Five Conservation District Supervisors provide board level oversight of the Whatcom
County Conservation District [CD] and its approximately 12 employees.
Typically, Whatcom County CD provides most of its services to local farmers.
Two supervisors are appointed by the Washington State governor, and three are
locally elected.
Any registered voter, urban or rural, may vote
in this CD election.
Whatcom County is
different. Most Washington State Conservation Districts have very low
profile elections for Supervisor positions, with farmers casting 100 or less
ballots per district to choose their supervisors.
Three years ago, this particular Whatcom County Supervisor
position election had over 3000 votes cast, with the winner’s margin being
approximately 60 votes. In that
election, the Bellingham environmentalist community almost elected their
candidate to the CD board, but were defeated last minute by a large number of
rural and small town voters who voted in person at the CD office on election
day. On election day, more than 600 people walked in to vote at the CD office,
mostly for Larry Helm.
Bad Cows + Rain = Big
Money. Why does Whatcom County have this unusually high turnout? Why is
control of a farm service agency being sought by non farm environmental
activists?
Environmentalist groups pay their leaders and staff out
of federal, state and local grants that address environmental problems. More
problems mean more grants, and that means more “envirocrat” jobs.
Cow (dairy and beef)
farms in Whatcom County are targeted as the alleged primary culprit for
varying levels of coliform pollution in tidal shellfish beds. Bellingham’s
large group of enviro activists want to use the CD to promote their agenda, giving
the “public” and the Lummi nation the “benefit” of attacking farmers with cows
in Whatcom County.
To compound this, in the last months, the Whatcom
Conservation District has been initiating plans to become the service agency managing storm-water runoff grants and programs for the City of Bellingham. De-prioritizing
farm services for city services looks like a good business money move. However,
farmers may become second class citizens in their own service agency.
Storm-water runoff management is a very lucrative grant
stream. Your taxes administer and salary technicians with vast government
oversight of rainwater running off your property. There is lots of rain in
Whatcom County. Again, this money is coveted by envirocrats and increasing
numbers of university grads seeking jobs in line with their environmental
degrees.
Grant streams are also the lifeblood of the Conservation
District. The under the radar issue in this election is direction and
prioritization of grants. Should the CD get any and all grants possible, such
as EPA and Puget Sound Partnership urban and farm storm-water control grants, or
focus its grant writing towards less lucrative farm service issues such as
ditch cleaning, and soil and manure management services.
Local farmers do not want EPA grant strings impacting
their farm plans. Period. Grants come with strings. The EPA and other state and
county agencies offer large funding incentives to farmers who will let them
move closer and closer into overseeing farm management plans.
As well, farmers are facing increasing fees and
mitigation costs by Whatcom County Conservation District and Whatcom County
Planning Department. CD technicians have a lot of power to levy fines and
rulings. These technicians are currently under significant criticism for
allowing environmental activist pressure to skew their farm site assessments
against small farmers and small farm profitability. Farmers need a supervisor
who will quickly and strongly address rules over reach when it happens.
Wildfowl. It
is a fact that various technicians in state and county storm-water runoff
monitoring positions are refusing to calculate how much coliform pollution
comes from wild fowl such as ducks, geese and swans. Large water fowls, such as
geese, produce 5 pounds of poop per day. 500 swans could deposit 2500 pounds of
excrement close to a drainage ditch in one day, and then the cows get blamed.
In spite of this, Fish and Wildlife officials routinely
refuse state funding grants to help them test coliform food source DNA to
identify what coliform came from cows or birds. Cow farmers rightly feel
unfairly targeted as the main coliform pollution source when wildfowl poop on
fields by ditches is totally ruled out by activists and technicians. It’s the “bad
cow” grant stream, stupid.
No one escapes.
This is not just an issue for dairy or beef farmers. It is an issue for any
small acreage family who has animals. It is an issue for home owners in towns
and cities. Not only has the EPA put rules in place to regulate the puddles of
rain on your driveway, but when farm neighbors are subject to the whims of
urban regulators, the resulting uncertainty also hurts town and city businesses
that supply farms.
The incumbent for this position is Larry Helm, a small
beef farmer in the Squalicum Creek watershed east of Squalicum Mountain. Larry
has consistently resisted the urban grant stream influences, trying to focus CD
services to farmers. He runs a clean farm with minimum stream buffers, and with
stream coliform levels at one quarter of the current pollution threshold
level. Even so, Larry is being
misrepresented and smeared as a polluter by environmental activists supporting his opponent.
The issue is not whether Larry’s opponent sells locally
grown vegetables at a roadside stand, but which former public official can be
trusted to use grants to serve farmers first, not the salaries of non profits
and public officials, and the multiplying rules police that stifle farm
economies in Whatcom County.
Remember packing houses? How many new packing houses have come to Whatcom County in this last year after
the envirocrats worked over packing house policy?
