Back our Game Farm

The Olympic Game Farm and the Beebe family have been a part of our community for many years. We need to stand with them in their fight to save their family farm and business.

They provide employment to more than 30 residents, boost the economy by increasing tourism, educate children and families, and take in animals that have nowhere else to go. They are an asset to our community and we support them.

The Game Farm was originally established to be a dairy farm but became much more when Lloyd and Catherine Beebe began working with the movie industry. They worked with Disney to train, care for, and house many of the animals used by Walt and Roy Disney to create the movies we raised our children on or grew up on ourselves. When the movie industry no longer needed these animals, the Game Farm continued to care for them as well as other animals brought to them by the Department of Fish and Wildlife or other groups.

Through the years they have updated enclosures and their facilities to provide better, more adequate homes for their animals; they do not ask the community to pay for the service they provide (accepting injured, orphaned, or born in captivity animals that would not survive in the wild) but run a business to support their needs.

The cost of updates must be astounding, as the requirements put on them by the government, and other groups and organizations, continually change and grow harder to meet each year. The Game Farm does not sit idly by and allow animals to be uncared for. They invest in their animals and when able, take in animals that need homes, while striving to reach the ever-changing requirements put on them and running a legitimate tax paying business.

The critics need to look at the steps the Game Farm has already taken on improvements and their plans to continue to care for and protect animals; they claim to be for animals yet are preventing those that actually care for and house them from continuing to invest in the needs of their animals.

We encourage these groups and organizations to work with the Beebe family in caring for the animals, rather than making the Beebe family spend money on attorneys to protect their farm, business, and animals from them.

We encourage our community to support the Olympic Game Farm and the Beebe family in protecting and caring for the animals they have given homes to and for the ones they will take in and care for in the future.

Sequim Prairie Grange #1108

Submitted by grange secretary Joy Headley

Sequim is inviting problems

Regretfully, it seems we are destined to go down a path that the city planning department and other well meaning individuals have designed for our future and the betterment of our community!

It’s disturbing, to say the least, how such a pristine and wonderful community could find itself unwillingly utilized as a parasitic host to the downstream side of the drug addiction business. Is this an industry we can take pride in?

Without calling by name, the local entity proposing this is who will stand to profit the most from this pernicious industry. But on the other hand and for the sake of our city we would at least have a modicum of control, regulation and policing.

Maybe it’s the best possible arraignment given our limited options rather than allowing outside investors and non-profits with no substantive skin in the game to impose their will upon us.

With the city’s blessing we know “tiny” houses and other forms of substandard housing are planned to be integrated amongst our established family neighborhoods thereby possibly compromising our property values and security to provide needed low cost housing, possibly to troubled people in treatment programs. Existing covenants, conditions and restrictions (CCRs) will likely be challenged in these neighborhoods as some homeowners, landlords and property developers seek ways to profit.

Personally, I believe there is no way to stop what is and has been in the works for some time as major influences outside our city are driving this as larger cities along with nonprofit organizations export patients to outlying communities like ours for treatment.

Although we might like to express our anger toward city officials and make this personal, we must realize they have no real power to resist. A centralized, narrow option planning matrix has likely guided their decisions and they must obediently follow or at a minimum risk losing grant money from state and federal coffers.

Their response to our grievances will be muted as they cannot, as city representatives, risk legal repercussions speaking out against programs and the supportive proposals set before them and lawfully protected.

If this comes to pass at least some of our fears will be realized and everyone living here regardless of what neighborhood or economic stature will in some way be monetarily, physically or emotionally affected!

Although the innocence and character of Sequim will likely be forever changed , they cannot take away our fine weather and clean air!

To underpin my personal concerns my wife and I have this recent experience to share. My wife who is a local realtor, shockingly discovered an uninvited and unwelcome individual making themselves at home in a listed, locked and supposedly unoccupied house! This home is in a very nice well cared for community within sight of Carry Blake Community Park.

The person was subsequently arrested and jailed facing various charges.

Do we want to invite even more homelessness and criminal activity into our community?

Gary Miller

Sequim

Move MAT proposal forward

I attended the Jamestown Healing Center public meeting on Aug. 8 at Guy Cole Center. The panel of collaborative partners who have worked on this project did an excellent job of presenting an overview of the proposed MAT center.

There were maybe more than 1,000 people in attendance, room was filled and many others were seated outside. Speakers were placed outside to let all the people hear the presentation and testimony. The organizers set up a microphone for the individuals pro and con so everyone had a chance to speak.

When testimony started it was clear the folks against the MAT center were only not happy about the location and didn’t want it in Sequim. There were demands to move it to Blyn, Port Angeles, Port Townsend or anywhere. So the folks against the MAT center didn’t hear the land was purchased and it was moving forward.

Then the pro MAT center testimony started and there were recovering addicts that expressed some personal experiences and said they were not like the MAT patients depicted by the con MAT testimony. These recovering addicts were ridiculed by the crowd; other pro-MAT testimony was met with booing and disrespect.

I am very sad that (Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe chairman) Ron Allen had to ask the group to be respectful several times, to be quite several times. It was an opportunity sponsored by the MAT center collaborators to present facts, to diffuse false information circulating in Sequim and to hear testimony from the public. It turned into a disrespectful, shameful assembly of Sequim residents.

I hope the MAT center continues to move forward to provide medical services for our local addicts. We have an addiction problem in our community and thankfully we have a wonderful group of collaborators willing to help with our problem.

Eileen Cummings

Sequim

Column was spot-on

I was surprised by the negative reactions to Bertha Cooper’s thoughtful, factual and honest column (“Mob squad,” Sequim Gazette, July 31, page A-10).

The letter writers clearly have their views and probably nothing she or anyone else says will change them. They reminded me of what an anti-abortion protester said when my wife tried to have a civil discussion about abortion with her. She said, “I like being closed-minded. It helps me stay focused.”

Jim Dries

Sequim

Dems enable degradation of cities, country

With reference to “Selective stats deepens divide” (Sequim Gazette, Letters to the editor, Aug. 7, page A-10):

It is a fact that almost every major population center (city) within the United States is governed by Democrats; in some cases they have always been governed by Democrats. Indeed such governance has made a mockery of the phrase “Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.”

Our large cities all have people living on the streets, there is filth and garbage in piles … the Democrats refer to these people as “urban campers” and appear to do everything to enable this activity … this cannot be attractive to (legal) immigrants.

The writer is correct, there is a “deepening rift between the left and the right.” Why is that? Perhaps it is caused by the fact that the left denigrates our country, vilifies our culture, ridicules law enforcement and has no respect for the sanctity of life.

Ethan Harris

Sequim