Dear Editor:

I enthusiastically support Sarah Blossom for city council.

I got to know Sarah when I was chair of the city’s Affordable Housing Task Force and she was one of our city council liaisons. She brought the same independent thinking and hard work to that role as she does to all of her council duties. She came to our meetings prepared and ready to work. She offered honest analysis and a passion for problem solving. She is committed to the difficult work of finding realistic strategies that will protect the natural environment while increasing housing options for people of all races, cultures, ages and incomes. She has abundant patience and extensive council experience which serve her well in the island’s sometimes contentious debates.

In contrast, her opponent, Michael Pollack, has a track record of lackluster performance as an elected official. As a current member of the Parks board, his embarrassing 50% attendance record merited an article in the Bainbridge Review. Worse, he has been making careless and untrue statements about housing and the environment, both on his website and at the recent candidate forum.

All of the candidates pay lip service to the need for affordable housing. But some of them oppose concrete strategies proposed by others while offering few substantive ideas of their own. Sarah is doing the hard work of creating meaningful housing opportunity in our community.

We are fortunate to have Sarah Blossom in city leadership. I urge you to vote for her.

Althea Paulson

Good evening Mayor, members of the Council, City Manager, City Attorney, City staff and members of the public. My name is Althea Paulson and I’m the Chair of the Affordable Housing Task Force, a one-year citizen task force charged with the responsibility of developing concrete recommendations on affordable housing to the Council for near-term action.

We have been meeting twice monthly as a full group since September. We also divided into subgroups, and studied specific strategies that would respond to the high priority policies and goals from the Housing Element of the Comprehensive Plan. Our recommendations are summarized in our report. We have also made previous recommendations to you, concerning the Suzuki property, inclusionary zoning, and increasing the number of live-aboards in Eagle Harbor.

Before I summarize our recommendations, I’d like to give you some context for this task.

We all know Bainbridge is having an affordable housing crisis, as are most communities in the Puget Sound Region and throughout the country, anywhere where good jobs are plentiful and the quality of life is high. In 2017, according to an annual report by Sotheby Realty,  the island broke three records: 1. highest median price for single family homes , at $840,000; 2. most sales in a single year; and 3. lowest inventory of housing, continuing a five-year trend. “Inventory is still historically low and buyer activity is elevated due to our strong job market,” the report found. “This is continuing to drive prices to record levels.”

In order to qualify for a mortgage at these prices, you need an income that puts you in the top 5% of earners in the country. Median condo sales are over a half million, and rental vacancies continue to be so low as to be almost nonexistent.

This data tells us that Bainbridge is becoming an increasingly exclusive and rarified place to live. We’re older, whiter and richer than surrounding communities. But many of  us value the vibrancy and creativity of a more diverse population –diverse in age, socio- economics, race and ethnicity. As a result, housing affordability is important both to those who live here, and those who cannot.

The task force has spent six months looking at ideas, both commonplace and out of the box. Let me emphasize something: there are no magic bullets. No one solution. We have to address affordability with a long-term, multi-pronged approach.

Our Comprehensive Plan speaks to many community values, which sometimes seem to conflict with each other. That conflict is particularly challenging with regard to the perceived notion that a choice needs to be made between housing and the environment. All of us tend to get a little tunnel vision when we’re trying to solve a specific problem. Sometimes we think of “the environment” over here and “human beings” over there. But that not how the world actually is. The Earth is our all-encompassing home, within which all species create their specific homes. Human beings are no exception. We on the task force have tried to keep an eye on the whole, approaching our task from a holistic point of view—just as the Comprehensive Plan has done. We’ve been trying to craft intentional and sensitive solutions, taking into account as many aspects of the real world as we can.

Taking a look at the real world like this can have unexpected policy implications. As just one example, the absence of housing affordable to people who work on the island has impact beyond the Housing Element of the Comprehensive Plan. Multiple aspects of the Comp Plan are impacted when large numbers of workers face increasingly longer commutes. People travel as far as Port Orchard, shouldering high commuting costs in money, time and stress, as well as gas and all that goes with that. Local business has a harder time attracting and retaining employees. Same for the school district, the City, the post office and other public and private employers. Those are real impacts on local businesses, and the Economic Element of the Comp Plan.