Whatcom County Farm Bureau, the GOP, and the Cattleman’s
Association have endorsed Larry. His opponent is supported by the Democrat
party circle. Democrat voters from Alabama Hill and the Columbia District have
heavily responded to Larry’s opponent’s doorbell campaign to use mail in
voting. Do you get the picture? Where might
Futurewise and ReSources and Whatcom Land Trust be in this?
Floodplains by
Design is being cued up. With characteristic doublespeak, an extensive
program grant application by Whatcom Land Trust targeting prime farmland for wilding in the South Fork area has been filed with
the Washington State Department of Ecology. Note the promises that prime
farmland is only going to be moved away from the river, not taken away.
Really!! Do the farmers of Whatcom County need a friend of farmers on the CD
board of supervisors, or a friend of progressive, Democrat, urban
environmentalists?
Note the letters of support in the appendix from Whatcom
County Public Works (Paula Cooper), Whatcom County Parks (Mike McFarlane), and the
Nooksack Tribe (Bob Kelly)
GreenLinks is here!
The Squalicum Creek watershed, from downtown Bellingham out to the Rome area on
SR542, is being set up for an intensively managed water runoff program called Green Links, jointly administered by the City of Bellingham and
Futurewise, the recent litigant against Whatcom County’s exempt well
policies. Would not the Conservation District better the public interest by
electing a supervisor who would check and balance intensive environmental
advocacy (salmon are the emotional hot button in the above joint venture)
rather than smiling while urban eco activists collectively rezone the Squalicum Creek watershed.
Larry’s challenger in this election is an Everson area
resident who worked for the City of Bellingham Public Works, and runs a summer time
vegetable stand from her garden. As a past Democratic party candidate, she is
most notable recently in her loss to Vincent Buys for District 42 State
Representative. Larry’s opponent has benefited from considerable resources to
door bell neighborhoods in Bellingham environmentalist hot zones, people who
are NOT farmers, and adversarial to most current Whatcom farmers.
Monday, February 9, 2015 was the cutoff date to request a
mail in ballot from the Conservation District office, which manages this
election apart from the Whatcom County Auditor’s Office. As of that date, over 3600
ballots had been requested, most to Bellingham addresses. Ballots may also be
cast by people who walk in and vote in the Conservation District office on
March 10, 2015. Last year, 600 people voted in person at the CD office.
Walk in and vote.
If you don’t want to see farmers, big or small, significantly damaged by
Bellingham eco activists, please take the time to go to the CD office in person
and vote for Larry Helm on Tuesday, March 10, 2015. His opponent may have a
very pleasant demeanor, but her handlers and supporters are determined to turn
local cows into “the” environmental scapegoat and grant stream. You can read
their words here, and here,
and here.
Please pass this walk in voting information on to people
in your rural and small farm town circles. This election will determine who manages
CD grant programs, urban shell fish guardians or farmers. Your tax money, your
rural farm profitability, and your freedom to manage your own storm water
runoff costs is at stake. This is a very pressing issue, even for those living
in town lots.
Please walk in and vote for Larry Helm for CD
commissioner at the Conservation District office at Hinotes Corner, (Pole and
Hannegan), 6975 Hannegan Road, 9:00 a.m.
to 6:00 p.m., Tuesday, March 10, 2015.
Thank you,
John Kirk
Whatcom Works
Post Script:
Do you see the shell
game? The straw man here is having
to choose between shell fish (or salmon) and cows. That is just the current version
of a much larger shell game, using the Marxist dialectic to establish fascist
communitarian socialism for nihilist narcissists. Chew on that for a while.
In other words—
One party (globalist dialectical power brokers) gets two other parties (cow farmers and salmon/shellfish environmentalists) to fight, and then lives well off the two weakened parties.
Collecting juicy fees to manage perpetual reparations (socialism) perpetuates the outcomes of the fights.
Rules that tax “offender's” profits (fascism) return more than taking their assets (communism).
The expectation of no ultimate consequences for making such a mess (nihilism) trains people to only talk, think, act and care about their own desires and comforts (narcissism).
Thus, a key milestone in the enviro terrorism program is
ruined “trust” between urbanites and farmers. The key movers are quiet, eco
activist, grant funded, power base building community organizers who do public policy by Alinsky rules—deceive, flatter, fatten, divide—then defund and enslave the
middle class (BOTH farmers AND urbanites) before they know what hit them.
A second problem is well meaning, sophomoric urbanites
with ruinous ideas for how farm families should run their farms, significant
ignorance of how Whatcom County farmers are improving in environmental
stewardship, and the gross delusion that heavy regulations on farmers will
improve urban outcomes, and never come to be applied to their own free wheeling
urban lifestyles.
A third problem may also be farm families, in debt to
their eyeballs, whose fewer and fewer children do not want to assume the pressure
cooker of large scale farming in a free falling society, parents whose retirement
income can only be secured by corporate culture, selling out or hiring in. What
stops the free fall? Who will feed you or me, my corporate farmer or urban
environmentalist friend, in ten, twenty, forty years?
Really now, How will you get vegetable garden dirt out
from under your finger nails?
