It has been a while since we heard anything about the effort to site the University of Washington branch campus in Snohomish County. I have always been an advocate of working on controversial issues when the heat is focused somewhere else. I hope the decision makers are as well.
Since I have been a strong advocate for the Marysville site, I look at the process they used to make the selection and am still perplexed that they could choose Everett Station. I was not invited to participate when they did the initial go-round so they are not really interested in what I think. That has never been a deterrent to me offering my opinion anyway.
If you read the Revised Code of Washington RCW 28B.50.020 Sec. 7, you see that Community Colleges are supposed to be independent institutions, not a part of any other educational institution. At the same time, you can go to the UW Bothell campus and find that Cascadia Community College shares the site with the Branch campus. Other community colleges in our area also offer undergraduate degrees through branch affiliations with Western and Central Washington State Universities.
I am not trying to undermine the mission of the Everett Community College, but the only way I could imagine siting the UW Snohomish County in Everett would be if it piggy backed on the ECC campus. If you look at the size of the ECC campus, you can understand why the Everett Station site is totally unsuited for the needs of the new university.
The argument I hear in favor of Everett over Marysville is the proximity to transit in Everett. I do think the new train station is much better than the old one, but I don’t think of the train will be a significant factor in bringing students to the campus from the target market to the north. Regardless of what the politicians say, the students that will attend this university will take busses or drive in their cars from their homes and jobs in northern Snohomish and Skagit County. Certainly there will be a draw from the south if the focus of the school is of a technical nature, but with a UW in Bothell, putting one in Everett doesn’t make much sense.
I know a University branch campus is not a high school, but today’s standards for new high schools recommends that a high school be a minimum of five acres plus one additional acre for each 100 students. So a high school with a student population of 2000 would require a minimum of 25 acres. I would imagine that a branch campus for a university would use similar criteria to establish size requirements. I would also imagine that a branch campus would expect a student population of more than 2000 so the site should be large enough to accommodate growth. Maybe a long term enrollment of 10,000 students would require a site of 100 acres or more. If the campus was to include student housing, the number of acres would increase significantly. The point of this thought is to demonstrate that the Everett site is hardly suitable for minimum enrollment let alone the thousands we all expect.
If the process for siting UW Snohomish County has a site-size criteria, Everett loses every time.
If you consider the general area around the university that will develop in conjunction with the school, Marysville has many more possibilities.
In spite of the fact that the analysis suggests almost any site is better than Everett, shoe-horning the UW Snohomish County into a tiny site on the wrong side of the tracks in Everett is a distinct possibility since politicians are involved and that changes everything. Spending a fortune on the wrong thing would be no surprise since it is just public money and everyone knows we all have more than we can handle.
This whole Everett infatuation thing reminds me of a parent with an unattractive child describing how beautiful their baby is.
No Loss for Words 
Where is the Outrage?
by Steve DanaEven though I am not thought of as an environmentalist, I am an advocate for farming. In my mind, respect for the land as it relates to farming is a higher priority for me than a stand alone concern for the “environment”. It comes down to balance. Most people are generally concerned about the environment, but they are not fanatics. The lack of meaningful science that most average citizens can understand makes us leery of often unsubstantiated claims.
I think that in spite of the fact that the interests of farmers are consistent with the environmental community in many ways, they also have significant differences. Farmers have always been environmentalists. Environmentalists are rarely farmers. They are too idealistic to figure out how to make a living applying their own regulatory expectations to the real world.
My concern about agriculture in our community comes from living in a town with a rich farming heritage. In the early years our city was a center for forestry related businesses; it was a processing and market place for farm products grown in and around the town. Living in an agriculture community does not require that you be a farmer to appreciate the work they do.
For general purposes though, I grew up working on different farms from the time I was ten. Most young people in my age group started our work lives picking strawberries or raspberries on the local farms. I lived on a dairy farm for the summer in 1963 to learn about hard work. My dad knew the lessons learned on a dairy farm would serve me throughout my life. Walt and Alvina Hereth may have also learned some lessons about taking in a city kid as well. Even today, I appreciate the experience working on their farm that summer.
Off and on for several years, I worked for farmers haying and doing other crappy jobs. It was a good way for a kid to make a few bucks.
After high school, I went to work at the Seattle Snohomish Mill. I had the privilege of working for “Old Bob” Waltz. Even though my job was working in the mill, he allowed me to work on a couple occasions with forestry managers who needed a young guy who could lift a bunch and think at the same time. Neal Bowman gave me a few lessons in the late sixties and early seventies that are still meaningful today.
A couple years later, I had the opportunity to work on a corporate farm in central Oregon. Irrigation infrastructure creates an incredibly productive farming environment in that part of the world. Yields compared to dry land farming are sometimes a factor of ten or more. Technology on the farm made it possible to quantify what we did, how much we did it and when we did it. I had the chance to learn about farming from professionals. The lessons were not wasted.
Most recently, my brother bought an apple orchard in Yakima for his life after military retirement. The learning curve for a venture like that is steep for everyone in the family. Who knew about all the non-farming things you need to know to be a farmer?
I am not a farmer today and make no claims to be one. I have done the work though and understand the satisfying feeling farmers get when they produce a crop or a tank of milk. I sympathize with them when their task is made more difficult through regulations passed by government types who have not walked the furrows on a farm yet feel compelled to pile on. I know the feeling of watching a wheat field be pummeled by a hail storm. Farming is hard enough by itself without the additional load of government bureaucrats.
From a regional perspective, I am troubled as farmers I have known over the years have given up farming. They cite a variety of reasons, but the bottom line is as each one disappears, we all lose. Unlike the environmental community, I am more interested in preserving farms and farmers than I am “farm land”. Without the farmers, the land is just land. Working the land is what makes a farm.
In our county, the priority has been to save the farm land, but not the farmer. That needs to change. We need to rethink our priorities so that it is possible to make a living working the land again. That might entail lobbying government at a higher level to change state and federal regulations. This would the original “grass roots effort” to make a difference.
In our state, the Growth Management Act tells us that we must preserve farm land. To that end, we are prevented from using agricultural land for recreation or open space purposes. Apparently, it is not because of a desire to preserve open space. Play fields for kids could be a great use for land if it cannot be farmed productively. The state has been clear about the farm land preservation thing by repeatedly denying requests for regulations that would allow them.
So I finally get to the point of this story. In spite of the fact that our state is vehement about preserving “prime” farm land, we are witnessing the state sponsored destruction of “prime” farm land in the name of the environment.
One example would be the Biringer Farm between Everett and Marysville. There is little doubt that it has been very productive farm land, but the land is now owned by the Port of Everett and will be used as a wetland mitigation project. In the near future, the Port will remove the drainage structures and the dikes to flood the “prime” farm land and turn it into a swamp. I guess that tells us how important preserving the farm land is to our government officials.
Another example is the sale of hundreds if not thousands of acres of farm land between Monroe and Snohomish to the Nature Conservancy. Their plan is to tear out the drainage infrastructure and the dikes to flood the “prime” farm land to make it a swamp that will serve as a nature habitat for ducks.
These are just two examples within ten miles of my city. High minded nature lovers are destroying our “prime” farm land for their play fields. Isn’t that hypocritical at the minimum? It really makes me wonder about the motives of our elected officials. What is their agenda?
I hear what they are saying with their words, it just doesn’t match up with their deeds. I feel a change in the winds.
Posted in Environmental, Political commentary, Snohomish County Political Commentary | 2 Comments »