International Speedway Corporation’s push for a NASCAR track in Bremerton hit the wall of opposition with enough force to push it out of Kitsap County for the foreseeable future. The loss of the proposed speedway is still sinking in to those financially-minded folks down south who saw dollar signs as opposed to true economic improvement.

The two are often confused. More revenue means better living, right? Not if the area you’re living in suffers as a result. Quality of life was parked in the garage while track fans and opponents drove in circle for months. Fortunately, its horn was never silenced.

Maybe now, with this million dollar goose finally dead, Kitsap can again return to its attempts to create something that truly benefits its residents — living wage jobs. They’re still not here en masse as evidenced by the fact that thousands of local residents must commute to the east side to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, the cost of living here increases annually by leaps and bounds. Would NASCAR have helped in this regard? For a few. But not nearly enough.

Wide-scale telecommuting, something Poulsbo City Councilman Ed Stern has pushed for years and that is working in communities throughout the nation, is still apparently an unreachable goal. As a result, the roads are clogged, Washington State Ferries are packed and what Kitsap County Commissioner Josh Brown described as “Brain Drain” is occurring daily as knowledgeable, college educated workers are forced to look elsewhere for employment.

Would NASCAR have changed all this? Proponents would argue that the economic boom would have been so big that Bremerton would have blossomed into the flower of the Kitsap Peninsula. Perhaps, but what about the rest of Kitsap? Should the will of the few outweigh the needs of the many?

Fortunately they didn’t.

But Kitsap is still Kitsap. And, as such, home prices and the increasing cost of living here are still catering to those willing to commute to Seattle and beyond to bring home the bacon while others are starved out of the region.

So with NASCAR off track, it’s high time to put an adequate stopper in the brain drain, create an environment where “affordable housing” is no longer an oxymoron, where living wage jobs are the rule — as opposed to the exception to it — and the Kitsap of the future becomes the Kitsap of today.

A tall order? You bet.

But if we’re not working toward improving this county and healing it’s long standing socio-economic ills, just what exactly are we working toward?