Many West Hill residents were hoping to get a chance to vote early next year on annexing to Renton. While some West Hill residents have expressed interest in staying in unincorporated King County and others have expressed a wish that Seattle would annex them, there are a large number that have been expressing desire to annex to Renton. (The West Hill is in Renton’s potential annexation area, so it would take pro-active actions from multiple jurisdictions to bring about an annexation of West Hill to any other city. )

Renton Council has previously expressed tentative support of holding an annexation election (with a 5 to 2 council split), with the intent that IF residents of West Hill expressed a majority interest in annexing, Renton would make a final review of whether we could make the annexation work financially. The financial determination would be heavily dependent on an annexation funding sales tax “rebate” from Washington State, which was set up a few years ago specifically to enable cities to close the budget gap when annexing unincorporated urban areas.

But last week, Governor Gregoire revealed that she may propose eliminating this annexation funding. If she did, the budget gap for a West Hill annexation would grow from about ten million dollars over ten years (depending on the assumptions used) to about thirty million dollars over ten years– a gap I predict is too wide for a majority of Renton Councilmembers to accept.

In other words, if Governor Gregoire persuades the legislature to cut this funding, Renton could not afford to annex West Hill.

Here is an article with more information on this topic, as it relates to the city of Burien.

This weekend kids enjoyed an old-fashioned Halloween Party in downtown Renton, and a trick-or-treating afternoon at the Landing.

Our daughter Katie and her husband were greeting trick-or-treaters at “Eyes on the Landing,” and we stopped in to see the festivities. A highlight for us was seeing our new grand-daughter Carolyn participate, even though she is only seven months old. She’s going to be an early walker.

The event at the Landing attracted many more visitors than last year, easily numbering in the hundreds. Here are some pictures.
Seven-month-old Carolyn trick-or-treats for the first time as she chooses a piece of candy from the treasure chest in front of “Eyes on the Landing”
Crowds of trick-or-treaters helped crowd the sidewalks and stores at the Landing this afternoon

Cathy and I enjoy excellent vegetarian food at Renton’s newest restaurant, Blossom Vegetarian.

In a very positive trend, Americans are starting to become focused again on healthy eating. Several documentaries have come out in recent years covering the many positive impacts of a proper diet and the negative consequences of too much junk food.

My favorite recent documentary on healthy eating is the inspiring story of Joe Cross, an Australian who dramatically lost his excess weight and eliminated the need for medicine to control an auto-immune disease by increasing his fruits and vegetables consumption. By eating fruits and vegetables, primarily in the form of juices in his case, he eliminated his hunger for less-healthy processed foods. In filming his story, he caught the interest of others who were suffering from obesity and illness, and they too had their lives transformed by changing to a diet high in fruits and vegetables. The documentary, called “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead” is available at Amazon.com, and averaged five stars (the highest possible) by the 99 people that have left reviews. I encourage you to read the user comments about this video on Amazon.com here. This is an enjoyable film that everyone should see. It is also available on streaming Netflix (so Netflix subscibers can watch it for free).

Joe Cross, the star and producer of this incredible documentary is speaking at our Renton Community Center tomorrow evening at 7:00 PM. You can get in for five dollars. I am going to try to make it after the council meeting, if there is still room. (I’ll be arriving late).

In keeping with this trend toward healthy eating, Renton now has a restaurant that specializes in providing delicious vegetarian cuisine. “Blossom Vegetarian” is now open on 305 Burnett Ave, in downtown Renton. I attended the Grand Opening celebration last week, and I found the food to be amazing. The restaurant is the latest offering by one of Renton’s premier restaurateurs, Gene Sens.

As Joe Cross discusses in his film, the average American diet includes only about five percent fruits and vegetables. But humans thrive when we eat about 80 percent or more fruits and vegetables. I’ve increased my fruit and vegetable consumption dramatically in the last few months, and I’ve been very happy with the way it makes me feel.

Here are a few pictures from Blossom’s Grand Opening last week.

