Being neither an authority on stormwater runoff from impervious surfaces nor a resident of Harper, I can only judge the kerfuffle over the proposed widening of Southworth Drive as an innocent bystander.

But from where I sit, it sounds like the folks out there don’t want the county cutting a swath through their property to create 11-foot traffic lanes and four-foot medians on either side that can be used by bicyclists and walkers.

And frankly, I can’t say as I blame them. Had I invested substantially in waterfront property, I’d be every bit as resentful as they at the notion of the county helping itself to it without my consent — regardless of whether I was being “fairly” compensated or not.

The only difference is that I’d object on a property rights basis rather ginning up yet another dubious environmental crisis.

Rebecca McCoy, who lives on one of the 17 plots affected by the county’s plan, hopes to speak with the commissioners soon in an effort to delay or scuttle the plan based on her contention that adding more pavement will mean more stormwater running off into Puget Sound rather than seeping into the ground.

“This is a really bad plan for anyone that is not a commuter,” she said.

By a striking coincidence, however, it turns out that pretty much everyone is a commuter — except the owners of the land the county plans to seize in order to widen the road, which makes their objections sound rather more personal than altruistic.

And honestly, I’m OK with that, because I understand that tomorrow it could be something of mine Big Brother wants.

In the meantime, though, I guess you have to cater to your audience. And if McCoy and her neighbors think playing the “green” card will get better traction with the commissioners, I wouldn’t be at all suprised if they were right.

They’ve always been more worried about carbon footprints and such than property rights anyway.

A reader calling herself sarahjane46th raised a fair point last weekend in an online response to the Independent’s Feb. 19 editorial, in which I criticized the Legislature for ignoring the “will of the people” by voting to suspend Initiative 960.

“Did you complain similarly,” she asked, “when the two initiatives (I-728 and I-732) to lower class sizes and increase teacher salaries were also set aside?”

It’s a provocative question, but one she helpfully answers herself when she later points out that while the education initiatives “passed by much bigger majorities … they were unfunded.”

Exactly right.

Otto von Bismarck famously described politics as “the art of the possible,” and it’s my contention that it’s appropriate to disregard the other two initiatives because they asked the Legislature to do the impossible, while I-960 didn’t.

It’s one thing for the lawmakers in Olympia to realize there’s no way they could comply with a pair of vaguely worded ballot measures that required them to hire more teachers and pay them more but made no provision whatever for funding this largesse.

It’s something else entirely to decide you no longer wish to be constrained by laws that limit your ability to take money from the pockets of those who sign the checks in the first place.

Frankly, the Legislature was sent contradictory messages. On the one hand, it was told to spend more on education. On the other, it was told in no uncertain terms by I-960 and an alphabet soup of other ballot measures that tax increases were off the table.

Something had to give, and it did.

Because lawmakers are supposed to work for their constituents, the best way to summarize all of this is with a workplace analogy.

Suppose you, as a supervisor, told one of your employees his or her department needed to produce twice what it was currently producing but you weren’t giving them any more resources to do it with. How angry could you be if they came back after a few weeks and admitted they had fallen short because you were asking them to do the impossible?

On the other hand, suppose you told the same department head that from now on their budget would have to be checked by a co-worker before any new expenditures were approved. Think you’d be pretty upset if they flatly refused?

You bet you would.

The same principle applies here. You can’t fairly criticize the Legislature for failing to do the impossible. But Initiative 960 wasn’t impossible, nor was there any contradiction in its message.

Somehow it doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable to be critical of the Legislature for applying an identical standard to ballot measures it can’t comply with as it does to those it simply doesn’t feel like complying with.

Strangely, the mayor doesn’t very often ask my opinion before he takes action.

Or afterwards, come to think of it.

In fact, I can only think of one time when Lary Coppola has shared secrets of state with me, and that was right after he was elected a few years ago, when he confided that there was a movement in the works to form a separate South Kitsap port district and secede from the Bremerton port district.

I guess somehow he got the idea I didn’t think we were being well-represented by the port commissioners, despite the fact that two of the three are elected from South Kitsap.

Anyway, I told Lary I thought it was a fabulous idea, but he asked that we not publish anything about it until the plan was a little further down the road.

I guess the cat’s out of the bag now, because the mayor addressed the issue in an online comment to one of our stories last week.

He noted, “After having an attorney look into this, the problem they found is that there is no current law governing leaving port districts to form new ones — only joining them. For that to happen, it would require new law being brought forward to the Legislature, and the Legislature passing it. However, on the surface, all things considered, I don’t think you’d find many people in SK that wouldn’t vote for forming a new port district if it were put on the ballot.”

