The first monthly meeting of the San Juan County Democrats took place this past Saturday. We elected officers for the coming two years. Here is the list.
Chair – David Turnoy
Vice Chair – Geri Turnoy
Deputy Vice Chair – San Juan – Ryan Palmateer
Deputy Vice Chair – Orcas – Keara Axelrod
Deputy Vice Chair – Lopez – Jeffrey Hanks
Secretary – Ryan Palmateer
Treasurer – David Dehlendorf
State Committee Woman – Sharon Abreu
State Committee Man – Bob O’Connell
40th Legislative District – Bill Severson
The main event for our meeting was a presentation by longtime islander Joe Symons. Joe has been trying for almost 30 years to get the county to study the carrying capacity of the county in terms of how many people can realistically live here without changing the quality of life. He also wants the county to make our wonderful Vision Statement an operational plan, breaking it down into actionable items. If we do nothing, it will cost all of us more, because growth doesn’t pay for itself; either we all have to pay more in taxes, or services are reduced. It will cost us money to do something about the problem, but better to spend the money and get some positive results than spend more money and continue to see livability degraded. Joe would like to see a branding of San Juan County so that everyone who lives here and everyone who visits here becomes a steward of our environment, as if we were stewards of a park. Currently there are no restrictions on vacation rentals or building permits, so growth is only limited by what the market will bear, not by a plan to preserve our quality of life.
New county councilors Cindy Wolf and Christine Minney were both in attendance. Cindy was able to ask Joe a number of questions, and Cindy made it clear that she welcomes working with members of the public. Joe mentioned that the council’s format for public comments has been really limiting over the years, providing three minutes per person and no opportunity for dialog back and forth between the speaker and the councilors. Cindy is interested in looking at changing that so there is more interaction with the public. Cindy also mentioned that the council will be dealing with the vacation rental issue this Monday and Tuesday at 9:00 each morning, and you are welcome to tune in.
We have formed a small committee to work on getting this issue before the council and keeping it there. If you have an interest in joining us in this effort, please contact me. It’s your county and your quality of life.
Important websites for information from Joe’s years of work on this issue can be found at http://doebay.net/bigpicture.pdf and https://www.keepsanjuanswild.org/.
There were a number of important items written into the chat during our meeting, and many in attendance were interested in those. Therefore, I am listing them below:
The Peacekeeping bill was introduced in the last Congress by Barbara Lee https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1111
A wonderful piece of writing by our own Susan Grout links domestic violence to some of the violence we saw last Wednesday at the Capitol – https://susansmagicfeather.blogspot.com/2021/01/do-domestic-terrorism-and-domestic.html Song about a Department of Peace by Sharon Abreu – https://sharmuse.com/DOP.html
History of efforts to start a U.S. Dept. of Peace (Peacebuilding) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Peace
Here is the staff Memo and Draft Land Use and Rural Element, being discussed by Planning Commission this week 1/15 – https://www.sanjuanco.com/DocumentCenter/View/21615/December-29-2020-Staff-Memo-Natural-Resource-Land-Policies-Discussion-on-January-15-2021
We had a great comment from Learner about the buildout issue: Other pathways for reducing the max-buildout potential include community non-profit or cooperative ownership. Profit driven development is the problem because developers only concerned with their bottom line tend to externalize the true costs to the community and the natural resources. Community ownership tends to result in better stewardship decisions because triple bottom line cost accounting is in the DNA of community-owned institutions.
If people have ideas about public/council interaction, contact the Charter Review Commission.