An Orcas Island man who admitted to brutalizing a live-in girlfriend during an alcohol-fueled two-day attack was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to two felonies, including third-degree rape.
The San Juan County Council appointed Orcas Island’s Tim Blanchard to the county planning commission on Jan. 29.
The penalties start with 30 days in jail for a Suquamish man in the wake of a high-speed boating collision that left one man with a shattered pelvis, another with a broken shoulder and several others scrambling for safety after being catapulted into the waters of Wasp Passage in July, 2011.
With the sheet thrown back and cage door opened, a once-injured adult bald eagle needed only but a few seconds to clear its six-foot wingspan from its temporary entrapment, gain its footing, and then, without even a hint of hesitation, off it soared.
Not even its exceedingly spacious lobby, nor the balcony above, proved large enough to contain the hundreds of people who turned out Nov. 17 for the ceremonial ribbon-cutting and open house of the newly constructed hospital on San Juan Island.
The bleachers inside the gym were awash in a sea of red, the color of choice of the anti-coal crowd.
Outside the high school, the sidewalks were rimmed with placards touting the jobs and economic opportunities that an export facility built for coal would bring if permitted as proposed to nearby Cherry Point.
With results of a full-blown environmental review yet to come, it could be months before a verdict is handed down on the giant export facility proposed to be built at Cherry Point, just north of Bellingham.
San Juan County voters last week handed their local government a lifeline of new revenue in the form of a three-tenths of 1 percent increase in the local sales tax.
A Lopez Island man was ordered to serve 30 days in jail for walking away from the scene of high-speed crash and leaving behind a friend whose injuries proved too severe for him to leave the scene.
A Lopez Island man accused of a late-night sexual assault of a female friend more than twice his age will stand trial for rape in late August.
The pulse of San Juan County’s real estate market began to quicken in the past two months. And while the median price of a home sale remains below the same mark of a year ago, $579,000 compared to $597,000 in 2011, an increase in property sales and transactions has San Juan County Land Bank officials breathing just a bit easier, for the moment.
In the event that a reservation system proves to be a poor fit for the San Juan Islands, Washington State Ferries is prepared to drop the idea.
Nicknamed Mojo, the young Stellar sea lion that spent nearly four months being nursed back to health at Wolf Hollow, the San Juan Island-based wildlife rehabilitation center was escorted back to Washington’s outer coast May 29 and released back into the wild, south of the Olympic Peninsula, in an area where many of its kind are known to congregate.
