August 2011

Last week while driving past Beverly Park Elementary School I noticed it was boarded up, a victim of its age (circa 1945).

Saddened, I also noticed the chain link backstop in the playground where I coached neighborhood baseball in the early ‘50s. We lived a few blocks from the school. My volunteer spirit and age of my own kids made me take on the challenge of competing with other community boys of summer.

I was a great coach. I learned that 12-year- old boys don’t listen all that well and when they strike out they stomp their feet and pout in the dugout.

I learned about “riding the pine,” an expression about those kids who play right field; they play right field for a reason. Most boys are right handed. Right fielders don’t see a lot of action at that level so the kid who can’t run very fast, catch very good or toss a ball more than 20 feet is usually the son of your insurance man who just might raise your rate if the kid does not play.
 

Grafting unincorporated White Center and North Highline onto Burien would be good for the community. It would give the new city an area of about 11 square miles and a population of 65,000, making it the state’s 12th largest city. If it’s true that there’s strength and safety in numbers, then perhaps more of “us” is better.

Since the trend seems to be toward more incorporations and annexations, I suggest we “Burienites” follow suit and use this opportunity to “bulk up” and consolidate our northern boundary. As a kid, I remember when going to Issaquah or even Federal Way seemed like treading on the edge of the earth.

Today, city crowds city in a realm of vanishing elbow room. Might as well give that lonely 3.4-square-mile chunk of real estate and its 21,000 souls to the north a happy home – with us.

I know that many of you are less than thrilled about bringing White Center home to meet the folks. But before you get your feathers too ruffled or your wind in a jammer, consider the following:

Ascend Health, based in Denton, TX, a behavioral healthcare provider, has acquired Schick Shadel Hospital, an addiction treatment facility in Burien.

For Schick’s Chairman and CEO James P. Graham, the purchase marks meeting a business goal with highly personal impetus behind it.

When he learned of Schick Shadel’s struggle to survive, Graham recruited nine other former patients to form Duffy I, L.P. They purchased the hospital in October 2002. Graham, owner of Palo Petroleum, Inc. in Dallas, struggled with alcoholism for 20 years before checking in to Schick Shadel’s 10-day program 11 years ago. He has never craved a drink since.

“We are pleased to add Schick Shadel to our portfolio of facilities,” said Richard Kresch, M.D., President and Chief Executive Officer.    “Additionally, we plan to enhance our addiction treatment offerings by adding Schick Shadel units to several of our facilities.  This expansion opportunity offers compelling growth, allowing us to continue to satisfy the increasing need for addiction therapy by offering patients more treatment alternatives.”

A fund to help a seriously injured Burien teen has recently been set up at the main office of KeyBank and community leaders and family friends hope that the Whitney Sellers Recovery Fund will provide a sufficient cushion so Whitney’s mother can stay close by her side during the long ordeal ahead.

With bones in her hip, pelvis, knee and jaw broken or shattered, 13 year-old Whitney faces a long and painful recovery – both emotionally and physically – at a time when most of her peers are getting ready to head back to school.

Whitney, a student at Sylvester Middle School in Burien, was struck by a pickup truck on Aug. 7, when she was in a crosswalk on Ambaum Boulevard near Southwest 153rd Street.

Among other medical procedures, the young teen will need to have her hip reconstructed and will have to re-learn how to walk.

Spearheaded by members of the Rotary Club of Tukwila, the fund is envisioned as an additional resource for single mom, Jennifer Shields, during the months ahead. Shields works at the office of Rotarian Kathy Foster, at the Executive Support Center in Tukwila.

With the Burien City Council examining whether the city should annex White Center and the homicide of a young woman in the area last week questions have been raised about crime trends in the area.

The King County Sheriff’s Office has released statistics comparing January-July 2010 with January-July 2011. The sheriff’s office reports overall dispatched calls for service are up by nearly 24 percent.

The most frequent calls include public drunkenness, area checks, trespass, disturbances (including noise and fights), family disturbances and suspicious circumstances. The category that increased noticeably- is drunkenness – up to 142 in 2011 from 85 in 2010.

At a Burien City Council meeting on Aug. 22 a KCSO spokesman noted that part of the 24 percent jump can be attributed to business owners and community members calling the police more often, so it is difficult to discern whether that increase pertains to a jump in crime or a jump in people calling 911 over suspicious activity.

Violent crimes, including robberies and aggravated assaults are up slightly this year compared to last year, according to the report. There was one homicide last year in May and now one this year.

BRIDGE TUMBLES DOWN. A wrecking ball demolishes the Sylvester Bridge last week as a worker monitors the destruction. The bridge along Sylvester Road in Normandy Park is being replaced with a wider bridge. Road closures and detours continue until the end of the year.

To the Editor,

I am opposed to the annexation of White Center by the city of Burien, but forget the arguments about economics, forget the arguments about the libraries and the fire stations. My argument against annexation is that it creates a city with two downtowns, two business districts, two distinct histories and traditions. This dumbbell shaped city will cause nothing but contention between the two areas.

Donald Dorres
Burien

The turnout was good and discussion lively when 9th District Congressman Adam Smith held a town hall meeting on Aug. 25 at the Burien City Council Chambers to discuss the national budget, debt reduction and economic recovery.

Please click the photo above for another picture from the meeting.

Rep. Smith is a member of the Democratic Party in his 8th term representing the 9th District of Washington State and the top democrat in the House Armed Services Committee.

Rep. Smith started the discussion with a presentation on his understanding of the economic climate in the United States, and then opened the floor to suggestions from the crowd about 20 minutes in.

“We face many many challenges in this country right now,” he said. “This is the worst economy of my life … massive budget deficit and debt … and we still have 150,000 troops deployed between Iraq and Afghanistan. If we are going to begin to solve them it is my believe we need to be honest about the choices that we face and one of the great challenges we face as a nation is we are deeply divided right now.”

Rep Smith broke the county down into four ideologies:

Melanie Allen and her husband Ken got their dog Bowline (also known as Bobo), a Golden Retriever four years ago in Cincinatti, Ohio, where they are from. He's named after a sailing knot. "All of our dogs are always named after some sort of sailing, either a location or something to do with sailing," said Allen.

Her daughter Jordan who was four at the time was devastated when their former dog died so it was important to get a new one right away. He came from a breeder and, "He was the last one. He was the runt."

Jordan actually picked Bowline out. "We had a couple of places we looked at and when we got back in the car after seeing this dog, we started pulling out and she started balling and said, 'How can we leave that puppy?' so we turned around and that was our dog."

Bowline howls a lot according to Allen. "He kind of sounds like a whale. If you're not around, he howls."

True to his sailing identity he loves to be in the water. "If we're at the dog park and he's in the water and we leave, he won't leave. We have to literally be almost outside the dog park before he will follow us. He also likes to just stand in the water or dig up rocks."

press release:

Starting this fall, Seattle Public Schools elementary and K-8 students attending their neighborhood school will have shorter bus rides, thanks to new transportation zones approved by the Seattle School Board earlier this year.

The goal behind these neighborhood-based transportation zones is to streamline bus routes for attendance-area elementary and K-8 schools, decreasing the bus ride time for neighborhood schools to 25 minutes or less and saving an estimated $4 million by using fewer buses and less gas. To accomplish this, some buses will cover three routes in the morning and afternoon instead of the more traditional two routes.

“With more efficient routing, buses are less likely to encounter the traffic delays that occur on longer routes, so families will find departure and arrival times to be more reliable,” said Tom Bishop, SPS transportation manager. “In addition, the more streamlined routes will also benefit the environment by taking up to 80 buses off the roads and reducing the district’s carbon footprint.”