NEWS | Water taxi gets OK to carry more passengers [3] BUSINESS | Movie Magic [5] Espresso to close CRIME | Arrests made in [18] Beachcomber thefts
GEARING UP FOR SPORTS Vashon’s teams get ready for the fall season. Page 14
IN SUPPORT OF VAA All kinds of art will be featured at annual auction. Page 12
BEACHCOMBER VASHON-MAURY ISLAND
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2012
Vol. 57, No. 35
www.vashonbeachcomber.com
75¢
Park district director terminated; board defends actions By LESLIE BROWN Staff Writer
The Vashon Park District’s five-member board officially fired Jan Milligan, the agency’s executive director for the past 10 months, at a brief public meeting Wednesday night, three days after she was asked to tender her resignation. The public meeting, as well as emerging details around her dismissal, touched off strong feelings in the community, raised questions about the board’s behind-closeddoors decision to let her go and fanned
concerns about the financial state of the small park district. Financial statements issued at a board meeting two weeks ago show the agency has sufficient cash in the bank to pay its current bills but is holding a negative fund balance of $720,000 — liabilities due in large part to the agency’s efforts to complete a multimillion-dollar sports fields project. Four of the park district’s commissioners — Chair Bill Ameling, David Hackett, Michael DeBlasi and Joe Wald — voted at last week’s public meeting to terminate
Milligan. Lu-Ann Branch, another commissioner, abstained, saying after the meeting that she did so “because I didn’t have enough information.” The meeting, held in a small conference room packed with Islanders, was tense at times. The meeting’s printed agenda included a line that said “public comment,” but Ameling, as soon as the meeting began, announced he was changing the agenda and the board would not take public comment. When Janet Quimby called out from the back of the room that she had information
she wanted to share with the commissioners before they took action, Ameling said she could submit it later. “We’re pretty confident of what we’re doing,” he told her. Ameling then said the board “has had much discussion at several executive sessions about the performance of the executive director.” On Monday of last week, he went on, “I asked her for her resignation. Not receiving one, we are now proceeding SEE PARK DISTRICT, 10
State seeks soil samples to refine map of plume New map should more accurately show areas of contamination LESLIE BROWN Staff Writer
Natalie Johnson/Staff Photo
A construction crew works to bury underground utilities at Vashon High School last week.
Ready or not, school is set to start next week By NATALIE JOHNSON Staff Writer
When science teacher Elisabeth Jellison returned to Vashon High School last week after two months away, she arrived to a much different scene than the one she left in June. The school grounds are now a construction zone, complete with chain-link fences and heavy machinery. Large, gray portable classrooms have been set up on the south end of campus to hold science classes over the coming months, and in one area a long, metal tunnel has been put in place to protect students from flying debris as they walk to class. Jellison and two other science teachers are now scrambling to prepare their classrooms for students to arrive in
a week — not only unpacking their materials, but deciding how to alter their curriculum and labs for the smaller classroom space. “I think it’s going to be a lot of work for us to get done, but we’ll get it done,” she said. “We’re those kind of people.” Jellison and her colleagues aren’t the only teachers scrambling right now. None of the high school staff had access to the building over the summer while construction work consumed the campus. And at Chautauqua Elementary School, professional movers who were brought in last week helped teachers reassemble their classrooms after everything had been packed away so that SEE SCHOOLS, 19
State officials mailed letters to 200 Vashon property owners last week seeking permission to sample their soils — another step in the state’s ambitious effort to clean up yards and gardens tainted by Tacoma’s copper smelter decades ago. The letters went to property owners on Maury Island and the southern half of Vashon Island, areas officials believe could have been affected by the smelter’s arsenic- and lead-laced plume. The first 50 property owners to respond will get their soil sampled. The state’s goal is to use residential sampling to provide more information about the extent and location of contamination, so as to refine and improve a map it created last year showing the general outlines of the plume. All of Maury, the southern third of Vashon, Burton and the Burton Peninsula are currently within what the state
considers the “high zone.” But that high zone for contamination will likely look different, said Hannah Aoyagi, a project planner with the Department of Ecology’s Tacoma Smelter Plume project, once the state creates a more detailed and refined map, taking into account topography, proximity to the smelter and the many soil tests the state hopes to conduct within the high zone. “We’re planning to use this (new) map to get a much better sense of where we might have to clean up,” she said. The current map, she added, “is a rough estimate.” The new one, developed by a geo-statistician using various factors and considerably more data, “will show the highest probabilities for contamination,” she said. The state announced plans last fall to undertake a farreaching sampling and remediation program in neighborhoods that scientists believe were most affected by Asarco, a Ruston-based copper smelter that produced a toxic plume some 1,000 square miles in size before it closed in 1986. Highest on the list are neighborhoods in Ruston, north Tacoma, University Place, SEE ASARCO, 15