New Math

I was educated in the late 60's through the early 80's, so I have an understanding of new math. Fortunately, I have a good mind for math or who knows what kind of nonsense I could have bought into.

When you get right down to it math is pretty easy. Some numbers are big and some are small. sometimes the difference is small or insignificant, and sometimes the numbers are totally out of whack.

Take this dock proposal on Orcas for example. No amount of new math can ever make this compute. Current dock rental is $4,500 per year. To buy the new proposed dock will cost $3 million dollars. Without interest it would take over 660 years to pay off the cost versus the rent. Granted there are other considerations, but 660 years is a really long time; and without interest!

If you add interest, the price jumps to $220,000 per year. Sometimes, what you have is better than what is being proposed, and without a really compelling reason to shell out $3 million, maybe paying the $4,500 a year is a better option.

No news here really, Shannon of Public Works has a fascination for spending taxpayer money, and without Washing State Ferries in on the deal it is all on the taxpayers of San Juan County. It appears that we don't need roads anymore because much of his shopaholic behavior is at the expense of the road fund (and yes, you the taxpayer).

How much money exactly is (was) in the road fund? Enough to fund both Kelsey South (the "new" transfer station location "designate") for $1.8 million just to buy the land, and now another $3 million for a dock.

Who will reign in Shannon? No one has yet, and the short leash proposed by Pete Rose seems not to have worked.

(Piet Visser is married, and a father of 3 young children, a former small business owner and commercial real estate executive. He retired from commercial real estate to spend more time with his family. He sold residential real estate on San Juan Island, and now he and his family live in Europe)

Choices In An Election …

Kevin Ranker for the State Senate? What can I say! Besides trying his best to defeat the voters wish for Home rule, taking action in executive session, leading the negotiations and making a deal in secret with his former employer, he is a stand up guy. Despite clear mandates from his constituents in important matters, he chose to vote against them in too many cases.

Ranker, as the chair of the County Council, added a $1.8 million dollar land acquisition to the consent agenda, thus avoiding any potential pubic comment. Ranker then added his name to a response letter addressed to me. After purchasing the site on September 15th 2005, I sent a letter confronting the illegality of the action. Ranker and Lichter responded, indicating among other things, that there was no intended use for the site. The copy of the resolution to purchase they attached to their letter indicated the intended use was, in fact, to be a public works yard.

Public disclosure documents indicated this site was intended as a public works yard and transfer station since February 2005. With obviously contradictory public statements on use, which one is true, and what does that say about their other statements?

And appearing at a public meetings where his presence could affect the outcome? No problem with that either, Kevin showed up for a for a Planning Commission meeting planning and ADU issues, a topic that not only did he lead the negotiations for the county, but benefited his former employer. Attending the meeting was not illegal, but was certainly inappropriate.

My dealings with Kevin have been fleeting, but I have been told he is informed about environmental issues, but his actions have not always reflected respect for the environment, or good judgment. In fairness, I have not paid much attention to him for some time. With a 5 member council he looks a lot better than with a council of 2, since the other Council members can keep him in check.

Kevin’s influence will never have any effect on my life, but it will on those in district 40. I think it only fair that “you” remember what Kevin has done “for you”. He won’t remind you of these things, and they won’t appear on his updated website. His old one talked about a lot of things like listening to constituents and fiscal responsibility; his scorecard for those commitments is not very good.

You have choices in an election, and some of them might be good.

Parilla

Punta del Este is a tourist destination in the summer time, just like Friday Harbor (we live in Punta del Este, as it’s in the Southern Hemisphere it is now summer here). The difference is that the high season starts right after Christmas and ends in late February. The number of tourists and those with summer homes here is also a lot higher. About 75% of apartments near the beach have been closed up until just recently, when cleaners and gardeners are busy preparing them for the return of the summer residents.

Another thing that happens around this time of year is the busting of the tax evaders. At the start of the busiest time of year, the local restaurants have been temporarily closed, with the windows covered with stickers showing the business owners have been playing fast and loose with the tax code. After being closed for a few days, during a big tourist weekend everything is back to normal, the stickers are gone and its business as usual.

The relentless promotion of the Christmas season that had started in America in late September has still not happened here. I am holding my breath. Seeing snow scenes and Santa’s sled doesn’t jive with the actual season here. Halloween was an indicator of what was to come, everyone waited until the day before Christmas before getting serious about shopping.

