| I have been involved with Initiative-933 on Bainbridge Island this spring. Getting signatures and having the city make me dismantle a twelve-year old garden that I had on a high ridge on the edge of a wetland. One side is about 100 feet from the wetland. The other sides are much farther. Although it was an organic garden and it had evolved its own ecological niche, the City of Bainbridge Island would not hear of any reasonable compromise.
Our newly arrived neighbors from California did not like the garden because it was close to the property line. It had the required 15 feet set-back with a well-grown hedge row. Their house is built on the same ridge 50 feet from the garden. This house has a septic tank and a drain field which is probably more harmful to a wetland than an organic garden. The bureaucrats said the garden was not in compliance because it was already too close to the wetland under the old rules; even before the passing of their Critical Areas Ordinance on February 15, 2006.
This is a bureaucracy that allowed an oil corporation to sink their tanks and build a service station on a wetland. The community opposed it for a decade, but the corporation finally won with their deep pockets. The Director of Planning and so-called “Community Development” and the Vegetation Manager have watched, for the past 15 years, zombie-like, as developers and others have filled in wetlands and seasonal streams and removed all that he preferred — on the north side of Murden Cove. City planners have made the plans for developments, approved the plans and then have gone to work for the same development. There was no penalty of any kind assessed.
It fits in with the City of Seattle taking land to give to “poor” Paul Allen on Lake Union and the land-grab after the condemnation along the now defunct Monorail. The taking of our properties is in all kind of forms and is often unknown because people don’t know or can’t fight back. And the cretinized US Supreme Court now condones such acts of corporate welfare.
I would like to sue the City of Bainbridge Island for $1000 a year for the vegetables, flowers and fruits that we will now have to buy instead of growing ourselves.
I hope you will read Initiative-933. Find it at www.properttyfairness.com. It protects the natural environment. It also protects us in the use of our land and it makes the bureaucrats really think about why and what they are doing. It is very easy for them to say: one hundred feet here and 40 feet there and then they go back to sleep and wake up once in a while when a nasty neighbor appears from hell.
J. P. Gagnon
Bainbridge Island | 