriff if John Geniuch was seen on County property.

Okay ... now for the events of today. Hale shows up at citizen access time this morning and says that Pamela Morais (our local County Catbert) and Mike Thomas intimidated her prior to yesterday's public access time. Hale said they pressured her into withholding comments about Portland Fair. Dehlendorf then followed Hale's comments by calling for Mike Thomas to be reprimanded ... even resign, for intimidating a private citizen into silence.

Ever seen that picture of a snake eating itself? Shreene Hale, the woman who invented intimidation as public-participation kryptonite used it in her public comments to accuse her former employer of intimidation tactics that she used when she worked there ... which aforementioned tactics said employer still uses against employees and the public (e.g., Shireene presently).

The ever-composed Mike Thomas, who is accustomed to helping people invent intimidation stories rather than be on the receiving end, found himself out-maneuvered ... caught off-guard. After Dehlendorf finished, Thomas asked to make some comments himself. It stings to be out-smarted by Hale, and it showed in Thomas' comportment. Thomas said he was offended by the public access comments (although he didn't say they were untrue).

In upcoming posts, we'll explore the codependent relationship that has developed between the Council and Mike Thomas. It seems wherever Mike Thomas goes, allegations of misconduct follow. Mike Thomas has now been accused publicly of intimidating private citizens. The Prosecuting Attorney found that he violated County policies and procedures. This, along with other allegations, would appear to violate the County's employment contract with Thomas.

But, we have reached the point in San Juan County where Mike Thomas doesn't just run San Juan County government, he IS San Juan County government. Whatever Mike Thomas says, goes. The job of this Council is simply to back up Mike Thomas. They have given him raises, cleared him of wrongdoing. Mike Thomas is bulletproof. As the Prosecuting Attorney declared when clearing Mike Thomas of Improper Government Action (IGA) in the Portland Fair situation:

Manager has the duty to "comply with all lawful governing body directives, state and federal law, Employer policies, rules and ordinances. ..." See County Manager Employment Agreement and San Juan County Charter Section 4.40 and 4.41. The IGA Report mentions similar obligations of employees in the Personnel Rules Section 15, but the Personnel Rules (which have not been updated since the adoption of the Charter in 2005 or Charter Amendments in 2012) were not written to apply to management level employees and do not apply to the County Manager. See Section 1.010 and Chapter 4 of the 1992 Personnel Rules.

No rules apply to him. This is why Mike Thomas can approve (or disapprove) any wetland study ... or anything else for that matter. He can do whatever he wants, and the Council (and the PA too) have backed him. The dynamic that has emerged within the employment ranks of San Juan County is that if you are loyal to Mike Thomas, your job is safe. If you aren't, you will be eliminated.

Looks like Gibboney is safe.

When is a Wetland not a Wetland?

We’ve been reviewing the statistical and demographic train wreck that is San Juan County, but we want to pause for a moment to update everyone on some current events.

During public comment at the County Council meeting last Monday (June 8), some citizens finally brought to light a situation regarding wetlands that has been brewing for some time. We’ve been following this story quietly, letting events unfold. Now it’s time to summarize some of the salient points and let the general citizenry evaluate this situation for themselves.

It’s a controversy involving wetlands … specifically some purported wetlands on San Juan Island in a development called Portland Fair. Now, before we get into the details of this story, we have to first state that we, at the Trojan Heron, have a particular point of view about “wetland science” and “wetland scientists”. Namely, if you were to send 5 wetland scientists out to an identical property, you are likely to get 10 different opinions about the presence of wetlands on that property. No matter how much mumbo jumbo may be spouted about the integrity of wetland science, the only repeatable aspect of this “science” is its non-repeatability. We’ve seen this time and again. For example, Adamus insisted his methods were essentially 100% correct regarding the presence and location of wetlands in the county, but we’ve seen numerous instances where the official county wetland consultant (Scott Rozenbaum) has disagreed with Adamus’ work, and so on. It invariably occurs that every wetland scientist is absolutely convinced about the veracity of his or her wetland determination for a particular property, but with inevitable regularity, that determination differs violently from that of every other wetland scientist who evaluates that same property. We won’t go into why that happens here … just suffice to say that such occurrences are a basic fact of life in the confusing wetland world, and it plays out in the story we are about to relate.

Our story begins with Sheryl Albritton. Albritton is a resident of San Juan Island, and she also happens to serve professionally as a critical area consultant. She was interested in buying a piece of property adjacent to her home. After performing due diligence on the property, including discussing wetland issues with the County (Annie Matsumoto-Grah), Albritton and her husband declined to purchase the property because they felt the parcel was too heavily impacted by critical areas issues, specifically wetlands.

Subsequently, another couple purchased the land, and Albritton soon noticed that the property was being developed in ways that she understood to be illegal. Albritton filed a complaint with the Washington Department of Ecology regarding the filling of wetlands on the subject property. Albritton also objected about San Juan County staff being overruled by management when they tried to perform wetland reconnaissance for the subject property, as per the San Juan County Code.

When the Washington Department of Ecology receives a complaint like Albritton’s, they fill out an Environmental Report Tracking System (ERTS) form and notify the local Code Enforcement Officer, who in our case is Chris Laws. Laws received the ERTS complaint for this situation, and he then had the responsibility to conduct an investigation, assisted by Ecology as appropriate.

Laws’ investigation found that County employee Annie Matusumoto-Grah had previously provided written information to Albritton saying that the subject parcel was potentially heavily impacted by possible wetlands; however, the new owners nonetheless had received County approval for their development from Annie Matusumoto-Grah … but Matsumoto-Grah’s approval came at the specific direction of Sam Gibboney, head of DCD, who stated that County Manager Mike Thomas walked the site with “local wetland expert JT” and found no signs of any wetlands. The “JT” evaluation circumvented the “normal” wetland ordeal that would typically afflict any other property owner in a similar situation.

Matusmoto-Grah had requested from Gibboney the identification of the mysterious “wetland expert JT” and his/her qualifications, but Gibboney refused to provide any information. Matsumoto-Grah nonetheless documented the situation as best she could in the county permitting database.

As Laws' investigation went on to discover, the new owners of the subject parcel had asked their local councilman for some “help” with their development project. This councilman, in turn, went to County Manager Mike Thomas to ask for a favor for his neighbor/constituent. While Mike Thomas has no expertise in wetlands that we know of (he’s a planner by background), his wife, Jennifer, is a wetland scientist. In fact, some of Jennifer Thomas’ work can be found in San Juan County's CAO Best Available Science on wetlands. Jennifer Thomas, as it turns out, is “JT”.

Jennifer Thomas’ drive-by and walk-through property inspection superseded the formal wetland reconnaissance required by the CAO County code. Apparently, wetland science includes the protocol that when (through your connections) you can get the right bureaucrats to say there isn’t a wetland on your property, you can avoid all the onerous requirements of the CAO ... while everyone else is thrown to the wolves.

In case you are keeping score regarding the opinions of the professional wetland scientists associated with this property, here’s the tally so far: Adamus thought there were wetlands on the subject property (hence the original advice by Annie Matsumoto-Grah), Sheryl Albritton thought there were wetlands. Jennifer Thomas (whose work is in the County BAS blessed by Adamus) didn’t think there were any signs of wetlands.

But wait … there’s more … while Laws was conducting his background investigation, Professional Wetland Scientist Doug Gresham of Ecology was undertaking his own evaluation in parallel. Gresham visited the subject property to conduct his own wetlands review, and he determined that there wasn’t just one wetland present, but three.

