The City of Hoquiam just installed many flower boxes on the pedestrian side of the sidewalk along Highway 12, the main route through Hoquiam. The flowers are pretty but these 9” x 18” bulky planters remove 25% of the already narrow sidewalk width, a sidewalk used all day and through the evening by mothers with more than one child, the elderly (me) and other citizens.

We already must deal with bicycle rides who race along this sidewalk as they try to avoid using the highway busy with logging trucks.. The pretty new planters create a big hazard. It is odd and sad that the City of Hoquiam would do such a fundamentally thoughtless thing as reduce the width of this already far too narrow sidewalk. Why did they do it? While making the city prettier for Yuppies working at Amazon and Microsoft driving up to their million dollar homes at Seabrook, the citizens of Hoquiam have been forgotten. We live here! We use these sidewalks every single day. Please remove these obstructions from our footpath.

There is an ugly strain of thought and feeling among men that it is more important to impress outsiders than to protect one’s own family. My father, an international civil engineer always put on his good face when dealing with his neighbors, his bosses, and new people and when he got home he terrorized his own family. In this world, one takes care of family first, the rest is gravy.

Jim Blake

Hoquiam