Editor,

In response to the article “Develop or preserve: Oak Harbor family farm at a crossroads,” Bos/Swan Lake is not an estuary.

No matter how many times Swan Lake Preservation Group president Angie Homola claims it, how many times Whidbey Camano Land Trust writes or how many times the Whidbey News-Times blindly parrots their misinformation.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency says, “An estuary is a partially enclosed body of water along the coast where freshwater from rivers and streams meets and mixes with salt water from the ocean.” National Geographic says, “An estuary is an area where a freshwater river or stream meets the ocean … Water continually circulates into and out of an estuary.”

Drive yourself around Bos/Swan Lake on Swantown Road and West Beach Road: no streams, no rivers, no mixing or circulating waters, fully closed off from the Sound for millennia.

A ditch occasionally drains storm water into it. A one-way drain pipe prevents road flooding. Flooded land depression, sure. Estuary, simply not.

Angie Homola, Swan Lake Preservation Group, and Whidbey Camano Land Trust apparently believe it helps their cause to elevate repeatedly this fully enclosed, grass-bottomed, shallow body of water to something it is not.

To wit: asking elected officials for 200-foot tree buffers around Angie Homola’s residential neighborhood when the Fakkemas harvest their own timber. They do so as radical not-in-my-backyard “nimby” folks bent on limiting other people’s private property rights, all under the guise of environmentalism. Their radical environmentalist behavior nefariously takes literally Woodie Guthrie’s leftist lyrics: “This land is your land, this land is my land.”

William Burnett

Oak Harbor