I suspect he’s right about that, assuming they understood the choice was between continuing to pay two-thirds of the cost of Bremerton’s port and forming our own district that would use South Kitsap dollars to support South Kitsap facilities.

My guess is, they’d be even more enthusiastic about supporting no port district at all, but that option was never on the table.

How typical of the “Alice in Wonderland” world of government, though, that the law has no problem with SK residents being taxed for someone else’s benefit but makes no provision whatsoever for the idea of people actually taking care of themselves.

I criticized former North Kitsap Commissioner Chris Endresen and Auditor Karen Flynn when they bailed in mid-term, so just out of fairness I should lob a few bombs in Barbara Stephenson’s direction.

As of this week, Stephenson will be stepping down as Kitsap County treasurer to take a similar position in Mayor Patty Lent’s administration with the city of Bremerton.

Of the two, Stephenson’s abdication more closely resembles that of Endresen, who left her post in 2007 to accept a job as Washington state liaison for U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, than it does Flynn, who retired in 2008.

Either way, I have a problem with it.

First and foremost, I cling to the naïve belief that public servants should be held to a higher standard than a normal private-sector employee.

If you or I get a better job offer, we’re free to leave our current position and accept it no questions asked — unless we have a contract, that is.

I guess my point is that I think an elected official has a contract — a moral one — with his or her constituents. It isn’t written down on paper, but it should be every bit as binding.

When you stand before the voters and ask for their support, I believe you’re making a commitment to serve out your entire term.

If you think otherwise, imagine how many votes a candidate would attract if they honestly conceded on the campaign trail that they’d leave in a heartbeat if their newly won office suddenly qualified them for a better-paying position elsewhere. (Or in Flynn’s case, if she suggested to the voters she might soon trade the the rigors of her office for the quiet comforts of retirement.)

Beyond that, there are also the political considerations, since it’s up to the county party apparatchiks to find a replacement for an elected official of that same party who leaves in mid-term.

Having a year or two to settle in and run as an incumbent is a big advantage for the appointee, and the whole process smacks of cronyism.

The simple solution is, if you run for an office with a four-year term, plan on staying four years.

The Port of Bremerton burnished its well-deserved reputation as the most tone-deaf public agency in Kitsap County this week by wasting $80,000 of the taxpayers’ money to hire a full-time employee whose main responsibility will apparently be to assure the public its tax money isn’t being wasted.

Commissioner Bill Mahan, whose disconnect with reality appears to grow wider by the day, was the most vocal advocate for hiring a marketing/communications director — at an annual salary of $65,000 plus $15,000 in benefits.

“I feel this position is crucial to the effectiveness of the port and for letting people know what the port is doing,” he said. “I don’t want to tell the public, ‘We wanted to be more transparent, but we didn’t want to put more money toward it.’”

Which prompts two responses.

First, there already exists a vehicle for telling the public what the port is up to. It’s called the media.

Port Orchard Independent reporter Justine Frederiksen attends virtually every Port of Bremerton meeting and her subsequent stories are shared among all five Sound Publishing newspapers in Kitsap County. The Kitsap Sun also routinely covers port commissioner meetings and, like us, finds no end of newsworthy material in their antics.

So what exactly is Mahan’s point? That the stories currently appearing in all of our newspapers are inaccurate simply because they report the news rather than spouting the approved party line?

If so, precisely how does the port’s newly hired, handsomely compensated marketing/communications person plan to change what’s being written?

Do Mahan and Port CEO Cary Bozeman, who also pushed hard for the new position, expect to go over our heads directly to the public via the port’s Web site and that people will take at face value what their flack reports?

Good luck with that.

Even more fundamentally, while I wholeheartedly agree that the port suffers from a serious credibility gap, it isn’t because the public doesn’t know what the commissioners are doing.

It’s because it does.

The voters, as Commissioner Mahan will discover in November should he be brazen enough to seek re-election, are still seething over the board’s decision in 2006 to raise local property taxes in order to fund massive upgrades to the Bremerton Marina.

No, it didn’t help that the decision was deliberately made with little or no public input, but it isn’t as though the voters would have been any happier had the commissioners approved the increase in the light of day.

If the Port of Bremerton wants to rehabilitate its tarnished image with the public, “transparency” is only a small part of the problem. The real issue is substance, not style.

Rather than worrying about whether its expensive, irresponsible decisions were made out in the open or behind closed doors, how about simply not making expensive, irresponsible decisions?

Instead of hiring a shill to rationalize the money they’re wasting, wouldn’t it make a little more sense to simply stop wasting the money in the first place?

The port doesn’t need a full-time employee to tell its story.

What it desperately needs is a better story to tell.

I’ve wondered many times over the years whether Kathryn Simpson and I were speaking the same language, and Wednesday night’s South Kitsap School District meeting offers a case in point as to why.

