I went to the meeting about the opportunity that SJC has to “opt out” of the Growth Management Act, and I was thrilled that we have this opportunity now.
If one doesn’t have to live in an urban growth area because of size restrictions on acreage/house ratios, Orcas is lovely.
However, if you are scrunched together in an urban growth area, with street light pollution, noise, and fumes from cars, people always around, it is another story.
It effectively keeps the workers in “their place” (in Eastsound). Unless you have time to “toodle” around the island for the fun of it, one doesn’t enjoy the pleasures of island life.
Acreage would be nice, but not at the inflated prices and the five-or-more-acres per dwelling that effectively segregates people, one from the other and, most especially, from the natural world.
When I came here, 30 years ago, Orcas was a true island community. People mingled with each other. Newcomers blended and adopted the “Island Way,” which included socializing together and helping each other out as neighbors should. Island dances were quite popular.
I remember when multimillionaires and farmers, office workers, gardeners, artists, business owners, house cleaners, writers and a couple of homeless individuals mingled and danced together, human to human. It is what island living truly is.
Along with new wealth came the separation of people and the GMA, which effectively cemented that separation. The workers live in town and the rest of the island is for those lured here by land ads in the Wall Street Journal in the 1990s.
They came here with the means to afford to live in the “country,” for which land prices shot up to the sky.
Many old island families had to sell their land because taxes were raised too high to keep large parcels of land. Now, the workers actually need all of the wonderful non-profits to help them out. Independent island life is a thing of the past.
The GMA is a tool to acclimate people to Agenda 21, which is slowly being implemented worldwide, under the guise of environmental protection, and it has nothing to do with protecting our Dear Mother Earth and all of our sisters and brothers in the plant and animal kingdoms.
This is a betrayal of the people and of the Earth Herself.
Do some in-depth research on it. You may see that “paradise” no longer exists for many of the people on Orcas Island.
Spirit Eagle, Eastsound