An article in the Seattle Times today mentioned that people who work in places they can’t afford to live move to outlying areas—thereby creating sprawl– –the very thing no one wants. Sprawl is harder to see on an island, but the ecosystem doesn’t end at the bridge. Carbon emissions from all that commuting don’t end at the bridge. Somewhere the Earth bears the burden of sprawl, of traveling people, of vehicles going extra miles—even if that burden doesn’t seem to affect Bainbridge Island. The environment is truly impacted by our lack of affordability.  Thus the aspirations and goals of the Environmental Element of the Comp Plan are negatively impacted.

Now to our recommendations.

You will not see any recommendation in here for a housing bond. It’s not because we don’t like the idea, but because the task force believes we are not the group in the best position to determine whether that is a good strategy, especially in the near term, which is what we were charged with doing. We will leave that discussion to the Council.

Housing depends on land, money and the willingness to build affordably. In this first set of recommendations, we have focused on the private sector, on those who have both land and money. We are trying to devise carrots and sticks to supply them the willingness to create affordability.

The stick is the inclusionary zoning ordinance we have already recommended. Going forward with this is dependent on a consultant which I understand you are close to hiring.

The carrot side of this approach is the Multi-Family Property Tax Exemption. This is an optional program whereby any developer of a multi family development who sets aside at least 20% of the units as affordable would get a property tax exemption for 12 years. There is a clear process to get this adopted and if you give us the go-ahead, we can refine this and set out that process for our final report.

Two of the most promising opportunities our group has identified are Cottage Housing and Conservation Villages, These are similar in concept, using small footprint—under 1200 sf—in exchange for slightly higher densities to create compact communities that reserve much of the land in open space, while designing to enhance a feeling of community. One of the City’s previous housing groups wrote a fully formed Cottage Housing Ordinance, which is appended to the CHC Final Report from 2007. If this is something you are interested in, staff can update code references and we’ll prepare it for submission to you.

We also think Accessory Dwelling Units hold promise, but we want to look more closely at the barriers that have so far prevented people from using this tool more often. A streamlined permit process, and perhaps some sample plans people could get from city hall are ideas for incentives. We also want to study the impact, if any, of AirBnB’s. We’ll have more detail for you in our final report. Tiny houses, while not thought of as a high near term priority on their own—due to issues such as septic and appeal to a narrow demographic—could possibly be folded into an enhanced ADU ordinance. Also, we would support tiny houses in select areas—such as the proposal the Friend of the Farms brought to you to create tiny house villages for farming interns.

As to other next steps, we’ll be exploring any possibilities for partnering with nonprofits and other governments. And we are working on some interesting ideas for making small changes to density requirements in Winslow that might result in more efficient design and more affordability.

Linked here is a copy of the Affordable Housing Task Force Interim Report. 20180228_AHTF_Interim_report

Contrary to some misunderstandings about what these laws are, they do not provide undocumented immigrants a place to hide from federal immigration authorities. Instead, they provide that local police will not use local resources to do the work of federal authorities in enforcing immigration laws, absent a court order or, in some jurisdictions, under very limited circumstances having to do with previous immigration violations and the commission of a serious violent felony. Absent those specified circumstances, police will not inquire about a person’s immigration status, or detain a person longer than they have legal authority to do. In the past and in some jurisdictions now, local law enforcement detains noncitizens longer than they would otherwise be allowed to do, in order to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the time to investigate the person’s immigration status. Some courts have held that so-called “ICE detainers” are unconstitutional, and many jurisdictions, including the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department, now decline to hold noncitizens under those detainers.

There are over 326 counties, 32 cities, and four states that limit local law enforcement’s involvement in federal immigration enforcement. Police departments tend to support these community policing laws. As Tom Manger, Chief of Police for Montgomery County and President of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, has said, “To do our job we must have the trust and respect of the communities we serve. We fail if the public fears their police and will not come forward when we need them. Whether we seek to stop child predators, drug dealers, rapists or robbers—we need the full cooperation of victims and witness. Cooperation is not forthcoming from persons who see their police as immigration agents. When immigrants come to view their local police and sheriffs with distrust because they fear deportation, it creates conditions that encourage criminals to prey upon victims and witnesses alike.”

On January 25, the president of the United States signed an Executive Order (EO), directing local jurisdictions to assist with federal immigration orders, regardless of local ordinance or policy. The EO provides that jurisdictions that don’t comply will lose federal funding. This EO has been the subject of widespread condemnation by immigrant and human rights advocacy groups, as well as mayors, governors, ordinary citizens. Seattle mayor Ed Murray called the day the EO was signed the “darkest day in immigration history” since the Japanese internment and said he’s prepared to lose “every penny” of Seattle’s federal funding, which was about $85 million in 2015. Governor Jay Inslee called the EO “mean-spirited, unnecessary and contrary to our values as Americans.”

