ISLAND COUNTY: Sound Off: Population allocations will have real impact (JILL JOHNSON/WNT)

Island County Commissioner Jill Johnson (R-Oak Harbor) wrote a Sound Off column for the Whidbey News-Times discussing the county’s 2024-25 Comprehensive Plan Update. Johnson’s column appeared in the paper’s Feb. 7, 2024 edition.

They Said It

…you would think that the next big step in the comprehensive planning process, population allocation, would be the easiest. It’s just simple math.

Math doesn’t account for other truths. And in the case of population allocations those subjective truths are equally, if not more, important. They include how we want to live, the cultures we want to protect, the infrastructure we can afford to build and the personal rights we hold as individuals.

Math has limits and it doesn’t care about real life, which makes this first big decision point of the comprehensive plan hard. We are told to do a homework assignment where the “right” answer could ultimately be different than our “right” answer.

But honestly, who cares? It’s only a plan. Put it on paper, assign the population, give the State the answer they want, collect your “A,” and go home. And, to a degree, that approach works; until you look further into the process. Because what comes next, after we tell the state how we will allocate this population, is the regulatory framework that they will require us to show how to put the plan into action.