Editor’s note

Next month, a group of business people from Goldendale, Wash. will come to Dayton to tour its beautiful down­town and talk to local of­ficials and businesspeople about how they’ve been so successful in restoring and promoting downtown Day­ton. Among other things, they’re going to learn about the restoration of the Colum­bia County Courthouse and the huge project undertaken to renovate Dayton’s Main Street.

The Main Street Proj­ect, completed in the early ‘90s, was an expensive and disruptive job. In order to pay for the project, property owners on Main Street voted to encumber themselves with a hefty tax levy, based on their properties’ front footage. The result speaks for itself. Daytonites are rightly proud of their beauti­ful downtown.

Shortly after my father moved to Dayton in 1982, he agreed to head up a com­mittee to oversee the renova­tion of the Courthouse. That project, too, was expensive and disruptive. But the result is one of the most beautiful highlights of Dayton’s beau­tiful Downtown.

When people talk to me about the school moderniza­tion plan the Dayton School District is proposing, they sometimes complain that the project is fancier and has more bells and whistles than it needs. Shouldn’t they just do the minimum needed to keep the school functional and the facilities modest? Our schools don’t need all that fancy stuff, like bigger classrooms and a new caf­eteria/ auditorium, they say.

Well, guess what…Day­ton’s Main Street didn’t “ need” new trees. Our courthouse didn’t “need” a cupola. But if the people planning these projects had settled for the bare minimum required to get by, the pride Daytonites have in their town wouldn’t be there. And people wouldn’t be coming to visit to see how they did it.

Another comment I sometimes hear about the school project is that the schools aren’t doing as good a job as they could educating our kids. Aren’t some fami­lies homeschooling? Aren’t others sending their kids to Waitsburg? Why should we tax ourselves to improve a facility when the people working there aren’t living up to our expectations?

Well, do you think the people responsible for reno­vating Main Street believed that all the business owners there were doing a totally outstanding job? Do you think the courthouse renova­tors loved everything about the county commissioners and judges and other people working in the courthouse?

One thing I’m sure of is that our beautiful Main Street has attracted a lot of good businesspeople that wouldn’t be here if it were a dump. And I have a hunch we have better employees and elected officials working in the courthouse because it’s a beautiful facility they can be proud to work in.

The idea that we should withhold funding from the schools because we think they could be doing a bet­ter job of educating kids is laughable to me. The best way to recruit better teach­ers and administrators to the Dayton schools is to provide them an outstanding facility to work in.

Actually, these all kind of sound like excuses. None of us likes paying taxes. So we rationalize voting against a school levy by saying that the people run­ning our schools somehow don’t deserve our money. If the people making deci­sions downtown two or three decades ago had had that attitude, Dayton would now have a dumpy Main Street and an ugly courthouse.

If voters in the Dayton School District approve the proposed bond levy on April 22, their taxes will go up some, but property tax rates in the district will still be lower than in many districts in southeast Washington and around the state. And they will be lower than the rates Dayton taxpayers have seen in many recent years. (See the tax rate analysis on Page 11.)

A lot of people and busi­nesses have moved to Day­ton in the past 25 years because it’s a beautiful place and the people who live there take pride in it. Schools are an important consideration when people choose where to live and do business. Let’s vote to make our school facility one we can be proud of and one that will give our kids the best possible chance to get a better education.