Letter to U.S. Senator and the Public: Buy Back Port Land

–by Walter Corbin —

To: Senator Maria Cantwell

Over the years both you and Murray generally have never responded to my emails or letters. Perhaps because I do not send you thousands for your campaigns. I limit myself to sending you and the several dozens of Democrats running in State and nationwide to $250 each.

However, that is not what my request to you several weeks ago was all about. I will repeat this message perhaps another 3 times and then just write you off as just another politician desperately trying to keep their job.

So, as I wrote previously, like all communities San Juan County needs affordable housing. About 15 or 16 years ago, the Port Commission here on Orcas Island actually fought the FAA insistence to expand our rural airport. Carol Keys, the FAA administrator was extremely critical of our refusal to take the $3.5 millions that was allocated by the FAA for the expansion of our airport.

Fortunately the consultants hired by the FAA went bankrupt and the matter was dropped for several years and we had a Port Commission mix that wanted to keep our airport rural and the many resident pilots were happy to see that happen. Well the FAA persisted and the make up of the Commission changed and the citizens were unable to prevent them and the FAA from buying 10 acres next to the airport at $850,000 for airport related business, which we really had none.

So they turned the land into a dog park and a community garden for the past 16 years. Now the FAA wants us to move all the facilities, that are properly placed and to which we have easy access to, onto the unused land. To do this the FAA has given a firm called DOWL a contract ($600,000) to address the rural needs of our airport. (think how many affordable houses seeking land that could
have accommodated!

I won’t get into the details of the millions of dollars DOWL wants us to spend. But it is hopeful that the increasing community resistance to their master planning will have the same results that happened in the early 90’s Anyway, I am asking you to help by interceding in this matter and allow our community to repurchase the 10 acres, that we and the FAA do not need for airport related business.

Obviously you can imagine there is a vocal minority that want growth, and care little about the beauty and quietness of our Orcas Community and are using messages like, “did you know that a plane hit a car on Mt. Baker Rd. some years back“. Of course they won’t tell you when the event happened and they won’t tell you that pilot was probably drunk or inexperienced in not following FAA rules on how to land a plane to hit a car that was hundreds of yards from the approach runway.

Anyway can you help? Our community needs this land for affordable – not government sponsored low cost housing. The latter generally ends up costing more per square foot than the most expensive houses on the Island. There are plenty of citizens in our County that might be able to fund affordable housing if they were allowed to invest in such a project by issuing municipal bonds and that would eliminate the terrible costs and inefficiencies that we incurred during the last Federal/ Sate project.

Citizens seem to be losing their voice to achieve the way they want to preserve their communities. There are of course and always will be those who for simple business reasons want to grow anything so they can prosper. Their desires are not evil but rational. However, they do not consider the long-range effects and the associated cost that this growth incurs. I have done a fair amount of research on
this matter and I am always amused when our uniformed elected officials tell the citizens “ that by allowing more growth that will spread out the cost of government and your taxes will go down”.

Can you help YES or NO ?