Okay … those are the “facts” … and then the alleged cover up began. The details are sketchy, but based on information pulled together from various sources; this is what appears to have happened since then.

Laws asked Ecology to formalize their 3-wetland finding in a report so he could place it in the enforcement file. A couple of days after agreeing to Laws’ request, Gresham of Ecology called Laws to tell him that he could not finalize his report because he was told by his superiors (the notorious Erik Stockdale) not to finalize it … because of political pressure.

Matsumoto-Grah, who had documented in an office memo the coercion and interference of Mike Thomas and the refusal of Gibboney to provide any information about “JT”, was then instructed to re-write her official statement to exclude any references as to how she felt about the involvement of Mike Thomas or Gibboney vis-a-vis normal staff procedure related to wetlands.

Based on the information gathered during his initial investigation, Laws filed a “whistleblower” complaint against Mike Thomas with Prosecuting Attorney Randall Gaylord for Improper Governmental Action (IGA). Reportedly, Laws has been the subject of harassment and intimidation within the County ever since.

And that’s where we will leave it for now … but there is more to tell … and more to come ...

The SJC permit database documents the involvement of JT (Jennifer Thomas) in securing the permit.

It's Development-Specific Stupid

On March 5, this Council will approve yet another CAO. Like all the other CAO messes, this latest snafu will buffer wetlands and other critical areas instead of buffering/mitigating the development effects that purportedly threaten critical areas. Instead of basing mitigation on the scale of proposed development effects, CAO restrictions will be based on a subjective ranking of your undeveloped areas.

It's backwards. It always has been backwards, and as long as critical areas themselves, rather than development effects, are the stuff of buffers and restrictions, there will never be nexus and proportionality. In the last CAO, the County took great pride in claiming that they had derived "site-specific buffers." The fatal defect, however, was that they did not derive "development-specific buffers." All the factors necessary to derive a County-specified buffer are present on any piece of property whether one builds a garden shed, a lead smelter, the Empire State Building ... or nothing at all. Buffer imposition is triggered by development, but not related to its effects in any way.

Nothing has changed. In the March 5 CAO, once again buffers are triggered by development, but not related to development impacts.

And this strange fact leads Councilman Hughes on the same search as that of his predecessor, Councilman Fralick ... looking for any weasely way to find some justifiable paradox that will allow Eastsound (and other urban growth areas, but mainly Eastsound) to have smaller buffers. Hughes wants the critical areas of more developed areas to be buffered less than rural areas ... and he lives quite comfortably with this desire even though it would undermine the "buffer protection" logic of someone more perspicacious.

Uncertainty In the Department of Stone-Age Ecology

About a month ago, Hiroo Onoda died at the age of 91. He was a Japanese WW II holdout soldier who didn't surrender until long after the war was over. For 29 years, he lived on an island in the Philippines with other holdouts, dismissing all evidence (including messages sent to them) that the war was over. They lived by eating what they could find in the jungle or steal from local Filipino farmers. After losing all his fellow holdouts to various circumstances, Onoda was finally persuaded to give up in 1974.

Also, we occasionally still hear press reports about Stone-Age tribes that hold out against the modern world ... in the Amazon ... Papua New Guinea ... or some remote island. In these days of iPads, space stations, and genetic engineering, some of these Stone-Age tribes don't even know how to make fire ... and have never heard of the wheel.

Which brings us to the Shorelands and Environmental Assistance Program within the Department of Ecology. These are the regulators who advise local governments about shorelines and wetlands because of the Shoreline Management Act (SMA) and the Growth Management Act (GMA). In reality, the responsibilities of Ecology are very different under these two Acts, but they don't want you to know that. Under the SMA, Ecology is directly authorized to oversee, and take charge if necessary, of land use planning for shoreline zones. Under the GMA, they have no authority. No one says this better than Gordon White, the Head of the Shorelands and Environmental Assistance Program:

"We don’t have regulatory authority in local critical areas ordinance issues. We don’t make rulings or issue enforcement actions under local critical areas ordinances. Those tasks are on local government turf" (Gordon White, Eco-Connect Blog, February 14, 2012.)

Let's be clear about this. Under the SMA, Ecology is authorized to carry out the limited objectives of the SMA only, which is a planning law, not an environmental protection law per se. Under the GMA, Ecology is not authorized for anything, except to advise the Department of Commerce about Critical Areas. That bears repeating ... they are authorized to advise the Department of Commerce (not local Counties) about critical areas (not about the 14 goals or any other aspect of the GMA). Ecology would like you to believe that they are in charge of habitat and endangered species and wetland delineation and saving the planet and the whole GMA. They would like you to believe they are authorized to mainline their biased GMA advice directly into the veins of buffer-addicts in every County Planning Departments ... but they are not.

Altogether different from the SMA and GMA, Ecology is separately authorized under the Clean Water Act (CWA) to regulate discharges to waters of the State/US, but their authority under the CWA is about discharges. They regulate pollution, not non-pollution. They regulate effluent, not waters. Nowhere, outside of the specific planning purposes of the SMA, is Ecology given authority to identify or delineate streams, wetlands, shorelines, or any other waters of the State/US. They have proclaimed themselves as the expert authorities in this area, but they are not.

This brings us back to our Stone-Age lead-in. The Ecology folks who aren't authorized for much of anything produce Best Available Science (BAS) about everything. However, like the Stone-Age tribes who haven't heard of the wheel, the Cro-Magnons at the Shorelands and Environmental Assistance Program seem to be entirely ignorant of concepts accepted everywhere else in environmental science. As we repeatedly mention, they know nothing about risk assessment, but they also know nothing about environmental chemistry ... or geology ... or habitat ... or hydrology ... or physics ... or bio-statistics ... system dynamics ... or science generally. They say revealingly stupid things like (from the Hruby report), "The recent research has also increased our understanding of the many different factors that control the effectiveness of a buffer at trapping pollutants" such as type of pollutant, concentration of pollutant etc.

Increased "our" understanding? How could you not know this? This is in every elementary textbook (and there are thousands) dealing with risk assessment, fate and transport, and environmental chemistry. These principles are at work daily in Ecology's own Toxics Program. This is like a Stone-Age tribesman in the 21st century saying that "we" just discovered fire, and then bombastically posturing as if they are on the cutting edge of discovery. Somehow, and I don't know how, the Shorelands and Environmental Assistance Program has been able to survive like a lost Stone-Age tribe, surrounded by modern technology, but unaware of it. Along with them are fellow holdouts comprised of planners, consultants, attorneys, and non-profits who profit from believing the earth is flat.

We have to contend with their ignorance and bias in maddening ways, one of which was mentioned by some commenters to the previous post ... namely scientific uncertainty and the application of the precautionary principle. One of the ways Ecology projects their power and Stone-Age ignorance is by practicing data sophistry. For instance, we actually have quite a bit of data in these islands that show that we have no problem. Cleverly, though, that gets twisted by Ecology and the County into an opportunity to apply the precautionary principle. Let's discuss an example for the sake of illustration. If I were to sample a stream for pollutants, and if the results were to come back as non-detects, that is positive evidence of no problem. We have lots of data like that here in the islands ... after taking into account data quality, we have positive evidence of no problem. The evidence for "no problem" is in the form of zeros (non-detects) but that's not "no data" and it isn't "uncertainty." It's just that we found nothing because nothing is there.

