Twenty Years of Whatcom Watch

Editor’s Note: As Whatcom Watch approaches its twentieth year of publication, we honor the efforts of our founders, volunteers all, who put service to the environment and the community ahead of pecuniary gain to expose and fight against the forces of greed and destruction. Volunteers built our Republic, and volunteers will restore it.

Whatcom Watch was born from the efforts of three ordinary women (Lorena Havens, Becky Meloy and myself) who met for the first time in a public arena, listening to one another talk into a microphone. The paper’s birth coincided with a visioning process outlined in the Growth Management Act, a chance to consciously make choices about our future instead of watching our community evolve (or devolve) more randomly, less elegantly, with little or no concern for what our children would inherit.

We three women discovered that this visioning opportunity ignited a passion in us, motivating us to show up at endless public hearings for several years. We came prepared — our detailed testimony was a testament to our months of research late into the night and, although our goal was to provide extensive factual information for the decision-makers, we learned to keep our audience awake by making those dry facts come alive with the same passion and emotion and vision that fed the fire in our belly.

However, at the end of each day, when we would read the local paper’s reports of the meetings we’d attended, we would barely recognize the event. There was a sharp reduction, a dumbing down, of the information provided and a distinct slant to the account. In our opinion, the people were systematically being denied sufficient breadth of information about the issues. The vox populi is as diverse as the people themselves, but we felt that the newspaper spoke with a singular voice, governed by those who wielded power and money, often to the detriment of the community as a whole.

So, to empower the people, to give them access to information that would likely not see the light of day otherwise, we three met in our homes and cobbled together the first issues of the Watch with scissors and glue and primitive computers. We invited the people on the front lines of public involvement to write the articles, editing them only for readability. And, to our surprise, things came together. Volunteers appeared who shared our concern — a concern that, as the mainstream media of the world is gobbled up by fewer and fewer power brokers, its content masquerading as fact when it is increasingly opinion in service to a hidden agenda, people deserve better.

Voting Reports 1999 – 2011

Whatcom Watch is the only local paper to comprehensively cover votes by the Bellingham City Council, Whatcom County Council and Port of Bellingham Commission. We began reporting the City Council and County Council votes in 1999 and the Port of Bellingham votes in 2000. We’re committed to continuing our reports; we believe they’re a valuable contribution to our community and hope you, our readers, agree.

We’re looking for individuals, groups of individuals or businesses to sponsor our City Council and Port of Bellingham Commission voting reports. If you have any questions, please call Bill McCallum at 734-6007.

Whatcom Watch has covered meetings for 13 years. Our coverage was uneven during the first three years but has been comprehensive over the past 10 years. We’ve covered a total of 878 meetings; 378 were city meetings, 272 were county meetings and 228 were port meetings.

The table below lists the number of votes covered.

	Bellingham City Council	Whatcom County Council	Port of Bellingham Commission	YearlyTotal
1999	62	67	0	129
2000	165	147	40	352
2001	199	198	75	472
2002	243	230	124	597
2003	222	228	110	560
2004	288	219	118	625
2005	282	257	134	673
2006	319	252	140	711
2007	291	288	143	722
2008	355	262	150	767
2009	295	305	189	789
2010	258	240	180	678
2011	271	230	185	686
Total	3,250	2,923	1,587	7,761

.