As is typical, a social aspect to Christmas shopping is important. Meeting people that you know while out shopping and exchanging greetings accompanied by the traditional kiss on the cheek is par for the course. Christmas eve takes on a South American twist in that Everyone cooks dinner on the BBQ and waits until midnight then set off a ton of fireworks before opening gifts.

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Uruguayans and those from Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay all enjoy a traditional barbeque called Parilla (pronounced parija). It is a family event that happens mostly on Sundays and special occasions such as Christmas and new years. Friends and family collect around a specially designed barbeque area that is either close to, or part of the house. The process of “parilla” takes hours.

First you light the wood, then the fire has to get going so that the embers fall from the cage that holds the wood. Then you cook the meat. Most invitations for such events start at 8:30 or later. You may not eat until 11pm or midnight. We have still not gotten used to the late dinners.

Our first invitation to a parilla was for 8:30pm when our younger kids start going to bed. Fortunately the host was from Rhode Island, but had lived here for over 10 years. He understood our needs and changed the time to 6pm. It was lovely. He and his girlfriend, their 3 kids (who arrived and walked around the table kissing everyone on the cheek) and his Mother and Father hosted a delightful evening including Chorizo, short ribs and a selection of salads.
The addition of Scotch and “Tannat” the local grape varietals of red wine kept the event true to the Uruguayan way. At the end of the evening we exchanged phone number with the parents, and promised to do it all again.

Unlike in the US, people in Uruguay don’t walk around with to-go cups of coffee. Instead they have a gorde, that is encased in leather with a silver rim and a straw for their Yerba Matte, and to keep the drink going they all carry a thermos under the crook of the arm that they carry the gorde in.

There is a whole isle in the supermarket for different types of matte and nothing else. It is not exclusive to Uruguay, but Uruguay consumes more matte than any other country in South America. I tried it, it looks like lawn clippings in a cup and tastes a bit like it too. It is somewhat interesting, enough for me to buy a cup and make it from time to time.

Piet Visser is married, and a father of 3 young children, a former small business owner and commercial real estate executive. He retired from commercial real estate to spend more time with his family. He sold residential real estate on San Juan Island before he and family decided to move to Uruguay

House & Car

So we bought a car not long ago, this is how you do it in Uruguay. You go to the bank and get the cash you need. This is done more or less the same way as Las Vegas, only they are more anal about the whole process here. The money that we took to the car dealer was in cash, with. big wads of $10k each and small ones of $1k each. Cars here are very expensive, but no one blinks an eye at when you drop this kind of cash on their desk.

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The teller opened her drawer, and found she was a bit light on dollars at the time. No matter a quick visit to the vault and here you go. In the interest of secrecy, they gave me a giant pink envelope with "Banco de Republic Y Uruguay" on it.

So with a pink bundle with the national banks name on it the size of a brick bulging in my pocket, I left the bank and headed home. After all the dealer didn't open for another couple of hours. I think walking to a US car dealer with cash would cause a second degree terrorist alert!

We had some wicked wind the past few days. The surf was wild and the tide was super high. Some trees blew down and the temperature dropped a lot (50f) some trees blew over and closed a couple of streets, but not much of that.

The surf almost engulfed the entire beach.

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When the storm was over the beach had been reshaped and was a simple flat plane sloping down to the water. Now the temperature is heading back to the 80's and 90's.

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This is the same area a day later - without the wind. The surf is over 100 feet back from where it was and the waves are more or less gone. Punta del Este is the collection of buildings that are above the water on the right. The taller ones closer by are condos.

Hey check out our new house, We close in a month! Its 4 bedrooms and 5 baths, but the rooms are small.
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We need to paint the inside other than that its under a 10 year warranty by the architect (required by law in Uruguay), it has a pool, but the pool and house are not nearly as big as the ones we had. A lot different from our old house but thats fine for us.

Piet Visser is married, and a father of 3 young children, a former small business owner and commercial real estate executive. He retired from commercial real estate to spend more time with his family. He sold residential real estate on San Juan Island before he and family decided to move to Uruguay

Hello Friends And Family!

ig_pv1_SignPost (58k image) We have been in Uruguay a week now, and all is well. We have had a little rain, but nothing compared with what we are used to. Now the weather has really improved. I have heard that the whales come to Punta del Este in August, but this year they have stayed and we saw them swimming within a few hundred feet of the beach just after lunch. We are not sure what type, I will send you info when we figure that out. All the books on local animals and plants are in......Spanish.... still lots to learn there.