Yesterday, Governor Kate Brown of Oregon signed her own executive order  forbidding state agencies and employees from helping federal immigration officials locate or apprehend undocumented immigrants. On January 31, San Francisco filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging a violation of the 10th Amendment because by issuing the EO, the federal government is attempting to interfere with the sovereignty 0f the states.

You can read the proposed ordinance for Bainbridge Island here. Concurrently, the Council will consider a Welcoming and Inclusive City resolution, which you can read here.

The Council meeting is at 7 pm at City Hall, with public comment starting at 7:05. These items are on the agenda for 7:30.

*Editor’s note: The author is a lawyer who has provided volunteer assistance to the Kitsap Immigrant Assistance Center (KIAC) in Bremerton, among other nonprofits. Her story was provided to me by KIAC’s Immigration Legal Services. Her experiences occurred during President Obama’s time in office. He deported over 2.5 million people, more than any president in history, continuing the upward trend in deportations since the 1980’s.  Incoming president Donald Trump has made mass deportation one of his signature issues, promising to deport as many as 11 million people. This article details the process as it is today; if deportations increase, the system’s ability to respond will undoubtedly deteriorate, and the way human beings are treated–including many children— will become inestimably worse.

A couple of years ago, I volunteered at a weekend workshop for immigrant “Dreamers”—those people you’ve heard about in the news who were illegally brought to the US as infants and are now in their 20s. I enjoyed the workshop so much that by the time I left I wanted to practice immigration law. I loved hearing the Spanish, seeing the amazing young people, helping immigrants achieve the American Dream. Most of my legal experience was in criminal law, and seeing a young adult with no convictions and straight A’s did my heart good.

Detainees inside the women’s wing of the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. (Photo by Alex Stonehill)

So off to Immigration Land I went. A friend of a friend helped me get started, throwing me various bits of contract work and showing me the ropes. Suddenly, there I was, going to court, writing appeals, the works. And what I quickly discovered is that one does not dabble in immigration law. It’s fantastically complex, and trying to peer at the hairs they split could make you go blind. Plus, if you lose, your client doesn’t go to prison, they go to a country where they are pretty likely to die. As in: die. Be dead.

So I chickened out and came back to criminal law. But along the way I met enough immigration lawyers that I started doing some post-conviction relief work for their clients, and I volunteered for a couple of pro bono immigration cases.

Even this tiny bit of immigration “experience” sets me apart from the average criminal attorney, for whom immigration law is a mysterious black box and all they know is “talk to Washington Defender Association.” That’s all I know, too, but I’ve visited Immigration Land just enough to have a few postcards to share from my travels. I think of myself as a tourist who went to Europe and saw 9 countries in 10 days. Here’s what I’ve learned.

I love the Constitution

Seriously, love it. Have you ever wondered what criminal law would look like without it? Okay, I know, you see that every single day. So do I. But really, what if it wasn’t there? What if the accused had no right to counsel, no speedy trial, no jury, none of it? Okay, a few shreds of Due Process for decency’s sake, but that’s all.

There’s no Constitution in immigration law. Not much of one anyway. The Constitution does not apply to borders, and, thanks to our old friend the Legal Fiction, much of immigration law is considered to be “at” the border. Clients have no right to a lawyer, since immigration law is “merely” civil. I have sat in court and watched person after person, with no legal training, no English, and no interpreter, try to defend themselves against deportation. I’ve seen a judge prevent an interpreter from interpreting, even though the interpreter was sitting right there. I’ve seen continuances that go years into the future, once because the interpreter didn’t show up, a few times because the judge was out sick. I’ve seen people locked up without bond who have committed no crime at all.

My own idea for immigration reform (with apologies to the people who actually know what they’re talking about) is to give these “courts” both judges and lawyers. Remove the air quotes and watch the justice burst forth.

It looks a lot like a criminal case

There’s a government attorney at every hearing. They’re not prosecutors, but you’ll be forgiven if you call them that. They sit in court typing on a computer. Their offices are upstairs. They are cut from the same cloth as many prosecutors—clean-cut well-dressed law-and-order types, who make a nice living and go home at 5 pm.

There’s an Information, called a Notice to Appear. It sets out reasons why the client should be deported and cites to a statute. There are hearings that look a lot like a pretrial, where the judge and the defendant try to figure out how to resolve the case. And there are trials, with witnesses and exhibits and all the rest.

