Whatcom Water Trust – The Progressive in My Mirror

Observations from the recent Water Rights Exchange Trust Forum

I started writing this early Monday morning, my chest ripped with the painful coughs of a common cold. With time, rest, nutrition and exercise, breathing will return to normal.  

I am finishing this Friday morning. This is draft #5.  This post got longer, and then shorter. Thank you for reading it. 

The cold is almost gone, and I am wondering what will be the new normal of this new day. There is work, there is family, and there are the hard-to-pin-down public policy service opportunities. I suppose community involvement never was a linear thing. The more I learn, the more holes and frayed edges and dangling threads I see.

My used-to-be-tidy life is more and more ripped with the spasms of water and land use conflict in Whatcom County. PSNERP. Meat packing on farms. Lawsuits over rural wells. Shellfish bed closures. Lynden water withdrawals. Small farm plans. Cycling paths. Wetlands. Water Improvement Districts. Senior water rights. Salmon and herring. Pacific Rim shipping.

Fresh cheeked youth spill into hearings to berate grizzled farmers. White haired seniors argue with each other over natural resources for the future. Planning technicians and planning commissioners redline out each others copy. Managers of parks and land trusts silently build empires. Volunteers snoop behind farms while distant lawyers and globalists unload on local elections. News editors and profs pull strings and spin the fresh cheeked youth, hawking this thing called “progress”. The racking spasms go on.

Progressives. Last night I viewed a lecture by the former progressive community organizer and publisher, David Horowitz. A key leader in the 1970’s leftist movement,  Horowitz turned on his progressive peers in the early ‘80’s, abandoning the “fight for justice”, arrested by the long list of civic destructions generations of progressives had wrought.

Born to card carrying American Communists, Horowitz was shocked out of the “dream” by

San Francisco’s hot anger when he confronted ‘80’s gays over sending AIDS throughout America from the SF gay bath houses. Pressed with feeding his four children, he abandoned the donors of the new left and became a capitalist, working in the traditional American free market economy.

What was Horowitz’ message? Don’t make deals with progressives when they are in the driver’s seat. They cannot be trusted.

But do not most key water players in Whatcom County call themselves progressives?

Why would Horowitz so vehemently accuse progressives? Who is a progressive? What makes a person progressive? Is this truly relevant to Whatcom County? To water rights?

Last Thursday afternoon, Jan 8, I saw my face in the public mirror. I went to a water forum in Lynden examining the idea of a trust to facilitate local water rights exchange. I use water to feed livestock. The issues of tribal senior water rights on the Nooksack River, the current urgency to prove a hydrological flow between river and ground water, and the resulting attachment of groundwater rights to tribal salmon management is a critical concern.

I went to hear what the heavy lifters would say.

After a 2.5 hour survey of laws and water rights exchange trusts in other places, things were very quiet in the room. When an informal survey of audience affiliation was taken, at least one half of those present declined to identify themselves with any group—agriculture, government, NGO or citizens. This was hardly a gregarious day.

In the last hour, six agency leaders talked for three minutes each about how they might relate to a water rights exchange trust. Lynden’s representative was very positive. The PUD was warm to the idea. Bellingham talked about things that had failed, and Whatcom County was quite guarded, notably qualifying ideas with questions.  A local water services manager shared his perspectives, and a county staffer tried to decopage the natural resources marketplace model onto water rights.

I was amazed at the meekness of normally quite self-assured local government water managers when the lawyers interviewed them, pointing out gaps in their understanding of water rights exchanges. As I watched and listened, I began making my own list of trust breakers that I have observed in Whatcom County.

1) 6+ highly polarized scientific issues that kill water policy consensus.

2) 8+ agency motivations that divide rather than build cooperation in water use policy.

3) 12+ events or interveners that have shredded trust between water users.

The lawyers gave a very concise, easy to understand, helpful presentation of water rights law. The DOE expert gave multiple, interesting examples of water rights exchange trusts.  A full video of the afternoon maybe viewed by going here.

I learned several new things.

1. WA state law treats water rights as property rights.

2. Water rights are extremely valuable.

3. Water rights are guarded intensely. Legislators are very unwilling to risk any fix of RCW problems.

4. Water rights transfers are very expensive. Water rights exchange trusts could offer scales of economy.

5. Current Washington water banking models use free market pricing principles.

6. WA state government does not currently set water rights pricing.

7. Water rights banks can ease water shortages with no grants needed.

8. Government grants have been used to buy and resell water rights to preserve existing water users who have no or faulty water rights.

Other takeaways:

9. Other property rights such as stream buffers and fish habitat, have extremely little market value compared to water rights. It seems grants and donations, not free markets is the only funding stream a Natural Resources Marketplace could swim in.

10. Selling water rights as property rights could force progressive light persons to see the historical value of property rights. Such a trust could provide some very teachable moments, reversing the Democrat / progressive choice to forecast no personal property rights in the future—IF Olympia leaves pricing alone.

After this forum, my first question was not

“Could a water rights exchange trust help here?”, BUT

“Who locally could be trusted to search out if a water rights exchange trust would work, AND

“Who could be trusted to manage it?”.

