These last few weeks with one foot standing in summer and the other in fall have been a little crazy. (In more ways than one.)There are fresh dahlias on the table and moose camp is up (the season opens Tuesday.) I hope the tent doesn’t get washed away today. There is a flood watch. When I asked Chip if I should be worried he said, no, it’s better to have it flood when we aren’t sleeping in it. And people think I’m the optimist.
Speaking of optimism. The Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on the 95 percent plans for the harbor tonight. The agenda says it’s for discussion, but the Chair says he will invite public comment and hopes to have an engineer for the project on the phone to answer questions. The meeting begins at 6:30. Please come. The PC meetings are much less scary than the assembly meetings.
When I testified about the proposed minor offenses ordinance my heart was pounding. (And I can stand up in front of 100 tourists and talk about anything.) I almost left.
But I had to say something– as it is a terrible ordinance. There are 34 pages with about 200 old rules on the books that have rarely, if ever, been enforced, that now will have automatic fines. We will be ticketed and fined for walking straight across Main Street (and anywhere except a marked cross walk), or having a dog in the pick-up, and parents accompanying little children riding their bikes to class in the new safe route to school will be ticketed if their children’s training bikes don’t have head lights and tail lights. When I said this to the assembly, there were some chuckles– as in, “Of course we won’t enforce those silly rules.” Then why have them? Arbitrary enforcement is what bothers me the most. Who will get tickets and who won’t, and why? I do think it can be fixed, and the rules we actually need can be kept and the others stricken, but so far the administration does not want to do that. I’m not sure why.
The good news is the assembly hasn’t passed it yet. After almost two hours of debate they barely decided on waiting until the next meeting to do it. Or not.
