Come Jan. 1, changes will come to county government.
At least that’s the way it looks after the first election returns Tuesday, which indicated a home rule charter was passing. The charter measure has received 55.8 percent of the vote, with an estimated 45,000 ballots to be counted.
At The Grant House on Officers Row, a party of charter supporters whooped and hollered as the results were announced.
Nan Henriksen — the former Camas mayor and chairwoman of the county freeholders who wrote the charter — said the changes it prescribes are long overdue.
“I am so excited and relieved,” she said. “We worked so incredibly hard.”
Retiring Republican Sheriff Garry Lucas — one of the faces of the pro-charter campaign whose photo appeared on much of the campaign literature — said he’d had no idea how the vote would go down prior to receiving the results.
The Clark County Republican party is asking for an investigation into the role County Auditor Greg Kimsey played in the passing of the home-rule charter.
In a letter to County Prosecutor Tony Golik dated Nov. 4, Clark County Republican In a letter to County Prosecutor Tony Golik dated Nov. 4, Clark County Republican Chairman Kenny Smith alleges Kimsey used his office to advocate for the passage of the home-rule charter when he placed a two-page explanation of the proposed charter in the general election voters pamphlet.
Commissioner David Madore, who was a vocal critic of the charter, expressed similar concerns before the election.
The county Republicans allege Kimsey “actively campaigned for the passage” of the charter and used “copies of pages 58-59 of the 2014 Voter’s Pamphlet as his primary campaign literature.”
“Additionally, any reasonable person who opposes the proposition would find these pages to be carefully crafted to put the proposition in the most favorable light possible, while strategically omitting the many legitimate objections voters have to the proposition,” the letter reads.
Clark County Commissioner Ed Barnes, a Democrat who has only eight weeks left to serve, suggested Tuesday that commissioners consider dissolving the Department of Environmental Services.
His suggestion did not appear to be taken seriously by Republican Commissioners David Madore and Tom Mielke, who last year hired state Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, to lead the department.
Barnes, who made the recommendation at the end of Tuesday’s meeting, said it wasn’t a personal attack on Benton.
The department was created five years ago, and Barnes said commissioners routinely look at other departments to determine if there are ways to create efficiencies and save money.
The environmental services staff could be reassigned to the community development and public works departments, which handled most of the responsibilities before the county created the new department in 2009, Barnes said.
The national fast-food chain Chick-fil-A may be headed to Vancouver as the restaurant makes its entry into the Portland metro area market.
The Atlanta-based chicken restaurant, which operates more than 1,850 restaurants in 41 states and Washington D.C., is in discussions to purchase a property on the northeast corner of Southeast 164th Avenue and Mill Plain Boulevard.
The company’s California-based consultant has requested a preliminary plan review for demolition of a residential building to construct a restaurant with a drive-thru window and seating for 119 patrons.
Chick-fil-A representatives would not comment on the proposal and the property owner, JMS Properties of Vancouver, said no deal has been finalized. But the chain clearly is making its move on the Northwest, one of the last areas it has yet to reach in its long expansion since the opening of the first Chick-fil-A in suburban Atlanta in 1967.
The American Empress riverboat has made its final 2014 journey on the Columbia River, and the president of the cruise operator is breathing easier about a successful season that was by no means a certainty.
The 223-passenger historic-themed riverboat ran on one-week journeys from April through last week between Astoria, Ore., and Clarkston, on the Idaho-Washington border. It attracted almost 6,000 passengers, said Ted Sykes, president and chief operating officer of Memphis-based American Queen Steamboat Company, which also offers Mississippi River cruises. That’s less than the full capacity of 7,000 passengers, but it beat expectations, and some of the cruises even had waiting lists, Sykes said. The riverboat operator hired about 80 employees for this year’s cruises.
Early reservations for next year are strong, and customer satisfaction surveys measuring a 1-to-10 scale are coming in between 9.3 and 9.6, Sykes said. “We hit it out of the park from a quality point of view,” he said. The local cuisine, wines and entertainment offered on the cruise all won praise from passengers and travel writers, Sykes said, adding that Northwest wines were a “hidden treasure” that surprised many passengers.
A large percentage of riverboat passengers came from six Western states — especially Southern California and Arizona — and from Florida, Sykes said. Their average age was 57, he said.
Viruses have been a hot topic across the country this fall.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa and subsequent cases in the U.S. have captured the public’s attention and raised concerns about the virus spreading here. A nationwide outbreak of enterovirus D68 has sickened hundreds and led to the hospitalization of children with respiratory complications.
But Dr. Alan Melnick, Clark County health officer, says there’s another virus getting lost in the hype around enterovirus D68 and Ebola. A virus that kills more people each year in the U.S. than the other two viruses have. A virus that, unlike the other two, has a vaccine readily available.
That virus is influenza, the seasonal flu.
“People get worked up about Ebola but don’t get their flu shots,” Melnick said. “I want people to take flu seriously enough that they get their flu shots.”
