West Siders Open Wallets For WSU Drive
Eastern and Western Washington face each other across a great divide of differences, as this newspaper just exhaustively reported.
But the chasm is sometimes bridged with money.
When Washington State University concluded a singularly successful fund drive this week, it turned out that 70 percent of the donors to the campaign, which raised $275.4 million, were from the West Side.
Not surprising, actually, given that about 60 percent of WSU’s alumni live on the West Side.
King County residents made up 17 percent of the WSU student body in 1996 alone, school statistics show.
“It’s really nice to think WSU is the state’s university,” said Mary Gresch in the university’s media relations department.
A record 137,157 donors contributed to the campaign.
The money is used to support scholarships, recruit and keep faculty, and build the university’s long-distance learning programs through computer technology.
Of the 10 largest grants, eight came from Western Washington, including a $9 million grant from the Boeing Company.
Emerald City knee-deep in goose poop
First, the sea lions. Now, Canada geese?
Seattle made headlines when plans were laid to kill pesky sea lions munching on steelhead at the Ballard Locks.
In the end, the targeted animals were spared when Florida’s Sea World took them in.
By that time outrage over the planned killings was so strong in the animal-rights-friendly Emerald City that fisheries workers reported death threats.
So imagine what will happen if noble Canada geese, those musical, graceful birds that mate for life, wind up in the cross hairs.
So it goes in Seattle, where a surge in the goose population has a consortium of local governments mulling what they euphemistically call “lethal removal.”
Lots of other things have been tried to scale down the piles of goose poop at public parks.
Between 1991 and 1995, about 7,300 geese were trapped by U.S. Department of Agriculture workers and relocated, according to Jennifer Cargal of the Seattle Parks Department.
More than 3,000 goose eggs were also disturbed on the nest so geese would not incubate them.
Still the piles grow higher.
“It’s really awful to go to a public beach and there’s bird poop everywhere. It’s not sanitary to lie down in that stuff,” Cargal said.
The next step is a public education campaign to teach people not to feed the geese, because that only attracts more geese seeking the easy life. Cargal is resigned to an uphill battle.
The parks department just put up new signs at Seattle’s Green Lake beseeching patrons not to feed the geese. So far the signs don’t seem to get in the way too much for people winging bread to the birds.
Close encounters of the political kind
Left will meet right on the Puget Sound’s Vashon Island this weekend, where the state GOP is staging its annual picnic across the street from a hippie confab called Earthfair.
Fairgoers will join drumming circles, munch organic whole wheat blackberry cobbler, and enjoy presentations on acupuncture, yurt construction and aboriginal music.
Meanwhile across the street, business mogul Tom Stewart will host Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Oklahoma Rep. Steve Largent, the former Seahawk turned Republican luminary.
The crowds will have at least two things in common. They will arrive by the thousands, and share shuttle bus service to the island, which can be reached only by ferry.
That may be the only mingling between the picnickers and the fairgoers. Unless the kids at Earthfair, faced with tofu and whole wheat, discover the Republicans’ menu of burgers, hot dogs and pop.
, DataTimes MEMO: West Side Stories runs every other week.