Finding positive evidence of nothing, however, gets transmogrified into "we have no data" or "we don't know" or "it's pristine" or "the results are inconclusive" or "we're uncertain" ... and before you know it, the precautionary principle gets invoked, and we get 300-foot buffers in rural areas and 50-foot buffers in urban ones. That's how that happens. The absence of a problem and lots of "zero data" gets manufactured into uncertainty requiring the greatest amount of precaution and the toughest land use restrictions. The cleanest areas get "protected" in the most severe way when any rational analysis would have deployed greater "protection" for the riskier exposure scenario. We have to put a stop to that BAS ackwards outcome by pointing out what the data are really saying.

Even A Blind Squirrel

We have written about the Department of Ecology's Tom Hruby before. Whenever Erik Stockdale of Ecology requires heavy-duty science backup, he calls in Dr. Hruby, and the results are usually farcical. Some of their collaborations are masterpieces of ignorance, like when they wrote a letter to our Council in February 2011 about "risk." Eventually, they had to back away entirely from that letter because of copious criticism, including from Dr. Tim Verslcyke, a highly-qualified and well-published ecological risk assessment professional on the faculty of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

So it was with some trepidation and amusement that I began to read Hruby's latest publication, Update on Wetland Buffers: The State of the Science, Final Report. Relative to genuinely professional work about risk assessment and/or fate and transport, it's still amateurish ... but nevertheless ... it isn't completely wrong. Let's review a couple of the good things about this mediocre report.

1. For water quality, Huby admits that the effectiveness of buffers depends on site-specific factors. He says that recent research has increased our understanding of the many different factors that control the effectiveness of a buffer at trapping pollutants, and then he names width, slope, type of vegetation, type of pollutant, geochemical and physical properties of the soil, infiltration rates of the soils, sources of pollutants, concentration of pollutants, path of surface water through the buffer, and for phosphorus, the amount of phosphorous already trapped by the soil.
2. For habitat, Hruby admits that studies do not show minimum buffer distances needed to protect species, but only show how far species roam from wetlands. He also says that there is very little research correlating plant diversity in wetlands with buffer width.

Please note that this document specifically mentions, for the first time, some very key points that side with the persistent criticisms of our CAOs. Our CAOs have never considered type of pollutant, concentration of pollutant, source of pollutant, or the geochemical and physical properties of the soil. This is what we mean when we talk about an "exposure scenario." Dr. Hruby is ignorant of standard risk assessment terminology, so he doesn't use the customary term, but that's what he is referring to.

Furthermore, we have all heard the Department of Ecology and Dr. Adamus proclaim that amphibians can be found hundreds of feet away from a wetland; therefore, buffers should be hundreds of feet wide to accommodate their roaming. Hruby admits that this "roaming data" is not related to buffer width. Stated another way, there is no science that explains how the distribution of wetland dependent species varies with buffer width. Amphibians may roam hundreds of feet away from a wetland regardless whether the buffer is hundreds of feet, tens of feet, or nonexistent. We do not know how, or even whether, changing buffer width affects species distribution. Anyone who has found tree frogs in their window boxes, for example, knows that tree frog wandering does not seem to depend on buffer size.

There are other good admissions in this report. Key Point #4 on page 30 says "Several researchers have recommended a more flexible approach that allows buffer widths to be varied depending on site-specific conditions." On page 10, the report says, "Site-specific factors (vegetation density and spacing, initial soil water content, saturated hydraulic conductivity, and sediment characteristics) are so important in determining the effectiveness of a buffer that simple designs that do not account for these factors can fail to perform their protective functions."

And lastly, this report discusses the Meyer and Zhang papers, both of which have been the topic of intense discussion at various Planning Commission and County Council meetings over the past two years.

We'll save our substantial criticisms of the report for the next post, but for now, take some heart in the fact that even a blind Department of Ecology can find a nut once in a while.

A Buried Report

The Growth Management Hearings Board (GMHB) ruled on our proposed CAOs on September 6, 2013. In October, the Department of Ecology came out with a new Best Available Science (BAS) document titled, Update on Wetland Buffers: The State of the Science, Final Report. It was authored by none other than Tom Hruby, the go-to wetlands science guru at the Department of Ecology.

This 2013 document updates Ecology's 2005 guidance on wetland buffers in some substantial ways. Over the next few postings, we will delve into the new document, but for now, suffice to say that while the new document still has some significant problems, it makes some surprising admissions too. In answer to the question of how large buffers should be, the new 47-page document essentially says, "It depends."

Yes ... it depends on a myriad of site-specific factors ... so it is impossible to prescribe fixed buffer widths ahead of time. Wow!

County staff have known about this report since it was issued. This fact came to light during CAO public comment last week. CD&P knew about it. County Manager Mike Thomas knew about it. Nevertheless, all during the effort to "fix" the latest version of the CAOs after the GMHB ruling, those who have been "in the know" did not inform the Planning Commission about the new document. Those "in the know" did not inform the Council about it either. Interestingly, even Ecology's official correspondence with the County doesn't mention their own new science document.

Among other things, the 2013 Final Report talks about the Meyer paper, and it talks about the Zhang paper. When deliberating about potential revisions to the CAOs back in November, Planning Commissioner Brian Erhmantraut tried to get the Planning Commission to consider buffers based on the Zhang paper, but the other Commissioners shot down the idea because (they thought) the Zhang paper wasn't supported by Ecology BAS. So, the Planning Commission and CD&P pressed forward in making revisions to the CAO based on 2005 BAS, not 2013 BAS. That's where we are at the moment. We have CAO revisions based on outdated BAS.

The 2013 BAS document is very inconvenient to anyone who just wants to get 'er done because it raises serious questions about the basic validity of Ecology's historical approach to buffers ... and our County's approach as well. The new BAS document is not perfect by any means, but at least it is nudging closer to the truth. Considering it was issued by the Kremlin of buffer science, it makes some astonishing admissions.

But "they" buried it so no one would be the wiser.

New BAS report issued after the San Juan County GMHB ruling and at about the same time as the SCOTUS Koontz decision.

Exposure Is Everything

There is a parable about a man walking down a road and repeatedly falling in a hole. He tries to avoid the hole, but his efforts are fruitless. He tries to patch the hole ... he tries to put up barricades to avoid the hole ... he tries to put planks over the hole so he can safely cross ... nothing works ... he falls in every time. In his frustration, he pleads to a friend, "What can I do to stop falling in the hole?!?"

His friend tells him, "Take another road without a hole."

This could be a parable about the CAOs. The County continues to fall in the same hole every time. The latest 78-page draft of the CAOs is no different from any previous approach. Like all previous Councils, this Council just doesn't get it. They don't understand "protection." They don't understand "risk." They are trying to follow what they believe are State mandates. They timidly react to every letter from the Department of Ecology as if they were in the presence of the burning bush.

Protection is inextricably linked to an exposure scenario. Football helmets provide protection during a football game, but they offer no protection if you wear them at a cocktail party. The risk of getting bonked on the head at a cocktail party is de minimis anyway, so the extra cost of wearing a football helmet is wasted. For the same reason, you would be foolish to undergo chemo therapy just because you might be afraid of cancer ... or just because you might have been exposed to de minimis levels of carcinogens. The cost and side effects are high whereas the benefits are non-existent.

