Mr Rutter is not ‘just any citizen from Blaine’, although that is now his address.
From his elegant, seaside home near Semiahmoo, Mr Rutter has been very active for the last few years in local efforts to control local growth, conserve natural resources, fund raise, and back political candidates who share his values.
And, as a successful business person, Mr Rutter certainly has to be knowledgeable about balance sheets and cash flow matters.

But, I believe Mr Rutter sometimes presumes more than he knows, as do many others who are successful in their chosen field. His arguments about the waterfront redevelopment somehow not comporting with the growth management act are convoluted at best, and remarkably wrong at worst.

I can and do understand that people differ in their views and opinions, and that is well and good.
But, I also subscribe very strongly to the statement made by former US Senator Patrick J Moynihan, who said ‘we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts’.

We need to be very clear about what the important public objectives were/are in deciding to clean up our blighted waterfront for redevelopment to a higher use. These have been under vigorous debate for several years, with the overall desired result no longer in serious question by most people who have participated in that process.

Of course, the costs of both remediation and redevelopment are expected to be high, but who can say with certainty it will not be well these investments?
There are not many things in this world that are truly worthwhile that do not require investment, whether in monetary terms or in stewardship over decades.
Our waterfront is no exception, notwithstanding those who may have other, more selfish objectives in mind.

It’s still a free country for such naysayers, but the only thing worse than a tyranny by the majority is a tyranny by the minority!

It’s time to get back to the hard work of achieving the vision this community has determined its wants for its children and future citizens. That is a clean, accessible waterfront, with jobs, prosperity and places where people want to be!

That’s what I want to hear about. What I’m tired of hearing about is idle, misinformed, mean spirited or self-serving carping about anything.
But maybe that’s just me.

Doug’s letter is now on-line, however, the comment link to the letter by Rutter appears to be not working.  I checked the link properties and the comment option should be working.  Therefore, this problem may be more a case of poor web page management than some nefarious plot to foil the Herald readers.  I also find that from time to time (as with the Joe Coons opinion piece today) there is quite a delay, especially on weekends, between that which appears in the print version and that which appears on line.  Again, having no facts to contrary, I would have to say that this is more suggestive of forgetfulness on the part of the individual responsible. 

(NB. Before, the Herald management gets a swollen head over my defense above, I want to re-iterate that I am not becoming a champion of their paper.)

The more I read and hear about this waterfront project, the more I am prone to think that we ought just give it a rest for a year or two.  In a recent Zonemaven blog entry (http://www.zonemaven.blogspot.com) I said to the Mayor, “My counsel ... is that, the next time he gazes at that desolate waterfront, he turn around and look at the neighborhoods and think about the folks living there.”  This project is sucking the life out of our planning department whose focus is no longer on the neighborhoods where PEOPLE actually live.  The waterfront will not solve our infill problem and will bleed our downtown to its former anemic self.

Well, John, I would certainly be careful about throwing your opinion around and belittling others’ as not factual.  After a brief conversation with Mr. Rutter, I can tell you that the GMA issue he presents is not merely his own imaginative figment, but is shared by at least one prominent GMA attorney who helped craft the original legislation.

I haven’t sensed any “majority” approval of the plan as it has unfolded.  True, appointees and officials have wallowed along in various sets of false choices to eventually arrive at the Port’s conclusions, but the record reflects many other viewpoints, a pervasive sense that the public’s comments have been ignored and that something is wrong with the plan. If anything, the process has been a testament to the propensity for otherwise reasonable people to get buffaloed by clever technocrats.  Your comments are a case in point.

Sure, folks want something done, and anything is better than nothing, but it seems only those regular attendees within hypnotic range of the Port’s baffling bullshit have wholeheartedly acquiesced to letting the Port rip off the City in order to enrich themselves.  Hard to imagine how you can mention “self-serving” without tumbling to that!

Frankly, I am of the opinion that anyone who advocates privatizing the waterfront has been drinking some kind of weird Port Kool-Aid.  It’s not like we can just get another one if we change our minds or ever need it someday.  Asking the City to pony up the costs so the Port can stick the proceeds in their bank is doubly questionable.  So, GMA may pertain not only in terms of sticking the public with those costs - as Rutter maintains - but also with respect to conserving special resource lands.  Oh boy, does Bellingham ever need a bunch of condos on the waterfront?!

Getting, as you say, “a clean, accessible waterfront, with jobs, prosperity and places where people want to be” isn’t hardly served by the Port’s plan.  For one, they’re doing the least extensive clean-up (cover-up) of any considered in ten years of trying.  Second, although a greater proportion of public space has started to emerge, it has been like pulling hens teeth, beginning with only a stingy strand connecting areas too toxic to develop.  Third, if you want jobs, we should be recruiting them with the surplus industrial water and treatment capacity G-P left behind.  To wreck that for a marina no one in Bellingham will use is absurd.  For the Port to include the marina in the No Action Alternative of their EIS is worse - it’s fraudulent.  Fraudulent first because it is a significant action, not a no-action action. Secondly because including it meant they didn’t have to address the value of the water supply and treatment lagoon.  They are on record saying they will not address it.  They’re just going to steal it.  And when we need more treatment capacity or want to host family wage jobs?  Will the Port just say, “Good luck!” Wait a minute!  Aren’t Ports supposed to facilitate jobs?  When did they become real estate developers?

