— by Margie Doyle —
- No moratorium on growth or sales of marijuana;
- At least a trial of Eastsound walking village (only motorized shuttles) for a day, a weekend or a week;
- Restaurants cooperating in an off-season Calendar of Restaurants, like Roses for Mardi Gras, White Horse for St. Patrick’s Day, New Leaf for Easter;
- Purchase of property for re-establishing the Exchange;
- Mental health counseling and resources more accessible with county funding ( the one-tenth of one percent retail sales tax fund;
- Use of the county building at the Orcas ferry landing;
- Progress and community support in preschool attendance through the Bob and Phyllis Henigson, and Joe Cohen and Marsha Farish initiative;
- Trail restoration and installation in Eastsound;
- Expansion of the Orcas public library;
- County-wide celebration of the pig war, the war that didn’t happen;
- A successful, win-win ferry reservation system.
Want to work with us on any of these ideas? Send a comment. And happy new year!
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Thank you for the thoughtful wishes Margie, which I do hope will come into being, as they are all forward thinking and would enhance our island life – and one more item I would add would be a strong school and county wide education program with incentives on the subject of the now awful litter problem that has become prevalent on Orcas Island, particularly in and near Eastsound.
“Eastsound Walking Village”?
It sounds like a good idea, until a resident (rather than a tourist or visitor) remembers that carrying one’s weekly food shopping from one conveyance to another would not only be a great difficulty and inconvenience for the shopper, but also an inconvenience for the other shuttle riders.
Maybe there should remain both a route and a market-convenient parking area, to allow patrons of the food markets to drive in and out of the village.
And then, too, there’s the problem of visitors and their luggage. How would that be handled?
Market-convenient central parking for everyone would be a better idea than shuttles, to create a workable “Eastsound Walking Village.”
I predict a lot more people with a lot better internet and phone service in 2015… ;-)
Walking Village? I hate to say “Duh”, but how about bicycles?