By JAMES BLAISDELL

Our county government has been working for a couple of years on a draft Island County Comprehensive Plan Update, or CCP, mandated by the Legislature and Department of Commerce every ten years. Planners fielded the draft CCP for public review on their web page Dec. 10, with a deadline for comment by the public of Feb. 9.

The Comprehensive Plan is one of the few tools Island County has to speak with a clear, unified voice to Olympia. This draft does not use that tool as forcefully as it should.

* County Commissioners and Planning Commissioners should treat this as a call to pick up the yoke of responsibility: Revise the language so that sustainable growth and lifeline resilience are front and center.

* Insist that state transportation mode-shift initiatives be applied with rural-island constraints in mind and make sure that when State Transportation and Commerce read our plan, they learn something about Island County they did not know before.

If we will not explain our reality to them in our own Comprehensive Plan, we should not be surprised when funding priorities and policy initiatives reflect their bias instead of our needs.

Our CCP should be more than a compliance exercise; it should be the clearest statement of what our people actually need from Olympia. Instead, the current draft reads as if our leaders have quietly accepted a one-size-fits-all planning agenda designed by someone else, somewhere else and for someplace else. “Active Transportation,” defined as “pedestrian mobility, including walking or running, the use of a mobility assistive device such as a wheelchair, bicycling and cycling,” appears 76 times in the Transportation Element, while “bridge” appears only nine times. That ratio may fit a dense urban county with multiple redundant ways to move around a failure point. It does not fit two rural islands whose lives, jobs, health care and national defense role depend on a handful of vulnerable bridges and ferries — each a single point of failure in our transportation system.

Throughout our Comprehensive Plan, “growth” is treated as something to be accommodated and served, not something that must be qualified as sustainable in a place with hard geographic limits, constrained access and finite environmental capacity. Island County staff and consultants have simply adopted Commerce’s growth framing instead of pushing back — gently but firmly — and stating that for rural islands, “sustainable growth” is not a buzzword. It is the difference between a livable future and congestion, housing pressure, and infrastructure obligations that outstrip our tax base. Treating “growth” uncritically throughout the CCP misses the chance to tell state agencies that “growth at any cost” is not acceptable here.

Our elected and appointed officials have a duty to do more than fill in the blanks on state templates. They have a duty to teach State Transportation and the Department of Commerce how their policies land in a rural island county. When the Transportation Element devotes pages to an active transportation network, new level-of-service standards, and urban-style transportation mode-shift language but barely mentions bridge resilience, ferry reliability or small-package logistics that reduce ferry trips and “drive-around-the-Sound” traffic, it signals that Island County has not asserted its context. It signals that we will accept small funding carrots and policy checklists even when they misalign with our lifeline risks.

This is not an argument against active transportation. Those investments matter — especially in Oak Harbor, UGAs, town centers and near ferry terminals. It is an argument against pretending that the same emphasis and vocabulary appropriate to Everett or Bellevue can simply be dropped onto Whidbey and Camano. On islands, “resilience” is not an abstract virtue; it is a concrete requirement for bridges, ferries, emergency relief and disaster-recovery routes. Yet it appears almost as an afterthought in the plan’s goals, while “active transportation” is elevated to a defining theme. That imbalance is not just something Commerce imposed on us; it is something we chose not to correct.

This is also not a criticism of the people who have made a Herculean effort to comply with mandates from the Legislature, Commerce and State Transportation. The plan represents tens of thousands of county employee hours and hundreds of thousands of your tax dollars. Rather, it is a plea that our elected and senior appointed officials inform, educate, influence and guide those state entities that one-size planning and funding initiatives, do not fit all counties — especially a rural island county. When appointed county and city officials vote against engaging our local elected officials with Commerce and State Transportation planners, it is often because our elected officials have not clearly described their responsibility to use opportunities to teach state agencies about the people’s true needs.

Our bridges exist, not because Commerce, State Transportation, our Legislature or even local government officials identified the need. The people initiated the effort, held bridge picnics, sent Rep. Pearl Wanamaker to Olympia specifically to champion Island County’s need for bridges — and they got it done. Please don’t let a couple of consultants be our voice to Olympia. Please take up the cause of ensuring Olympia reflects our needs — download the 2025 CCP draft and review the topics that matter to you. Please make comment to the planners and beyond so our input to Olympia is balanced and reflects the people’s thinking. Everybody knows more than anybody.

James Blaisdell lives with his wife in a 90-year old Oak Harbor home they rebuilt together (with a lot of excellent island help). Fifty years ago, he was a P-3 tactical coordinator. In the years in between, his career work has been centered around systems – from programmer to analyst to IT professor to CTO.