Let me illustrate. Several days earlier, a sharp observer pointed out to me a $20,000.00 line item in a recent WRIA1 joint board budget for hosting this forum. Having been involved in putting on forums, I know that amount is much, much more than what is needed to rent a room for up to 150 people, buy some cookies, and pay even high priced lawyers to speak for 3-4 hours. So, who might be getting all that dough?

I brought up this line item in a meeting a couple of days earlier, offending a colleague who really liked this forum. I decided to go straight to the organizers, and found out that the budget line item was based on a prior event that was 16 hours long, with multiple meals. It was a budget number, not a  disbursement.

(Was a two day forum planned? Then reduced to one day? Then reduced to one afternoon? Are water rights, property rights too explosive for local water use gurus to unpack?)

Now why not just trust the government bean counters?  (See item #4 below).

David Horowitz, a formernational progressive heavyweight, identifies four trust busters that define today’s progressive leaders from his 1960s group. Saul Alinsky is their prophet, and Bill Ayers, Hillary Clinton, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and Barack Obama are the “born with a progressive spoon” rulers who inherited the 1930-50 communist progressive legacy.

1) Progressive leaders are dialectic contrarians.  Progressives work a cycle of institutional destruction to “set innocents free”. This is the opposite of America’s founders, who “checked and balanced sinners” against eternal, unchanging laws.

2) Progressive leaders are arrogant. They are jihadi-envangelists of a never before seen, soon to be seen utopia that common sense does not confirm.

3) Progressive leaders hate Judeo-Christian America.  America’s sins are magnified, and her excellences are discredited. Progressives create class warfare to conquer Americans and destroy their institutions.

4) Progressive leaders are liars. Spin, argument, denial is the habituated progressive yellow brick road to the future.

But, you ask, what does this have to do with our green, verdant Whatcom County home? Who dares to class the fine friends and children of conservative Lynden with Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Even Alinsky, nasty god son of the Chicago Mafia, has passed away. Are not today’s progressives gentle and benevolent and totally approachable?

Horowitz answers this linking question. His 1960s, Vietnam War busting, Che Guevarra and Castro loving generation broke a progessive rule. They refused to deceive. They openly spit on the returning soldiers.  They openly spilled blood on American streets. They openly called themselves communists.

The young left despised the double standard their Jewish New York parents had lived. The parents claimed to be “Jeffersonian Democrats”, yet collaborated secretly with Moscow’s KGB handlers. The children rebelled against their parent’s cautions, sowing open, violent, bloody revolution, and it failed. America ignored them, and they had to abandon revolution for jobs.

Hence, Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Put on suits and heels. Penetrate American institutions. Slowly, steadily create the largest army of tactic proxies possible, winning America’s next generations to socialism through the public schools and universities.

Alinsky and his core group have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Two generations of Americans have become progressive light, are proud of it, and gladly move the progressive dream “forward”.

Are you a progressive? Give yourself a test.  Evaluate the idea of a water rights exchange trust using the following grid, adapted from historical American values of freedom.

Free People:

• Do water rights exchange trusts protect individual liberty?
• Do water rights exchange trusts promote personal responsibility?

Free Markets:

• Do water rights exchange trusts protect property rights?
• Do water rights exchange trusts promote free markets?

Good Governance:

• Do water rights exchange trusts maintain limited government?
• Do water rights exchange trusts protect local powers from state or federal over reach?
• Do water rights exchange trusts promote fiscal responsibility?
• Do water rights exchange trusts provide equal protections for all under the rule of law?

If my guess is right, the above issues seem strange or irrelevant or bothersome to you, don’t they. If so, you are likely “progressive light.” If you have a multiple reasons why the above nine values are moral faults to absolutely obliterate, you are more than progressive light.

Frankly, in spite of my “conservative” education, I have had to bend my mind to think about the above issues in the last several years. Why is that?

Probably the greatest tool for transforming Americans from being a free, motivated, sharing nation into a stagflated two tier model of progressive socialism (elites and masses) has been easy money. Loans, and grants.

Why would I say that? Do we not need an active WIT, Whatcom Integration Team, pulling in the maximum in outside grants as an approved “local integrating organization”? (WIT was rebuked sharply by County Council a number of months ago for classifying rural values that did not represent a majority of Whatcom County citizens.)

Good financial management is uncommon. Financial failure, in business and government and NGO/church groups is the norm. Easy loans and grants make freefall unnoticeable and turn shattering landings into an irrelevant dream that disappears in summer mornings of ease.

What better way to use an enemy’s strengths against him. Make economic hyperwarp growth the norm, turn the debt load and grant streams into a dagger, and the traditional American Judeo Christian moralist will fall to his knees, begging to drink this pure water at the progressive fountain.

Let me relate this to the forum on water rights exchange trusts.

Why must a WRIA region with too much water talk about a trust to transfer “scarce” water rights?

When is there scarcity of water?  Answer:  July and August, as relates to certain salmon spawning cycles.

