As 2011 closes, it’s hard to imagine a new year starting. The fresh sense of transition is missing for the fourth year in a row as the effects of the recession drag upon everything from the milk in your morning cereal to the electric bill at city hall.

This is the year that the Kitsap County Fair recycled its queen and pizza became a “vegetable” in local schools that serve free lunch to as many as 60 percent of their students.

Many people leading the community in business and government have begun to wrap their minds around the possibility that what lays ahead is not an effort to rebuild the blustering economy that collapsed, but rather a new way of doing business and running government. But they bump into those who envision nothing but past revenues.

In 2011, the financial crisis led to much change that will eventually turn to the good. It’s the nature of many people to see the niche and fill it just the way that Claude and Christine Hamner did when they turned a failed Wheaton Way quick lube building into their bustling seafood shop, the Crab Shack.

This year, Central Kitsap School District began its search for millions in revenue or millions in cuts. Hopefully they can channel the entrepreneurial zest of Silverdale resident Colin Shaughnessy, who started a mobile auto repair business to fill a need and raise a family rather than the city leaders in Bremerton who raised taxes on citizens to ease the financial strain on an old-model bureaucracy they cannot afford.

Houses continue to be lost to foreclosure, local business continue to fail and the numbers of local residents falling off the financial edge has grown just as the number of those who’ve moved closer to that edge.

Fresh starts and transitions aside, the pages of this paper also held stories of goodness and success throughout the year. As a community paper, we seek to place stories that reflect the community’s well side such as urban farm on Bloomington Avenue in Bremerton or the success of a young freshman female swimmer that reached ironman status. We featured local pumpkin growers along side local do-gooders raising money or rallying behind a cause to change the world.

Here is to seeing what comes of it all in 2012.