My name is John Bennett. I have been a resident of West Seattle for 32 years and my family has been here since 1906. My grandfather was president of West Side Federal Savings Bank and King County treasurer.

I have been very involved in the community. I was instrumental in getting the Birthplace of Seattle Log House Museum open and running. I own Luna Park Caf/ and have spent the last 20 years changing the end of Avalon Way from the worst area of West Seattle to one of the most up and coming neighborhoods.

I restored the old Seaway Marine building (Murphy's and Ola Salon ), the Boysen real estate building (Java Bean), Pat and Ron's Tavern building (Luna Park Cafe), and the Boysen Apartments. When I started on those buildings , the area was so crime ridden that the police told me they rarely responded to calls in the area because it was so bad. I worked hard to turn the neighborhood around. I am no stranger to neighborhood rebirths.

For the last eight years I have been spending my time in Georgetown. Georgetown is the real birthplace of the northwest as it was settled years before Seattle. I am excited about being involved in the revitalization of Seattle's most historic neighborhood. I own and am restoring 12 buildings in downtown Georgetown.

I have seen the area go from abandoned to blossoming despite all the hardships dumped on it. We have fought toxic waste companies, Southwest Airlines , proposed strip club zones, industrial re-zoning and garbage dumps, just to mention a few. It seems Georgetown is the dumping ground for all of Seattle's problems.

It is clear that Georgetown has gotten things over the last few decades that no other neighborhood in Seattle would stand for. Those days are over. There is a strong sense of community and determination. The Georgetown community council and the merchants association have made great progress in getting respect for the community. The word at City Hall is that Georgetown is really starting to become a pain in the butt. The powers that be are starting to realize that we are no longer going to sit idly and take the abuse.

The future of Georgetown is looking bright.

This brings me to the your article ("Garbage site argued," June 28). I sensed that your point was that if Georgetown succeeded in not getting the inter-model station, that West Seattle might.

First of all, neighborhoods should ban together to fight these kinds of things and secondly - and most importantly - no neighborhood should get an inter-model waste station.

Some of the facts of your article are wrong. The propaganda about the station being harmless is just that , propaganda. Seattle Public Utilities will gladly give you a tour of the proposed site and make it look like the next best thing since sliced bread. It isn't.

It is plain wrong. I wont even go into all the arguments why this kind of station shouldn't be in a neighborhood (and there are many including businesses losing their property and being displaced (see Seattle Monorail Project), smell, damage to historic buildings , increased residential traffic, health concerns, increased traffic on I-5, rodents, seagulls near an airport etc. etc.

I will go into the argument that the whole idea of filling more land fills is obsolete and archaic. When will we realize that we need to reduce our solid waste instead of building more complexes to gather it and ship it to more and more landfills? When will we run out of land to bury our garbage?

Every other country in the world has reduced their solid waste to a minimum. Only in the United States can we be so wasteful and short-sighted. Seattle leads the country in recycling. We should start to lead the country in methods of waste reduction. We can't bury our problems out of site and out of mind forever.

In conclusion, there is no neighborhood that deserves an inter-model waste station and, in reality, we shouldn't be building something that will be a dinosaur in only a few years.

John Bennett

Avalon