Seeking Silverdale and Central Kitsap

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I’m a Silverdale resident and frequent walker on the Clear Creek Trail. But I had no idea the trail actually extends from the mouth of Clear Creek on Bucklin Hill Road all the way into Old Town. It’s just disguised as a sidewalk for most of that journey.

Trail advocate and volunteer coordinator Tex Lewis says the group stenciled Clear Creek Trail logos on the sidewalks from the Silverdale Beach Hotel all the way into Old Town Silverdale several years ago.

According to Lewis, the goal has always been to work with property owners in Old Town to see if the route of the trail could be moved closer to the water so more people could experience the waterfront. Well, the trail just took a step in that direction.

The Port of Silverdale just contributed to the trail by allowing access to one of its commercial properties at the end of Lowell Street. That, combined with permission from property owner Ron Templeton, allowed the trail to run from the end of Byron Street up the waterfront to Lowell.
View Map

A Boy Scout Troop looking for a project was put to work creating a crushed rock trail from the Templeton property to  the end of Lowell Street.

Lewis says that the trail follows the sidewalk on the waterfront along Bayshore Drive, then follows the walk in front of the building housing the Yacht Club Broiler. To link that point of the trail to the end of Lowell, however, will require other property owners to grant beach access to the trail.

On the other end, the plan calls for the trail to follow Bayshore, cut between the old Sandpiper Restaurant and the water, and link up to the waterfront walking path around the Silverdale Hotel, and finallly to the walking trail at Old Mill Park. Access to the area around the Sandpiper is pending redevelopment of the restaurant site, Lewis said.

— Jeff

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My posts on this blog have been a lot less frequent in the past few weeks as the demands of my real job have increased some.

As strategic planning manager for Kitsap Regional Library, I’ve been meeting with community leaders from across the county to gather their ideas about how public needs for library services are changing and what they think the library system of 2015 will have to offer to meet those needs. So far, we have had discussions with all three county commissioners, two of the four mayors, all five of the superintendents of Kitsap school systems and with the chairwoman of the Kitsap Republican Party. Still to come are interviews with a third mayor, the Democratic chairman and with some other leaders.

In each case so far, the representatives of KRL have been given much to think about. From these discussions, we are pulling together a set of vision statements that will become the structure of the library’s new strategic plan for 2010-2015. I hope to be able to share more about this process with you after the KRL Board of Trustee’s retreat next week.

This process, and the resulting action plans the library will create to make the strategic plan a reality, could have significant impact on Silverdale and Central Kitsap. A new library facility in Silverdale is much needed, both for the community and for the library system as a whole (I’ll write more about that specifically in a future post). The intent of both KRL and Kitsap County is to locate the new Silverdale branch library adjacent to the village green that is proposed for the Silverdale Community Campus.

How to make that a reality is a major question that the library is trying to address. I hope to have more to say on that soon.

— Jeff

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I’m now finishing up “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by Leonard Mlodinow.

One of the most interesting things about the book is not it’s discussion of how random some things are, but it’s discussion of how we as humans want to insist that there are patterns in random occurrences. That often leads us to falsely believe that random events are actually things we control. He uses a great example from the world of finance and mutual funds.

Wall Street, he notes, is always crowning “superstars” who in turn are interviewed by every financial publication and asked to recommend the best stock buys. Studies routinely find that if you actually were to invest in the stocks these gurus pick, you would often lag far behind the return of the market index. Let’s look at one example, though, of how randomness is seen as a pattern of successful stock picking by a mutual fund manager.

Bill Miller, the manager of the Legg Mason Value Trust Fund, was named the “greatest money manager of the 1990s” by Money magazine, “Fund Manager of the Decade” by Morningstar and was listed as one of the 30 most influential people in investing in 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 by SmartMoney magazine (I’m not sure what his problem was in 2002). Why? Because for 15 years in a row, the performance of his mutual fund beat the Standard &Poors 500 index. One analyst was quoted as putting the odds of having a 14-year streak besting the S&P 500 purely by chance as 372,529 to 1.

Actually, that analyst must have flunked his statistics course. Here’s why.

