Snow removal strategies need to be examined
With regard to your Dec. 17 editorial, I believe the state of our roads over the past week affords an excellent opportunity for civic leadership to review both existing procedures and resources.

The inability to provide passable roads over an extended period has created significant issues for both residents and chamber members — many of whom are small businesses who depend on holiday sales to make ends meet, pay their employees and collect the sales tax that the city depends on to provide basic services. This could not have happened at a worse time for our merchant community.

After speaking with the mayor and a number of council members, as well as frustrated chamber members and residents, there are a number of areas which might be fruitfully discussed. The primary issue involves equipment.

The city is understandably loath to purchase expensive plows and sanders. A potential solution might be to inventory/assign needed equipment owned by other local agencies or private parties that could be used in an emergency.

The Anacortes School District, for example, owns a snowplow, which the superintendent loaned to the city last week for as long as needed. Many of the local construction firms also own equipment that could be fitted with plows, haul traction material, etc. Moreover, these firms have work crews that could be employed to augment city personnel. This would provide revenue to local companies and more quickly and effectively address road conditions, while at the same time eliminating the need for the city to buy rarely used equipment.

A secondary issue concerns communication. Storms typically arrive with sufficient warning to allow the city to coordinate with appropriate state agencies. The fact that the state in the past has performed a service doesn’t necessarily mean that it will continue to do so. Operationally, this follow-up should be SOP, ensuring not only that the work gets done but also that personnel from the city and state can coordinate their efforts.

A final issue worth consideration is timing. As has been expressed by a number of parties, by the time ice has been compacted by traffic, it’s too late. There must be a coordinated and consistent effort to remove snow prior to compaction, if possible. Once that layer of ice has been established the only solution is to wait for a thaw — basically where we stand today.

I think it is important that our tone and approach stay constructive. Our city is well-run and responsive. The events of the past week are the exception. We would be remiss, however, if there wasn’t an effort at this point to analyze what occurred, improvements that might be made, and policies changed.

On behalf of the chamber, I wish readers a merry Christmas and a happy, healthy and prosperous new year. Thank you in advance for your continued support of Anacortes businesses in 2009 — buying local is essential to the continued health of our town. 
Mitch Everton
Executive director,
Anacortes Chamber of Commerce

Cruel person who killed deer robbed us of so much
This is a tribute to the three shot deer and a plea to apprehend the killer

Sadly our neighborhood faces the holidays with the brutal killing of three friendly deer we cherished. No longer do they delight us with their presence in our yards. No longer do they lie regally on the rocky knoll in our backyard watching us come and go or look into our living room window.

They are gone from our neighborhood streets. Regal they were with their majestic antlers. Always curious about what we humans were doing. Sometimes accompanied by an equally friendly doe. 

One was shot as he ate from a feeder put out for him in a yard. His antlers were hacked off his lovely head. So tame were these three deer they probably trustingly stood and watched as the killer shot them.

A cruel killer ended the lives of these precious deer who shared our neighborhood.

The killer boasted of his “kills.” People heard him talk about it. Please tell the police what you know. There is a substantial reward. The tip line is 299-1985.

Or call the police department business office at 293-4684. Hunting is illegal in our city and Forest Lands. This killer should not remain loose in Anacortes. He has robbed us of so much joy and ended the lives of three lovely residents of our neighborhood. Our yards now feel empty and dead.
Martha Hall
Anacortes

City can do better keeping roads safe during storms
This recent snow storm provided yet again an illustration of a city ill-equipped to deal with this kind of weather. Anacortes streets were not plowed and the result was an icy mess. I could not believe the dangerous conditions that were allowed to occur based on the negligence of the city in its failure to perform its basic public safety duty.

All of the roads were covered with a thick layer of ice with a little sand on top, if you were lucky. I saw several vehicles that slid off the road. Why does this happen consistently in Anacortes?

My job depends on driving around town and into outlying areas. When I went to Burlington and Mount Vernon on the same day as the icy mess in Anacortes, the roads had been plowed and were clear and safe. The contrast was quite stark and only served to highlight the safety problems here.

Our roads are dangerous. This is a public safety issue. If the roads are not safe for travel because the city fails to plow, then the roads should be closed.

If people are in accidents because the city has been derelict in its duty to maintain safety, then the liability should also be extended to the city for those accidents. If elected officials are unwilling to protect the public safety, then they should lose their jobs.

If the issue is money, then subcontract the job out to private people who are willing to do it. In this economy, I’m sure there are plenty of folks looking to get the job done.

Come on, Anacortes, we can do better than this.
Kathleen Crawford
Anacortes

City needs a contingencyplanning effort
OK, class. One question, and it’s multiple choice. Ready? “When the next snowstorm hits Anacortes, the city intends to do what?”

a) Pull our snowplow out of storage and clear some roads.

b) Coordinate shared usage with another county to clear primary arteries.

c) Hire a private firm to clear a few major thoroughfares.

d) Do nothing.

I’ll give you a hint: There is only one wrong answer.

Inconceivably, our city government seems intent on failing our citizenry. Over the last four days, I have seen this town brought to its knees (and, literally, posteriors) negotiating the ice skating rink of Commercial, the Olympic luge of A Avenue, and the double black diamond ski run called 32nd Street. I won’t even discuss Rosario, Marine Drive, Heart Lake Road and others too numerous to count.

All right, I will concede that I have exaggerated just a bit. Perhaps I’m just trying to laugh a little bit through my tears. While I was only inconvenienced, missing a day and a half of work and increasing my commute time, this article is truly not about me.

