Don't take Boris seriously
Mon, 04/12/2010
According to GOOGLE, Boris Sieverts has no university degrees, worked as a shepherd in France and runs a tour agency that tours junkyards, wastelands and empty lots. He claims these are the wildland outskirts of cities; places of the last adventures.
Sieverts, self-declared poet writer, believes you should never read a newspaper in a city you visit but you should get drunk in the afternoon and sleep it off in inappropriate places of the city you are visiting.
Boris has no credentials in biology, environmental science, planning or architecture. So why did he come to Burien for less than half of a day and decide he could tell us what we should do with our city?
And why is he allowed a letter in the Highline Times that is more than 400 words? Other citizens must keep their letters to a 400-word length.
His father, Thomas Sieverts, claims that cities are evolving, but to what still remains unclear. So who has not already figured that out in these economic times?
Did the Sieverts come to see Burien because it was a wasteland? Did they come because of the junk art on display in our Town Square? It is unclear why they came. Neither man spent much time in Burien nor did they go to the far out places that Boris claims are necessary to visit in order to understand these wastelands and the real places of a city.
Based on the brief tour these two men had of Burien, the City Council and Planning Commission took their advice and declared in the Burien Comprehensive Plan that 153rd would now be developed into a Mercado Plaza.
Who paid for their advice? Who asked the merchants and citizens of Burien what they thought? According to both Sieverts, planners cannot make those decisions about the use of space; those things must evolve from sudden, spontaneous use by people.
Small lakes and freshwater in Germany have real water quality problems. Acid rain, auto emissions, unregulated human pollution and runoff pollution plague their freshwaters. Since 1990, Germany has made advancements in cleaning up its lakes but problems still exist.
Germany dumps raw untreated sewage into the Baltic Sea and some of its rivers.
There are regular problems in their freshwaters with toxic cyanobacteria. High cyanobacteria counts result mainly from unregulated human activities in and around the water. Germans drink bottled water because of remembered problems with their freshwater supplies.
Boris probably never has experienced good water quality in Germany like we have in Lake Burien and he does not have a clue about how to protect it. So how is he an expert on how we should handle our lake?
If Boris is really concerned about lakes, he perhaps should start his letter campaigns and slogans back home in Germany to inspire better water quality for German waters.
Please do not imply in any other articles or sensationalized stories that Boris is an expert about Burien or that he should be taken seriously.
Robert Howell
Burien