Our very small town is run in amazingly strange ways. First, property taxes here are TWICE what they are in the metro Portland area, which offers far more services than our little town. How does all that money get spent? For one, the City Engineer isn't an engineer, so the City hired a consulting firm to determine what needs to be done to lessen the flooding and growth of marsh; two fellows worked two weeks, from dawn to dusk every day, last March. Rumor is that the cost was $30,000. Great, I thought, something finally will be done. Hah--the City has done nothing, and most of the stakes, markers, flagging, etc. has been knocked down, dug up by the City's road grader, or destroyed by weather. There's supposedly written backup to all the on-the-ground work the consultants did, but, without all the flagging and markers, I'm sure that much of the surveying will need to be redone...if the City ever follows through.

When the eighth developer of the land both upstream and downstream of our place went bankers, the CITY bought those hundreds of acres, in the mistaken belief that they could become developers while supervising development within the City. Of course, that idea was shot down quickly, but, still, even though the City was offered more than the $2.8 mil they had paid by a real developer, they turned down his offer. Our town is now 24% VRDs (vacation rental dwellings, most "managed" by companies that siphon off most of the exhoribitant rent. A 4BR house is rented to 8-10 carloads of tourists, packed into every available space. Neighbors (remember a quarter of the houses are VRDs) are treated to cars parked in their driveways or blocking them, excess garbage overflowing bins, people partying most of the night, etc. The supposed management companies never have enough staff to deal with problems--but the City gleans the TRT (transient room tax), a multi-million-dollar bonanza.

The people who make tourism possible by doing the hard work of cleaning, working in restaurants, etc. can't afford to live in town, both due to the high taxes and to the fact that there simply are almost no affordable rental homes. They live outside the City north of town...the very area of manufactured homes that was hit by a forest fire last year. The City Mayor's reaction? "THOSE people don't live in the City, so they're not our problem." I volunteer for Backpacks for Kids (to feed low-income kids in the hope that they do better in school and better than their parents); our pantry is in City Hall. Over a week after the fire, I was hauling totes of bread out to my car to deliver to the places offering fire relief, and, in less than 10 minutes, I was approached by three women, all of them still living in their cars, wearing whatever they had on when the fire came at their homes. City Hall offered nothing, was closed due to Covid but didn't have any info posted about where to go for help. I went home and printed a stack of flyers; first place I posted them was on all the doors of City Hall. I was ashamed to live in a town whose leader had such a bad attitude about the very people that make this town function and earn all that lovely money from tourism! Don't get me wrong...the people who live in the City for the most part volunteered time, effort, and money to help the nearly 300 families left homeless. People here are extremely generous...except for our ex-Mayor.

@loribmt
I read that 10-14,000 giant sequoia trees were lost due to wildfires in the last two years here in California.
Jake

@loribmt, @joyces, @ess77 and all who love trees. I'm a rampant tree hugger. My entire career as a professional artist focused on the environment, climate change and the destruction and ultimate disappearance of pristine wilderness.
In 2004, when the ranchers and all other citizens in Big Horn Country, Alberta, contacted me to literally beg for my peers and I, as artists, to help them to somehow influence the government to stop the clearcutting practice in their area, I organized a group of 26 artists and we mounted a huge art exhibition dealing with the clearcut issues in their part of paradise. The show was held at the Red Deer Art Gallery and Museum in the centre of the Big Horn Country. 3500 people, a huge number, attended the exhibition during the three weeks it was up. I'm attaching an image of one of my three paintings juried into the show. The painting is 4' x 4', acrylic on canvas, entitled "Clearcut/The Rape of a Mountain".
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Well, folks, I tried to attach the image, but I've failed (again). I'll try again.