Measuring our discontent

The hottest topic in town this last month has been about traffic. It prompted the largest turnout to a city council meeting that I have witnessed in my nearly 20 years of living here.

The controversy is lead by a group that calls itself "Friends of Leavenworth." While I have a number of local friends who support the efforts of that group, I am always suspicious of organizations whose title creates immediate division. In this case, if you are a “Friend” of Leavenworth you belong and support all of their agenda. If you don’t belong it suggests you must not be a “Friend of Leavenworth.”

The problem in this important local debate is I hear a number of suggestions about how to solve the problem that would have disastrous consequences. Ideas like “lets cancel all advertising for a year,” or cancel the Christmas Lighting Festival. Many people have begun to talk about the problems of “over-tourism.” A concept that suggests too many tourists can kill the golden goose.

On the other side many believe the over-tourism crowd does not appreciate the benefits that our tourism economy brings to our community. Lower property taxes, more restaurant choices to enjoy, year round employment opportunities to name just a few.

The problem for our local politicians and community leaders is how do they sort out the true preponderance of opinion on this issue? How do we address the real problems and not give into hysteria.

The Friends of Leavenworth claim they have 400 supporters to their position. The problem is we do not know how many of those are truly local residents and how many are just Facebook friends of local residents. But even if all of them live in 98826 that is only 20% of the population of the city of Leavenworth and 6% of those who call 98826 home.

The real problem with these numbers is the Friends of Leavenworth have utilized Facebook to promote their agenda. I do not have a favorable view of Facebook. My experience is it’s a place for disgruntled individuals to criticize and complain about issues without having examined the issues in any depth. And because it derives much of its “support” from individuals around the world who have even less knowledge of the issue, it tends to create an impression based solely on the emotional response of the readers. That is not to say those who love Facebook should be ignored, but it should be approached with caution.

Last months City Council meeting was enlightening. It was crowded. I had people call me later and claim there were hundreds of people in attendance. That was an overstatement but it was standing room only. Those who spoke were predominantly critical of the cities efforts to address their traffic concerns. But there were a couple of local speakers who were supportive of the cities efforts.

Following that meeting I decided to put a poll up on the Echo website to test the depth of concern about the issue in our community. That poll has now been up for over a month. I said at the time that I am generally suspicious of on-line polling because historically activists have skewed the results by voting repeatedly. Newer technology however has made that more difficult. During that month the website had 3,265 unique visitors according to Google Analytics. Only 140 of the 3265 visitors actually looked at the poll and of those only 29 people responded to the poll.

My conclusion from that is this issue is greatly overblown. If we assume all 140 were city residents only 7% of the 1,965 city residents even looked at the poll and only 1.5% actually responded. If we consider that those who took the few seconds to respond included some local residents outside of the city of Leavenworth then the percentages become even less significant.

I have lived in this community for almost 20 years now. I have been an active participant in the life of the community and while I will admit there are a few times when traffic on Highway 2 is troublesome. It is not solely related to our tourism.

The reality is Highway 2 is one of two routes into the Seattle metro area. When Interstate 90 is shut down traffic gets rerouted over Highway 2. Also a large amount of Highway 2 the traffic is not just coming to Leavenworth. Much of it is simply passing through on its way to other destinations like Chelan or the North end of the wet side of the mountains.

Highway 2 is woefully inadequate to handle the volume of traffic that regularly traverses our city. Fixing that is a state problem that will take decades to address.

We cannot put our local economic engine in jeopardy to address the concerns of a vocal minority. There are far more pressing issues for the city to address. Issues that can have an immediate impact on the quality of life here. I will be replacing the online poll soon in an effort to give our city leaders a sense of the more pressing issues we face.

I hope each of you will take some time to help our local elected representatives prioritize some of these issues.