There is more than one threat to our rural quality of life than the one presented by the prospect of a 600-acre gravel extraction operation.

The current Sultan administration -- which brought you the Willow Run hornet's mess and the Wagley's Creek ecological disaster -- is now planning our future. A future that will impact us not just five or six years from now, but will rewrite the face of Sultan forever. Once built, it will literally be set in concrete.

If you just read that last statement and do not comprehend what it means, you have two choices: You can either yawn and go back to whatever it was you were doing, or you can read on.

What Sultan will be like in the future is reflected in the status of our current situation, which is described below:

The comprehensive plan is our "blueprint" for the future.

Sultan's original 1995 Comprehensive Plan clearly stated that most of the residents of Sultan wished to retain their quiet and rural environment.

Our Plan desperately needs updating. The plan should have been revised last year, at the latest -- certainly BEFORE the significant development occurred and absolutely before the industrial area plan moved ahead.

Sultan currently has no city manager. It has no City administrator. It has no planner. It has no planning department. (The city administrator was fired, along with his and the mayor's administrative assistant. A planner in favor of wise and legal growth and development was "encouraged" to leave the city's employ, the other one moved on to a place "where she could be respected.")

The mayor has been running this city as if he were the de facto CEO/President of a corporation. All city functions are under his control. Personnel in city hall report to him and he gives employees direction on both the priority and method by which their jobs should be performed.

The city -- in effect, Mayor Rowe -- has selected a committee to review the qualifications of various consulting firms being considered to author our comprehensive plan. All non-legislative members (i.e., council members, of which there are three) of this selection committee have been hand picked by Mayor Rowe.There are no "regular" Sultan citizens on this selection committee who are not already connected officially with the city.

The composition of Sultan's Planning Commission has changed significantly this year. Mayor Rowe has appointed the last three members of this seven-member advisory body. He will soon be choosing two more before the end of this year. Unless other events intervene to prevent that.

The current composition of the Planning Commission is:

• A real estate agent.
• An aggressive pro-development resident/proponent who never saw a development project he didn't like (who is one of the primary proponents of the North Wagley's $3.5 million LID currently being planned in the area in which he holds substantial land).
• Another member operates his own part-time mortgage company.
• A citizen-activist who fought code violations in Eagle Ridge.
• The owner of a Sultan motel and the Chairman of the P.C. whose tenure is up.
• One vacant position.
• I do not know anything about the 7^th and final member of the commission.

The mayor sent the P.C. chairman a letter, thanking her for her service and said that her services were not required. This, despite the fact that there is no city planning department and that three out of the six remaining PC members are novices, with less than one year's service on the Commission.

The compositional make-up of the Planning Commission now reflects a heavy pro-Rowe, pro-growth perspective, giving Rowe control over this advisory body.

Most candidates nominated to the Planning Commission by the mayor (subject to ultimate approval by the City Council), have been presented without a resume or detailed background qualifications, and without prior public or council review or scrutiny of any kind.

The city is currently planning extensive development, both in the industrial area with continued commercial expansion, as well as a $3.5 million water/sewer LID to run east-to-west along 132^nd Street. S. E. (which will bring a minimum of 550 homes over a 330-acre area.)

The mayor has publicly stated his excitement and approval of cookie-cutter retail franchises such as McDonald's, Texaco and a yet-unnamed hotel chain, which will present stiff competition to our current Sultan Chamber of Commerce members.

Mayor Rowe is serving Sultan up into a Monroe mirror image.

In short, our future now sits in Mayor Rowe's hands.

The intent of the comprehensive plan is to reflect what the majority of its residents and citizens of Sultan want, NOT what the mayor or the city administration wants. (This statement is supported by the 1995 actions of Sultan mayor John Walker, who was thwarted in his apparent push to amplify Sultan's power base by recommending an overly-large UGA [Urban Growth Area], but was "short-stopped" by a group of activists, among them Cathy Lee Haight, Pat Magnuson, Jean Roberts and others.) Even though the position of mayor is responsible and accountable to all city residents, he or she does not always perform in accordance with the desires of the majority of those he/she serves.

If you are interested in learning more about the subject of planning for Sultan's future, we urge you to read our more comprehensive editorial which addresses this subject in greater detail, Back For the Future. But don't stop there. It is up to each resident and citizen of Sultan -- and especially for those living within Sultan's UGA area, whose quality of life is now endangered -- to make the effort to find out for themselves what is going on, and whether or not they are in agreement. If the answer is "Yes, I like what I see happening," then that's okay. If the answer is, "No, I do not agree with what is happening," then you have taken your first step toward a greater civic responsibility -- getting informed and involved.

Our government -- any government -- requires oversight by the people it is working for to ensure that it is held accountable for its decisions. Use of our tax dollars to forge a future we do not want is, in my opinion, immoral.