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

I read your editorial “La Conner needs to plan for more than just floods,” (Weekly News July 12) with great interest, and your words raised my eyebrows more than once. You see, you made a blanket statement, “No one in La Conner, elected officials, town staff, activists, or this paper, saw, much less grasped the opportunity and possibilities for working family housing when Dave Hedlin offered to sell his family’s Maple Avenue property in 2020.” Now, I think of myself as an activist, and I did see an alternative plan, even went out of my way to attempt to dialogue with Landed Gentry about transferring those building lots to a more appropriate site; no response!

You quoted Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” I like to back up one with the other, you see, imagination is much more valuable when backed up by knowledge and wisdom.

For years I have begged for a bit of space for a legitimate story to be written about how I came up with something as imaginative as dike housing. Six years is a long time to maintain patience and persistence. I ran for town council and tried to get people to see that I’m not, “asleep at the switch.” I’ve been pleading for the Port, town and county, for years, to help me get the right group of people in the room.

My plans are holistic and sound, from the physics, to the economics, to the psychology of our community. That “space for hundreds of apartments for those future workers, awaits the vision to unlock it.”

I’ve written letter after letter, trying to maintain a certain sense of diplomacy, but it seems to just get harder every day. Just because I’m a bit eccentric, doesn’t mean I’m dumb. On the contrary, I’m a knowledgeable, imaginative, visionary, inventor who is just trying to help his lifelong community. I have to ask, why are you afraid to interview me, do I come across too strident?

Maybe you didn’t read my recent letter about the Jenson property. I’ve spent the time to study the place, invested time in designing the property, taken input from the mayor and other community members. Maybe I’m too ad hoc, maybe there’s good reason for my being ignored. I’d sure like to know what it is.