ESSENTIAL NEWS

Kari Mar wants to know what stories The Northern Light is missing. For starters, they aren't missing anything; they are covering up essential news. She wants to know which questions aren't being asked, and what local issues deserve deeper reporting. So here's my answer.

The Northern Light needs to hold Blaine City Manager Mike Harmon to the same standard they require of letters to the editor: provide documentation. When I noted the millions it would cost Blaine utility customers to annex Birch Point, The Northern Light required me to provide city and county documents supporting my claim. Then they cross-examined me for ten minutes by phone before publishing my LTE.

Contrast that with unverified claims by Harmon and Blaine Community Development Services director Alex Wenger that The Northern Light routinely published without question, even when Harmon made wildly false claims about public records requests in order to defame his and Mayor Steward's political opponents--the open government activists the mayor's friend David Brudvik threatened to murder.

Convicted violent felon Brudvik was inspired to threaten the four of us by the so-called "anonymous letter" alleging these requests cost the city hundreds of thousands, that Harmon and Steward then used to interfere with the 2025 city council election. Brudvik specifically cited the SEPA appeal records requests by Water Planning Matters that later exposed Birch Point wetland map fraud by Harmon and Wenger.

Harmon began his escapades as new city manager in March 2023 at the city council retreat where they brainstormed how to exclude the public and accommodate developers by unlawfully fast-tracking  rezoning that ignores environmental impacts on the Central Business District, the Critical Aquifer Recharge Area, and  Drayton Harbor by not doing a single Environmental Impact Statement.