Why would a majority of people need a trust to exchange a minority portion of water rights?

Answer: because unusual favor has been granted to a minority people to sue and win the majority portion.

Who decided this? Why?

Answer One: The progressives. Innocents must be set free from debilitating institutions. And, the most innocent “environment” is the “original, natural one”, where there were no roads, no planes, no farms, no sawmills… …just wild animals roaming free, and first nations foraging and hunting.

Answer Two:  The progressives.  Rich oppressors must be forced to share, being moved from consumptive suburban lifestyles and homes to high density urban enclaves, using only public transit, not owning property, but sharing only what local cooperative soviets determine is good for one and all equally.

Answer Three:  The progressives.  Fathers and mothers saw the nice homes and cars and vacations and chose the mortgage and the second job. Public schools, being well funded, well staffed models of American decorum, could be trusted with the children.  Now, sixty years later, generation x rocks to a progressive beat, and progressive teachers wink and smile as the core American values lie bound and gagged on an altar built to salmon, cycling viewsheds, organic chocolate and boundless sex.

Who is the progressive in the mirror?

It is me. My generation. My parents generation. The public servants I have delegated my citizen responsibilities to so I need not be stressed.  Tell me, does Whatcom still work?

Should I resist the public policy of whoever I call a progressive?  Maybe. Maybe not. There are the far left progressives that want me to burn out fighting their nasty machine. Then, there are the ‘progressive lights” who are just doing the job they are being paid to do, watching to see if I can eat humble pie, make the leader of the day successful, and carry a load wherever possible.

How does one make worthy local leaders successful, regardless of conservative or progressive orientation?

Shine the light. Lend a hand. Ask before blaming. Gather the facts. Interpret the choices. Don’t beintimidated. Tell the world about both good and bad public polices. Do it again.

America still requires its citizens to choose their leaders. Are you concerned about public policy abuse? In the next few months you may have a chance to  get involved up close in shining the lights. Stay tuned.

And, thank you, facilitators of this water rights exchange forum for putting on a very informative afternoon, and…  … for not spending the whole $20,000.00 on we who attended.

Time will tell if a water rights exchange trust is a good idea. It may very well be a next step in re-engaging true civic service and public policy awareness.

JK – Whatcom Works

-----------

David Horowitz video short version

Water forum link

Obama’s Rules for Radicals

Radical Son

Principles of Liberty – principles

Principles of Liberty – reports

Democrats against Agenda 21

Hues...Votes...$260 Million+ for a new Lummi Casino salmon marsh in Whatcom County.

Stars of mercy guiding the mariner on the night seas…

Clouds of dew and shade nurturing the tender plant before the full heat of the sun…

Mountains, unbending standard bearers, dividing fertile plains of loam, sand, and clay…

Seas, whose age old tidal boundaries, swarming coral reefs, green feeding billows, and black silent depths beckon and guard stories of gain and loss…

The natural world is full of spiritual dialectical hues. The question is what spirituality lens is used? A pantheist’s pantheon? A deist’s dream? A humanist’s mirror? A theist’s day in court?

I am reading some books these days. Techgnosis, by Erik Davis. Can technology unleash the age old energies of spirit and searching? Is this for progressive San Francisco yin/yang doctors only? Do Christian conservatives also have an age old connection to technologically driven spirituality in this same old—new age? Whose words or tweets or newsfeeds crackle through the techniverse with Ultimate Power? Is the Book in LED luminescence as relevant as it is on parchment?

I am reading the news these days. Is 2014 the apex of progressive promise? The poster children of dialectical crush, the disciples of Saul Alinsky, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Marx, grasping the levers of power in government, media, education, business, food production, natural resources, find themselves unable to shake the people in the street of the fear of God. Ebola, ISIS, Benghazi, food stamps, immigration amnesties for foreign street gangs… is this the brave new world order?

I am working in homes these days. The swelling tide of governmental regulation reaches to the neck, the chin, the nose, the eyes. In the daylight, community organizers proclaim the waters of government micro management to be warm and nutrient rich, spawning all kinds of socialist goodness.

In the dark, the burdens of debt, the volatility of markets whose time worn steering wheels are laden with grease and wildly spinning, and the loneliness of a technocracy that divorces the visions of youth from the wisdom of their parents—these whisper fear and loathing.

Where is hope?

For millions caught in the last world war, a dim memory to youth today, hope did not lie in football and turkey, or in a glittering tree, spiced eggnog and lavishly wrapped treasures. 

Hope did not lie in cycling viewsheds, in the return of wolves and cougars and wood rats, in vast tracts of wilderness relieved by reduced carbon emissions and erasure of humankind.

Hope did not lie in proposed Whatcom County tidal salmon spawning marshes,

• $260 millionprice tag to remove levees, raise bridges
• one of 11 Puget Sound shoreline projects
• a late, quietly advertised hearing by Washington Fish and Wildlife
• managed by the Army Corp of Engineers
• funded through unknown LIO’s  (and NGO’s ??),
• caring little for raised upriver water tables through unstudied flood drainage,
• a crescent of flooded farmland showcased around the Lummi casino.