We have a 78-page CAO that explains in great detail how to wear a football helmet at a cocktail party. It tells us what color the helmet should be ... how thick it should be ... what the internal padding should be ... how the chinstrap should be worn ... and on and on. It references Best Available Science (BAS) by experts who proclaim that football helmets prevent concussions. The Friends and their allies at the State say that, without the biggest football helmets in the universe, our risk of dying from a concussion is extremely high.

No. The absence of a "protective" measure (i.e., a helmet) does not create risk. Risk arises from our behavior and ambient factors (i.e., cocktail party versus football game). The absence of a remedy may fail to mitigate risk, but the absence of a remedy does not "create" risk.

Regarding the CAOs, we occasionally hear public officials say, "Tell us what needs to be fixed and we will fix it." To those officials, listen carefully ... it is unfixable because you have chosen the wrong path. If you do not first evaluate exposure scenarios, it is pointless to prescribe a remedy.

The perennial complaints about the CAOs fall in the following general categories:

1. The County is imposing protective measures without providing county-specific evidence of an exposure scenario justifying those measures.
2. The State and County habitually (and erroneously) say we are in a high-risk situation only because of the absence of their favorite purported "protections," not because there is any evidence that our behavior is creating an exposure scenario with excess risk.
3. The "protections" being foisted upon us, land use restrictions, would not be protective anyway. If we did find ourselves in a high-risk exposure scenario, land use restrictions would be the least effective way of mitigating the risk. Other, less-costly remedies would likely be vastly more effective.

If there is a fix, our CAOs should simply say, "We will develop and implement site-specific remedies to mitigate excess risk related to critical areas, commensurate with our ability to measure such risk and directly link site-specific development activities as the cause."

Unless our public officials can get some simple concepts through their thick heads, we will always find ourselves in the same hole.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Tomorrow morning (February 11, 2014) at 9:15, the County Council will take public comment on the latest draft of the CAOs. This Council has decided to go forward by going backwards ... in all senses of that word. This Council has decided to proceed with yet another new CAO despite still-pending litigation on the last version.

This Council's CAO work has been so unoriginal that they haven't even mustered the creativity to make their own mistakes. They are recycling a CAO framework first thought up, and then rejected, by Shireene Hale and the previous Council years ago. It's not simpler. It's not better. It's not newer.

The new old version is currently planned for enactment by the end of March.

The Story No One Covers

There is a culture of government corruption in these islands, and its meme carries with it a narrative that says, "Give us money or else we'll all die." We've seen this meme at work when it comes to phony environmental "protection." It also seems to be at play with some of our police, safety, and fire departments on occasion. They're willing to save us, as long as they get lots of cash up front.

While attention has been focused on the San Juan Christmas hayride, some strange incidents also are being talked about on Orcas, where the nephew of Randy Gaylord, Kevin O'Brien, is Chief of the Orcas Fire Department. Orcasites approved a controversial levy several years ago that was advertised as necessary for capital infrastructure (another new firehouse and new fire-fighting equipment), only to have Chief O'Brien recently reallocate those funds to payroll, including creating new paid positions, including a new, highly-paid deputy. Now the "temporary" levy is up for renewal, and the Chief is claiming that if it is not renewed, services will have to be cut. These events have occurred against a backdrop of many rumors of bad behavior by the Orcas Fire Department ... everything from having dinner flown in from Bellingham ... to staff using the Fire Department washing machines as their personal publicly funded laundromat.

New questions have arisen about the Orcas Fire Department sparked by an accident involving Jack Delisle, one of those hired by O'Brien. In short, Delisle got into a single-car accident at about 2am back in March 9, 2013. He ran a car off the road and into a ditch. The car was owned by another member of the Fire Department, Nick Kiniski. Yet another member of the Fire Department, Seth Ybarra, came to Delisle's aid after the crash, pulled the car out of the ditch, and towed it to Fire Station 21, where Kininski was on duty that night as a paramedic.

As some Orcasites tell it, the gist of the concern is this: a member of the Orcas Fire Department (Ybarra) allegedly removed evidence of a crash involving a drunken driver member of the Fire Department, did not properly notify the police, and let the injured driver disappear from the scene. Earlier that night, the driver had been attending a party at the Chief's house to celebrate his (Delisle's) hiring. The Chief had served food and alcohol at the party.

A detailed report of what happened is provided in the scanned pages shown below, and it includes some commentary and questions inserted by a concerned citizen on Orcas. This story has not been reported anywhere, so perhaps Orcasites can shed some further light on these events. With the "temporary" levy up for renewal, issues of Departmental integrity and responsibility are on the minds of many on Orcas.

In other news, the latest draft of the CAOs is undergoing public comment this week. As bad as the last Council was regarding the CAOs, the new Council has been worse. Their public participation record is awful. Their ability to think through the issues is abysmal, and their "fixes" to the CAOs have done nothing to correct its fundamental flaws. In its latest CAO version, the Council has decided to abandon the last Council's system for buffers and replace it with another one that is equally flawed. For more information, please visit the CSA website. This Council is just as much in the pocket of the Friends as the last one.

In addition, Councilman Jamie Stephens was seen in Olympia this past week. He attended hearings put on by the House Agriculture and Natural Resource Committee regarding Ecology's practice of sending out threatening letters. Stephens didn't testify, but he sat in the last row near the door next to the Sierra Club representatives ... being very Friendly.

The Mathematics of Today

A reader asked me to re-post the video of "Blink Your Eyes" by Sekou Sundiata because they felt it had some relevance to events in Friday Harbor. I've re-posted the link to the video below. Enjoy!

But while that story continues to develop, the business of the County moves forward. Our County Council is quietly proceeding to revise the latest update to the CAOs, in order to comply with the Growth Management Hearings Board (GMHB) ruling -- despite the fact that there is a court hearing about the GMHB ruling occurring in late February. Got that? It's so simple to follow the CAOs, isn't it? ... just like so many things about government.

When I was a kid, government was (or at least seemed) so simple. Cop, school, mayor ... that was about it. Now it is an incomprehensible mess. I'd be interested to know how many of the following acronyms you can identify, or if you have the vaguest idea how any of them influence your life.

1. GMHB
2. SMHB
3. PSP
4. AAOG
5. LIO
6. SMP
7. CAO
8. MRC
9. ARC
10. TAG

And ... if you are interested in providing comments to the latest revision on the update of the proposed new changed modification of the latest draft of the CAO modifications version, you have to get your comments into the County by February 3. Actually, providing comments is serious stuff, even if the process is mockable, sad, and laughable all at the same time.  The current Council is doing a miserable job at keeping the public informed about their work on the CAOs, but you should still make the effort to keep up because these looming ordinances will have a big effect on you.  Follow this link to find the latest draft.

Lastly, I want to reiterate a point I made in the comments. We are working on a new site that will allow readers to have greater control over the comments they see. We will always allow people to make comments of any kind, but it's clear (to me anyway) there are some commenters who are deliberately trying (and failing) to drive readers away by being troublesome. The antidote to that, in my humble opinion, isn't to restrict what people say, but to give readers the ability to filter comments so that you have a better chance of reading the good ones. The new site will allow you to make whatever comment you want, but also you will be able to filter comments to exclude ones with certain words or groups of words (e.g., profanity) as well as view comments according to a rating system that is also in the works.

Until then, enjoy the posts and the many good comments that are being made ... regardless of the ones that try to be destructive.

