Bickleton Java Talk focus is progress
Lou Marzeles
News Editor
Java Talk took to the road for the first time last week, holding a meeting in Bickleton on Thursday. Twenty people—a sizable representation of the town’s population—showed up to discuss community matters, and the topics centered on pride of accomplishment on the one hand and curiosity on the other hand over why the east end of the county seems so invisible to county commissioners and project priorities.
Talk started off with the school, which continues to demonstrate significant advances by any school’s standards. “There are some things that have happened this past year that I’m extremely proud of,” school superintendent Ric Palmer stated. “We have a mathematics teacher who was a valedictorian in 1986 in Bickleton, Kim Clinton, and she went on to a scholarship at Central Washington University on a cross-country/basketball scholarship and ended up a year later at Washington State University, where she graduated with a BS degree in mathematics. She did her master’s degree in technology a few years later. Since then, she has gone through the national board certification for teachers. That’s pretty strenuous. Only 33 percent of teachers taking that exam pass it.” Bickleton has a total of 13 teachers for grades K-12.
“It brings a whole different perspective on how we bring curriculum to our students. She’s been able to bring her expertise in to other teachers. It’s sparked an interest in some of our younger teachers to go ahead and pursue national board certification. One of our goals is to see a high percentage of our teachers be board certified. It says a lot about our community and our school. She’s a very dynamic, motivated young lady. That’s what we like to see in our school.”
Bickleton is also about to launch its pilot four-day school week program. “We start our four-day school week the 25th of this month, and we’re excited to see where that’s going to go. It’s basically done to meet economies of efficiency. As you know, state dollars keep getting less and less, and as they shrink for a school district that pretty much runs bare bones in the first place, something’s got to give somewhere. This year particularly, we had to take a look at our classroom aides. Without them, our reading program for which we’ve had national recognition, suffers immensely.”
Talk then shifted to roads in dire need of repair in the area, beginning with Hale Road.
“The county really needs to finish Hale Road,” said community council president Mike Copenheffer. “It’s only been 18 years. It’s about 12 miles, and they’ve paved the bottom six and a half. I would think with the revenues being generated from this end of the county, they could get it done. It’s critical to the bus route; over 50 percent of our kids come from that route. It’s in such bad condition, it eats the tires off the buses.”
“Last month I had to put three new tires on buses, and those are $380 apiece,” Palmer said.
“So that’s half a teacher’s wages just to put tires on buses that have to go down an unimproved road,” Copenheffer added.
The group was asked if the delay was just slow bureaucracy or is there an attitude at the county that Bickleton is some backwater.
“I think they just don’t understand how much traffic there is here and how important the road is. They don’t understand that it would save the district money, and then there’s the safety of our children. Now, they paved the bottom six and a half miles because they’ve got vineyards down there, and those people complained and complained because the dust was getting onto the grapes.”
“And there’s part of the thing: they complained. I think if we had a good community voice, like this Java Talk is right now—we’ve got 18, 19 people here [the final count was 20], all of the same accord on this issue.”
A comment was then made about how the county is laying off some personnel in the face of budget constraints and that perhaps part of the problem was lack of county funds.
“I don’t understand how the county can be stretched for resources,” Palmer said. “In terms of this school district, I’ve gone from a $72 million tax base to right now close to $400 million. So it’s hard for me to swallow that the county has revenue problems.”
“It would be nice to see a county commissioner out here once in a while, so we know we’re not forgotten,” Copenheffer added.
“I think between the wind farms and the garbage dump, this part of the county provides at least 50 percent of the whole county’s revenue,” a participant said.
“That seems to get lost because the county line perpetually has been about two miles east of Goldendale. But again, we need a concentrated effort of us to make noise, because they hear noise from the other end of the county all the time. You go to a commissioner’s meeting, you see it.”
Copenheffer then talked about developments with the community council. “We started a couple of years ago and started a couple of projects,” he said. One of them, headed up by Ada Ruth [Whitmore], is the bluebird project, and since then a couple of people have come on, and they’re a ball of fire. They’ve replaced probably 150 houses this year.”