Hope did not lie in aborting children to secure a fading quality of life lived in cloned, high urban density neighborhoods filled with faux, ever morphing relationships that bruise community and innocence.

Hope for those millions lay down a bloody road, a 20th century cross, finding the blue skies of freedom through sacrificial death and tear laden life. Orphans and widows found meaning and renewal. Our parents and grandparents, they struggled to give us a future. Their prosperity after war, however, fueled a generation of bitter rebels. The most hardened and focused of those offspring now rule, thumbing their nose at both wisdom and folly. Tyranny is no longer a foreign reality.

This is the countdown week to the 2014 American election. Life trajectories pass quickly. Loyalties, graven in the heart in childhood, fuel lifelong conflicts over worldviews. In the end, the old people sit, panting on rocking chairs, still arguing over ideas.

Where is wisdom in this? Why vote? Why struggle to define and build community?

If you are wise, you are wise for yourself. If you are a fool, you alone will suffer. Prosperity is relative. Happiness is both a crust of bread in famine, and chicken cordon bleu in prosperity.

Discontent also knows no class boundaries. Enough is never enough. Percieved success and failure, a cup half empty or half full, can co-exist in the same house.

So, why vote? Why care? True, unshakeable, quiet contentment comes in deliberately choosing to share, to bear a communal cross, to feed one’s neighbor before the mocking foe. Contentment lies in the hope of life after death, in the promise of the just Creator that the dialectic will then be over. And, hope lies in his quiet hand of provision during days of turmoil.

Until then, there will be many hues.

Stars of mercy guiding the mariner on the night seas…

Clouds of dew and shade nurturing the tender plant before the full heat of the sun…

Mountains, unbending standard bearers, dividing fertile plains of loam, sand, and clay…

Seas, whose age old tidal boundaries, swarming coral reefs, green feeding billows, and black silent depths beckon and guard stories of gain and loss…

So?

Just go vote!

JK

$260 million price tag to remove levees, raise bridges

one of 11 Puget Sound shoreline projects

a late, quietly advertised hearing by Washington Fish and Wildlife

 

managed by the Army Corp of Engineers

funded through unknown LIO’s (and NGO’s ??)

caring little for raised upriver water tables through unstudiedflood drainage

a crescent of flooded farmland showcased around the Lummi casino.

Full Report - Strategic Restoration Conceptual Engineering — Final Design Report

Full Report -PugetSoundNearshore-EcosystemRestoration_Draft-FeasibilityReport-EIS

Psalm 36:5,6

Seth Fleetwood Body Language and Voter’s Most Pressing Issues

This cartoon came to mind after watching a half hour of the Fleetwood – Ericksen debate sponsored by the Bellingham City Club. For all the audience cheers he had, Seth Fleetwood still had a hard time speaking eye to eye to the crowd. Maybe this is a lawyer’s way of keeping concentration on the stand. Or maybe it is body language that foretells more than the words being said.

Click on cartoon to enlarge.

These last two weeks, our home has been INUNDATED with professional survey takers, an average of one survey per day. What are these people fishing for? 

The Colorado Blueprint method in September works this way:

1) Survey every voter (needs lots of money) to have bulletproof intel for messaging.

2) Identify their most pressing issues / frustrations.

3) Re-cast the progressive candidate as the best person to solve these issues, even when there is no way that progressive candidate will buck the party whip to fulfil his campaign promises in the legislature.

4) Parade the recast, dolled up candidate. Promise the moon on those most pressing issues.

5) Overpower voter hesitations and the opponent’s rebuttals with gush of well crafted news reports,  commercials and mailers. Dramatize the progressive candidate’s bona fides (needs lots of money).

This morning I saw a Fleetwood commercial. What do swing voters in North Bellingham?? care about?

1) The coal trains. (Be sure to link to Ericksen’s lobbyist lunch schedule)

2) Low wages for women. (Single moms? Entry level female workers? Can we get them out to vote?)

3) Partisan gridlock. (Cast Fleetwood as a peacemaker. Pre-emptively bury the 2009 “yellow sign down zoning” war he helped bring on while on Whatcom County Council. Lisa McShane knows all about that.)

It is all in the Comcast ad running today, Monday, September 29. And, of course, Seth Fleetwood has the answers, and will work for “you”. Colorado Blueprint smokescreen. High priced, targeted messaging. It worked in Colorado. Will it work on low information voters in North Bellingham? Good chance.

It worked last year in Whatcom County. Vote NO COAL TRAINS. Only thing, those million dollar promises were unattainable. Train traffic grows on, only with OIL TRAINS.  And, now, Vancouver Canada has approved a coal terminal. So much for the Steyer funded promises delivered per last year’s Colorado Blueprint.

Sooner or later, even Tom Steyer’s millions won’t buy credibility to drive votes using the Colorado Blueprint. But, until then, we must endure giddy, well paid millennials wooing us with the latest Colorado Blueprint survey.

Also from the Colorado Blueprint—501c4’s—lots of them. Just because Tom Steyer says his money will go to target other key senate races farther south, does that mean the Fleetwood race has been back burnered by the progressive gurus? Don’t count on it. Keep watching. The money moves here and there and everywhere, through the “collazione” of progressive 501c4’s. It is pure genius. What a Colorado Blueprint meal! It is not over til the “fat lady sings”. Or til the Scott Walkers of the world outflank the Colorado Blueprint. Think about that!

---------------

The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado

Unintimidated: …Scott Walker

Muddy Waters

Tuesday evening at Whatcom County Council, a hearing on the formation of four new Watershed Improvement Districts will take place. A formality, this hearing precedes an upcoming vote by farmer—owners of open spaces qualified properties on whether to initiate WIDs over themselves, and join Bellingham, Whatcom County, the tribes, and the PUD as a tax assessing authority at the table of water negotiations.

In the local world of water rights, quality and quantity, this is a big development. Water is a big deal, and the prospect of farmers successfully organizing into a cohesive group is—well, shocking, kind of like a large brontosauros, waking up and looking long at your stilt house. Maybe the farmers will change the water game. Maybe not.

Having made a serious effort to understand the water issues, and participating as a small Whatcom County hobby farmer, I see several factors.

Funding is a central issue in determining water rules.

Money pays salaries and determines balances of power. City water managers, contract water managers, expert hydro-geological engineers, soil conservation regulators, tribal water system managers and lawyers, state and federal water oversight and grant agencies, NGO socio-environmentalist lobbies generally can count on funding with generous amounts of not water, but money.

There are some things funding can’t buy, such as children who work the soil for love of farming, foregoing the relative ease of urban living. Many big farmers in Whatcom County advise their children to not take on the increasingly onerous burden of perpetuating the family farm. Out of state and country corporations and individuals continue to buy up prime Whatcom County farmland.

Toughing it out, the average Whatcom County Farmer does not have the luxury of a staff of water experts to secure ditch cleaning permits, negotiate water rights, argue with Fish and Wildlife Agency activists, and lobby other recalcitrant government agencies, often staffed by planners who seem more concerned about their career peer legacies than walking a mile in the farmers’ shoes.

Then, there are native tribal customs. If you have opportunity to work in planning sessions with them, tribal leaders can be approachable. However, there is a huge ring of appointed bureaucrats, activist judges, government and non-government agency activists who hedge in the tribes, making finding local solutions a big headache.

If the farmers are not at the table, they will be on the menu. But do Whatcom farmers want to organize and represent themselves at the table of water negotiations?

After attending a significant number of farmer meetings, my observation is that farmers are highly independent, expect their virtues will protect them from activists, and thus are really not interested in collective funding or organizing, unless it is within their own crop sector. Farmers have traditionally kept their heads down and tried to fly under the radar. Most farmers choose partnerships with marketing boards, co-ops and corporations who will buy their product in one annual agreement, freeing them to roam their fields and have coffee with their friends. The people who grow our food generally avoid us.

Muddying this further are well meaning conservative small acreage holders. Not farmers themselves, they push back at the aggression of socio-environmental activists in NGO lobbies and local county agencies. Having the same adversaries, however, does not guarantee them understanding of, or standing with their big farmer neighbors.

Some of the Whatcom small acreage people have revived the state mandated WRIA 1 Water Planning Unit that was sidelined by the “Joint Water Board” about five years ago.

The Lummi and Nooksack Tribes formally abandoned the Planning Unit almost from the beginning. Contentious and dragged out legal and water engineering studies destroyed momentum and farmer interest in the Planning Unit, giving a cadre of well placed civic water officials the freedom to move water policy along socio-environmental activist lines.

Unofficially, the tribes and the civic officials have made a host of decisions behind closed doors. However, as conservative acreage holders began observing the public meetings of related county and city agencies, these plans were uncovered and challenged, and a movement to resurrect the oversight of the Planning Unit took place. Farmers looked at this with skepticism and open hostility.

Key civic officials scoffed at and sought to sabotage the Planning Unit revival. And, the Planning Unit advocates have duly noted the disinterest of the farmers in water rights issues for small acreage holders. On the other hand, big farm advocacy groups have supported the County appeal against the recent Futurewise lawsuit over “exempt” residential wells.

So, to sum up—on one side is a host of well funded (by the taxpayer, in various ways) non food growing “guardians” of water and land, and on the other side is a ragtag, conflicted band of farmers and small acreage conservatives.

Enter Watershed Improvement Districts. Central in water conflict resolution elsewhere in Washington State, Watershed Improvement Districts in Whatcom County have the legal potential to absorb irrigation and diking/drainage districts. Assessing a tax, WIDs will have more or less money to secure grants, and coordinate and carry out projects with other peer agencies with legal standing, whether county, state, or federal, whether volunteer or salaried.

Farmers have duly noted the sluggish agency staffers who soak up irrigation and diking/draining funds, and county administrators who transfer these funds to other contentious projects outside the initial scope of the tax assessments. Hence, there is a plan to create a joint WID board, representing the two existing and four proposed WIDs, and not with county staffing or administrative service.

