| | 
--
OPINION AND EDITORIAL | |
BART'S BIG MOVE TO BLOW UP SULTAN
Is the timing right for voters to deep six Sultan as a stand alone burg?
August 18, 2010
 Driving into Sultan over the Sultan River bridge. Here the Sultan River meets the Skykomish River. SkyValleyChronicle.com staff photo. CLICK TO ENLARGE
In a broadcast news report Tuesday night on Seattle’s KOMO-TV about Sultan’s latest political football fight, a veteran reporter for the station let slip into the story a very dated and no longer factual image of the Sky Valley town as “little more than a speed trap on the way to Stevens Pass.”
The report was about long time local Sultan resident and real estate agent Bart Dalmasso leading an effort via petition to disincorporate (dissolve) the town as a legal entity and send it back into Snohomish “unincorporated” county land.
Bart thinks it will save the local taxpayers a fair amount of money in the lean times of this still lingering Great Recession. He could be right.
Tiny Sultan is semi-famous (among other things) for spending over $100,000 a couple years ago – in a burg infamous for budget shortfalls, mismanagement and not having two nickels to rub together for years - to hire a young city administrator, Debbie Knight, who’d never held the position before. No one batted at an eye at the hire or the money for the gig.
She now makes over $130,000 a year. Sweet deal if you can get one in this economy (or any economy).
The current community development director Bob Martin pulls down almost $120,000 a year. (You could count on your toes the number of working stiffs in Sultan who reported an annual income to the IRS last year of over $100,000).
Government beezness at Sultan city hall done been berry-berry good to a few folks, thanks to those generous Sultan taxpayers.
Dalmasso has put together a group called “Independent Citizens Acting Now” (I CAN) and is trying to get enough signatures on a petition to get the issue on the ballot early next year.
But back to the TV guy for a moment: this is important because it eventually ties into why the citizens of Sultan should perhaps take Bart and his “blow-the-town-up” petition seriously.
The TV reporter Tuesday night seemed totally unaware that the “speed trap” stuff about Sultan is a dated, ghost-image of the town from the 1970’s and early 80’s – corresponding roughly to the reporter’s long gone salad days as a high profile, then curly haired young 1970’s reporter - when the town was often correctly labeled a speed trap.
OF SPEED TRAPS AND COP TAILGATE PARTIES
But that was when Sultan had over a dozen police officers with little more to do (there wasn’t much crime in Sultan to speak of as there isn’t now except for the occasional god awful and bloody murder case) than congregate up around the Dutch Cup restaurant and a few other hot spots, drink coffee and spend a fun evening or afternoon pulling over and ticketing U.S. Highway 2 motorists by the dozens who never quite got the hang of dropping it down to 35 mph when the city limits came into view.
Long time locals have memories of those long ago days when squad cars three and four deep would congregate daily (and nightly) in an almost tailgate party like atmosphere in Sultan for extended periods of time.
But that hasn’t been a factual image of the town for a very long time.
Nevertheless, last night’s LSM (Lame Street Media) tee-vee report served to extend the life of that incorrect stereotype of Sultan by another five to ten years.
Eventually that overkill of police officers in Sultan went the way of the dodo bird, as did the speed trap efforts.
HELL BENT ON GETTING RID OF THE COPS
And by 2007 and 2008, with a decimated police force down to four or five officers – and a raging battle between the then police chief and city hall underway – two of the town’s mayors (one of which was a preacher who got caught saying not nice things about certain people on the Internet) and most of the city council were hell bent on doing away with the local police force for good.
And they did.
They were aided in those efforts by a tiny National Enquirer type, heavily slanted Sultan town “newspaper” run by a then real estate agent who was part of the old family town pecking order and who had a brother who was a sitting Sultan city councilman at the time. (Slanted as in being a drone for the self-serving views espoused by city hall, which was part of that pecking order).
It was a strange twist of a time in Sultan (roughly 2000 through 2009) with enough skullduggery underway (including folks trying to intimidate into silence a lady who wanted to make public meetings, well, public meetings again) to make up a dozen pulp fiction novels.
You can read about that whacko time in Sultan’s recent political history in this Op-Ed piece from September 2008 in SkyValleyChronicle.com located HERE
That Op-Ed piece is, by the way, the only place you’ll find a historical narrative of what was really happening in Sultan in those days.
All other media in the area at the time either did not cover the real story of what was happening in the community, for reasons only they know, or if they did print a story or two about something when events got ugly or out of hand, the reporter simply called a friendly face at Sultan city hall for a friendly quote (and blatantly self-promoting world view).
At any rate, after years of contentious nastiness of all sorts and by many, the Sultan city council voted unanimously in November 2008 to get rid of its local police force in favor of a contract for law enforcement services with the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office.
The county began delivering services to Sultan on January 1, 2009.
So you could say that Sultan city officials themselves saw the light – and the wonderful benefits to the community - of getting rid of local, city employed workers (the kind with a badge) and turning to the county for answers.
Hey, why hire and maintain your own when you can outsource by contract?
Seems like Bart Dalmasso & Company is only following the city’s lead.
Curiously, it’s only been under the new policing contract with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s office that all the recent high profile (and ghastly) Sultan murder cases seem to have occurred. Some folks wonder now what all the fuss was in getting rid of the local cop shop since no one seems to be any safer.
