| This past spring the City of Bainbridge Island made me dismantle a twelve-year old garden 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 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 now required 15 feet set-back (I-933 will do away with arbitrary set-backs) with a well-vegetated hedgerow. Their house is built on the same ridge 50 feet from the garden fence. This house has a septic tank and a drainfield, which is way more harmful to a wetland than an organic garden. The city 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. The wetland is classified wrongly as a Class 2 when it should be probably a Class 4. There are no cattails and the “wetland” supports hundred-year old trees and plants that do not grow in a wetland.
This is a bureaucracy that allowed an oil corporation to sink their tanks and build a service station in a wetland on the island. 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 Watershed Technician have watched, for the past 15 years, zombie-like as developers and others have filled in wetlands and seasonal streams and removed all vegetation from buffer zones. One even moved the bed of a stream to give it a course that he preferred — on the north side of Murden Cove. City of Bainbridge Island planners have drawn the plans for developments, approved the plans and then have gone to work for the same developers. There was never any kind of actions taken by the City leaders.
The same has happened in Seattle recently. The city of Seattle has taken land to give to “poor” Paul Allen on Lake Union. The City of Seattle used imminent domain and condemnation to take land for the new defunct Monorail. The owners have to buy back their land at hugely inflated prices. Some of the cretinized US Supreme Court judges now condone 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 on our land.
I hope will you read Initiative-933 before you vote. Find it at www.propertyfairness.com. It protects the natural environment with all of the reasonable laws now in place. It also protects us in the use of our land. It makes the bureaucrats prove the need of the new regulations, to tell us the cost and whose property will be damaged by the new land regulations. More importantly, the agencies will be required to consider voluntary alternatives and work cooperatively with property owners.
J.P. Gagnon
Bainbridge Island | 