Above, Blossom Vegetarian restaurateur Gene Sens holds our granddaughter Carolyn at the restaurant grand opening celebration.

Developing the latest update to our Renton Shoreline Master Program has been a very involved, busy, controversial, and expensive project. The update– which we must complete in order to comply with state law– has cost over two-hundred thousand taxpayer dollars and thousands more in private-sector funds, and has taken over two years. During this time we have held numerous public meetings and hearing in such public forums as the Renton Planning Commission, the Renton City Council, and in our Renton Council Planning and Development Committee. We have also received countless letters from citizens and their attorneys, as well as phone calls, emails, and virtually all other forms of communication. ( For further background on this work, see my previous journal entries on this topic by clicking here.)

The result of all of these public meetings and hard work to date has been that Renton produced a 334-page ordinance , that you can see by clicking here

I was personally never fully satisfied by this ordinance, and joined my colleague Marcie Palmer in voting “No” on it after a lengthy, highly-attended public debate (which included testimony from a representative from the State Department of Ecology). I was particularity concerned about the ordinance provisions that mandated removal of river bulkheads, many of which protect our city’s downstream bridges and other critical infrastructure. This bulkhead removal is already putting our city at risk and costing Renton taxpayers dearly, as can be seen in journal entries and letters here.

While I voted “No” on this ordinance, the ordinance was nevertheless approved by Renton City Council on a 5-2 vote. And though I wasn’t thrilled about council moving ahead with this compromise, I accepted this result. In summary, the council majority was ready to “split-the-baby” on the remaining issues that our citizens and DOE could not agree on, and simply be done with this ordinance– a decision I can understand after two years of hard work. So while Marcie and I were ready to keep working the bulkhead issue, the rest of the council was ready to make some final compromises and move on. After ending up on the losing side of this vote, I thanked the council for affording us the time to debate the topic, and I reported on it in my journal here.

With the council capitulating to Department of Ecology (DOE) on so many areas including the bulkhead issue, this should have cleared the way for a DOE approval. Especially since DOE was with us on the floor of the council in the public meeting where we developed the final wording for our ordinance. Except now the DOE informs us they are not satisfied with the compromise that council approved on a 5-2 vote, and they have unilaterally decided that Renton needs to narrow our dock width standard.

The dock width standards are sensitive, because they pit clear safety and access issues against theoretical fish issues. Federal ADA access guidelines recommend a minimum of five feet and preferably more where people of limited mobility are trying to get into a boat or trying to turn around a wheel chair. On the other side of the issue, DOE officials say that predator fish like to hide in shadows under docks and ambush baby salmon, and that limiting the dock width to four feet helps reduce this threat. Renton’s ordinance had balanced these concerns by requiring that new and rebuilt docks be surfaced in light-transmitting metal or plastic screening instead of wood (so that 70 percent of the light penetrates the dock and prevents shadows). The limitation to a six-foot width along with increase in light transmission would give improved protection to baby salmon, meet the Army Corps of Engineers Standards, and meet guidelines associated with the Americans with Disabilities Act which state in part:

“Accessible boat slips must have clear pier space at least 60 inches wide and as long as the slip. Providing more than 60 inches wide clear space will improve safety for people with disabilities, especially on floating piers. This space is the minimum necessary for individuals with disabilities to have sufficient space adjacent to their boat slip to use a chair lift or transfer device for getting on or off their vessel and provide a turning space for changing directions. Every 10 feet of linear pier edge serving the accessible slips must have at least one continuous clear opening that is at least 60 inches wide. ”

While Renton Council reached it’s final SMP compromises in some highly public meetings, the State DOE testified to council last Monday that they subsequently held some private meetings of their own in which they decided that Renton’s standards for dock widths were not acceptable.

