Vol.
5, #54
A most unusual presentation is on
deck for our March meeting. Speaker
Mathew Velguth will soon have The Bike Shop up and
running in the Sterling Neighborhood where at-risk kids are taught
responsibility through the ownership of bicycles. It’s an exciting concept that has worked in
Labrador and Portland, Maine under Velguth’s
direction. The Bike Shop is an open-door
preventative project whose goal is integrating children (ages 8 to 15) from
low-income homes into the greater community. The bottom line of Velguth’s work is that he instills in kids the habits of
good physical health while providing the internal tools that enable them to
move out of a subsidized existence.
Also scheduled to speak is our Ward One
Councilman Jack Weiss who will address our most pressing problem: the Big Box
Ban and the distinct possibility of mega stores leaving Bellingham for
Ferndale. His comments follow a City
Council working session in which a bewildering array of “solutions” were put on
the table in what threatens to enlarge the Big Box Controversy. The possibilities include: a demand for a
“living wage” (whatever that means); a highly complex green transportation plan
that would require a percentage of employees use alternative means (as in
bicycles and buses) to and from work; and a reduction from a 90,000 sq. ft.
limit to 60,000. The latter, if adopted,
would make even more difficult the development of The Waterfront Project.
Come experience an exciting program Tuesday,
March 9, at 7 p.m., at Birchwood Presbyterian Church, 400 Meadowbrook Ct.
Your Board of Directors has completed
five/sevenths of a series of meetings with members of the Bellingham City
Council. The sessions are believed to be
the first of its kind with Neighborhood Associations normally concentrating
contact on the council member responsible for the Neighborhood. While most Bellingham Neighborhoods are
well-established with few problems, Guide Meridian/Cordata
is unique. Growing at a rapid rate (our
population will top 6,000 when current building plans are completed), the Neighborhood continues to encounter problems that need
to come to the Council’s attention.
Attendant to those problems is the inclination of Council members, highly aware of
commonly-shared responsibilities, to know considerably less about smaller
matters in other bailiwicks. Having
written that, it is worth mentioning that by far the largest chunk of total
meeting time with the Councilmen has dealt with the Big Box situation. It is our contention that the Big Boxes,
principally WalMart and Costco, will leave Meridian
if the City continues to threaten them with unrealistic demands of
compliance. At this writing, there are
a lot of complex possibilities on the table, the kind that, if adopted, would
likely produce paroxysms of laughter among the Big Boxes, then send them
scurrying to Ferndale where the door is open.
Should that happen, our forlorn hope would be that WalMart,
the target of a pronounced postcard-writing campaign by unions, keeps the
Bellingham store open as a “service” operation.
With the approach of this publication’s deadline, we have learned that WalMart will spend nearly $1 million on interior
re-vamping. Bear in mind that that $1
million expenditure can be regarded in a number of ways including this corner’s
suggestion that the money is chump change to WalMart.
Deadline Dash….Ten acres across from Fred
Meyer stands a decent chance of becoming a mixed-use urban village. By a 6-1 vote, the City Council will
re-consider a re-zone of the area from industrial to commercial and industrial
after rejecting the proposal two years ago.
City planners will now work with landowners and our Association before
the project returns to the Planning Commission and Council….That wicked left
hand turn off heavily-trafficked Telegraph Rd. to get to Key Bank and Rite Aid
will soon be eliminated after two straight years as Bellingham’s worst spot for
traffic accidents. Polite drivers headed
west are the odd problem who by stopping encourage the turns as the outside
lane rolls on….It’s good to see a third tenant announced for Whatcom Plaza at
the entrance to Whatcom Community College.
Westside Pizza will move in shortly….We already owe such great thanks to
the Birchwood Presbyterian Church and now even more with the news that a
playground project will start as early as October. The project, whose estimated price of $50,000
was met with contributions, is now challenged by a new price tag: $95,000. Further contributions will be regarded as
answered prayers. Next month’s Insider
will include details of what will be built on west church grounds close to what
will be Cordata’s first trail….Those Phase One Trail
bids, by the way, came in at well under anticipated costs. The winner: Razz Construction with a bid of
$565,270. Unfortunately, Parks & Recreation has decided that any “found”
money will go to “unforseen budget demands” rather
than, say, a trail extension to the church project….An elementary school on
Aldrich Rd. took another step toward reality the other day when the Bellingham
School Board gave district officials the green light to call for bids. The project was made possible by passage of a
$67 million bond issue in 2006….And, for your considered opinion, how about the
complexities of a possible demand by the City Council that a to-be-determined
percentage of Big Box employees take either the bus or bicycle to and from
work. One wonders how the bureaucratic
mind might grapple with accreditation for the bicycle built-for-two?
More later,
Bob Sanders with a low bow to Micah
Vol. 5, #53
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We’re most fortunate to have as our next general meeting speaker
Eric Hirst, active in local government and
environmental issues since arriving here late in 2002. The meeting, to
be held Tuesday, February 9, at 7 p.m., at the Birchwood Presbyterian
Church, will center on land use. Hirst has
served on: the Bellingham Budget Advisory Committee (2004-06); Bellingham
Herald Voices (2004-06); Bellingham Greenway Advisory Committee (2006-present);
Futurewise Whatcom Steering Committee; and Bellingham
Capital Facilities Task Force (2010-present. The essence of his attitide toward life here is that “Whatcom County is a
wonderful place to live, but I worry that the pressures of population growth
will slowly erode our terrific quality of life.”
