Americans once shared their Founding Fathers’ views that government was a necessary evil that was to be granted limited, enumerated powers.
This, history’s most nearly perfect state of governance, has long since lapsed. Here in San Juan County, with the empowerments granted by our (Growth Management Act), we’ve moved far from the notion that citizens, and not a bureaucracy, should properly retain sovereignty over their affairs and their property.
The debates about “best available science” or “best practices” or whether wet ground ought to be a protected wetland or etc. or etc., are relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Of manifestly greater importance is the choice of who shall be empowered to obtain the goal: the citizen or the bureaucrat.
In the 20 years that I’ve resided in Friday Harbor, the citizen has consistently lost in this debate. Interestingly, proponents of ever more regulation should be required to cite an example of successful implementation of any proposed regulation. The consequences of our ever-more-empowered-bureaucracy have not created the environmental nirvana hoped for.
Instead, they have (predictably) moved us ever closer to being like Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Aspen… and all at great cost and with great loss of comity and community. Whether the topic at hand is land development or other matters, decision makers ought to keep the below questions in mind.
The record is that locally these questions have been consistently subordinated or ignored. These questions are:
— Does the proposed regulation require a bureaucrat to enforce?
— Can a citizen fully implement the intended result by a plain reading of the regulation without having to hire an expert or get a bureaucrat’s interpretation or permission?
— Does the proposed regulation presume citizen compliance; or the alternative, that citizens are presumed non-compliant until a bureaucrat says otherwise?
Our county’s Vision Statement states that “[w]e are self-governed by informed citizens [and] that activities of government [would] recognize the independent, self-reliant nature of its citizens.”
Are we citizens, in fact, going to be accorded the sovereignty presumed by our Constitution and specifically called for in our Vision Statement?
Albert B. Hall/Friday Harbor