CUTTING SLACK WHERE SLACK IS DUE
But one can cut the KOMO TV reporter a bit of slack for perpetuating a long dead negative stereotype of the community, being that a long line of clueless and hapless mayors and city council members - mental midgets, many of them - have done virtually nothing over the years to combat that long embedded Seattle media view of the town which rears its ugly head from time to time (in the form of those stereotypes) like clockwork.
It is as if the entire city hall crowd is scared to death to confront media when the media is wrong and correct reporters when they needlessly perpetuate incorrect stereotypes about the town that do damage to citizens in the community and the reputation of the place they have chosen to live.
As a result of this timidity (fear?) on the part of city hall, the same negative stereotypes about Sultan are perpetuated ad infinitum in the news media over and over like an endless loop trailer in news stories.
WHAT THOSE STEREOTYPES COST HOMEOWNERS IN CASH
We figure the town’s various embedded - and consistently unchallenged media fostered stereotypes - cost homeowners in Sultan about 25% of the real value inherent in their homes and land. (Negative stereotypes have a way of keeping families away and driving down real estate prices).
Or put another way, you could say that having the town as a stand alone legal entity called Sultan (the name itself is now synonymous with bad vibes, bad crimes and bad times as far as LSM media goes) extracts a 25% premium from homeowners on the value of their real estate each and every year in addition to the cost of running a very expensive city hall with grossly overpaid paper pushers.
The combined spine of the Sultan mayor, city administrator and the city council when it comes to publicly speaking out to media - when media grossly misrepresents the community with damaging stereotypical phrases and images or prints outright lies and fabrications about its local police force - is about as substantial as that found in an 8-ounce jellyfish.
You’ll never mistake that crowd for fight-to-the-death warriors.
An example of this is a blatantly obvious hatchet job a Seattle newspaper did on Sultan in July 2009, again perpetuating a long time stereotype that paints the town in a bad light.
Oddly, SkyValleyChronicle.com was – as far as we could determine – the only Sky Valley news source (and only source in Western Washington) to call a time out, call a spade a spade and correct the misinformation spread by that story in a piece we did on July 21, 2009 located HERE
We said in that piece at the time, “we’ll wager a Danish not one official pencil pusher from Sultan city hall has yet written a letter to the Times protesting the hatchet job and pointing out with facts exactly how inaccurate that portrait of their town was.”
We’ll wager the same Danish today that letter was never written nor a protesting phone call made to the Times.
The Chronicle was only surprised that the Times piece – or the KOMO TV piece last night - didn’t pull out yet another well worn Sultan stereotype: that of a 28-year old toothless, dirty T-shirt wearing, meth-tweeker looking guy with no shoes, no education, who doesn’t know his eyeball from a bowling ball yet has been cornered by a reporter to give an on camera quote about one thing or the other -- and to the everlasting horror of community members he does just that.
And happily. And with a big, toothless grin.
Over the years that has been one of the prime stereotypes of an average Sultanite that TV crews sought out and highlighted in their reports. (Now think about the value of your home again).
PERHAPS DALMASSO MAY BE ON TO SOMETHING
It’s possible the 70-year old Dalmasso – who has long been a town insider and “good ol’ boy” that has now angered some of that old boy/old girl town clan with his newly found desire to deep six Sultan - could be on to something.
Maybe the time is right for citizens to get rid of a bloated, expensive city hall that never made much sense to begin with, caused a lot of folks a lot of grief over the years, and isn’t even smart enough to stick up for the town when Seattle news media types continue to portray the same old negative stereotypes of the community over and over and over.
If Dalmasso and his crowd are successful (they only need to get half the city's 2,274 registered voters to sign on the dotted line to get the thing on the ballot) and voters swing their way, Sultan would become the first city in this state to vanish into the mists of time in some 44 years.
We haven’t a clue whether dissolving Sultan would be good for the community or bad in the long haul. There's a yin to every yang and a yang sometimes where a yin oughta be but we think Bart hit a nerve with this petition thing.
Now may be the perfect time for city residents to really examine the issue of whether having Sultan as a stand alone burg is worth it; to gaze down deep into the belly of the beast and answer the question of whether a tiny town like Sultan should be paying TV star sized salaries to bureaucrats in what is essentially a dinky dot on the road of just over 4,000 folks in the foothills of the rainy Cascade Mountains.
A place where those highly paid government workers don’t seem to mind their town being called “a speed trap on the way to Stevens Pass,” or seeing that toothless, T-shirt guy every once in a while on the nightly news representing the community.
That’s our take on the matter. We’d like to hear yours. Write us.
Have a community event, news tip, comment, news release, letter to the editor, Op-Ed piece or other information you’d like mentioned in the ALL NEW Sky Valley Chronicle?
Send us the info at the contact points shown below. The World Famous Sky Valley Chronicle -- the ONLY Sky Valley news source serving up HOT, FRESH LOCAL NEWS for the Sky Valley 24/7!
To send SVC news tips or photos: newstip@skyvalleychronicle.com
To send News Releases: newsrelease@skyvalleychronicle.com
Letter To Editor: editorial@skyvalleychronicle.com
Phone tips to: 425-791-1471
To send bags full of money: Call. We'll send a limo.
| |
|
BACK TO
HOME
| |
|