What does it mean to improve a watershed? WIDs have a broader scope of endeavor than irrigation or diking districts. Assuming watershed responsibilities can be a headache, but has been looked on with significant favor by state legislators, who have provided very large financial grants to WID projects in other counties. The key is working out a watershed improvement plan acceptable to WID members and other entities such as tribes and cities.

This early October ballot will allow farmland holders in Whatcom County, whose land is in the “Open Spaces” reduced tax program to decide to organize as WIDs. In other words, the WIDs are being organized in a way that gives farmers control of their agenda.

A temporary committee of farmers, framers of the watershed “boundaries” have modified the initial boundary lines to increase the chances of the 2/3 approval needed to establish the WIDs. And, votes are based on acreage, specifically, 2 votes for every 5 acres enrolled in the boundaries. This “gerrymandering” has been contentious, not only with “yes vote” farmers who have been excluded, but also with “no vote” farmers who have been excluded.

My informal observation is that the volunteer boundary committee is pressed to the limit by lack of organizing staff and bare bones funding, just as the Planning Unit revivalists are struggle as County officials fund meeting facilitators handsomely, but provide relatively little staff or funds for Planning Unit members to carry out real life, non-meeting projects.

In other words, “gerrymandering” accusations seem to be largely fears that the WIDs will be a foe of legitimate Planning Unit processes, becoming a power center that overshadows the Planning Unit and further marginalizes rural non farm conservatives on the Planning Unit. Farmers and Planning Unit conservatives need patience and a servant’s mindset here. There is no perfect, eternally static balance of power or system of checks and balances. It is the open hand that undergirds community life. And, the consensus decision making process of the Planning Unit is onerous and notoriously slow.

What sets apart pretending and legitimate water curators here? 1) Children. 2) Growing food.

Thirty or fifty years from now, whose children will manage the water and land resources? Progressive partners have few children. Farmers’ children don’t stay on the farm. Many tribal children move off the reservation and out of the boats. Grey headed activists, environmental and conservative, rarely have their children and grandchildren engaged locally with them.

Perhaps, the greatest contribution towards good water policy will be farm sensitive youth living on food producing parcels, who can, in community and good faith, without endless overlays of urban officials, negotiate water use rules that provide balanced stewardship of natural resources.

Who provides food from the land and the water? It is the tribes and the farmers. Working the soil and the seas are the hard scrabble trusts that validate water policy expertise.

Maybe the WIDs and tribes can work together to sweep away the Seattle based, UN/federal agency funded NGO encrustments in Whatcom County, to model service based, not adversarial driven agreements. Again, the open hand gets things done. The closed hand destroys.

Maybe the big, local Whatcom farmers will pursue a model that allows global sales, yet also enables local urban and suburbanites and their children to again produce value added foods, to balance and preserve farming with businesses and cash flows, farms not so dependent on bank financing and government subsidies.

Maybe.

Collaring Public Employee Negotiators/PAC Managers OR Collaring Citizens in Blaine

Last week, two petitions were submitted to the City of Blaine, which, if there are no insurmountable regularities, will either be approved by Blaine City Council as written, or will be approved or rejected in a February 2015 ballot initiative put to the citizens of Blaine.

This is interesting. Novel. Amusing. Even threatening. City and County officials have been tasked with processing two petitions that cut to the core of their group identity and vocational remuneration.

The Bellingham Herald gave a news report Saturday on these petitions. “Blaine voters may consider measure to weaken city employees’ unions.” It was a basic article, basic news reporting. Or was it?

I see a number of questions that were not answered.

1) What union or unions serve Blaine city employees?

2) Are all Blaine city employees unionized?

3) Are collective bargaining agreements in Blaine negotiated behind closed doors, with terms buried to all but the most persistent researchers? Or are these agreements an open public process?

4) How do Blaine City union agreements compare to those, say of Lynden, or Ferndale, or Bellingham?

5) What percent of Blaine city employees approve their union’s political contributions?

6) How many citizens live in Blaine?

7) What percent of that number is 500 petitioners?

8) Do residents of Blaine (and Whatcom County) disapprove of levels of public sector service under unionization?

9) How hard was it, how many hours did it take to accumulate these signatures?

10) Has the public perception of unions changed from champions of the underdog to body guards of privilege and nepotistic politicking?

11) Should unions for public employees have more limitations than other unions?

12) Do all public sector unions nobly avoid collusion with elected legislators who ratify their contracts?

13) Who is Freedom Foundation?

14) Why would they have boilerplate initiative language for these petitions on their website?

15) What marks Freedom Foundation’s relationships with unions in Washington State?

16) What marks Freedom Foundation’s relationships with conservative activists in Whatcom County?

These questions were not addressed by the Bellingham Herald Reporter. In depth, balanced reporting takes time, which is money, something the Herald seems to be in short supply of these days.

I would make some additional observations.

1) The two largest employers in Whatcom County are Western Washington University and the Public School Boards. Public sector union engagement is a central issue in Whatcom County.