Yesterday we opened a bank account. The process itself takes about an hour and a half. That presumes a lot goes well. The first issue we ran into had to do with the account numbers. Non Uruguayans get different account numbers - the "system" is stocked with a limited number of them. Once they run out, the system needs to have new numbers added by the network administrator. No one knows when the numbers run out until the system refuses to produce an account number for a non-Uruguayan.

Once this happens, you might as well go do something else because it requires a call to HQ, an instruction to the network admin, and time. At least half an hour. Not so bad, that same instruction in the US could take... who knows! During that time we went to order DSL for our house. When we came back all went well, and in not a lot of time we had an active account.

The DSL order caused some other problems. The phone at our house stopped working. This caused another problem - the alarm company could not call us when we had password trouble (about 80% of the time - I am good at things like this but for some reason there is some trick to when and how you enter the password and I don't know what it is and my Spanish isn't enough to figure it out). We would trigger the alarm by accident - usually the phone would ring and we had to give a pass word and tell the alarm company in poor Spanish that everything is OK. I thought we might have set off the alarm too many times and they had given up on us. Instead the phone didn't work, so the second the alarm triggered and we didn't get a call they sent a car around. The guy politely rang the door bell and spoke to me in Spanish, most of which I didn't understand. I responded in “Spanglish” explaining that I had just ordered internet and that is most likely what happened to the phone - after a few minutes of almost complete bewilderment we both mentioned the property managers name so I called her. Her phone didn't answer. So he asked my name, smiled, introduced himself and left.........

My Spanish is getting way better, but in context that means that I understand 5% instead of 3%. While this may seem like a huge triumph in language skills it is still not enough to understand what is going on in most cases. On the positive side, I am way better at Spanish than I was!

The kids LOVE school. Emma is so excited to wear uniform! She has 5 new friends all bilingual. She has not made a lot of effort to speak Spanish yet, maybe we need to work on that this summer. Eli and Erin are having fun too. For the first week we pick them up from school for lunch and bring them back after (90 mins). Drop off is at 8am and pickup at 5pm. Long day but they like it. Another big difference is that they don't have homework. After a long day like that I wouldn't want it either.

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Today after dinner we walked to the beach and played for a while. Everyone came home exhausted and went right to bed.

We are working on buying a car, it sounds easy.....

... More about that later.

Recycling

On September 14th I received an email from Shannon Fitzgerald from Planning with a copy of a summary of the public scoping meeting on the Environmental Impact Study (EIS) for a transfer station. In general, what was said was about right, the way it was written appeared to favor a specific outcome.

The Island Guardian reported contentiousness, discussion of flaws in the process, and a distrust of Public Works. None of these things appeared in the summary. Within the report, under the heading of “General Concerns”, the report implied that those attending the meeting where divided more or less equally between those in favor and those opposed to relocating the transfer station.

The quotes also all seem to be ones that support a new station,; with no quotes provided from those opposed. Now we have a new Solid Waste Manager, hired by the sound of things, to slam this deal through.

One comment that was deemed worthy of being quoted in the report shows up in the paragraph:

One citizen said it was time to move beyond Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) thinking and to consider the environmental health of the island. “Do the right thing now with new technology and construction, not the easy fix.”

Ironically, I was told that this was said by someone who lives by the current transfer station (but I can not confirm this). Let he/she who is not a NIMBY throw the first stone!

I get irritated that the same arguments for a new site keep being used even after they have been proven untrue. The existing site is too small only because the county refuses to buy the current site, which is much larger than the one+/- acre that they lease now. The site is as steep as it has always been, and a preliminary design was produced for the site, but no one talks about that anymore.

The contamination issue will not go away by moving the transfer station. In fact the odds are good the new site will become contaminated too. As for the cost of expansion, the money spent buying the alternative site and the cost of future development could only be more than the cost of expanding the current site. As for being out of compliance - Public Works Director Jon Shannon chose to remove the roof over the tipping floor, thereby bringing the site out of compliance.

When it comes to having both a transfer station and a PW (Public Works) yard together in one place, that is just unfair. Until I complained about non compliance of an existing CUP (Conditional Use Permit) I could clearly hear Mike Carlson's rock sifting operation at Olerin Business Park from my house, almost half a mile away. I heard it for months until I complained to the County about it. Having a PW yard and a transfer station in close proximity will ensure noise for miles in all directions, seven days a week (as opposed to only five days for one or the other of a transfer station and a PW yard).

After hearing of my complaint, Carlson told my neighbors he knew Shannon - implying that that relationship made compliance with the conditions of the CUP optional.