“We’re also working on a Bickleton water system. We’ve got the first part of the feasibility study, and we’ve got the first informal plan of where the wells would go. It’s going to take about another $20,000 to complete that study. At that time, it’ll go to a vote of the residents.”
“The Department of Health very much wants Bickleton to have a water system,” a participant added
“The reason is that we have high nitrate levels in the drinking water, above the levels that are acceptable, plus other chemicals. We’ve had their attention for a long time up here. We’ve had experts here, we’ve had the PUD here—we’ve had everybody here but the commissioners.”
“About Glade Road,” Copenheffer said. “That’s a Yakima County road that is an extension of Bickleton-Mabton. Glade Road is not acceptable by any standard of state law or county ordinance, so we started making noise up in Yakima County. We got a Yakima County commissioner involved, Kevin Bouchey, and all of a sudden we got results.”
“The second Saturday in June we’ve got our rodeo, which is the second oldest one in the state. That will involve a community picnic Friday night.”
“We’ve got to get the younger people involved if we’re going to keep the community going, and I don’t know the answer to that other than become active and have something interesting for them to come to.”
“We don’t want to be in a situation where our youth is our number one export.”
Klickitat County Sheriff Rick McComas then spoke to that point. “If the school is where the younger generation’s activities are centered, maybe that’s where the council needs to start soliciting support and involvement. As a former resident and now outsider, that’s where I would go.”
McComas then returned to the topic of area roads. “In the last two months, we’ve had a significant increase in vehicle accidents,” he said. “I’d like the community to be a little more vigilant in reporting cases. At the request of the wind farm managers, we did come out and increase patrol in the area. I would have to say that out of all the warnings and citations issued, 90 percent were associated with the projects. However, that other 10 percent were locals.
“I’ve talked with the county about the condition of some of the roads,” McComas went on to say. “It always seems to hit a dead end, like the Glade Road situation. Comments about 50 percent of the income coming from this end of the county—actually, I think it’s a lot higher than that. The number of people we have traveling through because of the wind projects, the wineries, the gas drilling, the sightseers and so forth, because of all that, this end of the county needs a lot more significant attention, not only from our county commissioners specifically but from all the county department heads that have some involvement out here. So again, through these conversations and continued Java Talk, maybe we can get their attention.”
Representatives on the economy
Lou Marzeles
News Editor
State representatives Bruce Chandler, Jim Honeyford, and newly elected David Taylor visited The Sentinel Thursday, and each had something to say about the state’s budget woes and the governor’s approach to solving them.
The conversation began with a question: the governor seems to be taking things out of the budget, then suggesting maybe they’ll go back in; what’s that about?
“It means she wants a tax increase; she’s building a base for a tax increase,” Rep. Honeyford said.
“She didn’t want to propose it,” Rep. Chandler concurred. “She’d rather the legislature propose it. I think she’s created a perception of ambivalence, or at least confusion. The public response hasn’t been what she wanted. We hear from people all the time. What they want from government is for people to talk straight, and they want to know what’s going on. We’re burning a lot of time, and a big part of the problem with the deficit is the delay. We operate a two-year budget, and when we reduce something by 10 percent, it’s like taking 20 percent out of the two-year budget cycle. Government is, by its nature, slow.
“What people in Olympia tend to forget is, there’s cause and effect,” Rep. Taylor added. “When we take action, there are effects of it. My focus has been on regulatory reform; streamlining the permit process, putting in place opportunities for business development, infrastructure improvement. A healthy main street is going to get us through the deficit quicker than more taxes, more spending, or borrowing more money.”
There’s a ripple effect with taxes, Chandler pointed out. “If you raise taxes on businesses,” he said, “they pay those taxes by laying off employees or reducing hours for employees, which reduces spending, because they have less to spend, which reduces sales tax revenues. You may be gaining in one tax, but you’re losing more in another. You really are pushing a string uphill. The bottom line, it’s only a healthy economy that can support public services for any length of time. Our goal is restoring economic growth in the state and not get tempted by the quick fix and put out this immediate fire in the short term that actually cripples our economic future in the future.”