Catching Up (Again) - Ethics and PSSA's

As usual, there has been a lot going on, and my thanks to commenters who keep abreast of information even when I am unable to post. Here are a few recent items of particular note:

• David Dehlendorf and Friends Attorney Kyle Loring raised a stink about the fact that three Common Sense Alliance (CSA) Board members sit on the Planning Commission. Dehlenloring alleged that it was a conflict of interest since CSA is opposing the County's draft of the Critical Areas Ordinance (CAO) in court. Loring even said that the conflict was so obvious that it was "Ethics 101." If it is Ethics 101, then Dehlendorf and Loring are late to class.
  
  Unlike the Friends, CSA has never received a penny from the County and never voted to give itself grant funding. Unlike the Friends, CSA is a relative newcomer to County advisory committees. In fact, when Mike Carlson of CSA was appointed to the Planning Commission, he replaced Mike Kaill, former President of the Friends Board. Kaill's tenure on the Planning Commission coincided with the Friends opposition (including lawsuits) of the County's guesthouse legislation. Where were Dehlenloring's concerns about ethics then? Or ... when Susan Dehlendorf took a "straw poll" of Planning Commissioners regarding the CAO last year, where were the concerns about ethics?
  
  Ethics 101? It seems more like Ethics-ish 101. When Dehlenloring are interested in ethics for everybody instead of simply using the name of ethics as a tool to advance their own interests, then we're more likely to pay attention. By the way, our Prosecuting Attorney reviewed the issue and twice produced a written opinion saying there is no conflict. The Planning Commission is only an advisory body to the Council, and as such, no conflict exists.

• By now, most people have probably heard that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been armoring the beach at Watmough Bay, one of the most beloved pocket beaches in all the islands ... and certainly one of the most beloved beaches on Lopez Island. There are several incredible ironies about this story, which we will cover in greater detail in an upcoming post. First, the hard armoring isn't even protecting any structures. Second, despite all the meetings with BLM officials over the past few months about local outreach and involvement, apparently no locals knew the hard armoring project was in the works. Third, the BLM produced an Environmental Assessment of the proposed work which led to a "Finding of No Significant Impact" (FONSI). Think about that for a moment ... the federal government armored a beach in the National Monument and there are no significant impacts, and yet the Friends oppose nearly every dock and armoring project on the grounds that there are environmental impacts. Fourth, one of the contractors involved in the Watmough Bay project, Coastal Geologic Services, is the Friends "go to" consultant whenever the Friends oppose docks and armoring. It's hard to believe the Friends didn't know about the Watmough Bay project ahead of time ... and yet they said nothing, even as they opposed other armoring projects elsewhere and opposed the expansion of the Islander Resort on Fisherman Bay too. There are more ironies, but ... we'll cover them in the upcoming full post.

• Speaking of the Friends, they're at it again. One of the key strategies of the Friends is to take local issues and link them to national and international affairs, so that we become subsumed into a global matrix of restrictions based on the pretense of "local protection." Case in point was Stephanie Buffum signing a treaty to protect the Salish Sea last March. As we've seen, the Friends' megalomania becomes especially virulent when it comes into contact with grant money. Below is an email from ex-CDPD employee Elizabeth Anderson talking to the usual suspects ... Barbara Rosenkotter and Stephanie Buffum ... about (wait for it) a grant to designate our waters a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA). I know ... yet another acronym. It never ends. Some of you may remember Elizabeth Anderson, whose employment with CDPD was justified by (you guessed it) a grant, and who was put in charge of writing a County Solid Waste Management Plan during the collapse of the County's solid waste management system. Her time here could not have been more fruitless and pointless.
  
  Now she is touting another "brilliant program."

__________________________________________________

From: Elizabeth Anderson

To: Barbara Rosenkotter

Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 11:53:00 -0700

Subject: Fwd: Oil Spill Prevention - Addition to today's discussion

Attachment(s): 1

OOPS! I forgot to copy you on this.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Elizabeth Anderson <ebanderson12@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: Oil Spill Prevention - Addition to today's discussion
To: Stephanie Buffum <stephanie@sanjuans.org>

Stephanie - this is a brilliant program with a high degree of probability of success in preventing oil spills. However, it does not fit the NTA where I had notes that you would provide some further milestones. I attach the revised table thus far.  The only red letters are under SD 1B, where I thought you had more to add.  It may be fine as-is.

Do I need to add anything from yesterday's IC discussion?

Thanks, 

Elizabeth

On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 5:22 PM, Stephanie Buffum <stephanie@sanjuans.org> wrote:

The purpose of the Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA) for the Salish Sea Feasibility Study is to investigate the possible benefits and costs of enhancing the management regime  of the areas surrounding the shipping lanes surrounding the San Juan Island National Monument, through the creation of an internationally mandated Particularly Sensitive Sea Area for the Salish Sea. This potential designation can only be achieved if the area is particularly sensitive (in ecological and cultural terms) and the existing regulatory regime does not adequately protect it. Whilst such PSSA designations have been recognized in other parts of the United States and the international community, they have not been considered in the context of the highly vulnerable Salish Sea.

Goal: 

To communicate to the Salish Sea populace, including organizations, business, Tribes and First Nations and government, what important ecological and cultural values are present in the Salish Sea, their fragility, and how they will be negatively impacted upon if the risk of vessel traffic in this area is not adequately managed, as it is in other part of the United States, and similarly, within the international community. Simply, we wish to show the gaps in our regulatory protection of the Salish Sea, and an existing tool can be applied to fix this problem, to the benefit of both the ecology and the surrounding communities.

Objectives:

1.     To provide a principle campaign tool for protecting marine waters.

2.     To educate the public about what is at stake if large scale shipping traffic of potentially hazardous cargo, is not adequately regulated.

3.     To show how adequate management has been achieved in comparable areas with similar risks to the Salish Sea.

4.     To empower local groups, including Tribes and First Nations, eco-tourism operators with information for their own campaigns to protect the Salish Sea, and to learn from the experience of other communities facing similar difficulties

5.     To develop “new evidence” to bring to any review process.

6.     To provide an Alternative, which has been successfully adopted elsewhere,  to reduce the risk of an oil spill in the Salish Sea.

Audience and campaign

The audience is the general population of the Salish Sea. The request for designation will require Washington State Tribes and Canadian First Nations, federal, provincial, state and local leaders and public officials to support this designation. Key business leaders and ngo organizations in British Columbia and the US, principally within Washington State, will be essential for cultivating support for these two proposals separately in the US and in Canada. 

Cost: $35,000 for Feasibility Report. Gap: $25,000

$90,000 for full nomination in the US and Canada, conference, materials. Gap: $90,000

Our Fourth Councilman?

According to State law, our elected Prosecuting Attorney serves as a legal advisor to our Council while also representing the County in all criminal and civil proceedings where the County is a party. Under our Charter, the Council must use resolutions to declare policy or exercise its executive power.

When the County's CAO was appealed to the Growth Management Hearings Board (GMHB) in June 2013, our Prosecuting Attorney's (PA's) Office defended the ordinance in front of the GMHB. I want readers to take particular note of the date. The GMHB hearings occurred during June 2013 ... after our new three-person Council took office. Our PA's defense of the CAO ostensibly took place under the direction of a different Council from the one that rammed the CAOs down our throats in its waning days last December. Our current Council has not passed any resolutions declaring its policy stance towards the new CAO nor directed the PA to defend any particular position regarding the previous Council's CAO work product.

Then, when the GMHB ruling came down in September 2013, it was the PA who issued a press release declaring the GMHB outcome to be largely a victory for the County. Again, there was no comment or resolution from the County Council.