Hirst has a Ph.D. in engineering from
Stanford University, taught at Tuskegee Institute, then worked as a policy
analyst at Oak Ridge (TN) National Laboratory on energy efficiency and the
structure of the electricity industry. The last eight years of his career
prior to retirement in 2004 were spent as a consultant.
Also
appearing at Tuesday’s meeting will be Scott Miles, Social Media Chair of
Transit Works, the campaign favoring a sales tax
increase of two-tenths of one percent with funds going to the WTA.
By
the way, dates for coming general meetings, always held the second Tuesdays of
the month at 7 p.m., will be: February 9, March 9, April 13, and May 11.
There will be no meetings June, July, and August.
Having
been elected unanimously by the membership at the January general meeting,
your board of directors met February 2 and chose the following officers:
President, Adrienne Lederer; Vice-President, Bob
Sanders; Secretary, Julie Guy; and Treasurer, Bill Dubay.
In addition, the following will head committees: Dee Andrews, Community Garden;
Beverly Jacobs, Library; Vinson Latimore,
Transportation; and Linda Trentman, Homeowners
Associations.
Your Association Board continues to improve and expand.
Our newest additions: Bill Dubay and Vinson.B. Latimore. Bill comes to us by way of a full-time move to
Bellingham last August. Before that, he and his wife of 32 years, Diane,
had owned a unit at El Dorado while spending vacations there six weeks of the
year. Home base then was Sacramento where Bill spent 33 years as financial
manager for a commercial general building contractor with annual revenues of
$30MM. Possessor of a B.S. in Business Administration (Accounting) from
California State University, Sacramento, Bill was born
in Detroit, Michigan, graduated from high school in Petoskey, Michigan, then
spent 10 years in the U.S. Navy as a nuclear reactor operator on submarines.
Vinson
B. (“Vinny”) Latimore is
president of Gibraltar Senior Living which he founded in 2006 to focus upon
meeting the needs of seniors with dementia. It was a natural progression
beginning with a discovery early in life that he had an affinity for the
elderly. After earning a B.A. from the University of South Carolina in
1992, Vinny began work as a laboratory assistant with
Northwest Laboratories in Anchorage, Alaska. His next move was to Seattle
where he was accepted by the University of Washington’s Master of Health
Administration program, ranked number two in the Nation. It was while
working on his Masters thesis at the Sisters of
Providence skilled nursing facility in Seattle that Vinny
produced an internal study subsequently used by administrators to help improve
interaction between staff members and residents. Having earned a Master of
Health Administration in 1996, Vinny worked six years
within the hospital as both an administrator and consultant. In
addition, he possesses additional certification in Alzheimer’s dementia and has
worked for various not-for-profits playing organizational roles in their
formation.
Author
Tobias Wolff, whose list of literary triumphs includes This Boy’s Life, will
speak Monday, February 8, at Whatcom Community College’s Syre
Center, beginning at 7:30 p.m. Wolff, a professor at Stanford University,
has taught English and Creative Writing there since 1997. This Boy’s Life
was turned into an absorbing 1993 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and
Ellen Barkin.
This is the day (Thursday, February 4) that Phase One Trail
bids will be opened amid high Cordatan
interest. Bellingham’s north side trails will one day number 65 miles
with wetland mitigation a major cost factor. Phase one will start at the
end of Horton Rd. and run north through Cordata Park
not to connect with Birchwood Presbyterian Church under whose auspices a
playground is being built for kids. Rather, the Phase One Trail (costly
because of its eight foot width) will veer east to the dog run at El
Dorado. Parks & Recreation is very hopeful the bids will be many and
competitive allowing for any savings to be applied to future work.
Deadline
Dash….While our Neighborhood Association tends to concentrate on challenges
within our boundaries, such subjects as our water supply from Lake Whatcom and
Waterfront Development affect all of us. The latter will be discussed
Wednesday, February 10, at 7 p.m. at the Bellingham Cruise Terminal in
Fairhaven….Graffiti, sometimes considered art but mostly regarded as vandalism,
has moved north into Cordata and there is something
you can do about it. Give Public Works a call (778-7700) and tell them
how your eyes have been offended and/or the empathy you feel for the property’s
owner. Often, city property is involved and the owners are us….A man with
a mission is Matthew Velguth who is creating The Bike
Shop in the Sterling Neighborhood. Velguth, an
educator who learned that working with troubled kids was more emotionally
rewarding, teaches responsibility by involving youngsters in the use and care
of bicycles. His wonders have been worked in such places as Portland,
Maine and Labrador….Always looking for ways to increase interest in our
Association general meetings, the Board of Directors ask if the creation of
child care would be of help. If so, call Vinson Latimore
(389-2360)….Note to Home Owner Associations: The Neighborhood Watch program is
worth your attention if your involvement does not yet exist. Katrin Dearborn can be reached at 778-8660… That’s a wild
situation up in Ferndale where one of the community’s councilmen signed a
contract to buy nearly $1 million worth of land for a new police station.
Neither the mayor nor the guy’s fellow council members had a clue regarding the
lone land arranger’s transaction…The world of computer search engines recently
came up with the latest in mole reduction, a subject about which ‘hamsters know
far too much. Key in the new elimination process is the connection of
mole holes to a running automobile by way of a hose-line. It certainly
begs the question: regular or premium?
More
later,
Bob
Sanders with mucho thanks to Micah
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