What Does a Holiday Weekend in Port Angeles Look Like?

In case you're wondering what a sunny holiday weekend looks like on Nathan West's Million Dollar Boondoggle Beach...Well, it looks like this:

 

Where's Waldo? Where are Susie and Dick and Spot? Where's Vincent Price, the last man on Earth? Where is ANYONE? Not here. Maybe if Nathan had taken that million dollars in silver dollars, and spread them out on this desolate stretch of nowhere, maybe then someone would be here. But instead all a million bucks bought was a people-repeller.

 

Anyway, here are a few comments from our intrepid photographer who braved the hordes to capture this inspiring image...

 

As you see, once again.. still...the place is vacant. Not a person to be seen. I went down last weekend at 4:30, which was admittedly after the glorious "Waterfront Day," but the place looked EXACTLY like it does in this picture. Not a sign of anyone, or that any popular and well attended event had just occurred.

 If, even on a sunny, hot, holiday weekend afternoon NO ONE is interested in using the facility, when will it be used? Does this not, once again, show the importance of doing an honest "needs" study, before building these public projects? What is the point of  building multi-million dollar public projects, if nobody uses them? 

 

Oh, that's right. Grants, and the salaries they pay. 

Is This Place sdrawkcaB Or What???

You gotta love it...The period for signing up to run for elected positions closes, and they haven't got enough candidates to go around. So, they extend the filing period, only to have some of the people who already signed up drop out.

Clallam County am strange place! It am perfect...For Cherie Kidd.



Let the Games Begin...Or Should That Be "Lames"?

The filing period is over, which means the worrying period has begun. So let's start the process of "getting to know" the candidates for the Port Angeles City Council.

In the Aug. 1 primary, James “Jim” Moran, Todd Negus and Marolee Smith will face off for the Position 1 seat and incumbent Lee Whetham and challengers Mike French and Jake Oppelt will vie for the Position 2 seat.

In the general election, Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin and Artur Wojnowski will go for the Port Angeles City Council Position 3 seat while Travis Berglund and Kate Dexter will vie for Position 4.

Now, I don't want to unduly influence anyone's opinion, but, I do feel I should point out that Moran is just one letter off from moron. That's all I'm gonna say. Really.

But you all should feel free to speak up with whatever you know about this crew of familiar faces, newbies, and unknowns. (And near morons.)

Get offa my lawn, you damned kids!



High, Everybody!

How many people are there in Clallam County?

North Olympic Healthcare Network plans to nearly triple the capacity of a program that provides medication for addicts trying to get off opioids after being awarded $250,000 in funding from the Salish Behavioral Health Organization. NOHN will transition over the next couple months into having a nurse care manager model for its medicine-assisted treatment program and has hired more providers, allowing it to increase its current capacity of about 120 Suboxone patients up to about 300, said CEO Dr. Michael Maxwell.

How many people are there in Clallam County? And how many of them are addicts? The way things keep "developing" there, you'd think all the local elected officials own stock in the company that manufactures Suboxone. That would at least be one explanation for the chaos and dysfunction they've created.

Rolling in Her Grave...Under the Elwhaphant in the Conferencearts Center

Well, of course.

Michael Peters, the tribe's CEO, said that though the tribe doesn't know exactly what the partnership will look like yet, it's excited to be part of the project.



Benched

Hey, give credit where credit is due. It's not a bad idea at all, really, especially by the standards of Port Angeles ideas...

The City Parks and Recreation Department is providing $10,000 in seed money for a pilot project with the Composite Recycling Technology Center to build a first-of-its-kind park bench.

Park benches have to be pretty durable, so this seems at least like a seed of a good idea - even though the whole "tax dollars from the Parks Department to try putting on a show" angle is, of course, classic Port Angeles and very suspect. (What, the City hasn't got any "clean" economic development dollars? Nathan's getting stingy in his old age? What?)

Ah, but this is still Port Angeles we're talking about, where success is not exactly King. And this is the taxpayer-funded boondoggle called the CRTC that we're talking about, after all. So what does their track record look like?

CTRC Chief Operations Officer Dave Walter said that, if successful, production of benches...could add 10 jobs to the fledgling nonprofit's employee roster, almost doubling its current staff list. Walter said it would be the CRTC's second manufactured product, following the recent production startup of a $99 pickleball paddle, about 100 of which have been sold...

A whole 100 pickleball paddles? Wow! They must have someone running off to the Post Office or UPS for shipping every day! Well, every week. Okay, okay, once a month. But still "about 100" is a lot more than "about a dozen" so...

We all know Port Angeles is already capable

of supplying at least half of what you see here...



Needless to say, pickleball paddles are also lighter than, say, a park bench. Which would keep said shipping costs down. I know from my experience trying to get the City to put one bench in Jessie Webster Park how expensive (regular) benches are, and how many standards they have to meet - and how many roadblocks the City itself kept putting up rather than putting up a bench.

My point being, any new composite benches will have to overcome the distance/shipping/expensive hurdle, the headaches of meeting all sorts of (varied) codes and standards, as well as just the general bureaucratic inertia and fear of doing something new or different that is endemic in City Halls across the country.

In other words, though this at first glance might seem like a good idea, I suspect it has a low chance of hitting the field, and is instead more likely to just get...Benched.

Ask, and You Shall Perceive...

A reader has made what I consider to be a reasonable, and doable, request:

Donna Morris died in 2014, and she stipulated that the $9M be used "specifically for the design, construction, and maintenance of a performing arts center to be located in Port Angeles, Washington,"

The gift was left to the Peninsula College Foundation to get this done.

Rather than carry out the gift's very expressed purpose, the Foundation members decided to work with The-Powers-That-Be to morph this into a "convention center." Maybe someone could look into who runs the Foundation and their connections?

Anyone? How about starting here?

http://pencol.edu/foundation/who-we-are