Letters to the editor
August 20, 2008
By Contributed
Community Center
Genius, absolute genius!The Snoqualmie City Council should be commended and thanked for the agreement they have reached with the YMCA to operate the proposed Community Center. Nationally and locally the YMCA has distinguished itself as the premier human services organization. Committed to an impressive set of values, the YMCA programs set the standard. As a result, people of all ages flock to their facilities.
Further, the YMCA will provide many bonuses to our community, opening the door to our young people participating in leadership development training, environmental education and rich camping experiences, such as Camp Orkila in the San Juan Islands.
The opportunity to get a YMCA-operated facility is reason enough to vote for the Community Center.
Robert R. Richards
North Bend
I read your article in (Aug. 14′s) SnoValley Star regarding the Community Center Bond vote and I was very disturbed to be misquoted and misrepresented in several places. I am very careful with my word choices when speaking in public and I would appreciate the same consideration from you if you are going to use quotation marks and attribute the quotes to me. I was also paraphrased inaccurately in a couple of instances in your article. This is unacceptable. There were harmful errors in your article as well as simple inaccuracies. I would like to call your attention to both.
The following errors were harmful misrepresentations of facts and of my position. As I said more than once at the meeting, communication to the citizens on this community center issue must be crystal clear this time.
Article: Henriksen said previous attempts to secure voter approval failed, in part, because the city did not do a good enough job of selling the proposals to the electorate.
Actual: I did not, nor would I ever, say this. It would be completely inappropriate for me or any other elected official or city staff member to “sell” proposals to the electorate. We are very careful about this. It is our job to communicate accurate and complete information about the proposals to the electorate. The quotes in your article were also inaccurate. What I said was “…My observation of last time a couple of years ago was that communication, I think, was not as clear as it could have been from the city and I want to make sure in this case, that communication from the city council and from the city staff is crystal clear about this project and this vote…”
Article: The $100,000 in additional annual city funding, she said, would come out of a recently established fund for family support and non-profit organizations that will be seeded by a city contribution of 1 percent of general fund revenues, and therefore have no adverse general fund impacts.
Actual: This is completely wrong and misleading. I said that the $100K would not affect the human services fund which was recently increased, by Council policy, to 1 percent of the general fund. Your attribution was exactly the opposite of what I said. To be clear, for your understanding – the $100K is separate and will come from a contractual agreement with the Snoqualmie Tribe as a result of its casino operations. The money we receive from this contract will be restricted to human services uses only. The Tribe is in favor of this money going to support the Community Center/YMCA project.
Article: A community center, Henriksen said, would be an asset to local schools and children, as well as contribute to the property tax values of homes on the Ridge.
Actual: I did not say anything about contributing to “the property tax values of homes on the Ridge”. If I had said anything about home values, I would not have called it “property tax values” and I certainly would not have attributed the benefit only to “homes on the Ridge”. There is no point on the tape where I even come close to saying anything like this.
Article: “If the school district is not going to improve our facilities, we have to do it ourselves,” Henriksen said. “A community center will do this.”
Actual: This misquotation is particularly distressing. It is not what I said. Frankly, it sounds inflammatory and disrespectful to the School District and I am very disturbed that you would attribute a sentence like that to me. I have nothing but respect for the District and the challenges it faces. The exact sentence I said was surrounded by a great deal of context, and I can only guess that the quote you were trying to use was when I actually said “If Snoqualmie is going to do something to support our youth then we’ll have to make that investment ourselves, and a community center/YMCA is something that would work in tandem with the schools, not in opposition to them.” (in minute 35 on the tape). I did not say the second part of the above quote at all.
There were several other misquotations that got the general gist of what I was saying, but were not accurate quotes.
In the future, I would respectfully request that if you can not quote me accurately, that you not quote me at all. I should not have to spend time on damage control each time your newspaper quotes me. I would much rather spend the time in conversation with you before publication to make sure you have accurate information and an opportunity to clearly understand the issues before writing about them. We all owe it to your readers to be accurate.
Maria Henrickson,
Snoqualmie
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