Debating the question of whether to raise revenue by selling advertising space in the district’s buses, Simpson, who serves as president of the school board, opined that, “I think (advertising is) a bad idea in terms of student safety.”

Safety? Is she worried one of the placards will fall on someone’s head?

Dialing back Simpson’s hyperbole a few notches, I gather what she actually means is that it’s unhealthy for children to be exposed to advertising messages. But I have a number of reactions to that conclusion, none of which could be confused with agreement.

For starters, depending on which study one listens to and how one defines advertising, the average American is exposed to anywhere from 600 to 3,000 advertising messages a day, and youngsters tend to be on the upper end of that scale. I’m not suggesting it’s always a great thing, but at this point it does kind of seem as though that train has left the station.

Either advertising isn’t quite as harmful as Simpson fears or our kids are already too far gone to worry about, but one way or the other I can’t see how a few additional messages on the wall of their school bus will push them over the edge.

That’s particularly true since the district would obviously control who advertised and who didn’t. Just because advertising was allowed doesn’t mean the district would be compelled to festoon its buses with images of Joe Camel or satanic pentagrams.

Maybe it’s just me, but I actually think a billboard from the Washington Milk Council or Colgate Toothpaste would be better for kids than looking at an unadorned yellow bulkhead.

But Simpson wasn’t finished. She also made it known that she would be “very apprehensive about advertising on the inside of our buses from Corporate America.”

Again, huh? In my world, “Corporate America” is a euphemism for the private sector — you know, the folks who voluntarily invest capital to create a good or service the market will hopefully desire enough to trade its hard-earned dollars for. In the process, “Corporate America” generates the wealth and provides the jobs needed to fund the private sector — for example schools.

This is the horror we need to shield our kids from?

I’m not saying the program wouldn’t require a certain amount of oversight or that every conceivable ad would be appropriate for consideration. I’m just saying that in the version of English I speak, being asked to drink Ovaltine doesn’t put anyone’s safety at risk, and “Corporate America” is the place Mommy and Daddy go every morning to earn the paycheck that keeps a roof over our heads.

I agree with just about everything in the Guest Opinion from state Sen. Derek Kilmer and Rep. Larry Seaquist that appears in our Jan. 29 issue.

No reasonable person would disagree with their objection to the state Treasurer’s stated intention to raise Tacoma Narrows Bridge tolls to unrealistic levels.

What I don’t agree with is that only Kilmer and Seaquist’s bylines are on the opinion.

What about Rep. Jan Angel, the third member of the 26th Distrct delegation and, by a strange coincidence, the only Republican (as well as the only Port Orchard resident)?

One assumes Kilmer and Seaquist’s argument would have carried more weight if it had come with the unanimous and bipartisan endorsement of all three members of the delegation.

And Angel would have signed it, too, had she been asked. But according to her, Seaquist and Kilmer never bothered to show it to her.

In fact, when I contacted her office on Monday just an hour after receiving the op-ed from her colleagues, Angel said she hadn’t even heard about it.
“I see what’s going on,” she said. “My Democratic opponent is trying to build the case that Derek and Larry are representing the district but I’m not. I share their concerns, and we’ve all talked to the treasurer together. But leaving my name off the letter is just their way of making it look like I’m not engaged with this issue.”

Kilmer and Seaquist, of course, were under no obligation to include Angel. But again, the letter would have commanded more credibility if they had.

All of which does sort of beg the question of which is more important to them — actually thwarting a toll hike or creating the misleading impression that they care about the tollpayers and Angel doesn’t?

Maybe it isn’t a big deal, but you might want to keep that in mind next time either Kilmer or Seaquist earnestly assures you that petty partisanship has no place in the legislative process.

Sumner Schoenike, the presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge 26th District Rep. Jan Angel for her seat in the Washington State Legislature, kicked off his campaign on Tuesday by condemning “the poisonous, partisan politics in Olympia.”

By this, one can only assume he actually meant opposition to the virtual single-party governance currently on display in Washington state, because the words were no sooner out of his mouth than he launched into a poisonous, partisan attack of his own.

Calling his Republican opponent a “weak leader,” Schoenike concluded that “Jan Angel hasn’t done anything of consequence during her first term.”

He continued, “She gives the impression she is working hard, but the public has a hard time figuring out what she is really doing.”

In fact, as a freshman lawmaker Angel has actually enjoyed about as productive a term as could be expected under the circumstances. But one shouldn’t overlook — as Schoenike hopes you will — that she has not only served only one of her alloted two sessions in the Legislature, but as a member of a severely outmanned minority party.

Consequently, much of what has had to pass for actual accomplishment consisted of pointing out the excesses of the party in power.

