Exhibit A
Exhibit "A59 ' PonCommission WC}.\ Meeting ofAug'RL': 300? Hello Commissioners and thank you for your work, concern and attention on behalf of the citizens of this region. My name is Karen Morris of 15788 N.E. 4th St. Bellevue. I come today to plead with you to apply that concern and attention equally to affected parties on an issue. That issue is the presence of the tent encampment which set up without permission on property the port holds for the public. You are presently being heavily pressured to make a quick decision to allow it to stay, and that pressure is being applied by those who I realize try to make it hard to deny them. But there are many very good reasons to do so. I wish I had more than 3 minutes to go into them, because there is so much more here than meets the eye, and you are really only hearing one biased and anecdotal side of it. I am one of a number of citizens who had reason to start looking into the overarching issue this comes out of years ago. We saw decisions being made on trust and faith with an almost total lack of data to support the claims being made. We started researching and collecting data on our own. We unfortunately found that the trust was misplaced and the anecdotes and examples misleading and sometimes flat out false. We did this not for the reasons that others who are pushing you will undoubtedly attribute to us, but because we saw conicting information and wanted to know the truth. And we wanted the decisions that affected us all to be made based on truth and data. That data has been very hard to come by, and it has taken us years and a lot of volunteer work to gather as much as we have. Whenever we have brought that data forward at public forums, we are usually subjected to a somewhat brutal round of "kill the messenger". So I totally understand the reluctance I have been told about that the residents of this area have about voicing their quite legitimate concerns in public, and being attacked and called names for doing do. What our research and data says is that many of the things this group and their supporters tell you happen don't happen in any reliable and regular manner. Dangerous things have slipped through those loopholes, and will continue to. And many of the things they insist don't happen do. o5: There is also plenty of evidence in the record of this groupy their supporters saying things that they know not to be true, if that is what they think it takes to get what they want. They have sometimes voiced their real agenda and methods of operations in articles which we have and in other comments. The port has had dealings with them in the past, not only over the SHARE shelter which was on port property, but also over the illegal break in and attempted hostile takeover of the Lora Lake Apartments which produced a police report we have featuring prominently both of the main leaders in this current effort. This is only one of stacks of police and court records we have and could provide. I don't ask you like they do, to be trusted and taken at my word. What I do ask is that you give us a chance to bring to your meetings on this issue our evidence that this is not a good idea, and that the safety and liability issues are far greater than you are being led to believe. If you do listen, I think you will stick to your original decision that it is not appropriate to let this particular group use port land or for that matter, any public land. I am willing to put my time in to participate in this process, as I suspect are others if they knew, and ask that you quit holding meetings with only the supporters of this effort and port commissioners, and start having representatives of the other perspective at those meetings. It is only fair and prudent.
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