Even though the GMHB ruling struck down parts of the County's CAO, the County did not file to defend the new CAOs in Superior Court (CSA and the Friends have filed suit with Superior Court). Again, there has been no comment or resolution from the County Council.

Last week, the PA's office opposed a Motion to Stay brought by CSA regarding enactment of the new CAO. CSA seeks to stay the implementation of the new CAO until the legal issues can be fully resolved by the courts. Along with the Friends, our PA's office, on behalf of our County, is opposing the motion. Again, there has been no comment or resolution from the County Council.

Let's review ...

• New Council takes over in May 2013.  What do we hear from our Council about the CAO? ... crickets.
• The GMHB hearings occur in June 2013. What do we hear from our Council in terms of coordinating with the PA on a position regarding the CAO? ... crickets.
• The GMHB ruling is issued in September 2013. What do we hear from our Council? ... crickets.
• CSA and the Friends file to take the GMHB ruling to Superior Court in October 2013. What do we hear from our Council? ... crickets.
• Our PA files an opposition to CSA's Motion to Stay in October 2013 ... and so do the Friends.  What do we hear from our Council? ... crickets.

No one knows how the new CAOs will affect wildlife in the San Juans, but the crickets are flourishing at the County Council chambers.

With last week's opposition to stay, this Council cannot hide from the CAOs anymore. We already knew of Stephens' advocacy for the CAOs, since he voted for them. Now, we have to put Hughes' and Jarman's names alongside those of Pratt, Miller, Fralick, and Rosenfeld as those who are forcing a dysfunctional CAO upon us. Not even Pratt, Miller, Fralick, and Rosenfeld took court action to have the CAOs enacted, but last week, this Council allowed our PA to do just that. While our Council does nothing, Gaylord is making up County policy out of thin air ... and our Council sits on its hands doing nothing to stop it.

The CAOs have acquired several nicknames over the past few years ... Crazy Asinine Ordinance, Critical Agenda (21) Ordinance, Can't Avoid Obedience ... but under this Council, it might as well stand for "Currently Absent Officials." Despite the fact that the CAOs were a major election issue, this Council has done nothing about them, and in the resulting policy vacuum, our PA has been happy to act in their place.

Who is directing our PA regarding the CAOs?  Answer: Not our Council.

Ich Bin Ein Kay Kohler

One of the common threads in the environmental-ish world is that rules apply only to the non-environmental-ish segment of society. We've seen this at work with the Friends, who have long criticized guesthouses for everyone else, but seem to like them personally. Former Friends Board member, Vivian Burnet, had an illegal guesthouse. Former Friends President, Lynn Bahrych, who started off the whole guesthouse fiasco by filing a guesthouse lawsuit in 1999, had a guesthouse. Friends attorney, Kyle Loring, has a guesthouse. Former Friends President, George Lawson, has a guesthouse ... and there are probably others.

Another common thread in the environmental-ish world is to distort the meaning of "grassroots" and "local." Nowhere is this more apparent than in the oxymoronic title of the organization "ICLEI" ... which stands for the "International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives" with their motto of "Local Action Moves the World."  Think about that for a moment ... how can there be an "international" council about "local" initiatives? In the case of ICLEI, the global organization provides a blueprint for local communities to follow ... so that each community fits into ICLEI's overall design in jigsaw-puzzle like fashion. ICLEI isn't a local movement any more than McDonalds is a local diner. However, when we see the golden arches in Lubbock, Texas, or Paris, France, we understand we're seeing corporate McDonalds, not our hometown diner. But, we have not yet trained our eye to recognize that when we see the same environmental-ish battles cropping up in Plumas County, Marin County, Bainbridge Island, or San Juan County, we are seeing the corporate environmental-ish agenda at work, not a local one.

One of our local San Juan County citizens, Kay Kohler, has run into a spot of trouble on her family homestead that she inherited in Snohomish County ... and her situation has lessons for us in San Juan County because, incredibly, it is not an isolated case. In fact, Kay's situation is remarkably similar to the way Rachel Dietzman and our Prosecuting Attorney treated Lopezian Nicholas Padvorac during the Fisherman Bay Road Improvement Project.  We will explain that situation in a later post, but the message we want to convey is that you should pay close attention to the way the County interacts with its citizens on Public Works projects ... because this could happen to you. It's part of a developing pattern involving critical areas (in this case, wetlands, but it could just as easily be shorelines or something else), Public Works, stormwater (think Eastsound mosquito hatchery), contractual fine-print, and the legal power of bureaucratic whim.

The five acres that Kay Kohler owns in Snohomish County was bought by Kay's grandfather in 1936. Kay has old photos of the place dating back to that time, showing what it looked like then. When Snohomish County started developing rapidly, the Kohler clan did not sell the farm, which is located just north of Lynwood.  They held onto it, and houses sprang up on all sides. In 2007, the County wanted to purchase a portion of Kay's property for a road improvement (stormwater) project, and in 2009, after three separate appraisals, Kay agreed to sell one acre of her property to the County for $404,000. At the time, it seemed like a pretty straightforward deal, and neither Kay nor her (now former) attorney noticed that the fine print of the contract said that the County could change the valuation of her property after the fact through "condemnation" or "some other" method. 

In November 2011 ... two years after the sale ... the County hired an "expert" to re-value Kay's land.  The new expert valued the 2009 land transaction at just $48,750 because, the expert claimed, Kay's land was covered by wetlands and was hardly worth anything because it was un-developable. Snohomish County then condemned Kay's land for $48,750 and demanded that Kay hand back $355,250. Then, the County began court proceedings to get its money back.

Notwithstanding that Kay has photos stretching back over 70 years showing her land as not being wetlands ... notwithstanding that the County, as development proceeded apace in the 80's and 90's, configured their stormwater system to dump millions of gallons of stormwater on Kay's property without  her consent ... notwithstanding that Snohomish County has an NPDES permit that prohibits stormwater discharges that bypass their system ... all that notwithstanding, Kay's legal case was bungled and she lost both her court case and her appeal.  Snohomish County is now threatening to freeze Kay's bank accounts in order to get back its $355,250.

Ironically, after declaring Kay's stormwater-flooded property to be "waters of the United States" (i.e., a wetland), Snohomish County then failed to get the required permits from the Corps of Engineers (Section 404 Permit) and the Department of Ecology/EPA (Section 401 Permit) that are necessary for construction projects occurring in wetlands. Is it a wetland only when the County wants to get it for a cheap price, but not a wetland when the County wants to avoid getting the federal and state permits needed to build on it?

And so it goes ... rules only work one way in Snohomish County ... just like they do in San Juan County ... (ethics too, and an upcoming post will examine the controversy currently being manufactured by David Dehlendorf and Kyle Loring about our Planning Commission).

Note: ICLEI has recently changed its name to Local Governments for Sustainability even though it continues to use its original acronym of "ICLEI."

Pure Imagination: 100% Environmental-ish

Today we start another Trojan Heron series called "Pure Imagination" about the environmental-ish ideas we confront daily in the San Juans. The series title comes from a famous song in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and one of the stanzas could be the motto for the Friends and their friends.

We'll begin

With a spin

Traveling in

The world of my creation

What we'll see

Will defy

Explanation

Books like Fast Food Nation exposed the dark side of the All-American Meal, and there is a dark side to environmental-ish ideas too ... and oddly the two dark sides are linked. Like McDonalds, environmental-ish organizations spew images of wholesome goodness ... but there is an underlying profit motive distorting the truth. The truth about environmental-ish organizations is that their "wilderness loving" policies and actions actually promote urbanism ... by being against rural living. They even support and promote factory farming ... by demanding Conditional Use Permits (CUPs) for new family farming and suing to shut down family-run aquaculture.