As a freshman, neither Angel nor Schoenike could be expected to author and pass sweeping legislation. And as a Republican, Angel faced even more daunting odds.

But we knew that going in, and yet she managed to earn her seat by a comfortable margin in a year when just having a “D” behind your name on the ballot should have been worth at least 50 percent of the vote.

The point is, just because Angel didn’t flood Olympia with a blizzard of legislation during her first year in office doesn’t mean she didn’t serve her constituents well by pointing out the flaws in the bills others were passing.

Just as we expected she would when we elected her.

It may not seem fair to over-scrutinize what a person says when they’re coping with emotional and financial setbacks. Then again, if you insist standing up in public and lecturing the county commissioners on the subject of economics, you should probably be prepared to have someone point out when you’re spouting nonsense.

And that’s all the more true if it’s by no means clear the commissioners understand the subject any better than you do.

Audrey Graf, whose husband Michael faces the prospect of being laid off from his job as a corrections officer at the Kitsap County Jail because of the county’s persistent budget problems, last week informed the commissioners that, “If my husband loses his job, we will no longer be able to afford daycare. The daycare workers will lose income and will no longer be able to pay for their haircuts. There is a trickle-down effect that happens when you pass a budget that lays off needed personnel.”

Um, no.

In point of fact, as a public employee, Mr. Graf’s salary is paid by the taxpayers. Which means that if he isn’t receiving it, there’s simply more left in our pockets to pay for our own daycare and haircuts — or whatever else we might choose.

From the Grafs’ perspective, it may seem as though those dollars disappeared from the local economy. But the truth is, they’re just being spent by someone else.

That’s not to say Mr. Graf doesn’t perform an important function. Many — though certainly not all — public servants do, which explains why we willingly employ millions of them despite the fact that their salaries show up firmly on the debit side of the ledger.

To state what should be obvious, government by itself produces neither wealth nor employment.

Zip. Zero. Nada.

At best, government merely confiscates resources from productive workers in the private sector and use them to fund services society as a whole requires. Where to draw the line regarding which services actually warrant funding is the essence of political debate. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it’s the private sector that underwrites the public sector, not the other way around.

With all due respect to Mrs. Graf, one can make a reasonable argument that her husband’s continued employment as a corrections officer is important in terms of public safety. But to suggest that paying his salary benefits all of us because he, in turn, will re-spend it is to completely misunderstand the whole concept behind a market-based economy.

When a private-sector worker creates something of value where previously nothing existed, the resulting new dollars inevitably trickle down to others through the goods and services he or she buys. But when a public-sector job is created, it simply means existing dollars trickle from the person who earned them to someone else — usually someone a politician considers more deserving.

The point is, there’s a huge difference between “trickle-down” economics and “trickle-around” economics, if you will.

As I say, it’s frustrating though predictable that someone whose grasp of economics is confined to her own circumstances should make the mistake of believing government can actually improve the economy by redistributing someone else’s wealth.

But the real danger comes when those in government start believing it, too.

I’ve never taken more heat for anything I’ve written than I did back in 2000, when I did an editorial critical of Festival of Chimes & Lights.

To be clear, it wasn’t intended as a criticism of the concept so much as its execution. But that didn’t keep me from looking like Port Orchard’s resident Grinch.

Chimes & Lights made a modest debut in 1999 as a way to show off the new City Hall’s carillon and draw Christmas shoppers downtown, and organizers were pleasantly surprised when thousands of people showed up.

Quick to recognize the community had a potential hit on its hands, the event was expanded in its second year to include music, hayrides, a theater troupe and other holiday fare.

The result, as I famously chronicled, was a comedy of errors that included a free-for-all each time the hayride wagon returned to the curb for another load of youngsters, the bells interrupting Mayor Jay Weatherill’s welcoming speech, the unfortunate placement of a children’s choir in a location that prevented anyone from hearing them, and much more.

I pointed out the flaws in the program not to embarrass or hurt anyone’s feelings. Rather, I simply wanted to challenge Chimes & Lights organizers to iron out the problems before they killed an otherwise promising event.

On the festival’s 10th anniversary, I should belatedly point out that they’ve done just that, and what started out shakily has evolved into a cherished holiday tradition for all of South Kitsap.

Even better, Chimes & Lights appears to be attracting visitors from surrounding communities who come to soak in the festivities and, not coincidentally, leave a little money behind.

People of my generation and older remember when a community was almost expected to host this sort of holiday celebration, and it’s a nostalgic experience for us, as well as a treat for our children and grandchildren.

There simply aren’t enough Chimes & Lights in the world these days, which explains why Port Orchard’s has become so irreplaceable in 10 short years.