INSIDE: Still kickin’ ... Sports, A7
RECORD SOUTH WHIDBEY
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SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2013 | Vol. 89, No. 36 | WWW.SOUTHWHIDBEYRECORD.COM | 75¢
Lowincome Freeland housing advances
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By JUSTIN BURNETT Staff reporter
It appears a controversial lowincome housing project in Freeland will move forward after all. Teri Anania, executive director of the Island County Housing Authority, confirmed this week that the major permitting problem facing the $6.3 million project is in the process of being resolved. “It’s a huge relief,” Anania said. “We have to keep the momentum going.” Sunny Side Village is a four building, 26-unit low income housing project planned for a nine-acre lot off Fish Road, between Highway 525 and Scenic Avenue. The housing authority has worked on the development since 2008 but those plans nearly fell through earlier this year. Concerns about a nearby well, which supplies water to a large portion of Freeland, were validated when a hydrologist found that the housing complex’s planned septic system would not be enough to keep nitrate levels in the well from exceeding state standards. SEE HOUSING, A6
Ben Watanabe / The Record
Alex McMahon, a first responder with South Whidbey Fire/EMS, runs around a fake car crash at South Whidbey High School. Behind her, Whidbey General Hospital emergency medical technicians fake an attempt to revive student Lauren Breslaw, who was laid on the hood as if she had crashed through the windshield in a head-on DUI car collision.
Faux DUI car wreck preps students for prom By BEN WATANABE Staff reporter Sobbing and stabilized on a stretcher, South Whidbey High School senior Caitlin Christensen averted her face from the gaze of her peers. She just watched another teenager, Lauren Breslaw, be carried
off in a white body bag by Island County Coroner Robert Bishop. It was all fake, a tableau to demonstrate what can and has happened on Whidbey Island when people mix drinking and drugs with driving. But it left an impact. “I think it is very effective,” said Hannah Cotton, a senior leadership student who organized the lesson.
“When you go to a normal assembly it gets students, but when you go to a wreck scene, they see what can really happen other than just talking about it.” “I was on the verge of tears just watching it right as it started, and I knew everything that went behind it and it still moved me.” This class knows the lesson and
the agony all too well. In November 2011, three young men, all under 24, died in an impaired driving single-car collision on Wilkinson Road. Many seniors knew those men: Robert Knight, Charles “Mack” Porter and Marcel “Mick” Poynter. SEE PROM, A9
County’s shoreline master plan takes final shots By JUSTIN BURNETT Staff reporter
Justin Burnett / The Record
ate Port of South Whidbey Commissioner Dennis Gregoire speaks at a public hearing in Coupeville on Wednesday concerning Island County’s Shoreline Master Program. a
Concerned residents and business owners took advantage of their last chance to publicly voice their feelings about Island County’s Shoreline Master Program this week. The state Department of Ecology held an open house and public hearing Wednesday in Coupeville. The agency, which is charged with reviewing and approving the county’s recently adopted program, will accept written comments for several more weeks but this was the department’s only scheduled public
meeting before Ecology officials make a decision. Critics didn’t waste the opportunity as more than 35 people attended the three-hour event. Many took to the microphone to complain about specific sections of the program. The hottest topics concerned aquaculture rules and regulations surrounding existing and future public beach accesses. Ian Jefferds, owner of Penn Cove Shellfish, testified against last minute changes made by the Island County commissioners in December. Language was added that suggests his family’s
mussel farm, in business since 1975, may have to prove that operations are not resulting in “adverse environmental impacts.” Jefferds said the farm has done much to keep the water in Penn Cove clean and while the rule may have been directed at fin fish net pens, he regarded the language as an affront to their long efforts. “This particular regulation is not only misdirected but offensive,” Jefferds said. He didn’t go into specifics at the SEE SHORELINE, A6