Gosh, John.  Sorry I didn’t have time to write something short, but if you want to hear the rest of it, stay tuned, I haven’t even started.  I doubt you’ll find me terribly “misinformed”. And as far as possibly sounding “mean-spirited” or “carping” at these issues, give me a break!  If anything, the mess we’re in on the waterfront devolves directly from too little carping and disagreement from those carefully selected to legitimize the process.

The Herald’s headline writer got Lincoln’s message pretty succinctly, “waterfront plan exploits taxpayers.”

I’m sure John and Lincoln are both sufficiently versed in the nuance of Growth Management to appreciate that the Act only provides guidelines and principles to direct local government.  Policy making is left to local discretion.

Lincoln’s is correct that the GMA gives local government discretion to use impact fees to protect taxpayers from the consequences of growth decisions.  And John is right that the act doesn’t mandate local government put the impact costs on would be developers.

I don’t read Lincoln’s argument to be local government must recover the taxpayers’ investment, but that it should. 

I think that the Mayor is rightly concerned with the impact on city taxpayers, and hopes to balance the long run benefits with the immediate costs.

What is becoming increasingly obvious is that there is no public confidence in the Port of Bellingham to handle the public’s money.

This project is turning out to be another case, in a long tradition, of the public subsidizing the profitability of the well connected who benefit from growth.  We’ve already go a county administration running that program.  It’s a god damned profession in its own right!

Candidly, the “vision thing” bores me.  Most of the public rolled their eyes back long ago and haven’t got ten minutes to consider the pros, cons or ramifications of what’s going down.  A bunch of hard working fools, we hope that the people we elect will do the right thing.

The right thing is to get the Port under control and get answers to the tough questions.  I think one of those questions should be: what’s it going to cost us as a community, and what are we going to get for it?  Bellingham is right on to worry that this is a potential disaster in the wrong hands.

We keep being offered dreamy visions: parks, open space, bike paths, and lots of seductive things.  “Show me the beef!”

If all we’re going to get is pie in the sky; if we’re going to leave the POB in charge of our waterfront, I say, screw it!

Why attribute to intent what can better be explained by software (or temporary incompetence)? And they gave it a good headline, no?

What’s worth commenting on about Mr. Rutter’s letter is that it does not go far enough. Where is the OTHER $137 million going to come from? Where is the reliably less-than-profitable Port going to come up with that? Moorage fees? Georgia-Pacific?? Koch Industries??? AIG????

The answer so far seems to be from sale of property that is owned by the taxpayers, and is being cleaned up at taxpayer expense. That’s why there’s this panic to get entitlements in place. (And why we are putting the “regulatory predictability” cart before the environmental cleanup horse.)

It’s taxpayers, all the way down.

So, let’s get behind John Watts, Mayor Pike, and the new PDA and insist that this project truly belong, permanently, to the taxpayers who will follow us, all the way up.

It worked for Granville Island. It worked for Pike Place. It can work for us.

Yes we can.

I have heard it said that personal attacks are evidence that there is a deficiency of rational arguments, but who knows?

At some point, I may also be tempted to subscribe to an attitude like this suggests: “This is the kind of tedious [sometimes “pedantic”] nonsense up with which I will not put!”
But not yet, on such an important issue as this.

And, GMA lawyers have been known to back whichever argument delivers to them a fat fee.

So, rather than wrestle with this particular pig, I will leave that exercise to others, with the caveat that it usually results in both parties getting exceptionally dirty, with only the pig truly enjoying it.

If one really cares to know what the author thinks about this subject all that must be done is to review his copious production of opinion published under the aegis of ‘Friends of Whatcom’ a few years ago, while under the employ of Mr Doug Tolchin.

I doubt that very much has changed in that rhetoric, or in the mindset that spawned it. That is why I think the author has largely wasted his credibility on this subject.
Just hollering ‘wolf’ isn’t usually enough to actually achieve anything worth while.
Folks who aren’t willing to be a part of solution, often are part of problem, and Lord knows we’ve already got enough of those!

As Lee Iaccoca said, ‘either lead, follow or get out of the way’. But then he worked for Chrysler, so what did he know?
Over & out -indefinitely

John,

Which “personal attack” are you referring to?  Your first, or second?  Was there another?

BYW, Friends of Whatcom, a Tolchin sponsored but volunteer website, has been off-line for quite a while. 

For those interested in an object lesson on how to waste one’s credibility, I’ve posted the last edition of that project here.

I would only offer that none of this information had the slightest effect on Mr. Watts while he was in office, helping engineer the City’s deal with the Port.

Also, please excuse any inoperative links in the archival representation of the website. There has been no attempt to maintain it for many years.

Update:  I have been notified that commenting has been restored on the subject letter this evening.