I sit in Arch Cape watching the mist as it settles into the crevasses of our eastern mountain.  It reminds me of Carl Sandburg’s “The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.”  And at the same time, I hear the sounds of the ocean “bursting breakers, the backwashes with rolling pebbles”.  Arch Cape is a magical place.  Some here describe it as a portal to the sacred and the spiritual.  Whatever, it’s natural setting, privacy and seclusion calls to us, and we come here either for a brief interlude from our hectic life in one city or another or to settle down into its quietly alluring way.

Few of us want to be pulled from that cloak of peace and serenity into the harsh glare of business and politics.  The status quo is just right and we have an implicit hope/ assumption that things will remain pretty much as they are.  Huge inertia has to be overcome for us to peek our heads above the quietude of our lives and pay attention to local politics (I mean really … what could happen here that would be worth that amount of energy?).

The Board is in a different world, their own.  They hold monthly meetings to make decisions and they hand-pick committees to make recommendations.  They build web sites, post meeting minutes, make presentations at lightly attended community meetings and send informational flyers with quarterly bills.  And those presentations and flyers talk about the “mom, god and apple pie “of purchasing a forest (just like the local land conservancy).  The Board assumes that if no one comes to their monthly meetings and no one (or few) submits public comments, then everyone is in favor of what they are doing.  Thus, their surprise about the sudden ripple of discord across the community about the forest.

I think the disconnect is that, in Arch Cape, the silence of the community does not typically mean consent or indifference, it means blissful unawareness.

Local politics is exactly that – local.  Ideally, the political structure and machinations reflect the local culture.  In Arch Cape’s culture, the community assumes that the Board is there to run the business as usual and therefore gives the Board a lot of latitude.  The latitude is best summed up as ‘leave me alone unless something important happens’.

Buying a forest is definitely not business as usual.  It is something extremely different.   Operating the forest puts the rate payers at financial risk, logging it is inconsistent with the values of a portion of the community, and opening it for public recreation is in direct opposition to the reclusive lifestyle that a portion of the community has come here to build.  Buying a forest is a huge change in the District’s business that warrants a huge change in how the Board reaches out to the community to engage them.  The appropriate outreach, rather than lulling the community to sleep with lullabies, is to raise the community from their slumber with an alarm.

It has been a long time, if ever, that anything in Arch Cape demanded this type of outreach. The last time something of this magnitude happened was in 1993 (almost 30 years ago),  when we became a ‘special district’ Water District.  And that action required a vote of the much smaller community.  The implications of buying a forest are even more significant than becoming a special district, and community members never weighed in.

There is a certain element of insanity about the situation.  Some have expressed a feeling of helplessness with their lives being impacted without being asked.  Others characterize it as “indentured ownership without a say”.

The past is behind us, hopefully with a lesson learned.  Now, that we’ve had the wake-up call, perhaps the local politics can change to match the changing community’s culture, which is now more awake and aware. 

Our opportunity going forward is to refine the political structure and machinations in order to actively inform the community and meaningfully include their perspective in the Board’s decision-making process.