I find Todd Peterson (the meeting facilitator for the transfer station workshops) to be skilled at remembering what people say, repeating it back to them, kind of validating their concerns. As far as doing more than that, I have not seen much. A vote here, a vote there, when the results are what PW wants: keep them - if not, have another vote later.

From start to finish this process is a testament to PW's heavy handed approach to achieving a goal against the will of the public, with the complicity of Ranker, and Lichter and Myhr. The SWAC meetings are overseen by PW, the council is advised on the issue by PW, the consultant was hired by PW. Finally the report in question was blessed by Ed Hale of PW prior to being released to the public.

Once the project goes before the County Council, we know where 3 council members stand (two gave the green light for the project in the first place in an executive session).

So what result do you expect?

Greener Grass

I enjoyed reading about the luncheon meeting yesterday where the Town and the County discussed matters that effect them both. I was pleased to see that the Town brought up the issue of the transfer station, and in a polite way asked why the County is thinking about the lush greenness of the other side of the mountain with all its inherent risk.

As the Town correctly pointed out, the existing site is properly zoned, and is already in use and has been for as long as anyone can remember. People are used to it, and it can be adapted to improve its operation. It is hard to put a value on those things. Ranker’s bold faced lie about litigation had nothing to do with the existing site, but instead the site next door. Zoning in that case prevented its use, but a slew of other problems like Shannon authorizing grading before a grading permit was issued drove a stake through the heart of the project.

The existing site has been used as a transfer station since before the Comprehensive Plan was adopted, so those who claim that the zoning will revert to something are full of it. There is nothing for it to revert to.

Shannon was in such a hurry to buy Kellsey South that he didn’t bother with due diligence, and really didn’t care how much he overpaid. Something is different about the Town site, maybe the County feels that since they got a good deal on rent that the site has no value (they pay $10 a year plus discounts for tipping fees for the Town). Maybe the Town should up the rent to market and see what happens.

A private party has expressed interest in the existing site. This would play into the hands of the County who would then have to develop a new site – in theory anyway. That is unless the private party runs a transfer station. The odds are good that we would end up with a better transfer station. I would guess at the very least the tipping floor would be covered again.

Appreciation

I appreciate Pete Rose's work as County Administrator. He appears to be an honest and honorable person. Unfortunately, part of the process of selecting a location for a transfer station has already been badly tainted.

Before the purchase of the “Trash to Treasures” property, the county was actively negotiating with the town to purchase the current transfer station. The town has always wanted the County to purchase the transfer station site, but not just a little piece of it. To assist in negotiations the town only leases a very small piece of the much larger site to the County. Once the Trash to Treasures property came along, negotiations with the town suddenly stopped. The Trash to Treasures site is small, but larger than the area that they lease from the town. Somehow Public Works managed to shoehorn a transfer station, and more, onto the small site. The problem that stopped them was zoning. The site had a number of other major problems, but it was zoning derailed it

Since then, the Kellsey South site was discovered. Originally it was going to be for a Public Works Yard. When this was presented to the then BOCC in executive session, the BOCC was all for it. Ranker added a condition that it be a collocation for a new transfer station. So with almost no due diligence, an authorization to purchase was passed the following week as a part of the consent agenda. Public participation? None.

A few press releases from Public Works and its official. There's going to be a transfer station and Public Works Yard at the Kellsey South site.

When Shannon and Ranker met with the neighbors of the site, they more or less said it is going to happen there, and there is nothing you can do about it. When I wrote to the BOCC about it (Lichter and Ranker) after the closing, I got a letter back saying that there was nothing planned for the site, and they included a copy of the resolution that stated the intended use was a transfer station. One could ask in which document had they lied
So with all this evidence pointing to the Kellsey South site, and with 2 of the 5 competing sites listed as "other sites", we have a sense that we know where this is going to end

SWAC has spent a huge amount of time on this project under the watchful eye of Public Works, who had been complicit in the purchase of Kellsey South. SWAC could recommend any site to the CC, but as is often the case, the CC may not listen.

Pete Rose is in the unpleasant position of having one site that is already tainted. If Kellsey South is chosen everyone will "know" that the fix was in from the beginning. Ranker and Lichter are still in office, and agreed to the purchase in executive session, and put the resolution to purchase on the consent agenda. Of the 6 current CC members, we know for sure 2, and most likely 3, of the votes will be in favor of Kellsey South as the new transfer station location; regardless of the merits of other sites.