2) A ballot result in Blaine is also a referendum on the public sector unions serving these larger entities.

3) I know a number of public sector unionized employees who are happy to take their pay, yet highly critical of levels of service, political priorities and management collaring brought about by their union’s contract agreements.

4) This is not a little issue.

Who should be collared? Unions? or Public sector employees? or Citizens? We may see what Blaine voters think.

Executive Fiat

Once upon a time there was a land where attendance at the state approved church meant the difference between liberty or death. Many people died when kings and queens changed which church was approved. It became obvious that the decreed church had less to do with God, and more to do with the king’s grip on power.

Thousands of loyal subjects joined together to build a far flung colony of that land. They made covenants and implemented local town hall rule. They wanted a church unshackled from royal fiat, and hoped the king and his clerics were watching and learning.

Each landed citizen had a voice and used it. A later king did not like the distant ministers whose unfettered sermons thundered against unjust government policies. He made plans to send an army and trash the distant churches. That king died suddenly, and the ministers and townhalls and churches lived on.

A century later, another king moved to crush the town hall people. A war was fought, and the king lost his distant colonies. “We the people” and citizen based rule was allowed to enlarge itself over the next two centuries into the America that we know today.

Today, “we the people” honor citizen based rule, and bump along with the forms and instruments of government handed down from our New England forbearers, yet something is wrong.

Kings are quietly beginning to rule over us. And being at great ease, “we the town hall people” let them.

At local, state and federal levels, the voting game plays its loud tunes, but the quiet power more and more lies in unelected coalitions of bureaucrats and non profits and multi national corporations, not with the town hall people.

Last week, an enterprising group, Shiftwa.org published highlights of e-mails obtained from the first year of Washington State Governer Jay Inslee’s term in office. In essence, Governor Inslee’s office right from the start, hired outside consultants to solicit non profits and corporate leaders to fund up an environmentally driven governor’s agenda that would not be mired in restraints of the legislature. This is executive fiat.

A month or so ago, April 29, Governor Inslee signed executive order 14-04, creating a Carbon Emissions Reduction Task Force. Read the whereas line items. Do sweeping, minimally supported conclusions and initial West Coast regional discussions (not even non-binding alliances) justify unilateral executive orders?

Do you know the governor’s powers vested in unelected appointments to the Growth Management Hearings Board? What about the Governor’s Office controlled (and ailing) Puget Sound Partnership that dishes out EPA funds for environmental “improvements”?

At the Whatcom County level is the unauthorized spending of the WRIA1 Joint Administrative Board. Stopping short of direct legal suit, a coalition of water districts have written an open letter to the Whatcom County Prosecutor’s Office and Executive Jack Louws, detailing violations of the Whatcom County Charter in the budgets and spending of the Joint Administrative Board. They are challenging executive fiat.

Who will prevail? Who really rules, the executive or the cadre of non profit advisors and facilitators, the business consultants and specialists who hover in clouds in city and county health, planning and parks offices, and further their interests through our youth and educational halls, and honor themselves through a complicit media.

Schooled and skilled ingroup manipulation tactics, progressives keep the town hall people three steps behind in the game of public policy and media/education virtual reality.

Don’t you want to be liked? Didn’t you fill out the “share your thoughts” survey? Wouldn’t you like to attend a neighborhood discussion on bike lanes and downzoning of arterial roads? Your thoughts collected by skilled progressive group manipulators are usually excluded from their predetermined reports, and worse, you stop watching and resisting with a false sense of being heard and represented.

Conservatives, newly elected to public office, struggling to learn the ropes of public policy, networking with the panoply of local, state and federal bureaucrats, NGOs and business alliances, and wanting to establish a reputation for balanced, productive, teamwork in governing, are easy prey for environmental handlers. “Getting along” is not always a good thing.

The media pats you on the back, and your legacy unwittingly becomes one of furthering the progressive, environmentally justified takings of private properties and personal freedoms. And the town hall people who elected you slumber on.

Executive fiat. The new reality. Or is it all that new? What is the lesson of American history?

When people of Christian faith walked the talk, there was salt and light, amid conflict. That was the story of the “Black Robed Regiment”of 1776. That was the motivation for British generals to stable their horses in New England church auditoriums, or use them as beer halls. Today, there is precious little Christian salt and interest in town hall or citizen driven legislation. Kings and executive branches take up the slack, and a saltless Christian church, drowning in comforts and Madison Avenue marketing, is poised to be ground into the pavement. There may be a temporary euphoria of freedom while the culture is in free fall, but when the ground is found, the “kings” grind fine and hard.

Maybe the future hot political career will be court advisor. Maybe not. Maybe it will be salt maker.

Are you voting conservative in the primary? Vet your state representative candidate over loyalties to executive agencies like Puget Sound Partnership or the Growth Management Hearings Board.  

At the county level, did your rep candidate turn a blind eye to the WRIA 1 Joint Administrative Board’s (Bellingham Mayor, County Executive, PUD manager, Nooksack and Lummi tribal representative) out of compliance, unfettered spending and policy making? You may be surprised.

