It’s time for our annual roundup of the stories that made headlines throughout the year. Last week featured: No. 10: Orcas Fire brings piece of World Trade Center to Orcas; No. 9: Orcas wins Island Cup again; No. 8: Community saves sports; No. 7: Discover Pass implemented; No. 6: Rec District Levy passes. The final five are detailed below.
No. 5: New Orcas Food Bank building arrives
Since its inception roughly 26 years ago, the Orcas Food Bank has bounced around from one location to the next, depending on the generosity of various organizations. Four years ago it was operating out of a storage shed on Mount Baker Road. In the winter clients lined up to wait their turn in the numbing cold, facing rain and snow, sometimes with babies and small children in their arms.
In 2009 the food bank was relocated to the basement of the Orcas Island Community Church, which provided a warm, dry place for patrons to eat a hot lunch while they waited.
Food bank directors Larry and Joyce Shaw didn’t stop there.
The tiny distribution rooms were crowded, and there wasn’t enough room to store the food onsite, making frequent trips to a storage unit necessary. The Shaws began dreaming about providing the food bank with its own modular building. The church offered a $1 per year extended lease for the building to be placed on church grounds, and the fundraising began.
The community watched the campaign’s progress on a wooden dial placed in Eastsound. An anonymous donor offered $65,000 in matching funds if the community could raise $65,000 to supply the $130,000 needed to purchase, place and finish the building.
A final push in the fall of 2010 drew characteristic generosity from islanders and local nonprofits, and by mid-November the dial was pushed past 100 percent, with $5,000 to spare for a building maintenance fund.
The fundraising happened in 2010, but the fruition came this year: the new 24’ x 48’ building was brought over by barge and set on its foundation this summer.
Designed for efficient visitor flow, it’s also outfitted with shelving for food storage, sinks, a restroom, office space and refrigerators and freezers. Goodbye, trips to the warehouse. Hello, better accommodations for hungry islanders and food bank volunteers.
No. 4: Barefoot Bandit sentenced
On Dec. 16, Camano Island native Colton Harris-Moore, aka the Barefoot Bandit, was sentenced to seven years and three months’ incarceration in a Washington state prison. The 20-year-old pled guilty to 33 state charges, including burglary and identity theft” 16 filed by Island County prosecutor Greg Banks and 17 counts filed by San Juan County prosecutor Randy Gaylord. Charges filed in Skagit County were dropped, Gaylord said, because the Skagit prosecutor said he was not prepared to go to trial.
Harris-Moore was on the lam for two years, hiding out in Orcas Island homes and the woods before finally being caught in July 2010 in the Bahamas. He reportedly spent time hiding in an airplane hangar owned by Mike and Dawn Parnell, waiting until they flew off so he could drive their car to their home, eat their food and wear their clothing. He reports biking around Orcas Island during his time on the run. He stole six boats and airplanes from San Juan County, crashing one plane and damaging two others during landings.
The trial took place at Island County Superior Court in Coupeville, overseen by Judge Vickie Churchill.
In addition to the state charges, Harris-Moore pled guilty to seven federal counts this summer.
The federal charges included stealing an aircraft, possession of firearms and piloting without a license. Harris-Moore incurred the charges during a spate of crimes in late 2009 and early 2010, when he flew a stolen plane from Anacortes to the San Juan Islands. Federal prosecutors recommended that Harris-Moore be sentenced to six years in prison.
Harris-Moore is scheduled to be sentenced for the federal crimes in late January in Seattle. Browne has said Harris-Moore could receive between 5 1/4 and 6 1/2 years in prison.
Under an earlier plea agreement, any revenue resulting from movie, book, or other deals regarding Harris-Moore’s life story will go directly to pay the $1.4 million in restitution he owes the victims of his crimes. 20th Century Fox has already purchased movie rights for $1.3 million, to be screenwritten by Academy Award winner Dustin Lance Black.
The federal and state sentences are expected to run concurrently.
A high school dropout, Harris-Moore says he plans to devote his prison time to studying in anticipation of pursuing an aeronautical engineering degree.
No. 3: Sharon Hammel murdered by her son
Matricide.
It’s a word not commonly used and an act almost impossible to fathom.
But as the horrific events of April 3 unraveled, there would be no ignoring the fact that a 15-year-old San Juan Island boy bludgeoned his mother to death and then set their Friday Harbor home ablaze in the midnight hours with intent of covering up the crime.
That plan failed. Taylor Hammel was arrested later that week and charged with first-degree murder and arson. He turned 16 while awaiting trial in a juvenile detention facility. Given the violent nature surrounding his mother’s death, prosecutors sought to try the boy as an adult.
