That would be Spencer Jack looking happy to be walking on my old home zone's newly finished Skagit River Vision Flood Control and Riverfront Development.
Part of this project provides a long walkway along the river, as in that on which Spencer Jack is waving.
There is also a plaza and other amenities.
Including a flood wall that can be erected quickly should a rampaging Skagit River threaten downtown Mount Vernon, a situation which previously required an army of volunteer sandbaggers to save downtown from a New Orleans in a hurricane type fate.
Yes, unlike another town which comes to mind, the Skagit River Vision actually fixes an actual flood problem.
I believe that is part of the new plaza we are looking at below. It looks to be a nice open area which likely will come in quite handy when the next Skagit Valley Tulip Festival takes place next spring.
Below we get a closer look at Spencer Jack and part of the plaza. I like how giant boulders are incorporated into the design. In the HUGE versions of these photos, which Spencer Jack's dad, my favorite nephew, Jason, sent me last night, you can much more clearly make out details, such as the giant boulders.
That thing sticking up into the air above Spencer Jack is known as the Tulip Tower. Every spring the Skagit Valley has a month long Tulip Festival, with downtown Mount Vernon being one of the festival sites. The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival attracts over a million visitors to the valley every spring. These are real actual visitors, not an imaginary 10 million visitors like that which Fort Worth propagandists claim visit Fort Worth's imaginary Sundance Square every year.
Fort Worth's propagandists have used that bogus 10 million visitors to Sundance Square number in falsehood filled submissions to get awards no one has ever heard of so the Fort Worth propagandists can then make embarrassingly absurd claims, such as Fort Worth has the Top Downtown in America.
Those of you reading this who do not know anything about Fort Worth, let alone its downtown, Sundance Square is what the Fort Worth propagandists years ago named a 36 block area of Fort Worth's downtown which was, apparently, in dire need of revitalization. After a couple decades of confusing Fort Worth's few tourists, who thought Sundance Square was the parking lots at the heart of downtown, Fort Worth finally added an actual square on those parking lots, then goofily named the new square Sundance Square Plaza.
Continuing on, a broader view of the picture above, below in the distance you can see the Skagit River bridge which connects downtown Mount Vernon to west Mount Vernon. It is a big bridge, built over water, in less than four years.
The above picture sort of gives you an idea of the size of Mount Vernon's Skagit River Vision. Unlike Fort Worth's Trinity River Vision the Skagit River Vision had a project timeline, a qualified project engineer, was fully funded, was completed on schedule and did not hire the unqualified son of a corrupt local politician in order to try and motivate a corrupt local politician to secure federal pork barrel money to help pay for the project.
Below another look at part of the plaza, the Tulip Tower and the Skagit River Bridge.
Unlike Fort Worth's Trinity River Vision, eminent domain was not abused to take people's property to build the Skagit River Vision. The businesses and buildings which had to be removed were removed after this thing called "negotiating a fair price" took place with the owners, leaving no one feeling abused, unlike what has happened in Fort Worth.
We end this look at Mount Vernon's newest attraction looking southwest across the new plaza, which I doubt has a goofy name, at the sun setting on a Pacific Northwest fall day.
"...unqualified son of a corrupt local politician..." Didn't you MEAN "... corrupt son of an unqualified local politician...?"
ReplyDeletePS: I'm unsure of the grammatical rules when it comes to ... versus ?
Steve A, I don't know nothing about versus, but I think both corrupt formulations work just fine.
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