Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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By Sen. Mike Hewitt, Rep. Maureen Walsh and Rep. Terry Nealey The 2015 session lasted much longer than anticipated – a record 176 days – but a number of good things came of this extended session. We passed a new, balanced, bipartisan operating budget that did not rely on new general tax increases. The new budget makes historic investments in early learning, K-12, higher education and the mental-health system. Additional funding was allocated to in-home health care providers, long-term care, and developmental-disability programs for our mos...
Emma is saying farewell this week. Our Student Life columnist, Emma Philbrook, plans to keep in touch with us, perhaps submitting a column on a monthly basis, but it just won't be the same. While we're pleased to see her set forth on her college adventure, it's hard to say good-bye to someone who has become such a familiar face on the pages of The Times. As a matter of fact, Emma has been here longer than the rest of us. Her first published column, featuring gift-giving tips, was printed on...
Columbia County Commissioner Dwight Robanske said it best on Monday: “The ban will not stop pot use. It probably won’t even slow it down.” And so, on Monday, the commissioners voted 2-1 against a proposed ban on marijuana businesses in the unincorporated parts of the county. (See story on Page 1.) I’m encouraged to see a big dose of realism by the commissioners on pot businesses. Even Commissioner Merle Jackson, who made the motion for the ban, and lost the vote, made some very constructive sugg...
Hey there, everyone! Okay, so maybe that was a bit too peppy a start for the last regular edition of this column, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s when the final book in a series gets all moody and broody just because the author’s sad it all has to come to an end. I’ve been thinking about how to write the piece you’re currently reading for ages. For a while, I contemplated printing my “lost first column”, which was about getting a column, but then I decided that I really needed a...
Commodities prices as a class have been declining since 2011, according to the CRB Commodities Index. Created by The Commodities Research Bureau, it is an indicator based on a wide selection of commodity prices; that is, prices for real-world “stuff” from burlap and copper to crude oil, wheat and zinc. There are 23 different items whose prices go into making the numerical index for the CRB. Watching the chart for this index is to observe what is happening in the real world. We all know that crude oil has dropped from $107 per barrel 14 mon...
I drove with trepidation toward Walla Walla on Friday morning, waiting for the inevitable back-up of cars. I knew I would have to carefully thread through the line of young hipsters in their cars at the airport exit waiting to get to their camping spots. I brought walking shoes with thick socks in case I had to park somewhere beyond College Place and hike back to downtown Walla Walla. As I breezed through town on Highway 12, the cluster never appeared, (though all the left turns were blocked)....
As the nurse at my last doctor’s appointment so delicately put it, my vision is down the toilet. I am, according to that infamous test with the rows of progressively smaller letters, 20/70 in my right eye and 20/40 in my left. Somehow, they manage to collaborate and produce overall vision of 20/30, which is still deep enough into the metaphorical plumbing to necessitate an appointment with an eye doctor and possibly a pair of glasses. I just got back from a trip to Long Beach. During the s...
Wheat is an actively traded market, with participants ranging from individual small speculative traders, farmers and local cooperative elevators to billion dollar trading funds and multi-national grain handling firms. There are futures contracts trading all over the world, but soft red wheat futures at the Chicago Board of Trade are the best known and most widely followed. This is partly because of its reputation as a reliable indicator of global wheat prices, and partly due to its great liquidity or ease of trading, from “one-lots” of 5,0...
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On the front page of The Times this week is a tragic story about a young Dayton man who is being charged with multiple counts of child rape. Besides being terrible for those involved, stories like this present one of the most difficult dilemmas that those of us who put out newspapers face. This young man and the other people close to this story are obviously going through a very difficult time. Having the charges against him publicized on the front page of a local newspaper, even in vague...
As I am about to depart for college, I have been doing an extensive amount of research concerning what I need to bring with me, and I have found out that nobody on the internet knows anything about packing for college. But just to be safe, I’ll compare what I’ve already bought to this authoritative-looking list: •Alarm clock. Check – there’s an alarm function on my phone. •Bed linens/towels. Check and check, although I took the liberty of substituting bed flannels for the bed linens. •Ca...
Emergency services have been on the minds of Touchet Valley residents a lot this summer, what with four major building fires in Dayton and the Blue Creek Fire in Walla Walla County. None of the causes of these fires has been determined for sure, but they’ve kept a lot of firefighters and other emergency personnel up a lot of nights in the last few weeks. So it’s fitting that this week, Dayton and Waitsburg residents got to see many of these emergency management people during daylight hours and...
I’m an avid Dear Abby reader, and I’ve always thought that I’d be good at writing something like that. The only problem seems to be that nobody wants my advice. So I’ve decided to write down everything that’s been on my mind this week, put it in a safe, unlock the safe as soon as time travel is possible, answer my own questions, and send them back to today. Here are the results of this experiment: Dear future self: I’m in the process of writing a novel. I’m almost to the exciting part, but I c...
