La Conner Weekly News - Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper

Dear citizens:

I want to thank everyone who has engaged in the voting process, even if you didn’t vote for me. I certainly don’t have all the answers to our problems, yet my ideas and ideologies do fit our small town. As you all well know, it’s the tourists that butter our toast. Sure, there’s our Indian Tribe, Mavrik Marine and Dunlap Towing that assist, but without our beautiful landscape, tulip fields, swans and geese, we’d not have the tourists walking our streets. We’d be beggars with a tin cup, hoping for a nickel and a dime, to pay our public works, to fix millions of dollars’ worth of expenses.

We have not enough fish in our nearby waters, we have not enough flood protection for our seaside town, we have not enough wintertime income, of that I’ve been assured. Some of us would be plenty happy to be left alone, to while away our days, sitting in our little paradise, far away from the maddening crowds.

Well, some of us are artists and musicians and architects, trying to make a living. We’re still renting, paying mortgages and it’s not easy when our cool town is in a somewhat remote and cold corner of the county. Keep us on the downlow, we don’t want us to overflow, yet we have to create a more sustainable (and bigger) cash flow. Good golly Miss Molly, we have to get a bit more creative than which color of paint and pitch of the roof and realize that this little art filled town has it a little bit backward, isn’t art in the eye of the “beholder?”

Aren’t our customers as diverse as the currents in the sea, aren’t we supposed to appreciate the diversity of you and me? Aren’t we supposed to have a little pride in what we create? Aren’t we happy when we’re invited to put our work in a show, or someone puts some money in our cup, when we put music in their ears? Don’t we appreciate our chefs and servers, baristas and clam diggers and the open fields with their wide-open vistas?

Again, thanks for your vote and thanks for voting.

Glen S. Johnson

La Conner