If the environmental-ish proponents of the Growth Management Act (GMA) were to get their way, there would be über-planned cities and nothing else. The illogical conclusion would be that we'd all have to live in one crammed city bounded by uninhabited nature. There would be no country lanes ... no farm cottages ... no one-lane bridges ... no bucolic pastures. To feed people in the über city on the smallest possible land footprint, we would need planned factory farms, too ... there'd be no free-range chickens in that world.

At the density of Seattle, the entire population of Washington State would fit into Mason County ... with 50 square miles to spare. At the population density of Friday Harbor, the entire population of San Juan County would fit onto just two-thirds of Lopez. Do we really have a population and development problem, or do we have environmental-ish profit motives at work trying to separate people from nature and the land?

Watch the following entertaining video by (believe it or not) Chipotle, the Mexican natural (fast) food company. The images you'll see about mass produced food also apply to our centrally-planned, mass-produced environmentalism.  We're not getting real environmentalism anymore ... we're getting "environmental-ish" ideas that people (especially city people) consume without thinking.  And Crow Foods might as well be Friends Incorporated because both are only interested in money and image ... most certainly they are not interested in you, local food, rural character, or the environment.

These days, as with food, we have to ask ourselves, where does our "environmentalism" come from? We'll try to provide some answers in this series.

At the population density of Seattle, our State's entire population could fit into Mason County with room to spare.

Depiction of mass produced community ...  or what  "growth management" looks like in its ultimate stages (from Behind the Green Mask)

Shooting Elephants

Even more than fossil fuel use, it is our misguided land use policies that are causing changes in atmospheric carbon.  More importantly, our land use policies are causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown, and war ... or so says Allan Savory in the TED talk below.

Our CAOs assume that everything that Man does is destructive to the environment. The recent Growth Management Hearings Board (GMHB) ruling even says that our buffers have to be protected from agriculture. The GMHB ruling will require that our buffers be larger, and our buffers have to be no-go, no-touch zones.

It kind of makes you feel like an elephant, and for that explanation, listen to the video below. At one time, Allan Savory's "best available science" led him to recommend and implement the needless slaughter of 40,000 elephants ... 40,000 ... almost three times as many elephants as there are people in San Juan County.

This earnest biologist thought he was saving the ecosystem. Instead, he was killing it.





Press release from the Common Sense Alliance regarding the GMHB ruling -

Dear San Juan County Neighbors and Friends,

Three days of hearings in Friday Harbor before the Growth Management Hearings Board (“Hearings Board”) on the San Juan County’s Critical Areas Ordinance (“CAO”) culminated in a decision received by the parties on Monday, September 9, 2013. The determination remanded the CAO back to the County for changes consistent with Order of the Hearings Board that is found at the end of the 109 page document. The decision addressed only some of the issues raised by the 5 petitioners in the case, the Friends of the San Juans, the San Juan Builders Association, William H. Wright, P.J. Tagarres Company and Common Sense Alliance.

A core position that the Common Sense Alliance (“CSA”) took at the hearing is that an essential underpinning of the CAO, the proper designation of critical areas, has not been done by San Juan County. The Hearings Board dodged this issue by effectively saying that determining the legality of the County’s CAO is beyond its authority. By ducking the “legality” question the Hearings Board did not deal with the fundamental issue of whether the Ordinance, due to faulty construction, unlawfully interferes with the use of private property.

It is CSA’s contention that this flawed and incomplete decision leaves San Juan County with an unenforceable ordinance and the specter of an unknown number of future lawsuits brought by individuals who are denied the use their property. An unenforceable ordinance protects nothing and furthers the uncertainty in the real estate market that has been plaguing our County for so long.

CSA’s goal is an enforceable ordinance that complies with all aspects of the Growth Management Act, which is practical, reliable and good for our community, does not harm our fragile economy and makes a positive difference to our environment. CSA will be consulting with the public and weighing its alternatives for future action.

Trouble Brewing In The San Juans

On Tuesday, the current Council defeated a proposal for new rules for public meetings. It was an item left over from the previous Council. The "new rules" proposal was drafted by our previous Council to enforce "civility" at public meetings. Over the last couple of years, we have seen pleas for civility used by the Friends and their friends as a weapon to limit public participation and openness. Ironically, those who have clamored the loudest for civility here have often behaved in the most objectively uncivil ways themselves ... for example, by resorting to name calling and out-and-out lying.

And those tactics and strategies have been given succor by influential officials higher up the government food chain. A case in point is the string of emails below from 2011. In the emails, officials from the Puget Sound Partnership (PSP) are complaining about science being introduced by the Common Sense Alliance (CSA) during the CAO process. Specifically, state officials are reacting to a CSA newsletter about ocean science proposed for BAS by Dr. David Hyde, formerly of Scripps Institute of Oceanography. The emails between Bill Ruckelshaus, Martha Kongsgaard, and Gerry O'Keefe illustrate many things:

• First, they show that San Juan County is on the radar screen of some of the most influential people in the state. 
• Second, they show the casual contempt that state officials have for anyone outside of the Friends, the tribes, or insider scientists. 
• Third, they show no respect for the legitimate concerns of local people and display condescension at the premise that differences with the PSP might actually be authentic. Kongsgaard implies that CSA has somehow manufactured controversy and created dialogue that isn't "real." In fact, Kongsgaard shows off her political blinders by denigrating the "world view" politics of her opponents while she simultaneously displays nothing but her own "world view." 
• Fourth, the emails employ tactics that we've come to expect in the San Juans -- paint all CSA-like troublemakers with a broad politically-charged brush (e.g., Tea Partiers); lie about them (CSA "screamed" at Ruckelshaus); favor tourists over residents; and generally vilify anyone who encourages broad-based local public participation. 
• Lastly, the emails show the speed-dial first-name bonds that existed (and may still exist) between our local manipulative hardball world-view commissars and the state's manipulative hardball world-view commissars.

The email from Kongsgaard is sickening for its prejudice.

For reference and background, Martha Kongsgaard is the current head of the PSP Leadership Council. Ruckelshaus (formerly Head of the PSP Leadership Council) and O'Keefe (formerly Executive Director of the PSP) have moved on, but as most San Juan residents probably realize, Bill Ruckelshaus remains a hugely influential figure. And speaking of huge, he also owns one of the largest shoreline homes and docks in the county.

The email string kicks off with Ruckelshaus forwarding the CSA newsletter to O'Keefe and Kongsgaard with the ominous admonition, "Trouble brewing in the San Juans." However, Ruckelshaus is wrong. Any fair evaluator of the evidence would conclude that trouble has already been baked into our state, local, and tribal governments ... garnished with the scientists and non-profits that are in league with them.
_________
Errata: The initial wording of this post incorrectly identified Gerry O'Keefe as being the former Head of the Department of Ecology when in reality he served as the Executive Director of the PSP. Corrections have been made and my thanks to the reader who pointed out the error.

From: Gerry O'Keefe
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 1:10 PM
To: Jeanette Dorner
Subject: Fwd: Note from Ruckelshaus -FW: Ocean Science Missing in Best Available Science

FYI. 

