This week, a young lady took a Land Rover off the road and then launched it into the foggy air. She hit a tree while airborne and then a house when she landed. She was OK. The Land Rover and house and tree were not.
Also, this was a bad week for pedestrians. One of them even got cited for not using a crosswalk to cross the highway (after he was knocked into a ditch by a Lexus and taken to Harborview). The nearest crosswalk was in Suquamish.
…Well it’s about to get worse.
Or, at least that’s what the city Finance Director Elray Konkel is hinting at.
He said today that 2009’s budgeted revenues are now expect to be “substantially lower than projected.”
Konkel will reveal the new projections at a special city finances workshop on Wednesday. The meeting starts at 5 p.m. and precedes the regular City Council meeting at 7.
The city’s already noted that ’08’s year-end cash balance came in at about $1.2 million under projections. The new numbers spurred talk last week of a 15 percent cut to the operations budget, including possible layoffs.
The new projections for ’09 will likely lead to another round of cuts.
I’ll keep you posted.
The Bainbridge Island Land Trust, an organization that has helped preserve over 400 acres, will celebrate its 20th anniversary with an event featuring award-winning nature writer Robert Michael Pyle on Friday.
Pyle won a 2007 National Outdoor Book Award for “Sky Time in Gray’s River,” a reflection on the flora, fauna and people of a small community in southwest Washington.
The land trust event will also honor island resident Charles Schmid with the Phyllis Young Award for his decades of commitment to environmental protection. Schmid has worked to clean-up the former Wyckoff creosote treatment facility on Eagle Harbor, establish trails and lead the Association of Bainbridge Communities for many years.
Established by a small group of islanders in 1989 to help landowners permanently protect the natural character of their properties, the land trust has helped acquire and preserve over 400 acres of forest, wetland and shore. The trust owns 41 acres and has established 44 conservation easements linking protected areas.
