Well. I have been sitting at my kitchen table since Tuesday morning trying to figure out how to start this week's column, and I will tell you what, sometimes the news just walks right up and knocks on your door whether you invited it or not — and this week it knocked loud. The Pierce County Council voted five to two to put a six-month pause on new involuntary confinement facilities in unincorporated Pierce County, and I want to be very clear that I am not here to tell you how to feel about that, I am just here to tell you that the people who actually live here should have been part of that conversation a long time before it got to a council vote — and if you have been paying attention to how things get decided around here, you already know that is not how it tends to go.
And another thing — I remember when this whole valley was a different place entirely. My father drove me out past the edges of what was then just open land and he said, Traicy, somebody is always going to want to put something out here, the question is whether the people who live nearby get a say. Now I cannot tell you the exact year he said that, but I can tell you it was before the bypass and before they took out the old Safeway on Meridian that had the cart corrals in exactly the right spots, which — and I know this is not directly related but I have been thinking about it — nobody has gotten the cart corrals right since, and the parking situation at the current grocery options in this town is a whole separate column I have been drafting in my head for three weeks now. The point is, my father was right, and decisions about what gets built where tend to happen fast and get explained slowly, and a six-month moratorium is at least somebody hitting pause long enough to take a breath.
What I will say is this — five to two is not a squeaker, that is a real vote, and the people who actually live here in unincorporated Pierce County, which includes neighborhoods that feed right into Puyallup, deserve to know that their elected council is at least asking questions before something gets permitted and poured and suddenly it is just there and everyone acts like it was always there. I have seen that happen with certain developments I will not name specifically — you know which ones, and you know who made certain decisions — and once the concrete is dry, the conversation is over. A moratorium is not a decision, it is a pause, and I think pauses are underrated. I have more to say about this and I will circle back once I have had more time to think it through properly.
That's all for this week. You know where to find me.