Summer isn’t over yet. But what the heck, let’s have an end-of-summer closeout on column items.

• Maybe they aren’t in a state of shock, but Maple Valley Fire and Life Safety officials are at least surprised by the apparent defeat of their levy in the primary election last week. Maybe they shouldn’t be, though. The fire district, which is headed for some budgetary lean times without the levy, isn’t the only public entity around here that’s had trouble getting voters to approve property tax measures. Tahoma School District struggled seemingly forever to finally get a technology levy approved. And the city of Covington fell way short on a parks district proposal in 2006.

• Pat Cashman, whose humor column is a regular in the Reporter, recently has written about two issues that never fail to get a response: The phenomenon of tennis shoes slung over power lines and telephone lines (Aug. 20, “Mystery of the hanging shoes: What’s up with that?”) and Sasquatch, aka Bigfoot (today, “My meeting with Bigfoot: He shaved first”). Here are a few comments Cashman e-mailed (with tongue firmly in cheek) the other day on those subjects:

“Well, most readers said that they had heard from a friend of a brother of a cop that the hanging shoes are a sign that drugs are being sold in the neighborhood. My little brother and I threw a pair up on a line just to see if we could do it when we were kids. We always wondered later why so many people kept hitting us up for crack after that.

“Whenever I would bring up the Bigfoot thing on my radio show, there would always be a call or two from people who insisted that they’d seen a Bigfoot while camping or driving in the rain forest. So I would imagine this latest column (see page 8 of today’s Replrter) will unearth a few more, although people who believe fervently in Bigfoot don’t tend to read too often.”

• Given the cost of fuel, will boaters go out even less next summer on Lake Meridian now that the city of Kent has decided to start charging them to use the public boat launch? We’ll see. But like fire protection, somebody has to pay for public services.

Editor and publisher Pat Jenkins can be reached at (425) 432-1209 (extension 1050) and pjenkins@reporternewspapers.com