Opinion - Bainbridge Island

Let’s do right by Puget Sound

When I was young, a lot of years ago, we would come to Bainbridge for a week’s vacation. The beach was an infinite playground, especially for a city youngster like me. From morning to night we dug clams, fished, hunted for treasures, rode and swam our horses, found new birds for our house list, caught crabs, built driftwood and seaweed palaces, cooked over beach fires, poked at anemones under rafts, collected shells, beach glass and rocks with circles around them. It was a paradise. I vowed I would come back and live here. In 1973 I did.

Time to simplify, Bainbridge City Council

An open letter to members of the Bainbridge Island City Council: You have a difficult job ahead of you. As you do it, you should expect a lot of citizen disappointment and, naturally, the resulting flood of criticism from your constituents whose pet city projects no longer make sense.

IN OUR OPINION Recycling is here to stay

It’s difficult these days to find anyone who is against recycling. There are plenty of people who don’t practice it, perhaps, preferring to feed garbage receptacles with any container or waste of which they no longer have a use. But even the unconscious among us probably wouldn’t admit to actually being against making our environment healthier through recycling.

Mother Sea desperately needs your help these days

I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea – except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

So who gets to keep the house?

Just in case the city’s budget and the community eventually support affordable housing on the island, the Bainbridge Island Planning Commission continues to plug away on the creation of an inclusionary housing ordinance. It appears that sometime this summer a draft will be pulled together and presented to island developers for their input.

Letters

Wicca

What's that humming? The Earth, scientists say | Tom Tyner

This just in: scientists say the earth is humming. Not humming the chorus to “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” exactly, nor belting out Broadway show tunes, but rather emitting random clutches of notes and tiny clusters of chords woven into a mysterious, ethereal, rhythmic thrum of primordial noise so low and deep that it is imperceptible to human ears, so low that it can only be picked up by sophisticated geothermal listening devices, African elephants wallowing in the fetid lowlands of the Kenyan rain forest, and ancient blue whales diving for albino plankton in the silent inky depths of the Mariana Trench.

It's about time someone closed Bainbridge driving shortcut

The on-again, off-again passage through the business park segment of the Island Village mall has taken another divergence. Charlie Frame, owner of CFA properties, has decided to close the northern end of his rear parking lot, which for the last two and a half years has again become a quasi-public road that allows north-south traffic to slalom through the commercial development. Assuming the business owner receives approval from the fire department, he’ll place a semi-permanent barrier on his private property that would be removed only when there’s need for emergency ingress or egress.

Bainbridge’s loss of Ron Konzak runs deep | Sally Robison

The first time I met Ron Konzak was 20 years ago. The Chamber of Commerce sponsored a naval tour of the island. A tour boat providing dinner and a dance floor sailed through our bays. (It could have stayed at the dock the entire time because drinking, eating, dancing and having a fine time were the main attraction.)

Ride ferries when they want you to

Washington State Ferries representatives will be in town Monday to discuss operational and pricing strategies, which consist primarily of taking a new approach to an old problem that can be expected for most commuter runs – congestion in peak periods and underutilized vessels and facilities in off-peak times. They want to accomplish this by tweaking the pricing system and installing a systemwide reservation system.