By Steve Ulvi, Journal contributor
We are at an important crossroads. A deconstructionist, Gilded Age form of faux-populist federalism is looming and casting a long shadow of chaos and uncertainty. In our small outpost of promise, critical post-pandemic Comprehensive Plan revisions for the County and Town of Friday Harbor are simultaneously unfolding whether you are paying attention or not.
Longstanding social norms (truth and honesty), political decora (respectfully finding compromise solutions for the greater public good) and trustworthiness of now thoroughly corporatized public institutions (the Supreme Court, Congress and media) are in free fall. In my 70s I find myself a disheartened stranger in a strange land.
Being tucked away in the northwestern-most reach of the nation, embraced in a liberal region, may well slow or even stymie some of the more disastrous intentions to undermine personal freedoms, weaken ecological protections and calcify inefficient energy, agricultural and transportation systems.
Most of us do not fully realize just how complicated and limited our adaptive options are in this insignificant little archipelago, an insular place unwilling to reinvent. If only our local economy was a bit more muscular and regenerative. Alas, we are highly vulnerable to slight perturbations, let alone the supply chain uncertainties and fears wrought by purposeful deconstruction of federal policies, agency programs, imposition of stiff tariffs and redirection of tax dollars.
As in the ecological concept of island biogeography our dinkey communities are also constrained by being less complex and diverse. This entire trans-boundary region will likely continue booming in many economic sectors but this tiny county will have to find ways to punch well above our weight.
Our challenge is broadly three-fold; the obvious uncertainty of unmanageable summer tourism with the socialized costs of impacts largely ignored; anti-growth, unaligned, complicated land-use and housing regulations; and especially an elitist, litigious attitude against enabling significant clustered workforce housing, siting energy infrastructure and promoting significant population growth.
We need fresh ideas and broader support that may enable us to employ, and to some extent fund, effective strategies for substantially increasing community economic diversity in the unsettled years ahead.
New federal tax breaks, business incentives, development grants as well as continued subsidized fossil fuel prices and relaxing development regulations may well be worked in our favor for family housing development.
The sales tax revenue for lavish materials, wages and property taxes for building investment “homes” are substantial in our undiversified portfolio, but 45% of are empty most of the year minimizing community participation and daily cost of living contributions by owner-residents. These multi-home investors don’t care a whit about community well-being.
A “two steps forward, one back” kind of growth is well underway but bottle-necked by our stale focus on summer tourism, retirement relocation and trophy home construction. But out-migration is increasing as our island cost-of-living blows up, ferries falter, local business competition declines and rising property values constrain sustained family settlement. Realtors say we always have maybe 35% “island remorse turnover” every 5 years but I bet (without the benefit of data) it has increased markedly.
I feel that the only sure path to greater prosperity and self-reliance is accelerated, county subsidized growth. Success in building every type of housing, incentivized small business incubation and attracting thousands of thriving, working families will necessarily expand the tax base, recirculate many more local dollars and expand schools while fueling our year around community economic engines.
