Guest Opinion: Land Use and Traffic Safety Should Rank Higher than Confiscating Signs

By Sadie Bailey

Stan Matthews’ July 28 post, advising people to remove their off-premises signs and sandwich boards – or “County Staff” may remove them – rankles me. For all of San Juan County, we have only one County Code Enforcement Officer. How much time can he spend getting to know Orcas or Lopez, when he lives on San Juan Island? Does he know that several restaurants share Odd Fellows Hall on different days and depend on off-site signs, as do other restaurants and businesses off the beaten track?

The heavy-handedness of enforcing a sign ordinance in Eastsound that most of us never wanted, while allowing blatant land-use violations to go unchecked with no monitoring or followup enforcement of violations, is wasteful, irresponsible, insulting to our intelligence, and destructive to the pristine environment we all share and hopefully, steward.

I live in the Urban Growth Area (UGA), which seems to be written off, as far as environmental protections go. Our UGA contains one of the largest state and federally protected Category 2 forested wetlands on Orcas Island.

While the County is busy enforcing the sign ordinance, how did County officials allow permits for the newest three story commercial buildings east of Washington Federal?  What will protect non-flushing Fishing Bay from the runoff from these parking lots and uphill condos in construction – named, ironically, Ocean Forest? That name seems oxymoronic, when wetland trees are being bulldozed to put up parking lots, commercial buildings, and water-view condos at the head of Fishing Bay.

How did the developer get away with installing angle-in, back-out parking on Horseshoe Highway, our main road serving all points on the island into Eastsound? It’s a serious safety hazard to back onto one of our busiest roadways, especially near a blind curve and sometimes into the opposite lane. Most of our ferry traffic uses this route; imagine the added congestion, delays, and accidents. How can our county officials have missed the violations to the Eastsound Subarea Plan and pass the permits? Who keeps missing these repeat infractions? This is where applying a Land Use Violations Fine Ordinance would be mighty handy.

We have about six weeks of high-season tourism. A few off-site signs pop up – so what? Shouldn’t the county be enforcing building and land use codes to protect our marine habitats, critical aquifers, and forested wetlands from environmental violations – even, and especially, in our UGAs? Our Charter and County Land Use Codes, State and Federal laws all say that protecting Critical Areas comes first and foremost in any planning or land use.

So – how does the County justify sending over their only code enforcement officer to confiscate a few off-site signs, while overlooking commercial developments which are destroying UGA ecosystems, with nothing being done to safeguard Fishing Bay? What end justifies the means?

It seems to me that Land Use code enforcement and traffic violation enforcement should be top on the County’s list, and that fining repeat and continuing violators would produce revenue. Confiscating off-site signs won’t solve our budget problems or protect our fragile and irreplaceable environment.

Sadie Bailey is a 30-year resident of Orcas Island, and the author of the blogs
https://eastsound-habitat-matters.blogspot.com/
https://we-the-people-11.blogspot.com/