There is an old engineering joke that talks about EWAG. The term was on a report that a young engineer was trying to figure out. He looked everywhere, but could not find the meaning of this term. Finally, he asked an older engineer what the term stood for. “Engineering-wise-ass-guess,” the older engineer replied. Apparently, Jeff Sax and John Koster have taken this as a mantra for their revisions to the Buildable Lands Report – government by napkin.
What a concept! I was expecting an explanation of their changes when I attended the public hearing covered by Herald reporter Brian Kelly (Aug. 23 “GOP council changes county growth report”). As there was really no supporting data to justify the magnitude of their changes, I guess they didn’t want to confuse people by presenting their changes before public testimony was taken. As it was, the revised draft was not even printed before the hearing started, and it wasn’t even passed out to the council until the very end of th meeting, long after most had already left.
After recruiting testimony to impeach the data and the findings of the draft report, Sax and Koster presented their changes, basically justifying them by saying that since the data was bad, they could use any figure they wanted. If Gary Nelson, Jeff Sax and John Koster had shown real respect for the process, they would have approached the planning staff with concerns after the release of the draft report on Aug. 7 (two weeks before this public hearing) to get help in arriving at factors that are not “flights of fancy.” The original draft released on Aug. 7 was the result of a remarkable collaboration of the county and the 20 cities within the county. To throw away that effort with figures arrived at on the back of a napkin is the real tragedy of this story.
Mountlake Terrace
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