Should our city collect a $20 car tab fee?

from Jola and Albert Greiner to the City Council

Contrary to Mr.Tripp’s request to ask you not to impose it, we are in favor of instituting a $20 car tab fee. The main reason is that the county may well impose such a fee before we can and then, predictably, keep most of the proceeds for use off-island. Thus we’ll be paying the fee and not getting our money back. Secondarily, that fee amounts to about 7 gallons of gasoline, a trivial amount. For goodness sake, let’s get some perspective here!

Mostly what I hear from folks is the cynical prediction that at some point in the future, Council or staff will figure out some way to weasel these funds away from road repair and into some other budget item. This is too easily done by reducing normal road repair funding by a like amount. This suspicion may well be the real reason behind citizen opposition. You might address this concern in some effective fashion.

As to raising the fees for building permits, we think further discouraging new endeavors and new residents by raising fees and entry barriers even more (they now both are ridiculously high) is contrary to the City’s best interests. To bring in the relatively small amount of money from increased fees versus much larger possible tax revenues from realty transfer fees and sales taxes on construction does not make economic sense.

Another view of BI schools request.

A response to Robert Dashiell’s opinion by John Brown

As Robert is well aware, I, too, have performed months of analysis on the Wilkes estimated costs, and we have reached very different conclusions. While Robert is entitled to his opinion, I think it’s important that any misleading or inaccurate information is quickly corrected, such that voters can reach their own informed opinions.

In summary, much of my disagreement with Robert is based upon his source of data, OSPI. I find there to be overwhelming evidence that proves this is not a viable or appropriate benchmark. While we agree that the estimated hard costs are in the ballpark, Robert believes that the soft costs are $5 – $6 Million too high. I have run the numbers with this assumption, and have found this to be entirely unsupportable.

Do Bainbridge schools need $42 million?

Opinion by Robert Dashiell

Since I have received telephone calls and e-mails asking for my opinion of the $32 million Wilkes replacement portion of the $42 million BISD bond, I’m sending out my personal analysis.

I do not wish to be the community activist or heavy hand on a school bond, but having been a federal contracting officer for 12 years and also heading a waste, fraud and abuse inspector general team for four years, I look at financial proposals to ensure they are ballpark reasonable.

The Wilkes Elementary replacement costs for this bond seemed high, and questions to the school district were not satisfactorily answered on the bonds first passage attempt.

A few words about “Scoop the Poop”

Opinion by Rod Stevens

“Class, get out your books and turn to the environmental psalm on page 121: ‘I drop mine eyes from the hills, from whence come the streams, to the blue plastic New York Times bag at my feet, with which I will pick up after my dog.’”

I’ve made this up, but this is the kind of text that might be employed in an educational program called “Scoop the Poop”, on which the Bainbridge Island School District will have spent $12,300 in 2009 to have fourth graders make signs about properly disposing of dog waste. This is part of a larger curriculum on storm water management in which the school district is teaching children to be careful about what runs into Puget Sound. This year the spending on this program will include:

• $15,450 for Eagle Harbor students to create a BITV announcement.
• $10,300 for Odyssey students to create a calendar.
• $10,700 for sixth graders to design door hangers.
• $5,150 for Sakai students to lead tours of the school’s storm water run-off features.

All told, the School District plans on spending $79,000 this year on such storm water “education’, the equivalent of one teacher’s salary for an entire year.

Sustainability, salmon and Mother Nature.

by John B Evans

Despite weather that was too cool early on, then too hot, hit and miss watering, frequent trampling by our family dog and abundant weeds… the veggies are resilient and the harvest spectacular.

Mother nature figured, after a misstep here and there with dinosaurs and such, that resilience, (the ability to adapt to a range of less than ideal conditions ) works. She also determined it is a good idea to generate a “surplus” of everything… just in case.

Let’s look at our city’s legal fees.

From Daniel Smith (shoreline homeowner) to members of the City Council Finance Committee:

I just reviewed the City’s 2009 legal bills through those to be approved by the City Council on September 9th. As best as I could determine the payments for this period to the City’s four main law firms were:

Finding common ground.

Commentary by Rod Stevens

It is an interesting fact that, legally speaking, the unincorporated areas of the island voted not to become a city but to annex themselves to Winslow. For some months after incorporation, the entire island was legally known as “The City of Winslow”. This entity then changed its name to “The City of Bainbridge Island”.

When the rest of the island grafted itself on to Winslow, it also took on Winslow’s laws and politics, much of which stayed the same since incorporation. The city never has been well managed. It filed its financial statements late for most of the last 20 years, and one year the state auditor even walked away in confusion.

Politically, too, the old farm town politics, with most of the leadership drawn from a relatively small, self-selecting group. One of the most important changes in the new form of government is that the entire council now appoints the citizen committees and commissions, opening the way for far more people to get involved.