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I’ll tell the story of how I know so much about the appointed oversight and advisory boards.

A few years ago, when we were building our house, I became aware that the county was trying to form a “stormwater district’ that included the neighborhood where I was building. The purpose of this stormwater district was supposedly to benefit Birch Bay, a neighboring town (which is still unincorporated) We don’t live in Birch Bay and we never even drive through there if we can help it.

So, I started looking into this new stormwater district and found out that it was a scheme to get rural property owners to help pay for improvements to Birch Bay. Birch Bay had tried to get the BP refinery as part of the district and failed, but BP offered that they could help the town draw in all the rural properties and charge them per sq. foot of property, making the bulk of the funding come from people who did not live in Birch Bay.

So, I got busy reading the plan for this “Stormwater District” and found that it was to be run by an appointed board that would be funded by the fees that were collected. The actual work that would be done, would not be funded by the fees because fees must be spent in the area where they are collected, Got that, can’t take money from me for storm water and use it in Birch Bay, so that money is to be used to fund this paid board that runs the district. That never happened, or so I’m told. The advisory board claims to get their funding from an outside, unnamed source.

Anyway, during the community discussion period, I came up with a report by the state dept of ecology that named BP as one of two large property owners, having the greatest impact on our watershed. So, in the last minutes of the last public meeting, I stood up and asked the CH2MHill Contractor, how he could leave BP out of the district, when the state said that their property was one of the two main properties having the largest impact on the district. He said that I was right and that the county had withheld the report from him, that there is no way that they could leave BP out of the stormwater district under those circumstances.

BP was ordered to pay $164,000/yr under the fee schedule that BP had recommended for the property owners. But, then behind closed doors, BP met with the County Council and changed all that and then even got themselves a seat on both the secret appointed storm water advisory board and the citizen stormwater board that does nothing but rubber stamp the advisory board.

Recently, this board made a decision that will greatly benefit BP and once again negatively impact the residents of the area. When I complained, I was rudely shut down and labeled a conspiracy theorist. I said that it didn’t matter what they called me because it was illegal for them to pass this regulation when BP was benefiting financially from the decision. So, they took BP off the both boards before they passed the regulation.

It’s a classic pay to play scheme that the politicians and BP have been playing and the final impact is still not known.