Now, I have already said my piece about the Friday office closures — you can look back at last week's column if you missed it, and I trust you did not — so I am not going to relitigate that whole situation here, except to say that it is still happening and I still have thoughts and we can leave it at that for now. What I want to talk about this week is the two open seats on the Ferry County Planning Commission, District #3, because if there are two things the people who actually live here should be paying close attention to, it is land use decisions and who is sitting in the room when those decisions get made. Two seats. Both vacant. And the way they are being filled is by written letter of interest to the Board of County Commissioners, which is fine, that is the process, I am not arguing with the process — but I will say that back when Gerald Hoffsteader was running District #3 outreach in, I believe it was 1987 or thereabouts, he used to post notices at the hardware store on Clark and also personally telephone people he thought would do a good job, and you know what, those seats did not sit empty for very long under that system. I am not saying anyone should be making personal telephone calls necessarily. I am just saying it worked.
And another thing — while we are on the subject of things being done online now — Ferry County Environmental Health has launched a new permitting portal, which I am told went live back in April, and I want to be fair here because I know several people who have used it and found it straightforward enough, and I do appreciate that you can now track your application without driving down to Tessie Avenue and waiting to speak to someone who may or may not be available depending on, say, what day of the week it is. The new system handles septic permits and food establishment permits and complaints and I imagine a few other things, and look, progress is progress, I am not a person who refuses to learn new things — I learned to use the self-checkout at the grocery store and I have opinions about that too but this is not the time. What I will say is that there are people in this county, and I am thinking of several of them right now, who do not have reliable internet access and for whom "just submit it online" is not the simple instruction it sounds like, and I hope the people making these decisions are thinking about that, because the people who actually live here are not all living the same version of Ferry County, and some of them are living a version with very slow satellite internet and a printer that runs out of ink at the worst possible moment.
Which brings me back to the Planning Commission, because here is what land use decisions actually affect — it is not abstract, it is your neighbor's property line and the road that gets rezoned and the thing that gets built where the thing you liked used to be. I have watched enough of those decisions get made in this county to know that who sits in that room matters enormously, and two empty chairs in District #3 is not a small thing, it is an invitation, and I genuinely hope someone steps up to fill it who has been here long enough to remember what things looked like before and cares enough about what they look like going forward. The letter goes to 290 East Tessie Avenue, Republic, and I am not above repeating that twice. Also I want to note, and this is only loosely related, that the parking situation near the county office entrance has not improved and I did mention it previously and I will simply say it is still a situation and leave it there for now.
That's all for this week. You know where to find me.