Specifically, they have decided that in the future all cities need to adopt standards limiting the dock with to four-feet in the first (near-shore) 30-feet of dock. But docks may reach their maximum length before they reach 30 feet long, since they can not got out further than the point where the water depth is ten feet. The only provision for a wider dock that would allow disabled access in the first thirty feet would be if the homeowner has state disabled status at the time of dock permitting. This has a couple problems: (1) it does not address the problem of the homeowner having extended family or friends that may boat with them, and need safe access, (2) it does not address the fact that it can take one to two years to get a dock permit, and cost tens of thousands to widen a dock, and it is therefore highly impractical to build it too narrow for ADA access and then widen it if the need arises.

Adding fuel to the controversy is the fact that two years ago the State DOE approved Redmond’s Shoreline Master Plan, which outright allowed six-foot dock widths. Many other cities on the lake are still working their SMPs, and are not as far along as us. If Renton agrees to a four-foot dock width limitation, and the council commits it to an ordinance, will we find by this time next year that we are one of the only jurisdiction that limits our docks to this potentially dangerous width?

The State DOE’s response to this question was that as a result of their (private) meetings, they intend to start demanding that all the cities limit their dock widths to four-feet within 30 feet of the shoreline. My view, which I expressed at the council meeting, was that if the State of Washington wants to limit all dock widths to four feet, then the State of Washington should follow a proper legislative process, including notice of new regulations, hearings, testimony before the legislature, public comment, public legislative debate, and a public vote by the state legislature. They should NOT try to limit all dock widths in the state to four feet by going to every city council and demanding it, especially when they have already approved a different standard for Redmond.

But what happened next put me on my soapbox about the legislative process and open public meetings. The State DOE implied that if Renton did not capitulate on their DOE dock-width desires, then the state DOE might just go back into Renton’s Ordinance (which again was the product two-years of public meetings and legislative action), and perhaps arbitrarily change other things they don’t like. This was a threat–pure-and-simple– to try to make Renton lawmakers fear that the private policy-making of one of our state agencies would trump our public meetings and our elected-representative role, and leave our citizens with no meaningful way to apply for a dock permit. In short, the DOE threat amounted to EXACTLY what the state legislature wanted to PREVENT when they wrote the Open Public Meeting Act:

“The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them.
The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide
what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people
insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they
have created.” Washington State Legislature, 1971, Statement of Purpose in Open Public Meeting Act (42.30 RCW)

Near the end of our Monday discussion on this topic, I reiterated that if the State of Washington wishes to uniformly restrict dock widths, the State should use their own legislative process for making a new state-wide law, and give all cities a chance to weigh in at once, as well as give citizens an opportunity to contact their state legislators. In the meantime, the State DOE could do whatever they thought they had the power to do to limit dock widths in Renton, but they could not get me to agree that we should arbitrarily change our ordinance because of their DOE threat to impose other arbitrary (revenge-motivated) hardships on Renton if we didn’t.

If the state changes anything that we did not publicly discuss in our legislative hearings, I will contact the State Attorney General and ask for an investigation of State violation of Open Public Meetings Act. If the state DOE changes only the dock width, I will follow the issue to make sure that Renton has been treated fairly when compared to other jurisdictions, and if other cities are given permission for six-foot docks within thirty feet of shore, I will fully expect the DOE to give Renton the same consideration.

This topic will be back before Council Committee of the Whole tomorrow evening at 5:30.

A recent photo I took of our granddaughter Carolyn at Disneyland. Co-grandparents, Bob and Donna Jones, are in the background

Sorry for the long delay in posting– I just enjoyed the longest council break I’ve had in 18 years, and given the stunningly beautiful weather we were having I took full advantage of it. I even managed to get my family down to Southern California on an extended trip which included visits to Disneyland and Hollywood. All five of my kids made the trip with us, along with our son-in-law, daughter-in-law, granddaughter Carolyn, and our son-in-law’s entire family (parents and siblings), and several close friends– 17 people in total.

Here are a few photos:
Corman and Jones families and friendsThunder Mountain Railroad at Disneyland

Cathy swoons at Johnny Depp’s star on Hollywood Walk of Fame