It’s correct that if you were to ask what the chances were, at the beginning of his streak, that Bill Miller would best the S&P 500 for 15 consecutive years, the odds against that happening by chance might indeed have been 372,529 to 1. But that’s not what really happened. What really happened is that there are more than 6,000 fund managers, and there are many different sets of 15-year periods where one of them could have beaten the S&P 500. As Mlodinow writes, “So the relevant question is, if thousands of people are tossing coins once a year and have been doing so for decades, what are the chances that one of them, for some period of 15 years or longer, will toss all heads?” In fact, that probability is far, far higher than the chance of a particular individual tossing 15 heads in a row.

Given the number of funds being managed, the odds are almost three in four, 75 percent likely, that one of them would have a 15-year winning streak against the S&P 500.

“So rather than being surprised by Miller’s streak [and I would add, casting accolades as if he were a stock picking god]” Mlodinow concludes, “I would say that if no one had achieved a streak like Miller’s, you could have legitimately complained that all those highly paid managers were performing worse than they would have by blind chance!”

It’s human nature to see patterns where randomness exists. It’s also in our nature to want to believe we control things when events are being dictated instead by pure chance. That tends to skew our perception in ways that can get us in trouble.

Interesting book. I recommend it.

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One of the things I love about the library (aside from the fact that I now work there) is that I can explore all the books I hear about without having to buy them. It has saved me a lot of money in the past couple of years. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve bought in my life and then been disappointed that the book did not live up to its description. Now, I try them out for free, and if I find one I really want to keep, I can buy it.

I’ve been reading a book called “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives,” and last night came across some passages that I wanted to share because of how often I see people making decisions based on what is actually an incorrect presumption about what a person’s performance suggests about their skills. “The Drunkard’s Walk” author Leonard Mlodinow talks at one point in the book about two Hollywood executives. One, who had a few good years with one studio, was toasted as a brilliant movie mind; the other, who had a few bad years with a studio, was derrided as a terrible choice to head the business. In fact, Mlodinow points out, making such decisions based on five years of performance is contrary to what mathematics tells us about randomness. Here’s the excerpt:

“Let’s assume based on their knowledge and abilities, each CEO has a certain probability of success each year. And to make things simple, let’s asume that for these CEOs successful years occcur …. 60 percent of the time. Does that mean we should exprect, in a given five year period, that a CEO will have three good years?

“No. The chances that in a given five-year period a particular CEO’s performance will reflect that underlying rate are only 1 in 3. Translated to the Fortune 500, that means that over the past five years about 333 CEOs would have exhibited performance that did not reflect their true ability. Moreover, we should expect, by chance alone, about 1 in 10 of these CEOs to have five winning or losing years in a row. What does this tell us? It is more reliable to judge people by analyzing their abilities than by glancing at the scorecard.

“Going against the law of small numbers requires character. For while anyone can sit back and point to the bottom line as justification, assessing instead a person’s actual knowledge and actual ability takes confidence, thought, good judgment and, well, guts. You can’t just stand up in a meetin with your colleagues and yell, ‘Don’t fire her. She was just on the wrong end of a Bernoulli series.’ Nor is it likely to win you friends if you stand up and say of the gloating fellow who just sold more Toyota Camrys than anyone else in the history of the dealership, ‘It was just a random fluctuation.’ And so it rarely happens. Executive’s winning years are attributed to their brilliance, explained retroactively through incisive hindsight. And when people don’t succeed, we often assume the failure accurately reflects (their talents and abilities).”

How many leaders are actually given a long enough time at the helm to show their results are not just a function of random chance? Interesting question.

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Congratulations are due to Silverdale’s Ray Frederick, a longtime area fisherman who brought in the grandfather of all Puget Sound halibut last weekend during the Kitsap Poggie Club’s annual halibut derby.

The Peninsula Daily News had a good story about his experience along with a photo of Frederick and his 233-pound halibut.

Frederick, a former president of the Poggie Club, has been fishing in Puget Sound saltwater since the early 1950s, but he’d never before encounter a fish like the one that won the derby’s $440 grand prize. But the fact is that few Washington fishermen have. The state record halibut is 288 pounds.

Frederick hooked his big catch last Sunday just west of Point Wilson, off of Port Townsend, while fishing with his partner, Dick McDonald of Bremerton.

The photo that accompanies the story shows Frederick laid out on the bed of his pickup truck alongside his catch. The halibut is just about as long as Frederick is. He told the Peninsula Daily News that it took him about 30 minutes to bring the fish up into the boat; and the club did not have sufficient equipment to weigh the fish when he got it in for official recording (they had to use a scale at a nearby grocery store).

