Save the Date!! Please come join us on August 15 at 6 pm as we have the first Evening Public Hearing in recent history. I'm not sure how far back you would have to go to find a public hearing held in the evening.

Sure, there have been evening public meetings on occasion-like when they were trying to sell us on Prop. 1, the Conservation District fees, the Clean Water Utility tax-but an actual hearing, when we either adopt or deny? I have never seen an evening one here.

Of course my cohorts will probably make sure that this requires some overtime pay. Surely they will see that it gets an abundance of attention for heavily burdening the staff and other elected officials. I disagree that any of this has to be the case, but let me know your opinion. Go to my blog (CamanoKelly.com) and answer the poll questions on the subject.

The Hearing will be on the decriminalizing of the animal control laws. What this means is, if your dog gets away from you and is reported off your property, you would receive a fine as opposed to having to go to court. If your neighbors' dog is constantly over at your house uninvited, (as is the case on the private road we live on), after the third offense your neighbors can be prosecuted criminally.

Last month was the annual NACO (National Association of County Officials) conference in Portland, Oregon. Yes, in a recent newsletter I complained of the other two Commissioners attending such an event at your expense. Then some of you informed me that you didn't have the opportunity to be at those events and you felt I should go. So I did.

I attended several education workshops, a number of beneficial luncheons, and interchanged with many potential vendors. I had decided during the drive down to partake in as much that was Law & Justice related as possible. My thought was that since most Counties spend between 58-74% of their current expense on Law & Justice, I should spend most of my time there.

The bulk of one day was devoted to onsite tours of Multnomah County's (Portland) Juvenile Detention system. On the bus ride to and from, I spoke and listened about concerns in various localities around the Country.

I was encouraged that some of the ideas I've been considering for our County are indeed doable and not out of the ordinary. I look forward to bringing these things up for discussion once I have them a little more polished.

On the 21st of last month, the Washington Policy Center held its annual Environmental Policy Conference in Seattle where over 300 people paid to attend. The morning was full of panel discussions, and the luncheon provided an awards ceremony with the keynote speech delivered by a co-founder of Greenpeace.

The panel discussions were extremely educational with many audience members asking some tough questions. The point I got from the first panel, which included a scientist, a consultant, and a state representative, was that we need legislation requiring periodic review of Scientific Integrity.  

Take Global Warming for example. If we had never found out about the communications that showed this consensus was based on desired outcome and not Science, there would have never been a reason to start calling it, "Climate Change." All right, that one wasn't specifically talked about at the conference, but I think you can get the jist of why we need review of Scientific Integrity.

The second panel consisted of a chief of the Department of Ecology (DOE), a former bureaucrat turned business advocate, and a spokesperson for the Puget Sound Partnership (PSP). The interesting thing with this discussion was that the PSP had no answer for the question, "Aren't you ignoring Science with your suggestions for bulkheads in the Sound?" When the PSP spokesperson was asked why their agency only spent 2% of their revenue on Science last year, the answer was basically, "we advocate for whoever funds us; we are not Scientists.                                                                                                                                                                        Click Here, for a story about their spending $27,000 (PSP with DOE grant) to produce a video about picking up your dog poop.

That brings me to the outstanding lunchtime presentation. Patrick Moore was with Greenpeace at its conception and remained with the group as it became an international organization. As one of the less then ten regional World Directors, he found himself being the only scientist at the roundtable.

That didn't matter much, he thought, With issues such as Save the Whales and nuclear testing, you didn't need to be a Rocket Scientist to be concerned. But when it came to wanting a worldwide ban on the use of chemicals such as chlorine, which the group wanted to pursue, some scientific knowledge would come in handy. Especially since, as he points out, chlorine is an element of the periodic table and used to purify water.

Check out this link for much more on this man's work: Environmentalists bad for the environment, former leader says, Or do like I did and pick up his book: Confessions of a Greenpeace dropout.