First Person

Standing Room Only?

2006-04-25T06:48:00.000-07:00

One Day, That Economy Ticket May Buy You a Place to Stand - New York Times

Subtle Change

2005-11-23T12:53:00.000-08:00

When I first launched First Person off into the blogosphere, early this year, I didn't know much about blogging, really. To tell the truth, I had only seen one, maybe two blogs at that point, and both were of a more personal nature than First Person, which I envisioned at the time should have a more sophisticated, omniscient style and point-of-view.

Well now I'm not so sure about all that. Having read hundreds or perhaps even thousands of blogs during the past year, I now know that some of the best of them are very personal, journal-like, almost stream-of-consciousness writing.

Many of the better bloggers don't seem particularly concerned about style, or even content, but are instead, speaking their mind, as their thoughts take form (or not) and eschew editing of any kind. I don't think I would go quite that far; I can well surmise that most readers would not be interested in my unfettered recital of my every embryonic thought. Many years as a more formal writer have conditioned me to the value of at least some judicious editing, even if self-inflicted.

But I can promise writing on a much broader scale than before. More catholic in scope, less political, perhaps. After all, there is more to life than politics.

Blog is Back

2005-11-23T12:17:00.000-08:00

First Person has been a dormant blog now for some months, while I traveled and wrote on other topics.

I'm back now, and this space will be updated, if not hourly, then at least a few times per day.

Please check back often for news, features and opinion on the latest developments.

We Saw the Enemy and It Was Us

2005-02-09T11:20:00.000-08:00

The residents of Bayview, Idaho took the opportunity the night of February 8th to exercise their rights as citizens and to serve notice on a state agency that they will not sit idly by as an unnecessary nuisance is created near their homes. The meeting took place at the Bayview Community Center, where about seventy gathered to voice strong opposition to a state agency plan to create a classic nuisance in their back yard.

The controversy surrounds a plan put forth by the Idaho State Department of Fish & Game (IDF&G) to vastly expand an old open-air weapon firing range within the Farragut Wildlife Management Area on former federal land entrusted to the agency adjoining Farragut State Park. The state park and land on which the shooting range is located abuts the hamlet of Bayview, which overlooks Scenic Bay on Lake Pend Oreille.

The existing shooting range is a vestige of Farragut Naval Training Base, a large U.S. Navy facility which saw brief use between 1942 and was abandoned b y the late-1940s and eventually transferred to the State of Idaho for use as a state park and wildlife refuge. Little evidence of the U.S. Navy’s presence at Farragut remains, but the shooting range has survived. It is a nuisance to the residents of Bayview and surrounding rural acreages, but has been benignly tolerated in the interest of the “live and let live” way of thinking of most of the residents.

Now, however, comes the IDF&G with its plan to dramatically increase the size, scope and, particularly the volume of the ballistic activity. They want to spend more than $2 million to vastly increase the size of the range, in order to facilitate a venue where civilian, military and law enforcement personnel can fire a wide range of weapons. How this fits in with the agency’s mandate as a fish and wildlife conservator is beyond guessing.

When asked if the state would reconsider its plans in the face of public protest, the IDF&G, through its principal spokesman, regional wildlife habitat biologist Dave Leptich, was quoted in the February 8th edition of The Spokesman-Review, “…we’re not going to go back and make major adjustments or major revisions,” referring to the public outcry to either quash the plan, or revise it to build a quieter, more sensible indoor shooting range. Wrong answer. This display of arrogance and hubris has catalyzed neighboring residents to even more strident opposition to the plan, and they articulated it strongly at the Community Center meeting.

There are a lot of things wrong with this plan besides the intuitively obvious one of putting a large regional open-air shooting range within the boundaries of a wildlife preserve and state park. (If the state of Wyoming one day announced it was going to start using a flat area next to Old Faithful in Yellowstone for a bombing range for the National Guard, would it really be that much different than this idea?)

