news story / By Heidi Walters

District Fever

It’s election time and you are super excited about sewers and schools

(Nov. 3, 2011)  Never discount the potential for excitement in a minor election. School boards? Community services districts? No snoozing, citizen! This is your chance to dive into the conflicted heart of what makes us human: the desire to promote one’s (superior) ideas over another’s, coupled with the altruistic desire to serve one’s community. (Or, through the gimlet eye: wanting power and/or to fill one’s days interestingly.)

In the Nov. 8 election, voters will watch the drama unfold on the boards of a half dozen school districts, four community service districts, and one mysterious Resort Improvement District. (That would be in Shelter Cove, where recently a sharp-tongued phone-hanger-upper at the RID refused to answer a simple inquiry about what issues the district grapples with because she doesn’t “like talking to newspaper reporters because they never tell the truth.”)

Plus, these districts and their boards educate our children or deal with our poop, provide us with clean drinking water and maintain nice parks for us to dawdle in. So regardless of whether there’s a power struggle or not, they impact us hugely.

Case in point: Up in Willow Creek, three positions are open on the five-member community services district board. The district, among other things, manages three big parks and the town’s water system. It recently put in a new water system. Now it’s studying whether it can afford a new wastewater treatment system for gray water from restaurants and other water-intensive businesses in the downtown district. If it doesn’t put in the system, the town essentially can’t grow: The ground on the main drag is so saturated that the county has forbidden Willow Creek to allow another restaurant to be opened until it improves drainage, says board member Vonnie Gower. Gower’s seat is not up for election, but her sister-in-law is running for one of the open seats.

Gower says there haven’t been any complaints about how the board’s been directing things. “People are just interested in serving,” she says.

Some districts are embattled. The Manila Community Services District’s board, for instance, apparently had a storm-out at one of its recent meetings. Says board member Dendra Dengler — who admits she’s often alone in her opinions on the board — it got real ugly: “Somebody from the audience made a comment about the way the meeting was going, the president [Michael Fennell] didn’t like the comment, it got heated, and Michael wanted to call the police.”

Three seats are up for election in Manila (not Dengler’s), with seven candidates, including one incumbent. Manila’s got weighty issues, including whether to annex Samoa and Fairhaven; rising water rates (because of the loss of the pulp mill, which had subsidized the system’s costs); whether to lower or raise water and sewer connection fees; loss of its recreation program; a lawsuit over dune restoration; and financial intrigue — a confusing saga over a $245,000 deficit and a proposal to write it off.

Meanwhile, the McKinleyville Community Service District is suing the county over its multifamily housing plan. Lots of fun there for the board, which has two open seats and three candidates vying for them — including preeminent thorn-in-the-side David Elsebusch, whose avid citizenship puts us all to shame.

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE