By Steve Ulvi, Journal contributor
In this profoundly important election runup I focus close to home where interests may converge to make a tangible difference. I have come to know that significant progress on this island is at best a cautious step forward and one back with public blowback. We still hear that protecting something called “the island way of life” is important.
Is there a viable island way of life? Is it substantially different from our other major islands? Is such a life broadly available to everyone once they work and live here a while? This idealized notion is of limited value unless it evolves and raises the opportunities for family age, working residents to thrive, not just survive.
These lumps of glacially resistant rock, specifically San Juan Island, are imagined to have about 12,000 years of human use or occupancy. We can ignore this span of “time immemorial” with adaptive lifeways so drastically different as to be obscure and then forcibly discontinued. Really, how many of us soft, kale-munching, vino-sipping islanders would idealize living on camas bulbs, berries, mussels and dried salmon in crowded, smoky longhouses infested with lice while fearing the arrival of the war canoes of Haida raiders over thousands of years? For us a weak coffee or cancelled ferry is reason to riot!
But I digress. Obviously, the term in context means protecting scenic valley pasture lands from legal pot grows, grandiose multi-modal paved trails, a small OPALCO solar power storage site, and subdivisions et cetera despite the minimal local economic contributions of the acreage grazed and serious depletion of soil health.
The inescapable realities are that we are the smallest Washington county in size and population, suffer a faltering state ferry system, highest statewide median home prices, cost of goods and services 40% higher than the mainland, lowest average wages, highest cohort of people 65 and older, 40% of our residential structures empty most of the year, limited public lands, an overly white population, closed store fronts, the only county staff in the nation working 32-hour weeks, and we only produce 4% of our food.
There’s more. Incredibly deep pockets (apparently most with short fingers), Uniform Development Codes and policies that are a sorry quagmire, severe declines of salmon (once the region’s life-blood) and charismatic resident Orcas, few living wage jobs for college educated youth who want to return, and a town hellbent on pouring concrete, complicating affordable housing, and willingly sweeping cottage industry under the rug of gentrification preferring staid brick and mortar interests.
How about a “culture” and “ways of life” adapting to reality? Align and simplify existing codes. Race to construct permanently affordable housing allowing for year-around business establishment supporting hundreds more working families. Vote to continue the lifeline of our phenomenal REETs. Create tiny house and mobile home clusters on town and county land. Weed out phony hobby forest and farm tax breaks. Stand firm on VRBO caps and enforce codes. Fund sewage infrastructure and increase permitted densities in the town’s Urban Growth Area.
Forget rearview mirror gazing and lionizing pleasing viewsheds, a few rustic farms, and feel-good inertia that derails nascent economic diversification and regenerative population growth. The future depends upon redirected revenues and public-private collaboration on these key issues and higher levels of constructive public participation toward a more resilient island way of life through intentional growth.