The first and perhaps most irksome thing about the way the IDF&G has gone about this is that there was little or no public input in the early stages of their promotion of the gun range expansion. They claim they held public meetings on the issue, but I’ve talked to a lot of people in the Bayview area, and no one heard of such meetings or attended them, and they most certainly were not held in Bayview. I’m not suggesting that the Bayview residents are the only ones with a stake in what is done within the Farragut Wildlife Management Area, but they are the ones, other than the wildlife, most impacted by the plan.

A second and very disturbing aspect of the proposal is the fact that the IDF&G, in its stubborn and unwavering course of action, has put forth specious scientific data as a basis for minimizing and understating the impact of noise on the park and the surrounding residential areas. One acoustics scientist, a highly-regarded expert in the field, told the IDF&G, “…the noise survey you conducted has absolutely no value.”

Underlying all this is the cynical view that, if flawed data can be used to get past the objections of the raggedy-assed public, then there sure as shootin’ ain’t anything anybody is going to be able to do about it once the range expansion is complete.

The stubborn fact is that Bayview and the inhabited area surrounding it is situated in a narrow basin surrounded by mountains and bordering a large body of water—all of which contribute to an acoustical transmission and even, at times and under certain conditions, amplification of the noise from the firing range.

Aside from the real and legitimate concerns about the noise impact on an otherwise tranquil, peaceful place, there are a number of other issues, e.g.,

Increased traffic and infrastructure shortfalls, i.e., sanitation, waste disposal, etc.;
Impact on wildlife;
soil contamination (lead);
Constraints on the use of the property contained in covenants attached to the original title conveyance from the federal to the state government;
Impact upon the Farragut State Park users, who in the main come to the park to enjoy nature and the peace and solitude, which is a principal attraction of the park and the reason for its existence in the first place;

Doubtless others will be raised in the days and weeks ahead.

One might ask why the IDF&G is so unswervingly adamant about doing this. The plan clearly falls outside the scope of the IDF&G mandate as a public agency. It appears to be behaving like a rogue agency in advocating this, particularly in its efforts to circumvent or ignore legitimate public protest. Questions have arisen about a hidden agenda being a motive at the root of the state’s position. Surely this will be examined carefully as the controversy unfolds.

So far in this, the state is often referred to as “They” and the concerned citizens, residents and taxpayers as “We”. But We are the state. If employees and officials (elected and non-elected) of the state need to be reminded of that from time to time, then that is one of the necessary obligations of an informed, engaged citizenry in a free republic.

First Person - An Introduction

2005-02-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

The premise of this column is to dispense my personal observations and opinions on how and why things work and don’t work in the public arena of today. Thus the title, “First Person” leaves no question that the views expressed herein are solely those of the author and no one else.

This Blog has the somewhat ambitious goal of addressing issues through the full range of public discourse, from the local situation in North Idaho, (which never lacks controversy) to national and world affairs.

Of the many merits of the Internet, perhaps the ultimate one is the speed and immediacy of information transfer. The Internet allows a writer overlooking the quiet splendor of Lake Pend Oreille in wintertime, to instantly obtain an update of election results in Iraq; read a statement by a member of the U.S. Congress in a committee hearing in Washington, DC; analyze a court ruling in rural Washington State; see the response of a federal agency to a hurricane in South Carolina; get the price of wheat in Nebraska, or the temperature in the Gilbert Islands. What could be information overload can also be a means to see patterns and trends, and to view current affairs in a more comprehensive way than has ever been possible at any time in history.

The internet is, among other things, a great keyhole into the backrooms and corridors of government and public life, through which we can get an unobstructed view and, putting our ear to the door, get an unadulterated “unspun” version of what is going on. In theory, this should enable us to build a better republic, by having more oversight of and more access to those who seek to govern us.

As Ronald Reagan once said, “Facts are stubborn things.” To the extent that far too many of the decisions that affect our lives are taken in contradiction of the facts or the public interest, this writer aims to do his small part to illuminate the more obscure, darker corridors of political and social power.

Randall Brink

Copyright ©2005 by Randall Brink. All Rights Reserved.