Gerry O'Keefe

Executive Director

PUGET SOUND PARTNERSHIP

p: 360.464.1228 

c: 360.593.6620 

Via iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

From: martha kongsgaard <martha@kongsgaard-goldman.org>
Date: October 12, 2011 12:59:47 PM PDT
To: Bill Ruckelshaus <bill@madrona.com>
Cc: Gerry O'Keefe <gerry.okeefe@psp.wa.gov>
Subject: RE: Note from Ruckelshaus -FW: Ocean Science Missing in Best Available Science

Thanks for this Bill.  This is ongoing up there as you know. I think you have personally been screamed at there, no? The county has adopted the BAS already and this cannot be undone until the CAO is complete which will be sometime in June.  Then the law suits will be filed by both sides.  The best thing that can happen now is that  a thorough record is made by groups like Friends of the San Juans, UW scientists, and the tribes so that they can prevail in court.  It is a lousy system, but it’s the one we have.  IN the mean time, it is rough to be Lovell Pratt, for example, who is chair and is trying to hold the line.

The CSalliance is certainly whipping up fear and introducing new science into the CAO discussion and are managing to fill town halls with 50 – 70 people.  At the end of the day, it has much more to do with philosophy than with science – see the Tea Party.  If the case could be made publicly that their science is not on point, that over 50% of the shoreline is already built out and that the parcels are by and large under ½ acre, and that the economy of the San Juans depends on the 1,000,000+ tourists who travel there to be sold “beauty and wildness” and on and on, they would still hate government and resist regulation in most any form.  They are jamming the planning department by encouraging land owners to go, one by one, to the planning department to ask what effect these regulations ‘could’ have on their land.  They are demanding that the council notify all land owners of the same, with individual maps, etc., all under the request for transparency and open government.  That plays well and is hard to combat.  But it is killing the dept. who otherwise would be working on the CAO etc. and so the worm turns…..

This e mail got me off my duff to call Lovell Pratt, the chair, and friends of the San Juans.  They need our support to do the hard thing.  We need to listen to the CSA, and the worries of the property owners and figure out how to get the hard work done.  There is not a lot of real communications getting done.  It is world view stuff that doesn’t allow for much dialogue in my experience.

Martha

M A R T H A   K O N G S G A A R D
  
4 4 0 8   B E A C H  D R I V E  S. W.   
S E A T T L E,   W A   9 8 1 1 6
W - 2 0 6 . 4 4 8 . 1 8 7 4  *  C  -  2 0 6 . 8 1 7 . 5 4 7 3
martha@kongsgaard-goldman.org

---

From: Bill Ruckelshaus [mailto:bill@madrona.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 9:14 AM
To: Gerry O'Keefe; martha kongsgaard
Subject: Note from Ruckelshaus -FW: Ocean Science Missing in Best Available Science

Gerry and Martha,

Trouble brewing in the San Juans.

Bill

Diane L. Hodgson, Personal Manager

William D. and Jill Ruckelshaus
Madrona Venture Group and Evergreen Venture

1000 Second Avenue, Ste 3700

Seattle, WA  98104

206-674-3009 p

206-674-3013 f

From: Common Sense Alliance [mailto:info@commonsensealliance.net]
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 4:14 PM
To: Bill Ruckelshaus
Subject: Ocean Science Missing in Best Available Science

Images not displaying properly? Add info@commonsensealliance.net to your address book now. Tuesday, 11 October 2011 Vol. 73 Guest Editorial:  Why is Ocean Science Missing in the SJC's BAS? My wife and I came to San Juan Island in 2009 to enjoy the wonderful ambience of these Islands.   Like many friends and neighbors, we are environmentally oriented--I having retired from 40 years of ocean technology work, and she a long career in public relations.   We both are alarmed by San Juan County’s recent CAO developments and public disclosures--her from a public information perspective, and I from an ocean sciences point of view.  We are not directly affected, but I want to speak out as a county taxpayer and home owner in the cause of clarity and transparency.  Our fellow taxpayers and residents need the real facts to better judge the truth and value of this “environmentally necessitated” county initiative against the cost and economic risk to all our communities and their residents.  Here’s the main issue:   the current CAO is based on facts that do not apply to the San Juan Islands and missing the facts that do.  My comments are directed toward the centerpiece of the CAO plan--Imposing deep setbacks and buffer zones to protect and restore our marine environment. There’s a big problem with the County’s approach.   The County’s agencies have developed a long list of Puget Watershed and related reports, called “Best Available Science.”   This BAS forms their justification for the CAO, and the SMP to follow.   According to the State these ordinances must be based on some definition of best available science. With my long association with ocean institutes, including the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA, I tried to determine the basis of the “ocean truth” in this BAS.  I was appalled to find that, despite years of Salish Sea studies, no physical oceanographic studies describing our local marine waters exist in this BAS.   Without an ocean-reality baseline, how can this county legitimately proceed with a marine environmental remediation plan?  And, how costly will this plan be to enforce if their “science” is missing essential information? I found that, while unacknowledged in the BAS, the body of ocean literature on local waters is extensive, and represents 50 years of model development and measurements by leading institutes.   The circulation models we now have available are mature, detailed, and tested physical science.  The findings contained in this literature led me to clear conclusions that fundamentally counter SJC’s rationale for shoreline buffer actions: 1.            The San Juan Islands waters are not part of the Puget Sound at all – They are part of the Southern Straits of Georgia, almost 10 times larger in water volume, and in river outflows.  We may be politically connected to the Puget, but our local marine waters are Canadian, and incidentally contain the effluent of 80% of the economic output of BC. 2.            Mostly blocked from northerly exit, the massive outflows from BC’s Fraser and nearby rivers create a persistent southerly flow of their waters through our islands out into the Straits of Juan de Fuca.  These river flows exceed 100 cubic kilometers of river water annually--about ten times that of all Puget rivers. 3.            Because of seabed and tidal flow features just to the south of us, these northern waters don’t mix much with Puget waters during tidal cycles. This means there is little mixing of our Islands’ and Puget waters by our strong tidal cycles, further isolating us.  These tides also create massive upwelling of clean Pacific waters along our shorelines from the bottom counter-current, and constantly bring fresh ocean waters to our shorelines.  Our Islands’ shorelines have the best flushed marine waters of any coastline in the lower US, and no local marine water quality measurements can legitimately separate the origins of local and Canadian runoff. The ocean-truth for our Islands is that we are immersed in a huge BC system that mixes massive river outflows from the Fraser basin with Pacific Ocean waters.   BC governments have been addressing water quality issues for decades and are making progress—but, we are only a small part of their very large system.  We San Juan Islanders will be far better served by focusing on the few local area problems that we have and that we can do something about, rather than by incorrectly pursuing environmental actions that, to no avail impose laws based on incomplete information.  It is time for the County of San Juan to step back and get the Ocean reality for our Islands right--before proceeding further with these CAO and SMP initiatives. David Hyde, PhD  [Note:  David Hyde, PhD, has a professional background in ocean sciences from his association with the University of California, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and other institutes.  The information and opinions in this editorial are his own independent assessments of literature that is available for everyone to assess.  He has recently collaborated with Ed Kilduff, a Lopez Island hydrogeologist, to create a presentation entitled "San Juan Archipelago Water Quality & CAO."   Mr. Hyde has given permission for CSA to publish his editorial opinion.] Common Sense Alliance P.O. 1249 Friday Harbor, 98250 info@commonsensealliance.net www.www.commonsensealliance.net