It’s better to want what you have than to have what you want. ~Ancient proverb Those are good words to ponder if you’re looking to have a more satisfying life. But they beg one other question: What if you have a lot of stuff you don’t want? Answer: hold a yard sale. Last weekend, many of us who live on the South Touchet Road near Dayton took part in the third annual South Touchet Yard Sale. In our case, we passed the first two years. But as proud owners of a large barn, we felt we were guilt...
I had glorious plans for this week which involved Bennington Lake and my little blue kayak, but due to the wildfire situation, Bennington Lake is closed to boaters lest they be unwittingly scooped up by water-carrying helicopters. But because I’m still in a lake-y state of mind, I think I’ll reminisce about the wonderful trip to Lake Pend Oreille I took a couple weeks ago. Five of us went – me, my mom, Chris, Chris’s friend Kyle, and my cousin Ariel. We traveled to Sandpoint, Idaho, in my grandp...
As The Times was going to press on Tuesday, many of our local firefighters and emergency responders were busy helping out at the Blue Creek Fire, east of Walla Walla. That fire was called in shortly after noon Monday, and by Tuesday afternoon, it was reported by the Blue Mountain Interagency Dispatch Center to cover 5,000 acres. Teams have been called in from around the northwest to help fight that blaze, including multiple aircraft. One home and several outbuildings had been destroyed as of Tue...
I am supposed to be folding the clothes right now. I’m also supposed to be running a few errands and getting ready to vacuum the carpet in my grandparents’ motorhome. I have done none of that yet. But wait – I have a good excuse! I haven’t done anything because I was doing my homework! I know what you’re thinking. “But Emma,” you are thinking, “It’s summer! You don’t have homework!” As a matter of fact, yes I do. Whitman College sent me a link to a personal and community safety course. I started...
Hey, everybody, guess what day it is! (Well, not today, necessarily. I think it might be this weekend, or it might have been last Monday, but it’s this week and this is a weekly newspaper, so just play along.) That’s right, it’s National Embrace Your Geekiness Day AND National French Fry Day! On the same day! It’s my favorite holiday for obvious reasons. Obvious Reason #1: I am a geek. Big time. Obvious Reason #2: I am a French fry connoisseur. I have an authoritative Top 10 list of the best fr...
Back in the fall of 2010, the Dayton City Council and many city residents had a contentious debate over whether to allow limited use of off-road vehicles on some city streets. In the end, in a split vote, the council decided to kill the proposal. As we report on the front page this week, the issue is back on the council’s to-do list. But a lot has changed in five years. In 2013, the Washington State Legislature created a new category of vehicle, called a WATV, or wheeled all-terrain vehicle. T...
Dear Editor Just a note of thanks. After twenty five years working for Government at Hanford, (father also worked thirty years there) and several years for Boeing, I retired and with wife Olga bought the small lavender farm here. Yes, we are new farmers in town but full of energy retirees learning more every day. We are grateful to community: members of commercial club for opinions about lavender field uses, city office for consulting and at the hardware store people for advise and for finding perfect pets for our home, and for helping us...
Dear Editor, I find it positively exhilarating having been informed that Bill Clinton’s wife, Hillary, plans to invite Caitlyn Jenner to be her vice president. Imagine their apparelers’ grins as these grand ladies stroll the inaugural runway among flowers and more flowers! America is at war between the inner-city savages and the robots of the suburbs, and I wonder if this curious political marriage can appease the combatants. David Castleman Dayton...
Washington Legislature Slogs On Last week, the Washington State Legislature was within hours of passing a biennial budget, wrapping up business and going home. But a glitch developed at the last minute. Here’s how State Representative Terry Nealey, of Dayton, put it in an email message: Unfortunately, there’s some bad news. Due to some 11th-hour sabotage from Senate Democrats early Wednesday morning, the operating budget is now in jeopardy. The reason is Senate Democrats, despite an agr...
Do you remember those commercials (I think they were for Charter) that listed an implausible sequence of events resulting from having ordinary cable TV? (Example: “When you have expensive cable bills, you feel helpless. When you feel helpless, you want to do something about it. When you want to do something about it, you take karate. When you take karate, you want to use it. When you want to use it, you become the Fist of Justice. When you become the Fist of Justice, you crash through a glass r...
I grew up in the heyday of Smokey the Bear. Smokey drilled into our heads the message that we needed to stir our campfires until they were dead out, and that we must never ever throw a lit cigarette out our car window. Smokey doesn’t get the press he once did (he died in 1976, at the age of 26) but his message is as important as ever - perhaps more so. As The Times’ Dian Ver Valen has been reporting the last couple of weeks, we’re in a drought. River levels are at record lows and tempe...
I’ve always loved studying environmental science for two basic reasons. One is the large amount of impressive vocabulary you pick up and can use in everyday contexts– e.g., “That’s eutrophication for ya!” and, “I sense the formation of a positive feedback cycle here”. The second is how much of it applies to life and society in general. High school is an ecosystem, and it’s much easier to navigate when one thinks of it in terms of resource niches, apex predators, and keystone species, as opp...