Well, not all the rest. The Rules of Evidence, for example, those are nowhere to be found. The right to discovery, very limited. The presumption of innocence, gone. The burden of proof—often squarely on the defendant.

It’s all very secret

The courtrooms are in the middle of nowhere, behind three locked doors. If you appeal, you have no right to know who the appellate judge is. The government doesn’t have to turn over “Brady” material. You can’t look at the court file in your own case without (I swear this is true) a Freedom of Information Act request.

An immigrant is led to a holding cell at the Northwest Detention Center. Credit: Seattle Globalist. via Crosscut

Words don’t mean what you think they mean

In Immigration Land, you can be paroled without ever being convicted. A Theft 3 can be a felony. In fact, it can be an “aggravated felony.” Same for DUI. But burglary, PSP, even robbery, those are okay. I mean, not okay, but not necessarily anything to get excited about. I’ve learned to question every word immigration lawyers use, to make sure they mean what I think they mean. The foreign language in Immigration Land is often not Spanish or Somali, but CFR.

While I’m on it, DUI is a big deal in Immigration Land. A defendant can find himself locked up with no possibility of bond if he has a single DUI. And it doesn’t need to be a recent conviction. Immigration Land has no statute of limitations, so a DUI from 20, 30 years ago can get a guy locked up and then deported. He can try to show that he’s rehabilitated, with treatment and such, but there’s no guarantee the court will believe it.

The culture is heavily bureaucratic

But maybe there’s some good news after all. While progress on the Suzuki property has been bogged down in the particulars of an ecological study, the drafters of the Housing Element of the Comprehensive Plan update have done some promising work of their own.

The drafting committee has come up with concrete programs with a track record for helping to alleviate the housing cost burdens embedded in a community where the median single-family home price exceeds $750,000 and rental vacancies are near zero.

Among the ideas: amend the City’s development rules to encourage innovation such as tiny houses, micro units and cottage housing; expand opportunities for infill in Winslow and the Neighborhood Centers; and allow the creation of small lots and smaller footprint homes.

One idea in the draft Comp Plan has been especially popular in other communities: the Multi-Family Property Tax Exemption (MFTE) program. Established by state statute, this program allows local governments to exempt multi-family housing developments from property tax for 12 years if at least 20% of the units are rent-restricted for income-qualifying tenants. This program has been adopted by cities across Washington, both large—Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, Bellevue—and small—Bellingham, Moses Lake, Yakima, Shoreline, Bremerton.

The details vary with each city, but the basics are these:

—New or rehabbed multi-family developments of 4 units or more in designated urban centers (like Winslow) may apply for the program.

—At least 20% of the units must be set aside for affordable to low-and moderate-income households (the income requirements vary by location, tied to a percentage of median area income, and are sometimes specified in the ordinance, like this.)

—A qualifying project is exempt from property tax for 12 years, and after the conclusion of the exemption period, the project will be taxed as new construction.

—Condos may also be eligible for the program.

—An annual compliance certification and review is required. If the property no longer complies, it will lose the exemption and must pay back taxes with interest and penalties.

As a way to encourage the private sector to build affordable housing, the MFTE has been effective and popular. Seattle’s program was adopted almost 20 years ago, with modifications over the years to include more designated neighborhoods. Currently, there are 4000 housing units in the program, and that number is expected to increase to 6000 by 2018.

The program is not without skeptics. Critics of the Seattle program have argued that developers receive tax breaks that amount to more than the savings in rent. Foregone property taxes may mean fewer city services or higher taxes for everyone else.

The program must be carefully monitored. Seattle’s experience shows that some project owners skirt the rules, charging too much rent, setting aside fewer than the required number of affordable units, renting to tenants who earn too much, or engaging in racially biased practices.

Oversight is also important to assure that the program is achieving the desired results. Seattle recently made changes after it learned that its program produced mostly single-occupancy units, and did little for the shortage of family affordable housing (2-3 bedroom units).

Whitney Rearick, Executive Director of Housing Resources Bainbridge, the island’s housing nonprofit, is an enthusiastic supporter of the MFTE. She says that while no single program will be a complete solution to our affordable housing crisis, the MFTE is a good idea, because it can both create new affordable housing and preserve existing units.

The MFTE is mentioned several times in the Housing Element of the draft Comp Plan. Significantly, in the Housing Element implementation section, the adoption of an MFTE program is listed under “High Priority Actions”:

Policy HO 4.4  Partner with the for-profit sector to create affordable housing through the targeted use of the multifamily property tax exemptions in designated centers. 

