A beer can was spotted by administrators at a high school football game. Before the season-opening kickoff, 75 students – row by row – were consequently pulled from the section of bleachers near where a school official saw the can and all were sequestered in classrooms, creating what some parents described as a chaotic scene.
Letter: Rental Inspection Programs are an admission of failure
When a city adopts a rental inspection program, it means the originators and adopters – city staff and city council respectively – are tired of ‘fire-fighting.’ In a word: failed.
Letter: Renters’ and Landlords’ check-list for the Rental Inspector
With clipboard-carrying inspectors in Lakewood, Washington set to begin sometime after Christmas their examinations of rental bedrooms, closets, bathrooms, kitchens, and maybe cupboards, following is a suggested – in the spirit of the coming holiday – naughty-or-nice checklist of your own for the one knocking at your door wanting entrance to your home.
Letter: TNT endorsement a kiss of death
The editorial board of the Tacoma News Tribune (TNT) recently endorsed the incumbents of the Lakewood City Council for the November 7 ballot. Horror of horrors, to hear the TNT tell it, should Lakewood return to the “anti-incumbent fever” that infected the city when Lakewood Cares, described by the TNT as “a political insurgent group”, […]
Letter: Bookmobile vs. Bulldozer – Why Rental Inspection Programs are fundamentally wrong
For one, that a local government – like the current battle in Lakewood, Washington – would require inspections of all private rental properties with few exceptions, is a stratagem more often seen acted out during elementary school recess than one would expect to see issuing from the recesses of city hall. In a word: bullying.
Letter: City seeks forgiveness for Rental Inspection cost ‘oversight’
The “custom software solution to support the Rental Housing Safety Program”, described by the city as ‘complex and sophisticated’, is now five times the original estimate. Of the $200,000 cost overrun the city says was unforeseen but necessary to develop the deluxe program by which to ‘register and administrate the rental units’ in Lakewood, the […]
Letter: Why I Row
I guess because I can. My goodness, the boathouse where I work sits right on the shore of the lake, and the water, especially this morning, beckons. So, no excuses.
Letter: Rental inspection meetings no one attended
What if they gave a war and nobody came? Or no one attended a meeting in order to shame Lakewood City leaders who now, after the fact, Will inform landlords of its own version of the landlord-tenant act.
Letter: Decisions, decisions – marijuana legalization, rental inspection
And the list of such contentious issues could go on, and on. And on. What do they have in common, other than of course the sometimes-volatile exchanges verbally and in print? More importantly, how are decisions made concerning them?