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WEDNESDAY, September 2, 2015 VOL. 108, NO. 35 75¢
Larsen makes the rounds Greenhouse
rules revisited
By Anna V. Smith Journal reporter
By Anna V. Smith Journal reporter
Rep. Rick Larsen visited San Juan Island and Lopez Island last week to hold round table discussions and visit local sites. On Tuesday, Aug. 25 Larsen met with members of the advisory committee for the National Monument to see Lopez’s progress in coming up with a development and management plan. “The community at large has done a great job on preparing for a potential monument as well as insisting that there be a management advisory committee that is community based,” Larsen said. “It helps that the monument manager is out here, from the Bureau of Land Management, and so it’s not being managed in D.C., it’s being managed locally, and the management plan is being developed locally.”
Transportation
On Wednesday, Aug. 26 on San Juan he spoke with transportation stakeholders about county infrastructure, holding a roundtable discussion with members of county council, the school district, the town administrator, Port of Friday Harbor, and more. Larsen talked about the importance of federal government funds to assist the county with infrastructure, mentioning that San Juan County is “just about as far north and west in the lower 48 as you can get from Washington D.C.” Larsen mentioned the possibility of upgrading the Anacortes ferry terminal now that the Mukilteo ferry terminal project has begun. Members at the roundtable commented that they were appreciative of Larsen’s work for transportation, which include the Cattle Point Road realignment project, 14 years in the making. The project is realigning 1.27 miles of county road that was threatened by coastal erosion and moving the road up 300 feet to a glacial bench.
Staff photo/ Anna V. Smith
From left: Rep. Rick Larsen, Superintendent Lee Taylor, Chief of Resources Jerald Weaver.
“I think it’s an example of one: sometimes it does take a long time to get things done in the federal government. Second, it’s really emblematic that San Juan County itself doesn’t have a lot of resources to do a major transportation investment like that, so having the federal government step in through the federal lands access program really helps with funding,” said Larsen. “Third, and this is sort of tooting the horn of the office, there’s just a lot of ‘stick-to-it-ness’ in the office when it comes to getting things done, so 14 years on we can have this road done.” In Congress, Larson has been pushing to renew the Highway Fund, which supplies funding for roads and highways and includes the ferry system. “It’s the important way the federal government, through the graces of the tax payer, helps fund transportation improvements around the county,” Larsen said. “If we let the fund go bankrupt, what that means for Washington State, would be a precipitous drop in transportation funding. It’s great that the state passed the gas tax increase to help fund projects, but the State Department of Transportation’s budget is 27 percent federal money.” According to Larsen, in 2014 Washington state received $600 million of federal money for roads, bridges, highways and ferries, and received $400 million in transit improvements. “So we’re talking about a situation where if the Highway Trust Fund is not reauthorized, those dollars go away,” Larsen said. “And we’ll have a huge hole blown up in the middle of the state’s transportation budget despite the state’s gas tax.” The conversation at the transportation round table touched on the recent outage that happened See LARSEN, Page 4
A public informational meetings on potential greenhouse regulations in the county were held on San Juan, Orcas and Lopez last week. At the Aug. 26 event at Brickworks in Friday Harbor, concerned farmers, San Juan County Councilman Rick Hughes and members of the Agricultural Resources Committee discussed the future of greenhouses on the islands. After deciding to not pursue a moratorium on greenhouses in January 2015, the San Juan County Council directed Department of Community Development staff to develop a draft of greenhouse regulations in March. There are currently no permit requirements for greenhouses under local regulations, which some islanders and council members said were insufficient to safeguard against the potential issues that might come with marijuana production in the county. The marijuana legislation Initiative 502 was voter-approved by 68 percent in the county. Neighbors of San Juan Sun Grown, a legal, marijuana cultivation operation, complained about operations there in 2014. The neighbors sought to block use of a shared, private road leading to Sweet Water Farms as part of a lawsuit against the farm, owned by Jenny Rice, on which her brother David owned and operated San Juan Sun Grown. The business stopped active operations in December 2014. According to the July 21, 2015 staff report provided at the meeting, “Concerns were initially raised about the potential impacts of large greenhouses associated with marijuana production.” It went on to say that during the public comment period, comments “ranged from advocating for no regulations to only those necessary to address impacts on prime agricultural soil, to considering environmental impacts of any size of greenhouse.” A workgroup was created in March to work alongside DCD
members from the San Juan County Agricultural Resource Committee, Health and Human Services and local farmers. Candace Jagel, a member of the workgroup and of the Agricultural Resource Committee, commented that she found language seemed to “creep in” to the regulations that hadn’t been discussed, and that iterations of the regulations did not always include what had been discussed. She was unclear where the language was coming from. Members of the 30-plus audience voiced their frustration over the process, debating whether or not the regulations were necessary in the first place. One audience member summed it up as a “solution looking for a problem,” since no widespread problems with greenhouses had been quantified. Adding to the atmosphere of discontent was the outdated draft regulations that were provided for the meeting, meaning that members of the public were not looking at the latest rendition. The ARC will next meet in midSeptember to continue working on the regulations.
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