trails update

on Saturday, 9/22, we had our first trails work party under the new 'regime'. no last-minute phone calls to remind people. no signage put out several days before to drum up local support (and guide people). no phone calls to the Park District staff. Oh, and competition from local soccer leagues.

so guess what happened? Three people showed up. Parks staff forgot. Combined with myself and Ed (the other crew leader) that makes five of us, working with whatever tools we brought, which wasn't a lot!

end result: we got a good amount of work done - finishing up the sides & surface of the trail from the main junction down to the Fort Ward fence. Maybe its better that so few showed up, we got to work in a couple of clusters, and move quickly.
also we had a chance to complain about staff once more forgetting about our regularly-scheduled work party. Even after they signed up on the mailing list.

For those of you who need a reminder or want to know where the next one is located: its always 4th Sat of the month - signup for email on http://www.bitrails.org.

local political & blog scene heating up!

I guess its just the coming election - but we're suddenly seeing a lot of blog activity locally. I count at least 4 actively covering Bainbridge Island and its diverse politics. Attack ads in the local newspaper, stealth telephone campaigns, mailers and well-funded but "cheap-looking" hand-painted signs seem to be the tools of the local property-rights/anti-environmental/anti-govt camp (seems to be a vendetta - they don't propose their own candidate); while so far doorbelling and support letters are used by the candidates themselves. Gee, which do you think will be most effective in a campaign? I hope not the attack ads, although it certainly worked in national elections.

I hope that after the election some of these people remain actively involved. There is (and probably always has been) a lot of crap that goes on, some of it intentional, some of it simply naive. There are real issues to sort out, implications understood, decisions made.

Here's an example that bugs me at the moment: a planned boardwalk & trail linking a neighborhood to Winslow and the Ferry just disappeared off the table.
provides a picture and info.
What happened to this? I've worked with members of the NMTP and the TAC for a couple of years now, helping to site and scope this potential link. Its been discussed at several TAC meetings. The City has known about it, and supposedly budgeted for it. City wetlands experts were brought in. Permit issues were discussed and resolved. The whole project was a no-brainer: just a simple matter of finding the money for the boardwalk. Not cheap of course.

In a recent TAC meeting, when asked about this project, Park District staff claimed to have never heard of it, and questioned the need for it anyway. Case closed. Nothing to see here. WTF? First off, the City was supposed to be funding it as it was a non-motorized link. And its been discussed several times in open public meetings. So, what's happening here? At this point I don't think people really forgot, althought its certainly possible. Perhaps their workload just exceeded their capacity/funding and so they decided to reprioritize projects themselves? Unfortunately with an active volunteer community and neighborhood groups, that's neither fair nor just. But I guess what it comes down to is that we don't really know. One month this project was one the list of work to be done, awhile later its gone. Who made that decision and why?

anonymous local blogging

Today i ran actoss another blog started in my community (biword.blogspot.com). It had a first posting questioning the thoroughness and bias of the local print media - they've been going up and down for years and have never been known for their depth of coverage. Great, they'd like to provide detailed, in-depth coverage of stories ignored by local print media. Nothing wrong with that idea.

So then I want to the Profile section, since they're local I figured I might know the authors - when I found the blog creators had decided to remain anonymous. I can see why commentors on a story might want to remain anonymous, but I find the credibility of someone who wants to replace local media a little suspect when I don't know who they are.

I guess we'll see. There are certainly reasons why an author of some pithy piece of local news would want to remain anonymous.
We all have stories we'll only tell over a beer. Is an anonymous blog the place for them? I guess I'll have to create a pseudonym if I want to share any of them now!