JK

--------------

Colorado progressive money vs Scott Walker character

Longterm gas tax/carbon credit planning by Jay Inslee

Inslee seeks NGO evironmentalist funding

Governors should avoid the environmental mire.

Governor’s Carbon Emissions Reduction Taskforce

Reactions to the Inslee CERT

Puget Sound Partnership history and failures

Water District Coalition serves formal attorney’s noticeto the Whatcom County Prosecutor’s Office of Joint Administrative Board policyand funding violations under the Whatcom County Charter.

Countering Group Manipulation Tactics by B.K Eakman

Parades, Ballots, Scorecards

Have you looked at Whatcom County Ballot for all open positions, and for primary elections this year?

How well informed are your civic taste buds?

A couple of days ago, my wife suggested we invite some other families to walk candidate floats in parades this summer. It is a fun way for younger children to begin to learn about civic processes, and you see that political candidates are real people, with very diverse personas. BUT…

This year, who should we help? For example, State Rep Position 1 has four candidates, two of whom we would be inclined to help. Walking in parades means choosing now. Am I ready to choose? Have these candidates fully framed their legislative priorities and values? Do they intend to do so? Or must I choose by sentimental feelings? A candidate first serves voters by defining his or her self to those voters.

Last year, my daughter Krista and I covered 2013 Whatcom County school board elections.  A large slate of uncontested candidates stayed home and silent. Competition may spend dollars, but the value far outweighs the cost. Competitive elections enable informed votes.

Voters grapple with three levels of citizen responsibility in civic government.

At a foundational level is virtue. We teach our children to listen well, honor jurisdiction, be grateful, be truthful, be orderly, and work hard. The list of character goes on. Families, faiths, schools operate on a cycle of childhood, about fifteen to twenty years.

At a practical level is public policy. Happy people know issues, jurisdictions, and rules, and work within them. Unhappy peoples ignore or twist them. Public policy issues generally are a project of 2-5 years.

At the painful level are elections. “Go to” people rise to the top, and whether by formal ballot or habituated service, are there in times of need. The wheels of humility and pride grind hard, however, and elected service has large costs in addition to large benefits. Election seasons are measured in weeks and months, short and intense.

Easy to ignore, elections are still the hinges of the future, a time to mix epoxies that shape very long trajectories. Elections are like weddings—a lot of pomp and fuss, a big party, and a potential big hangover. Yet, that wedding intiates a fruitful or disastrous family life. So are elections. The hassles of elections underwrite both big rewards and losses.

This Saturday in Lynden, the 2014 season of local small town American fairs and parades begins. Who should I vote for? What do these candidates stand for?

Should I vote for a candidate because I knew them from childhood?

Should I vote for them because they have raised a good family?

Should I vote for them because they manage money well?

Should I vote for them because they successfully help needy people?

Should I vote for them because we need racial diversity in government office?

Frankly, what is the job description?

Do you buy a dump truck to go to the corner store? Do you buy a sports car to drive the baseball team to out of town games? Do you buy a corn chopper to take your RV to the lake?

The volume of local, state and federal business that elected officials deal with overwhelms the best voter. After the election, the newly minted public voices begin yelling into the meat grinder of the bureaucracy. Elected representatives come and go, but bureaucratic apparatchiks stay long, very long. Elected reps must be very perceptive, focused and quick -- tough and able cookies.

Candidates, please do me a favor. Can you write your own score card? I don’t mean photo opp flyers.

Can you write an honest scorecard that compares your priorities to your competition? Sometimes good score cards are very unsettling. But that can also be very good in the long run. And, how you frame issues on your score card shows us your underlying assumptions.

1) Prove to me you know what the policy categories of your civic arena are.

2) Prove to me you know how to coordinate research, amendment, and writing of law.

3) Prove to me you can improve bureaucracies, especially vis the public sector unions.

4) Prove to me you have staying power, can ride the bronco of day to day rules making.

5) Prove to me you can delegate, can build your team, can affect good policy in caucus.

6) Prove to me you can swim with media sharks, not serve them, not quarrel with them.

7) Prove to me you are a quick study.

8) Prove to me you are not for sale to the highest bidder, especially to global corporate or non profit trusts.
9) Prove to me you will not allow outside grant/tax dollars to overwhelm local governance.
10) Prove to me you will reduce the power of shadow government in unelected regional councils and boards

I could go on. Is it possible to be an informed voter? Is it possible to be an informed candidate?

One last thing. What might you gain by working for candidates, by letting the barbecue stay cold for a few more nights than normal this summer, by helping an election campaign? Why care? Why walk? Why doorbell?

Elections close the loop. What value has virtue if it is not applied to policy? What value has policy if it does not connect with people? Elections remind us that we must steer our own boats if we don’t want to be swamped by the side winds.

You may not know it all, but you can scrape the rust off, re-oil, and re-engage. Turn off the TV and turn out to some meetings. Ask some hard questions.  It is better entertainment, and better living.

JK

----------

Whatcom County Candidates – all

Whatcom County Primary Election Ballot, 2014

What happens when candidates run unopposed