While Comp Plan inclusion of the MFTE is an important endorsement of the program, adoption of the MFTE does not require prior Comp Plan approval. The state statute sets out a procedure for adoption of an MFTE ordinance that includes public outreach and a public hearing. If the Council does not begin work on it until after final approval of the Comp Plan update (currently in the public hearing phase), an MFTE program could be a year or more away.

As Rearick points out, the sooner the MFTE ordinance can be adopted, the better. By delaying, the City could miss some crucial affordable housing opportunities with developments now being considered or in the planning stages.

“There is a time element with affordable housing,” says Rearick. “Every year we wait, we lose more economic diversity.”

In Winslow, there is at least one large multi-family development in the pipeline right now, the Bainbridge Landing project, just north of Harbor Square on Ferncliff. The developer is Olympic Property Group (OPG), the same group that has been chosen to develop the Suzuki property. The Bainbridge Landing project is slated to include 115 apartments and 25 town homes.

This project might be a great fit for the MFTE. If the City adopted the ordinance in time and this project applied and qualified, the island could see an increase of more than 20 affordable apartments in a single development. That’s about a one-third increase in income-qualified affordable housing since 2003.

Jon Rose, Vice President of Real Estate for OPG, says he is open to the possibility.

“The multi-family tax exemption has been adopted as a means to provide affordable housing throughout Washington,” he wrote in an email. “We don’t know whether or not it would be a good match for both the city and our project but would happy to collaborate with the city to evaluate its feasibility.  If it were something of mutual interest we would have to work quickly because the program has to be adopted and our project qualified prior to the start of construction. That could be as early next spring.”

With the Comp Plan drafters, our housing nonprofit and a private developer all potentially interested, the MFTE seems like a priority the Council should explore as soon as possible. If you think so too, contact your City Council and put a bug in their ears. Here are their emails:

Val Tollefson: vtollefson@bainbridgewa.gov
Roger Townsend: rtownsend@bainbridge
Sarah Blossom: sblossom@bainbridgewa.gov
Kol Medina: kmedina@bainbridgewa.gov
Wayne Roth: wroth@bainbridgewa.gov
Michael Scott: mscott@bainbridgewa.gov
Ron Peltier: rpeltier@bainbridgewa.gov

You can hear more about this program and the draft Comprehensive Plan update at two identical open house/public hearings at City Hall this week.

Saturday September 17, open house from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and a public hearing from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Thursday, September 22, open house from 4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. and a public hearing from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. 

Each year from in 1999 through 2011, Bainbridge high school students traveled to Russia to put on an American-style summer camp experience for orphans. In addition, Camp Siberia helped many of these orphans gain vocational and academic opportunities through a scholarship program. (Since 2011, Bainbridge Island/Kitezh has continued to provide cross-cultural friendships and exchanges with Russian orphans through an ongoing, local program in Kitezh).

This summer, Hannah Crichton and Kyle Scoble, two former Bainbridge High School students who participated in the Camp Siberia program in 2007, will return to Russia to find campers from their summer with Camp Siberia, and capture on film a window on their current lives.

As Hannah explains, “They are now all young adults, living in the real world, without financial support or education. Our short documentary will explore the paths these former campers have taken and update us on the day-to-day lives they currently live. Statistics are not in these kids’ favors – most Russian children who leave the orphanage system around age 16 end up on the streets, becoming involved in crime, committing suicide, or unemployed. The campers we are profiling are all making their own paths, and we can’t wait to see them again!”

Hannah and Kyle are raising money for the costs of this project through Indigogo. You can learn more about their project, budget and their qualifications at this link: Tiny.cc/russiansummer

Hannah says they’ve raised about $8000 toward their goal of $17,700, and they are grateful for all donations, large or small.

Send some love to this worthwhile project by donating! Posting the link to their Indigogo page on Facebook or Twitter would be really helpful too.  Tiny.cc/russiansummer

The Bainbridge Island City Council has established a path to move forward with the development of the Suzuki Property, including completing an ecological study of the property and identifying a development team, the Olympic Property Group, to begin negotiating a development agreement.

At their Regular Business Meeting on March 23, the City Council laid out a path to move forward with an ecological study of the Suzuki Property. The citizen advisory Environmental Technical Advisory Committee (ETAC) will work with City staff to identify information already available regarding the property, and will identify additional information needed to establish an ecological baseline for the site. Once the additional information needed has been identified, ETAC will make a recommendation to the City Council as to the best path moving forward to gather the identified information.