The three had just come from a Chamber of Commerce lunch meeting which featured Goldendale school superintendent Mark Heid, who spoke on the upcoming school levy and its challenges with the state budget’s proposed removal of levy equalization funds. Those funds were provided by the state to property-poor school districts in order to bring their funding to a par with property-rich districts. The current proposed budget takes equalization funding away.
“Sitting in the Chamber lunch,” Taylor said, “and listening to this talk about loss of levy equalization for property-poor districts—that happens to be most of the 15th district, 21 out of 29 school districts. Where the disconnect is, the regulation by government over new land use and new land activities, the time it takes to get a new permit, can directly impact the school districts. Economic development increases property values, and that’s where levy money comes from. School equalization funding has to be preserved. The state is constitutionally mandated to provide for the education of all children, and it has to be the same education in its parameters. I think we need to put the control side of education back to the school boards and say, Goldendale school district school board, what do you need?”
“I believe the solution is to encourage existing businesses,” Honeyford said, “and I believe we do that through infrastructure so that when they want to expand and develop, they’ve got the water, they’ve got the sewer, they’ve got the roads available to them, in addition to regulatory reform. I’m concerned that the legislature pretty much eliminated the public works fund, which is a fund that gives cities and county governments low-interest loans to develop infrastructure. It’s financed by a utility tax and real estate excise tax that the local governments imposed upon themselves, and they sent that money to Olympia to be administered and loaned back. They didn’t do away with the fund; they just did away with the money. They took that money. I keep telling the cities: sue. That money was local tax money that was supposed to be used for infrastructure.”
Chandler indicated the recession would change everything in its aftermath. “We’re going to be in a different economic environment,” he said. “We need to use this opportunity to refine and reform government, the way we provide public services. The government hasn’t changed the way it’s operated in a hundred years. Business has had to find ways to do things faster, cheaper, and better, and still come up with more value. The state has not been particularly effective at developing better ways of delivering services, provide more quality and do things faster and cheaper.”
Chandler spoke of the state tendency to throw money at ineffective and unnecessary technology. “We’re spending money on software technology—every agency and every program has to have its own software, and it has to be proprietary,” he said. “They can’t use it off the shelf. I don’t know how many times we’ve had to spend $200 million to set up a computer system, and it never works right and three years later the legislature funds a new one. There are 49 other states that are doing pretty much what we’re doing. Somebody else somewhere has got to have a software program that works.”
The final question put to the three concerned balancing multitudinous constituent requests. When everybody wants something from you, how do you prioritize what can realistically be done?
“I go back to what I consider the four primary responsibilities of government,” Honeyford said, “public health and safety, the elderly, the disabled, and the young people and education. You would have to prioritize some things, but that’s how I would do it. Look at those four priorities, and those to me are the most important things.”
“And then you ask,” Chandler added, “is it going to create jobs or is it not? Is it going to help get the economy moving?”
“And then the final question you ask is,” Taylor said, “are there opportunities to create revenue without raising taxes?”
PUD appoints new GM
The Klickitat PUD Board of Commissioners made a unanimous decision to appoint interim manager Jim Smith as the new permanent General Manager for the PUD at their Dec. 22 meeting.
Smith has 21 years experience in the electric utility industry, nine of it in Canada at BC Hydro, before moving to the U.S. to work at Klickitat PUD. BC Hydro is the electric utility that serves all of British Columbia, employing more than 5,000 people. In his time there, Smith worked as an engineer, project manager, customer service and design manager, and did rotations through all the departments on a management training program.
Jim was hired Nov. 3, 1997, as the system engineer for KPUD and has been instrumental in the design of Klickitat PUD’s transmission and distribution systems, as well as substations. Smith is a registered professional engineer, and has been the engineering manager for the PUD since 2001. He was a key player in the design phase of the White Creek Wind Project, and oversaw the HW Hill Landfill to Gas Energy Plant expansion, which is now in the final stages.
Smith’s extensive knowledge of the PUD’s operations and systems has made the transition to General Manager easier. In his few months as the interim manager, Smith led the PUD through the completion of the bond sales, the 2010 budgeting process, as well as the 2008 audit.
Smith and his family are highly involved in the community, including the Goldendale Swimming Pool and the Klickitat County Fair, plus youth soccer and basketball. |
