If you were away for the weekend, catch up with these stories.
Our up-again, down-again temperatures may crack triple digits this week. Or not. Check our local weather coverage.
Vancouver Police Lt. Scott Creager has spent many evenings this year watching news reports of police shooting people of color, citizens killing lawmen and citywide riots.
He said that something similar could just as easily happen in Vancouver. He knows how quickly a police interaction can spiral out of control.
“It’s very important in these contacts with the community that we do it right because there’s so much credibility on the line for our agency if we don’t,” he said. “It just takes one very bad incident or one very bad decision to undermine a lot of good effort over a long time.”
It’s been a year since police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, in Ferguson, Mo. The incident re-ignited a national conversation about race and police.
In Vancouver, minority groups say there are areas for improvement for police, including implementing the use of body cameras on officers, and increasing the number of minority officers and officers who speak languages other than English. The Vancouver Police Department agrees there’s more work to be done to change the makeup of the police force; 86 percent of the agency’s officers are white while Vancouver’s population is about 75 percent white.
At the same time, the Vancouver Police Department is being praised as ahead of the curve. For years, officers and minority groups have held regular meetings on the Chief’s Diversity Advisory Team, and the team recently was highlighted as a model for successful policing.
This month’s primary election provided a wealth of information for those who like to speculate about politics and the fate of the incumbents on the Clark County council.
Though Republicans David Madore, Tom Mielke and Jeanne Stewart failed in their bids to become county chair, their recent performance in their home districts could point to their future, should they choose to run for re-election.
The primary election will be certified Tuesday. Although Marc Boldt, no party preference, and Mike Dalesandro, a Democrat, have declared victory in the county chair race, some results may change slightly when the final tally is made. After Friday’s count, Boldt led Dalesandro by only nine votes, but in Washington, the top two finishers advance to the general election, regardless of party.
Note: Council District 2 has no incumbent. Voters in November will choose between Republican Julie Olson and Democrat Chuck Green for the newly created seat.
District 1
Councilor Jeanne Stewart, Republican
The writing was on the wall for Stewart long before this month’s primary: it will be a steep climb for the Republican councilor to win her liberal district.
The results may not be relevant, though. Stewart said she hasn’t decided whether to run in three years.
District 3
Councilor David Madore, Republican
Madore must decide whether to run next year for his second term. It’s unclear whether he’ll do it, and he hasn’t responded to multiple requests for comment since the primary results were released.
Madore does, however, appear to have an edge his fellow councilors don’t. He’s the only councilor who won his home district in the chair race, though by a slim margin.
District 4
Councilor Tom Mielke, Republican
Conservative candidates in general succeeded in Mielke’s District 4, which covers northeast Clark County. Mielke, however, didn’t.
RIDGEFIELD — Her name was Dizzy, and I came to the Clark County Fair to milk her.
I was nervous. Before Saturday, I’d never touched a cow, let alone milked one. As it turned out, Dizzy had just won grand champion for Holsteins at the fair for the second year in a row. That made her a queen, I was told.
Were my untrained hands worthy of her royal udder?
Milking parlor manager Lori Johnson, whose fiance owns Dizzy, assured me they were. At 5:30 p.m., Johnson led me to a group of cows behind the milking parlor awaiting their second milking of the day. I met Dizzy, a large, black cow with prominent hip bones and a belly round with pregnancy. I stroked her head and the nubs of her horns, and she rubbed her mouth on my button-down shirt, leaving a sticky smear of chewed grass.
Johnson released Dizzy, who trotted eagerly into the upper level of the herringbone milking parlor and plunged her head into a tub of grain along a railing. One wall of the long, narrow room was a glass window, outside of which a crowd of parents and children had gathered to watch.
I wasn’t expecting an audience.
People tend to think of the daily migration from Clark County to greater Portland as a one-way street. Tens of thousands of Washington residents head to jobs in Oregon each morning, then return home in the evening.
New U.S. Census Bureau data released this week show more and more people making the trip in reverse: living in Oregon, but commuting to jobs in Clark County.
That trend has built slowly and steadily for years, said Scott Bailey, regional labor economist for the state Employment Security Department. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise, he said.
“I think that this is a typical pattern of suburban versus the core area, where at first it’s mostly one way,” Bailey said. “But it slowly evens out over time as that employment spreads.”
About 56,000 Clark County residents commuted to work in Oregon’s Multnomah, Washington or Clackamas counties on average from 2009 to 2013, according to census data. Close to 14,000 people traveled the other direction, heading from one of those three counties to work in Clark County.
Separate data released this week show the inflow of workers to Clark County is on the rise. In Multnomah County, for example, the number of residents traveling to jobs in Clark County increased for the fourth consecutive year in 2013.
Clark County has also sent more workers to Oregon in recent years, but the increase doesn’t appear as rapid as the other direction, according to the data.
With the sun rising and roosters crowing, Josh Miller rolls out of a bed tucked in a greenhouse full of lush marijuana plants and lights up a joint.
That’s how the Seattle attorney starts his day every time he stays at Tom Lauerman’s organic marijuana farm, named the Garden of the Green Sun, in Vancouver.
“It’s wonderful,” Miller said one day last week at the greenhouse. “I do my morning routine. Listen to music, and well, smoke a joint and whatever else comes to me.”
Lauerman, a medical marijuana grower colloquially known as Farmer Tom, recently opened the greenhouse as a place for friends, family and even tourists to spend the night. Furnished with a queen-size bed, a workspace with Wi-Fi service, a meeting area with a table made out of an old tree stump, the greenhouse also has become a popular office and sleeping space for lawyers, policymakers and other leaders in the medical marijuana arena.
“Somebody will be occupying the bed all the way through harvest,” Lauerman said. “As far as tourism, I don’t think I’ve seen anybody do anything like this before.”
The quasi-bed-and-breakfast is just one example of the creative approaches marijuana business owners are taking to get around state laws restricting tourism options for Clark County’s budding legal marijuana scene.
This summer, state lawmakers enacted House Bill 2136, which made a number of sweeping changes to the recreational marijuana industry. Among the key provisions was a new ban on any kind of lounge or club where people can consume cannabis. The broad language disappointed many marijuana entrepreneurs, dashing their hopes of providing some kind of business where tourists can smoke.
“The industry has been a work-around forever,” Lauerman said. “They just give us new things to work around.”
By now you’ve probably heard that the Pacific Northwest is due any minute for a mega-earthquake that could be the worst disaster in U.S. history.
That’s not new information, but last month’s article in The New Yorker certainly heightened awareness of the devastation a Cascadia subduction zone rupture will wreak.
In particular, the quote “everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast” triggered a sense of fatalism.
If we’re going to be killed, what’s the point of worrying about it now?
For those of us at The Columbian, a long chat with Scott Johnson, emergency management division manager for the Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency, booted us out of that hopeless mindset.
Johnson could create an epic Hollywood-style disaster narrative — exploding trains, crashing airplanes, the earth moving, dams failing and mountains erupting — but he won’t.
Yes, the earthquake will be bad, and people will die, particularly when the 40-foot-tall tsunami that follows the violent shaking strikes the Pacific Coast. However, the vast majority, especially in Clark County, which won’t be affected by the giant waves.
“It’s not going to look like ‘Mad Max,’ ” Johnson said. “There will be neighborhoods that will be severely damaged. And there will be other neighborhoods with extra leaves on the ground and cracks in the plaster.”
Given that, you might as well be prepared to live off the grid and be self-sustaining for several days to a week until outside help arrives.
