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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2016 | Vol. 92, No. 11 | WWW.SOUTHWHIDBEYRECORD.COM | 75¢
FEMA maps may be wrong, county says
Hospital board to vote on new name By JUSTIN BURNETT South Whidbey Record Whidbey General Hospital commissioners are expected to vote on a new name next week. CEO Geri Forbes announced the change at a meeting in Langley last week, but the decision still needs to be formally approved by the board. The decision is set for a vote at the commissioners’ next regular meeting at 7 a.m. Monday, Feb. 8 in Conference Room A and B at the hospital. “I’m really excited about it,” said Commissioner Grethe Cammermeyer, South Whidbey’s representative on the board. The name will highlight “health” rather than “illness” but also makes clear all the services and clinics that are currently under the Whidbey General umbrella. The organization has eight clinics and various services each with different names. This brings them all together. The proposed name was announced as WhidbeyHealth (one word), though hospital officials have since clarified that WhidbeyHealth isn’t the whole name; it’s the descriptor that will precede individual names all of the organization’s facilities. “In retrospect, we should have made something clearer: when Geri [Forbes] said we are changing our name to WhidbeyHealth, the ‘we’ is our entire family of locations and services, not just the hospital,” wrote hospital spokesman Keith Mack, in an email to The Record. “We are simply unifying everything under one name.” For example, the actual hospital in Coupeville will be WhidbeyHealth Medical Center, and clinics and outpaSEE HOSPITAL, A5
By DAN RICHMAN Whidbey News Group
tee this week. Rep. Joan McBride, D-Kirkland, the bill’s sponsor, said the bill wasn’t meant to undermine transparency in local government, but instead help limit what she calls the “one percent” of requests that amount to harassment of taxpayersupported public agencies. “This is a very modest bill and a good, elegant, first step in talking about public records,” McBride said Jan. 28 at
Island County has given the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, the first evidence that the agency erred when it revised flood-risk maps this summer, Hiller West, director of current-use planning and community development, told the county commissioners during a work session Wednesday. The county now wants FEMA to extrapolate from that evidence, which pertains only to two sites on Whidbey, and agree to reexamine its conclusions about the entire county, at its own cost. The alternative — paying an engineering firm to study each of the many county shoreline areas that FEMA recently declared to be flood zones — would be too burdensome and costly, the commissioners worried. West said he would relay the extrapolation request to the FEMA office in Lynnwood, where the decision would be made. He also agreed to invite FEMA to a meeting with the commissioners. That meeting could include Coast & Harbor Engineering, the Edmonds engineering firm the county hired for $43,000 in late 2015 to perform the initial studies. The new maps, which were issued free to any waterfront homeowner who requested one, show the elevation that one would have to build at to avoid flooding during the most violent storm likely to occur within a 100-year period, a so-called 100-year flood. Areas that received “questionable” flood-hazard designations from FEMA include Glendale, Hidden Beach,
SEE BILL, A16
SEE FEMA, A16
Ben Watanabe / The Record
Kevin Lungren drives away from the Clinton hillside with the abandoned Mazda coupe flipped over while Fred Lundahl takes video of the endeavor Feb. 3.
Clinton car comes down Businessmen remove area ‘landmark’
By BEN WATANABE South Whidbey Record The once-stuck and seemingly permanent hillside car in Clinton is no more. A group of four intrepid businessmen took it upon themselves to remove the car from a private property hillside near Highway 525 and Bob Galbreath Road this week. Spurred by a Record story about
the car’s origin and perceived meaning, Kevin Lungren, Colin Campbell, Fred Lundahl and Shane Thompson towed the car off the hill Wednesday morning. Their reason was simple: people want to see Clinton improved, and they didn’t want to wait for anyone else to help the natural beauty of the area flourish. “Unless the people who live here care for where they live, unless you’re willing to take action yourself,
you can’t ask others,” Campbell said moments prior to overseeing the truck towing the car about 100 feet down to a barbershop and commercial building along the highway. Campbell, owner-operator of Cadée Distillery, and Lungren of Edward Jones Investments in Clinton spent Tuesday afternoon preparSEE CAR, A5
Records bill fizzles in committee By LAVENDRICK SMITH WNPA, Olympia News Bureau A bill aimed at defanging abusive and profit-minded public records requestors at the state Legislature appears to be dead. House Bill 2576 would have given local agencies the power to limit the time they spend each month responding to public records requests, and allow local agencies to charge a fee for providing public records that are requested for commercial purposes. It did not make it out of commit-