Blue ribbon panel for a dump?

Marketing Sedro-Woolley with ad campaigns? A blue ribbon panel to guide the city? Both are great ideas on the surface.

But how do you market a city with a garbage dump a few blocks from downtown? How do you spin the fact that tourists and residents will navigate Highway 20, on their way to the natural beauty of the North Cascades, behind long lines of garbage trucks and pickup trucks dropping garbage? And how do you market a long line of bars and people peeing on the street?

And a blue ribbon panel, for a few months — for what? To help prioritize a budget? That sounds real visionary. And I’m sure the city will be eager to listen to a panel since they have such a stellar record of being such good listeners this past year. There should be lots of people ready to volunteer.

A marketing campaign and a blue ribbon panel — only window dressing for a community that has a cancerous and clueless city administration.

Sedro-Woolley could be a theme city — Small Town Americana — if there was some true leadership and vision.

The downtown could be a thriving tourist mecca — with some restoration and some compatible period businesses (circa 1940s and 1950s). The surrounding historical neighborhoods, the museum and the local train traffic could all be capitalized upon.

There are cities all over Washington, such as Winthrop, La Conner, Port Townsend, etc. — that have successfully capitalized on their true natures.

But no — we will have the blight of a downtown garbage dump that thwarts any hope of attracting any business with any healthy vision. And there are the continually deteriorating downtown buildings. It is truly heartbreaking.

But, despite all of this, I am still optimistic. Good will prevail over evil. What goes round comes round. We’ll keep on fighting. And maybe, just maybe, Deluxe will pay attention and actually listen to the citizens of Sedro-Woolley and take their business down the road to the Ovenell site where it makes complete sense to be. As for the city leaders — it’s time to clean house. Their actions have been truly appalling.



Shelley Carroll Burgett

Sedro-Woolley