It embarrasses me to agree with a Democrat, but Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen (D-Camano) is exactly right when she says that city officials brought the traffic problem in the vicinity of Wal-Mart on itself.

“It’s an awful mess,” she says, and that is the understatement of the year. It is a mess that could easily have been avoided with a little planning and just a smidgen of common sense, but city officials apparently didn’t have the common sense to understand that a little planning was needed.

Before Wal-Mart was built and developers built apartments to the curbside on the other side of the road, it would have been a simple matter to widen SR 20. Now what can we do? Beats me!

Many American businesses have gotten into trouble by caring too much about the next quarter and too little about the long run. I am sorry to say that Oak Harbor’s officials seem to be afflicted with the same short-run mentality. Their idea seems to be that if someone has the money to build something, let them have whatever they want. It will bring in tax revenues in the short run, and it will be someone else’s problem in the long run.

But it isn’t someone else’s problem. It is our problem, and it will be our problem for a very long time. Let’s elect city officials who will plan ahead and impose discipline on city growth.

Richard Donovan

Oak Harbor