The Council also voted to direct the City Manager to move forward with negotiating a development agreement with the Olympic Property Group. During their next meeting on Tuesday, April 12, the City Council will discuss the scope and parameters that will inform the City Manager during these negotiations. The exact details of the development contract including requirements for affordable housing, types of community amenities, etc., will be decided during these negotiations. All Councilmembers have already expressed a strong desire that the developer be required to carry out an extensive public engagement process as a condition of the development agreement.

Earlier this morning the Bainbridge Island Police Department was notified of two suspicious incidents involving an adult approaching students on Wardwell Road in Bainbridge Island.

The first incident occurred yesterday afternoon, March 17 at approximately 3:20 p.m. while students were walking home from school on Wardwell Road between Sportsman Club Road and McRedmond Road. A white male driving a dirty white pickup truck stopped and offered the students some ice cream. When the students declined the male drove away.

The second incident occurred this morning, March 18 at approximately 8:20 a.m. , and also took place on Wardwell Road. A white male driving a dirty grey four door sedan stopped and asked a student where the student was going. 

Chief Matthew Hamner wants to take this opportunity to remind parents to talk to their children about being approached by strangers, “In such a small and close-knit community, it’s easy to forget that dangerous situations can still occur. It’s important for parents to teach children to be wary of potentially dangerous situations – this will help them when dealing with strangers as well as with known adults who may not have good intentions. Help children recognize the warning signs of suspicious behavior, such as when an adult asks them to disobey their parents or do something without permission, asks them to keep a secret, asks children for help, or makes them feel uncomfortable in any way. Also tell your children that an adult should never ask a child for help, and if one does ask for their help, teach them to find a trusted adult right away to tell what happened.

You should also talk to your children about how they should handle dangerous situations. One ways is to teach them “No, Go, Yell, Tell.” If in a dangerous situations, kids should say no, run away, yell as loud as they can, and tell a trusted adult what happened right away.”

If you have any additional information regarding these incidents, or would like to report any suspicious activity, please call 911.

The Council decided to come back to its next meeting with suggestions for the parameters of an ecological study to determine where the significant trees are located, what must be done or avoided in order to maintain their health, and what kind of buffer is needed around the pond. A hydrology study will also be done. Council members will bring to the next meeting suggestions for a firm that could do the studies.

They spent great deal of time debating whether to decide on a proposer/developer before completing the study. Ultimately, they decided to choose the developer and then work to revise the plans as a partner with the developer, retaining Council control and opportunity for community input at each stage of the process. Peltier and Medina argued that they should delay choosing a developer until the study was complete. Peltier further suggested that all of the developers should submit revised proposals once the study was complete, based on its findings. That idea was rejected by those in the majority, who preferred to proceed on “parallel tracks”–continuing to work on choosing a developer while the study was being done. They were not in favor of throwing out the work that has been done so far, and did not want to have new proposals submitted.

The Council talked about what kind of affordable housing would be included in the development. Medina suggested that they can’t pick a developer until they have identified specifically what kind of affordable housing the island needs.

To that, Tollefson replied, “We need it all,” adding that this development will not be able to fill to all the needs. The final plan could be all rental, all owned with affordability deed restrictions, or market rate units that are so small they are affordable. He believed that as serious discussion proceeds with the chosen developer, those decisions will come naturally.

One of the biggest surprises of the night came when Tollefson said he had already begun to form an opinion on which developer he might choose. He said he didn’t think the Blue team had the financial capability to do the project and as a result, wasn’t in favor of that proposal.

Tollefson also asked his colleagues for an indication of whether they are interested in the possibility of a Boys and Girls Club on the site, as envisioned under the proposal known as the Farm. Medina said that although he is against developing the site, if it is developed, he would be in favor of the club, or some kind of community center. Peltier wondered why the Boys and Girls Club can’t remain at its current location at Coppertop Business Park. The others did not express an opinion.

The vigorous disagreement on Council and in the community over the past weeks and months appeared to be having an impact on some members. At the beginning of the discussion, Tollefson noted that the four members in favor of development had been singled out by name for criticism by a member of the public at the last meeting, and had been praised by someone at the current meeting. He said he didn’t care for singling out individual members, whether for praise or criticism.

At the end of the session, Peltier said he’d gotten some feedback from the public concerning the way he spoke to Interim Public Works Director Joe Tovar at the last Council meeting. He said he realized he could have stated his concerns in a better way, and had apologized to Tovar earlier in the day. Tovar graciously accepted the apology, Peltier said.