“SYSTEMS CHANGE IS always frightening,” observed someone at Wednesday’s Shelter Providers Network meeting in Port Angeles, which I emceed as part of my Serenity House duties.
We were discussing the possibility that Volunteers In Medicine of the Olympics — popularly known as VIMO — might seek a $650,000 grant for a community health center in central Clallam County.
With 8,500 Clallam County residents being uninsured and 16,000 being Medicaid-eligible, demand at VIMO’s limited-hours free clinic far outstrips volunteers’ capacity to provide medical care.
A rare opportunity to request funding to build medical care capacity is well worth seizing, Network members advised.
However, existing medical clinics have raised concerns about VIMO going after funds for a full-time non-volunteer clinic.
Concerns are understandable, in light of CliniCare’s recent closing due to the owner’s inability to find a buyer for whom the business was financially viable.
Balanced on a financial tight wire, operators of existing clinic worry that adding a community health center might negatively impact their reimbursement rates, which are already unsustainably low.
The specter of losing another local clinic is frightening, to be sure, but the network’s universal response was that fear should not prevent VIMO from pursuing resources that are desperately needed in this community.
Fear is a common response even when the proposed change addresses a problem that is well documented as requiring action.
Take biomass incinerators, for another local example.
The paper mills in Port Townsend and Port Angeles both currently burn waste wood, formerly called “hog fuel” and now labeled “biomass.”
Both mills propose replacing their circa 1950s steam-generating burners with new high-efficiency incinerators to generate the steam needed in paper-making, while simultaneously generating electricity and reducing emissions.
Port Townsend Paper’s $55 million cogeneration project would produce up to 25 megawatts of electricity for sale.
In Port Angeles, Nippon Paper Industries USA’s $71 million biomass boiler would produce 20 megawatts of salable electricity.
Initially, both mills anticipated starting construction by the end of this year and bringing the new systems on line in mid-2012.
Don’t bet on it.
Nippon’s project has been chosen from among the seven proposed biomass projects in the state as the target of anti-biomass appeals filed by No Biomass Burn and six other environmental groups.
Each project faces at least a half-dozen permitting processes, each with a full set of appeal opportunities climbing all the way to the Supreme Court.
The regulatory morass could keep the mills’ present equipment spewing energy into the atmosphere for decades.
Oddly, biomass was introduced as an environmentally friendly, renewable energy option, encouraged by federal tax credits.
State legislation encouraging biomass projects was sponsored by Sen. Jim Hargrove, D-Hoquiam, a forester by profession, and Rep. Kevin Van De Wege, D-Sequim, a fireman and paramedic.
Hargrove and Van De Wege represent the 24th District, covering Clallam and Jefferson counties and part of Grays Harbor County.
Van De Wege, who is now seeking a third term, cites the Port Townsend and Nippon biomass cogeneration plans as examples of “exactly what the state can do to help businesses create jobs,” yet he enjoys the support of the very people who are bent on blocking creation of those jobs.
Washington Conservation Voters endorsed Van De Wege over his challenger, Republican Port Angeles businessman Dan Gase.
Van De Wege’s score with the Conservation Voters bumped up from 82 percent in his first term to 100 percent in his second.
Nevertheless, Van De Wege scored zero success when he asked environmentalists to support his water rights legislation that would have helped preserve agriculture in Clallam County.
Every new option for generating energy — biomass, wave, wind, even some solar — is objectionable in the eyes of some environmentalists.
The only thing that’s sustainable is their opposition to change.
Be it health care, environmental stewardship, education, employment, criminal justice or economy — change is frightening.
And sustained fear is crippling.
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Martha Ireland was a Clallam County commissioner from 1996 through 1999.
She is on the administrative staff of Serenity of House of Clallam County, co-owns a Carlsborg-area farm with her husband, Dale, and is active in the local Republican Party, among other community endeavors.
Her column appears every Friday. E-mail: irelands@olypen.com.
