By MARK WAHL

There’s been doomsaying and fingerpointing in letters about farmers having to keep buffers on their property and WEAN peeking at farmers’ Conservation District farm plans. I felt maybe WEAN was putting too much pressure on farmers. But then I just heard that Keith Dearborn, the county’s astronomically paid consultant on critical areas, has recently inserted outrageous language into the critical areas ordinance. It says large commercial and agricultural concerns (that WEAN has stated should be exempt), should now be subject to the ordinance!

While everyone is citing WEAN as out of bounds, Dearborn has created a genuine threat that’s being ignored. While WEAN continues to advocate that lands between 5 and 10 acres should be able to seek protection from critical areas ordinances to do ag activities, Commissioner Shelton stonewalls this, thus creating another threat to smaller ag people. Yet only WEAN gets the outcry.

Then there are those Whidbey Island Conservation District (WICD) plans. The county commissioners assert that any farmer (with land of any size in the Rural Zone) who has filed a plan with the WICD is automatically complying with critical area regulations. In my mind the plans, written by a government entity, additionally having a government regulatory function, make them subject to public scrutiny.

The Planning Department monitors these plans that verify compliance with the ordinance, right? No. The county has never even seen them and refuses to look at them. So how do they know the plans satisfy county regulations? They don’t. But don’t WICD personnel scrupulously follow the language in the plans that says something like “plans will be in conformity with local regulations?” Theoretically yes, but how accurately? Nobody knows. There is no coordination between the County and WICD personnel. Nada, that I know of.

Are land buffers around wetlands and streams really that big a deal? An underpublicized county study of wetlands on Camano revealed that fecal coliform from ag runoff in some wetlands was as high as 200 times the allowable standard! Vague good intentions won’t stop this. Wildlife, Puget Sound and well users are all health-endangered by ignoring buffers and letting rains run animal waste into the water table through wetlands.

To see if I’m off, I gave a farmer who has submitted a WICD plan a call and I called WEAN too. Here’s what I found out. First, not all farmers believe that somehow their plans in a government document (usually submitted to obtain government funding for projects) shouldn’t be seen by citizens. Second, the WICD does a great education job for the farmer and it is helpful and needed. Often the red tape for funding smaller projects is found to be just too onerous, however. WEAN reasserted it has no interest in going after any individual farmers about compliance with critical area regs. In fact, the majority of the WICD plans they’ve seen show no personal name, only a farm name. But they feel the plans are part of the fabric of the rural areas discussion.

Their preliminary findings:

* On 114 plans filed between 2000 and 2006, about half the properties have critical areas on them yet almost without exception there is no mention of how buffers will be kept around them.

* Almost none of the plans are signed (maybe because fund seeking was too onerous to continue), making them not even in effect for the county’s regulation process.

* Also, in the plans there are 19 plots between 5 and 10 acres the county could possibly help if it allowed them to apply for bona fide rural ag exemptions. At the least, it seems the plans don’t verify compliance with County ordinances.

So, Island County and WICD, how about coordinating about how WICD plans keep the regs? And property rightists, how about telling Dearborn to keep hands-off large exempted ag and allow 5-10 acre plots to seek exemptions?