Quite a day for the 76-year-old Fredrick.

— Jeff

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Three positions on the five-member Central Kitsap School Board will be up for election this fall. In recent years, there has been little interest in these board positions.

Two years ago, in 2007, board members Chris Stokke and Christy Cathcart were re-elected without opposition. Four years ago, in 2005, board members Bruce Richards and LeeAnn Powers were elected without opposition. Back another two years, in 2003, Richards, Carl Johnson and Christy Cathcart all were elected without opposition. In fact, there’s been only one contested race for the Central Kitsap school board since 2001: Stokke faced Lawrence Herbert in 2003.

In fact, board member Carl Johnson didn’t want to run again two years ago and, according to Marietta Nelson’s recent Kitsap Sun story, no one filed for his position. As a result, he was put back on the board despite his desire to retire from it. Carl, who has served the community honorably as a board member for 14 years, says he has no desire to continue and will not agree to keep his seat if no one files for the position again.

This is not intended as a criticism of the school board or its current membership. But one measure of community engagement is active political involvement. There are commissioners elected to the boards of the Port of Silverdale, the Silverdale Water District, and the Central Kitsap Fire District. But let’s face it, because Silverdale is not incorporated, the pre-eminent local governmental unit is the Central Kitsap School District. What does it say about our community if no one wants to engage the public to serve on the board that governs CK schools?

All of us in the community deserve choices when we go to the polls to select our local leaders. Current board members are ill served, as is the community as a whole, if they are never forced by a challenger to defend their performance as board members.

Johnson represents the area around Jackson Park and Silverdale elementary schools; Eric Greene, who was appointed to replace Powers, represents the area around Cougar Valley and Green Mountain elementary schools. Bruce Richards is the other incumbent whose term is up.

The filing period for the fall elections is June 1 through June 5. If you know anyone who lives in the districts where seats are up this year who you think would be a worthy candidate for school board, encourage them to consider a run.

— Jeff

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I intended to post on this news this morning before I left for work, but the server where these blogs reside was down for a while and I couldn’t post until now.

Today’s Sun features a report that the county has signed an agreement with the Pierce County YMCA that will result, if fundraising goals by the organization are met, with construction beginning next year on a new Y at the Silverdale Community Campus, which will lie between Randall Way and Poplars Ave just north of Bucklin Hill Road. The facility, modeled after the one in Gig Harbor, would be opening sometime in the fall of 2011.

Initially, the new YMCA would be surrounded by surface parking lots and look out on a new village green, about the size of a football field. Eventually, the plan is to develop other public and private use buildings around the green and put in a parking structure to serve the Y and other tenants. The Kitsap Regional Library has signed a letter of intent speaking of its plans to eventually build a new Silverdale branch library at the community campus site.

I’ve blogged about the community campus plans before, so I won’t go into detail here. If you want to see past blog posts on it, click on the “Community Campus” tag in the right hand column on this web page.

This is good news for the Silverdale community.

— Jeff

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You have two weeks to submit your suggestion in the Central Kitsap Community Council’s “name the road” contest.
The road in question is the extension of Waaga Way west of SR3 to Frontier Road.

I’m not sure why Waaga Way isn’t an appropriate name for the extension. It seems like there are more than enough roads around here that have one name west of an intersection, or north of an intersection, and a different name east or south. Just makes it that much more difficult to get around in a geography where water already makes circumnavigation somewhat difficult.

But I’ll accept the spirit of the contest and give you this link to download an entry form. You can fill out and drop the completed form at collection boxes at the Silverdale Branch of Kitsap Regional Library or at the office of the Central Kitsap Reporter on Randall Way, or you can mail your completed form to the Central Kitsap Community Council Road Contest, attn: Dana Daniels, 614 Division St., MS-4, Port Orchard, WA 98366-4676.

The person submitting the winning entry will receive a $50 gift certificate from the Yacht Club Broiler in Old Town and a $50 gift card from Best Buy in Silverdale.

Only Kitsap County residents are eligible. Entries must be received by 5 p.m., Friday, May 15. All entries become the property of Kitsap County. The top three entries will be selected by the contest judges. The winning entry will be determined by the Kitsap County Board of County Commissioners. That decision shall be final.

The extension will be the first new road built in Central Kitsap in many years. Here’s the link to the county’s web site with information about the project.

— Jeff