At 49, Sharon Hammel was well respected, visible and a popular employee of the town of Friday Harbor. Born in New York and raised in Connecticut, she moved to San Juan Island, a single mother with a five-year-old son, in 2001 and developed a sizable circle of friends. As lead caretaker of the town’s parks department, she decorated, cultivated and maintained the many hanging flower baskets that adorned the town.
On Nov. 9, under a negotiated agreement, Taylor pleaded guilty to murder as a juvenile, and to arson as an adult. Under the sentence handed down by Superior Court Judge Don Eaton, the 16-year-old will serve five years in a juvenile detention facility, the maximum allowed by state law, and then, at the age of 21, he will be transferred to a state prison designed for adults, where he will serve two years.
Eaton echoed the reasoning of prosecutors and Taylor’s attorneys, noting that serving five years in juvenile detention would offer the teen the “maximum time to for treatment and to mature” before he’s immersed in a prison populated by adults.
No. 2: Orcas School takes on debt, levy approved
The Orcas Island School Board was in a fix: repairs were urgently needed for the elementary school’s heating and plumbing systems, but the community had voted down a $35 million bond in February 2010, then voted down a scaled-down $27 million bond that August.
Soon after the bond failures, the school was offered a $900,000 state energy grant to help fix failing water and heating systems, but it lacked the necessary matching funds. The board faced losing the $900,000 grant if they didn’t take action.
With the support and urging of a group of 44 community members who gathered under the name, “A Way Forward for Orcas Schools,” the board took a precipitous step. They borrowed $800,000 from Cashmere Bank in addition to $100,000 raised by local donors, and trusted that the community would approve a one-year levy to repay the loan placed on the next possible ballot.
The repair work was done over the summer, and this fall students returned to adequately heated classrooms with cleaner air circulating, functioning water fountains, flushing toilets and warm water in the taps.
The $900,000 levy was placed on the ballot this November, and much to the school board’s relief, Orcas Island voters came through to approve the measure by 61.18 percent. The levy will charge property owners 28 cents per thousand dollars of assessed property value over the coming year.
In other school repair news, the district was awarded $68,584 this September to upgrade or replace its fire alarm systems through the state Urgent Repair Grant program.
No. 1: Election 2011 doomed county transfer stations, extended land bank tax
In the end, the county council asked voters to tip the scales on the fate of the county’s solid waste operation. And it wasn’t even close. When the final count was tallied from the Nov. 8 election, voters dumped Proposition 2 like a hot potato, tossing aside the proposed funding measure with a 68-percent margin of defeat.
Proposition 2, which was expected to raise about $1 million a year over a 15-year life span, was intended to help keep the cash-strapped solid waste operation afloat and fund improvements at the three county-run transfer stations. Property owners would have borne the brunt of that measure, however, supplementing tipping fees, the price one pays to dispose of garbage, through an annual “user charge” of $100 or more, which applied to each parcel of “developed” land.
In the aftermath of the election, the county began rolling out its backup plan, aka “Plan B”, which removes trash collection from the hands of the public works department, sets the stage for the county franchise hauler to expand curbside collection of garbage, and perhaps recycling, and allows any of the three transfer stations to be leased by a private enterprise, or public entity, that wants to take a shot of its own at collecting and disposing of trash.
Results of the Nov. 8 election are more clouded in regard to Proposition 1. But one thing is clear. In spite of its victory at the polls, the San Juan County Land Bank emerged from the election with a bit of a public relations problem on its hands.
While voters granted a 12-year extension of the land bank’s principal funding source, a 1 percent tax on local real estate sales, paid by the buyer, they did so in far fewer numbers than before. Prop. 1 passed with only a 52.8 percent margin of victory. That’s a far cry from the 70-plus percent approval rating the land bank garnered when its REET was renewed in 1999, or the nearly 70 percent approval it received when voters created the publicly owned land conservation agency 20 years ago.
In arguing against renewal of the REET, some critics claimed that the land bank veered from preserving open space and pursued conservation projects in recent years that benefit the few at expense of the many. Others insisted enough open space has been set aside and that in tough economic times like these, the land bank could get by with less.
In contrast, supporters argued that because of its ability to conserve open space and cultural resources, the land bank benefits both the islands’ environment and its economy, helps maintain a rural landscape that both islanders and visitors enjoy, and, with only three percent of county land preserved as open space, the job of the land bank is far from complete.
Still, the drop in public support, as demonstrated on Nov. 8, weighs heavily at land bank headquarters.
“I don’t think any of us expected an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote, but that’s very tight,” land bank director Lincoln Bormann said of the election results. “I think there’s a message there and that now we have to figure out what that message is.”
