Peterson says he can bridge council gap

Published 6:03 pm Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Divisions are so great on the Edmonds City Council that it took 37 ballots before voting 4-2 to pick Strom Peterson to replace Deanna Dawson, who resigned from the Council at the end of December.

Still, Peterson says he can work with all council members, including the two who voted against him.

He says he hopes to bridge the gap on the council by looking for points of agreement.

“I think we’ll find that we agree on more things than we disagree,” he told me Sunday.

Peterson, who plans to run for a full term later this year, said the council was correct to pick someone who will make a long-term commitment rather than a “caretaker,” who would stay only though the November election.

Concentrate on limiting Paine flights

A letter last week exhorted readers to fight commercial flights from Paine Field.

We can’t stop those flights but we can limit them.

We can’t stop them because prohibiting them would jeopardize money from the Federal Aviation Administration that the airport needs for maintenance, maintenance required for Boeing test flights, for other airport-related businesses and for general aviation.

What county leaders can to do is negotiate with airlines that want to come so we limit the numbers of flights, the times of those flights ad the kinds of planes that the airlines use.

Maybe the county can allow a small terminal in exchange for an agreement to limit the number and kind of flights.

Will this open the door to more and bigger flights? No.

More flights? Look at King County’s example with commercial flights at Boeing Field. Boeing Field’s small commercial carrier running regional flights to Portland stands alone. When Southwest Airlines offered to leave Sea-Tac and build a new terminal at Boeing Field, Alaska and Horizon said they would come along, King County said it had limited room, and the project died.

Larger planes? Economics dictate against that. It makes economic sense for Horizon Air to fly from Everett to Portland or Spokane. It makes no sense to fly a big jet to Atlanta from a second Puget Sound-area airport.

We can’t stop commercial flights from Paine but we can negotiate the circumstances under which they operate.

Pet-burial bill not dead yet

The state Senate’s committee on government operations has approved a bill to allow cemeteries to let people and their cremated dogs or cats be buried together.

I wrote last week that Sen. Ken Jacobsen wanted to require cemeteries to allow people and their pets to be buried together. The committee sent the bill to the full Senate only after it made three amendments: 1) cemeteries would have the option to allow or prohibit the practices; 2) only dogs or cats would be included; and 3) those dogs or cats would have to be cremated.

Will there be objections from canary lovers?

Evan Smith is the Enterprise Forum editor. Send comments to entopinion@heraldnet.com.