This week, a skatboarder swooped onto Olympic Drive for a head-on collision with a northbound car. The helmetless skateboarder hit the grill, was thrown onto the the windshield and rolled over the roof. Injures: little more than a sore sore neck and leg. Don’t tell your kids. They’ll bring this story up every time you nag them about wearing helmets and knee pads.

Also this week, a rash of car break-ins in the North Madison area. Vehicle owner’s manuals are apparently a hot item on the black market.

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Islander columnist Becky Fox Marshall entered the journalism world in the era of Woodward and Bernstein. Now, some of the best reporting is coming from Comedy Central and most people only hunger for tasty little morsels of news rather than full meal deals.

Read Marshall’s column below…

Industries and professions come and go with the times. It is part of the march of time. The iceman no longer cometh, because we have freezers in our houses. Farriers are few, and exist mostly for girls who ride in horse shows, rather than serving as a critical cog in the wheel of commerce. It’s a painful transition. It’s even more painful when it’s an industry to which you’ve devoted most of your working life, and surreal to watch it peak and fizzle within your lifetime. It’s downright scary when the industry is a cornerstone of democracy.

I speak, of course, of the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and likely, The Seattle Times. Seattle a no-traditional-newspaper town? How can that be? Last week, a list of 10 newspapers circulated in the surviving media as in their death throes – newspapers in the cities of Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Miami, Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Fort Worth and Cleveland. And while many in the media believed that community newspapers were not threatened, we on Bainbridge Island have seen drastic changes in our local newspapers.

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A number of people have contacted me about the cost the city of Bainbridge will bear for the May 19 change-of-government ballot measure.

In one of my stories last week, City Administrator Mark Dombroski predicted that the estimated $75,000 cost of the election would be split between the city and the Bainbridge Island School District, which is hoping to pass a capital bond on May 19.

Some readers have cited a lower-cost estimate noted by a city councilwoman that puts the city’s costs at around $15,000. The lower cost is based on the assumption that the ballot will be split three or four ways with measures from other jurisdictions.

Dombroski’s cost estimate is closer to the mark, according to the Kitsap County Elections Manager Dolores Gilmore. She estimated this morning that the two-item Bainbridge ballot will cost the city about $35,000.

Gilmore said May 19 Central and South Kitsap fire district measures will not be included on the Bainbridge ballot because Bainbride voters are not eligible to vote in those elections.