THE HONORABLE MAYOR RON HARDING

MAYOR HARDING’S STATE OF CITY ADDRESS TODAY!

Mayor Harding was quoted last Friday in the NVN that he will discuss his accomplishments as Mayor during this last State of the City Address of what is assured to be his first of at least two terms.

He mentioned two major areas of accomplishment:
1. TRANSPORTATION.
Expect the Mayor to highlight the completion on the Inner loop and LID-financed roads, as he does annually about the city roads projects. While the completion of these roads is a stellar achievement, there is a major disconnect as the City’s Newspaper of record asked the public in their Question of the Week,
“What do you want to hear Mayor Ron Harding address in the State of the City next week?”

4 or 5 answers were about the roads & traffic.
That tells everyone the public sees the traffic issue here as unresolved. As this writer mentioned many times previously, installing a center turn lane and sidewalks on Yelm Ave. does little to alleviate the traffic issue. The city should have widened Yelm Ave. W. to 5 lanes from 93rd to the SR 507 traffic light when they undertook construction to three lanes.

2. WATER.
Regardless of an appeal by the city to a Court ruling, how can the Mayor stand before the Chamber of Commerce and look them square in the face and tell everyone all is well with water, no pun intended, when 5 developments are not allowed to proceed being permitted because the city does not have enough water to support them?
Now, the Washington State Legislature has taken notice of Yelm’s issuing permits without proving available water as of February 5, 2009, and has Bill 5867 before that body “By Senators Fraser, Swecker, Pridemore, Ranker, Fairley, Kauffman, Marr, Regala and Morton
Verifying water supplies for new subdivisions.
Referred to Committee on ENVIRONMENT, WATER & ENERGY.”
With this Bill, looks like the City’s appeal in the water case is not viable. He will not share with the Chamber Forum this Bill before the State Legislature, count on that!

And one for the future:
1. RECREATION CENTER
“Some of the projects Harding would like to start planning include a recreation center…”
He mentioned this last year and a very worthwhile cause. However, what will he do; place a public facility in a private, rented building?
That was done with the Yelm Library and in almost 10 years, this city did little to nothing to get our public library in a public building, so now Mayor Harding has stated the Library will go into much smaller quarters with reduced amenities.

CRIME. (not brought up in the newspaper as a subject of Mayor Harding’s for today)
This topic will not even be discussed, or if it will, the increase in crime will be explained away by petty thieves and other incidents as a result of the economy, instead of the on-the-record testimony of several before this City Council over the last years that crime will increase because of the city’s grow, grow, grow policies.