It’s about those that deserve our thoughts and consideration at times like these, such as the elderly dependent upon reliable and regular hospice care and medicine. Or concern for those younger drivers who, without a school bus in sight, end up trying to drive themselves to high school in conditions clearly exceeding their experience level.

Or the group of small children (like the one I led down the sidewalk of 41st Street to Mount Erie Elementary) who may inadvertently lie in the path of a vehicle sliding out of control. Or the hard-working folks barely making ends meet who don’t get paid for a day of missed work. The potential human cost is exactly why the “do nothing” approach is not only wrong, but unconscionable.

Don’t get me wrong. I applaud the environmental concerns regarding salt runoff and the salmon population, making the “East Coast” method of laying rock salt down the night before an impossibility. Some would remind me, too, that the city actually did send out sand trucks to improve traction for vehicles nutty enough, or forced by circumstance, to brave the roads like a dog sled team running the Iditarod.

I appreciate the truck drivers and their efforts. They’re just trying to do what they are asked. But putting a few pieces of gravel on six inches of snow packed into ice is akin to using salt to clean a wine stain on a carpet. Sounds good, but in reality is completely ineffective.

Anacortes so rarely gets significant snow to justify a full-time snow removal vehicle. What I decry, however, is the apparent lack of contingency planning whatsoever, in preparation for that rainy (or snowy) day in which Anacortesans would need such service. 

For the uninitiated, “contingency planning” is not rocket science. It’s simply a common-sense, proactive approach to real-world problems. In the Case of the Missing Snowplow, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys could have come up with a half-dozen alternative ideas in the time it took me to slide across four lanes of traffic on the corner of Commercial and 32nd. Heck, a bunch of regulars at Penguin’s could have drafted a coherent and in-depth plan for the city before finishing a 16-ounce non-fat Dilettante mocha. 

So the reader does not feel as if I simply criticize the city without suggestions to improve the situation, here are a few: 1) Hire the high school football team to practice their line drills with snow shovels in hand up and down Oakes Avenue, 2) put the Safeway store manager in charge of Anacortes Public Works (the Safeway parking lot was plowed, after all), or 3) secede from the oppressive leadership of Skagit County and become a suburb of Oak Harbor (their roads got plowed just fine).

Unfortunately, the city will have its reasons (primarily based in litigation concerns, no doubt) for denying the obvious viability of my proposed plan of action. I suspect that the city’s inaction could be inspired by a giant conspiracy led by Dunton’s Autobody Shop, but I could be wrong (just kidding, Greg – you know when my daughter turns 16 I’ll have you on speed dial).

The city will continue to blame the ambiguous responsibility for Highway 20/Commercial on the Washington State Department of Transportation, but why should we citizens care? We just want clear roads.

What I don’t understand is how the city can do absolutely nothing, and let the good people (and businesses) of this town simply suffer. We are incredibly fortunate that the human cost, as I write this, has been nonexistent. I call that “just plain lucky.”

I ask for the city to explain themselves and their failure to all who live here. A sincere “sorry” would be a good start. Hopefully this discourse will eventually result in actionable measures to prevent a reoccurrence of the past few days.

Now that I reflect on it, maybe we all deserve a paycheck from the city. After all, today, I’m just sitting inside, doing nothing.
Hunter Ware
Anacortes

Be careful when it comes to ‘big box’ gifts for city
It’s Christmas time in Anacortes, the tree lighting happened in downtown and soon it will be time for Anacortes to unwrap the “boxes” under the tree!

Anacortes has had its chance to “peek” into various boxes in the past, but thought the box too big, or there were too many boxes, or we liked what was in the box, but the place under the tree was the wrong place for the box to be, so we thought maybe somebody should move the box and it would be OK then. (I guess I am one of those guys).

Anacortes didn’t like the box Westport came in, so they sent it off to Port Angeles thinking they would like the box better over there. Anacortes doesn’t like the MJB boxes, there were too many of them and besides, MJB sells coffee, don’t they? Oh yeah, they were going to let people live in the top of those boxes.

Anacortes has their priorities right though. We wanted a sewage treatment plant, and now a marine tech center and a “big box” store with a big parking lot to go on some pretty nice real estate. Will we get our next wish?

We are currently in a debate over the “big box” and trying to figure out how big we want our box to be, and when we open our big box, how many small boxes we currently have that we won’t need anymore. Will we find that we like the “one stop” box so much that we no longer want to shop in our old, smaller boxes?

The owners of the “big box” don’t live in Anacortes or shop in Anacortes. They don’t belong to local service clubs or they haven’t been donating to local charities for so very many years like our small box owners have, but we need a place to buy socks, so let’s have the big box come to town. Wow! What a present.

I vote for the big box to be moved from under the tree to the same place where we put our car boxes and storage boxes. Seems that folks can get out there when the need a car or they need to store something. Maybe they can get out there when the need socks too.

Merry Christmas.
Dan Meyer
Anacortes

AHS athletes collected four tons of food
Thank you to the community and your support of the Anacortes High School Winter Sport Athlete Food Drive on Nov. 22 by Anacortes High School winter sport athletes and parents.

The athletes collected about four tons of food. The winter sport athletes gathered food and nonperishable items throughout the Anacortes neighborhoods. The food donations went to the Salvation Army Food Bank.

Thank you for your generosity in giving and the athletes and their families for collecting food. It is greatly appreciated.

 Please think about attending a winter sporting event. The sports posters will be at high school office as well as the athletic office soon.

Call me at 293-6803 if you would like a poster. The sports posters directly support the Anacortes High School athletes. Thanks again for your support of the community and the athletes!
Sydney Olausen
Anacortes High School Seahawk Athletic Booster Association president