1/17/18 |Cle Elum|The Sentinel Group: updated 2/26/19

It’s just about here! The first ever, first annual, Winter Forum on Affordable and Attainable Housing sponsored by the Sentinel Group. We’ll make this short and sweet. “None of what we are trying to accomplish will work without the people we have invited.”

Some points to remember:

• We think that the time has come to begin to change the current interpretation of the Growth Management Act on both the county and state level.
• The state will be looking at the GMA in the next year and will be taking recommendations on changes. It will be a brutal and bloody fight, but it is a fight worth fighting. The fight will basically pit the extreme environmental green movement against, well, the rest of us.
• The time is ripe at the county level with changes in the 20-year county’s Comprehensive Plan up for grabs. We’ll be there for both shows.

“We want this meeting to be easy on both your time and your resources. Please bring ideas and thoughts that will lead to policy or legislative proposals. We can all sit and talk for hours about the presence of overbearing government in our lives but that does nothing in terms of concrete change”. 

Sooner or later we will have to do all the usual stuff, identify and prioritize, triage, whatever you want to call it, and begin to go to work.

• First will be the Comprehensive Plan and the Annual and 20-year update process.
• The second will be submitting information to our state legislators as well as becoming involved with the people who will be suggesting changes to the GMA.

We will begin each ‘session’ of the forum with a short intro, then open the conversation up to general comment. Somewhere towards the end of each session, we’ll try to solidify thoughts and draw conclusions.

We will be continuing our communication with you in this newsletter. You’ll get progress reports, some thoughts and philosophy (of course!) and news that we think is important to our efforts. If for some reason you do not want to be on the mail list there is always an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each page. We welcome additions as well, so if you know anyone who might be interested in what we do let us know. We will contact them and ask their permission to be included. Politely, of course!

That’s about it. If you were invited, please show up. Who was it that said, “… 80% of life is just showing up”? Woody Allen? Wasn’t he a general contractor somewhere?

“One thing is for sure, 80% of life is NOT about shutting up”.

Thanks,

The Sentinel Group
Kittitas County Sentinel

Bruce Coe