While celebrating the Seattle Seahawks’ Super Bowl win at the White House in May, President Barack Obama veered toward Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler and asked what has become a familiar question.
“How’s Abigail?”
After the child was born, three months premature, weighing 2 pounds, 12 ounces and without kidneys, Obama had sent the Camas Republican a handwritten note, saying he was praying for her family. In the East Room of the White House that day, the two talked about their daughters.
“We were just being parents, talking about our kids,” Herrera Beutler said.
As she campaigns for a third term, she’s used to sharing the spotlight with her daughter, who turns 1 year old July 15. With nearly every professional interaction she has had since her daughter was born — whether it’s about securing funding for dredging the Columbia River or honoring an NFL team — people want to know how the “miracle baby” is doing.
And she’s quite well, thank you.
But now, as the congresswoman works to balance a high-profile career with being a new mom of a medically complex child, it will be up to voters to decide how Herrera Beutler is doing.
“The most people are going to know about her, quite frankly, is (the situation with) her child and that’s kind of dominated everything,” said Jim Moore, a political analyst and director of the Tom McCall Center for Policy Innovation at Pacific University.
The world is a better place because Jenny Rund, an itinerant personal caretaker and Certified Nursing Assistant, has affordable wheels.
“I really need a reliable car,” Rund said — and she’s not the only one. Her elderly and disabled clients rely on Rund’s new(ish) 2004 Kia Rio.
Closer to home, she added, her minor son and her disabled boyfriend, who doesn’t drive, also depend on Rund and her car for connections with the outside world. Plus, she said, one of the two jobs that she cobbles together into a reasonable full-time income also comes with health insurance.
“Without this car I wouldn’t have my agency job. Without my agency job I wouldn’t have health care,” she said. Clearly, a whole bunch of lives depend on Rund’s Kia Rio.
Because her credit wasn’t the best, she first qualified for a towering car-loan rate of 34 percent, with the bulk of each payment going to interest, not principal. Lund managed to talk the loan company down to 29 percent, but her monthly payments still would have eaten her alive, she said.
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So Lund was thrilled to connect with a helpful new arrival in Clark County: a program called Ways To Work, offering financial education classes and credit coaching to low-income working families. After completing the financial education component, participants are eligible for low-interest car loans of 8 percent.
The cost to Lund: one initial $10 money order. “It was the best $10 I’ve ever invested,” she said.
More than three years after C-Tran first floated a proposed bus rapid transit system in Vancouver, the agency’s board of directors could make the project all but a done deal on Tuesday.
The board will consider voting to authorize spending $6.7 million in local funds as part of the $53 million project. Approval would clear the way for C-Tran to secure a crucial federal grant and begin construction as early as next year.
But the board hasn’t been unanimous in its support for BRT. Some members have questioned or openly opposed the project. And Tuesday’s key vote comes amid new worries raised by a group of business owners in downtown Vancouver, where the enhanced bus line would end.
BRT uses larger vehicles, raised boarding platforms and other features in an effort to move passengers more efficiently and reliably. C-Tran’s version of the system would run between the Westfield Vancouver mall and downtown, replacing the existing No. 4 and No. 44 buses along that stretch. At Turtle Place, 60-foot articulated buses would maneuver through the property at the end of the line.
Spending $6.7 million on the project would consume two-thirds of C-Tran’s uncommitted capital reserves, estimated at about $10 million. Most of the overall $53 million price would be covered by grants, the largest of those a $38.3 million award through the Federal Transit Administration’s Small Starts program. BRT is already in the queue for that money; C-Tran hopes to secure a final agreement this fall. But it can’t do that without local funds committed.
C-Tran feels good about the process that led to this point, said public affairs manager Jim Quintana. The project has continued to advance at every step, undergoing plenty of scrutiny along the way, he said.
An attorney representing residents opposed to expanding mining zones in their neighborhood has put Clark County on notice.
In a recent letter to county commissioners, attorney David Mann wrote that a decision to expand the county’s “surface mining overlay” — areas in which mining is a permitted use — would make the county “potentially liable to neighboring property owners for damages related to nuisance and noise, dust and decline in property values.”
While the county’s planning commission voted last year to abandon the new zones, the state Department of Natural Resources has urged the county to add them, citing studies indicating a preponderance of high-quality rock aggregate to the west and north of an existing quarry.
If the county approves amending Livingston Mountain’s surface mining overlay, the Department of Natural Resources is proposing to lease the land back to the county so it can expand mining operations there. The state and the county could stand to receive millions of dollars in royalty payments as a result of the expansion, which would tap an estimated 11 million tons of new rock, according to DNR.
The Department of Natural Resources has implied it would challenge a decision that didn’t extend mining areas, on grounds that the state’s Growth Management Act requires it. But in his letter to commissioners, Mann said that such a challenge is “unlikely to be successful.”
“While the (Growth Management Act) does mandate you take certain action, it leaves the ultimate decisions to your discretion so long as you follow the required processes and consider the relevant factors,” Mann wrote. “This is precisely the work that the Planning Commission … accomplished through their lengthy and painstaking review process.”
Fort Vancouver park ranger Mike Twist used a long wooden wand with a smoking wick to ignite gunpowder inside a historical replica of a swivel gun — a small portable cannon used by Pacific Northwest fur traders in the early 1800s to scare away potential enemies.
“Make ready,” Twist called out.
A crowd of people — attired mostly in red, white and blue — simultaneously plugged their ears as the cannon fired.
“That scared me,” Amelie Ellingson, 8, of Milwaukie, Ore., said. “But it was kind of cool.”
Since the 1860s when the U.S. Army took over the fort, it’s been a tradition at Vancouver’s premier historical site “to make as much noise as possible on the Fourth of July,” Twist said.
Friday was no exception. In addition to Twist’s “black powder” demonstration in front of the fort’s stockade, revelers at the Fort Vancouver National Site continued the noise-making tradition throughout Independence Day with fireworks, outdoor concerts on a main stage, a children’s parade punctuated with classic car horns and bagpipes and the squeals of children playing a menagerie of games.
The day culminated with a 20-minute display of fireworks, synchronized to music. A crowd, estimated before the show at 30,000, counted down the show and cheered as the first salvo was set off at 10:05 p.m. The show started slowly, to drumming, then built to an early crescendo as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played.
“I hadn’t been here in 25 years,” said Viktoria Strommer of Vancouver, after taking in the fireworks display. “It was amazing.”
