Are the nights warm enough yet (that’s 50 degrees) to plant those tomato starts without shelter? Check our local weather coverage.
In case you missed them, here are some of the top stories of the weekend:
Stripped bare, the effort to build the nation’s largest rail-to-marine oil terminal at the Port of Vancouver is about money. Tesoro Corp. and Savage Cos. intend to make plenty of it, and they promise the community will get plenty too.
Surely the companies calculated when they launched this process in 2013 that Vancouver is their best bet for maximizing profits. But global oil markets had a different plan. High supplies, low prices and a decline in North Dakota’s oil production raise questions about whether the massive terminal planned here looks like a Fort Knox of liquid gold anymore.
Industry analysts are quick to point out the oil market’s extreme volatility in recent years has changed financial expectations of projects like the Vancouver oil terminal.
“(Crude-by-rail) economics between North Dakota and Washington state have turned upside down in the past year,” wrote Sandy Fielden, an analyst with Houston-based advisers RBN Energy, in a March report.
The Cowlitz Indians say their $510 million casino resort will employ 1,000 people to start with.
Local residents could use some of those jobs, but big questions remain: Who will get them, and will they attract a lot more Native Americans, from other tribes as well as the Cowlitz, when the casino opens in north Clark County in fall 2017?
Tracie Driver, a board member of Kelso-based Ethnic Support Council and part of the Cherokee and Oneida tribes of Oklahoma, said she has friends from as far away as North Carolina planning to apply for work at the Cowlitz casino. She said she expects a rise in Native Americans living in Cowlitz County, where housing costs are much lower than they are in Vancouver and Clark County.
With Cowlitz County unemployment levels stuck in the 7.5 percent to 8.5 percent range, area residents are in need of job opportunities. And Dave Barnett, a Cowlitz tribal member who launched the casino project, said he hopes almost all of the jobs will go to locals.
“Our goal is to hire within our tribe and within the community,” Barnett said.
The city of Vancouver owes the Evergreen and Vancouver school districts nearly $1.6 million after neglecting to update its computer system for almost three months following a school impact fee increase in January. In addition, builders of Evergreen district homes were overcharged.
As a result of the city’s error, developers of more than a dozen single-family and multi-unit housing development projects were undercharged by thousands of dollars each. The city cannot go back to the developers and demand more money, said Chad Eiken, the city’s community and economic development director.
Even though the school districts understand it was a mistake, they can’t afford to forgive the debt. The city owes $1.19 million to Evergreen Public Schools and $393,000 to Vancouver Public Schools.
A person’s health can be affected by numerous things — diet, physical activity, family history, lifestyle choices. But one factor people don’t often consider is their home.
“There is a link between how healthy a house is and the health of the people who live in it,” said Mike Selig, program manager for Clark County’s weatherization and building safety program, which provides energy efficiency and indoor air quality improvements for low-income families.
A past client of the Clark County program provides the perfect example, Selig said.
The woman is the mother of an asthmatic child. She noticed that when their home’s furnace kicked on in the morning, her son would wake up in a coughing fit minutes later.
About twice a month during the legislative session, lawmakers representing Pierce County gather over lunch in the state Capitol’s basement. The noon hour conversations help them identify, and some believe deliver, their region’s top priorities.
Here in Southwest Washington, lawmakers can’t remember the last time they were all in the same room on their own accord.
In the most recent legislative session, local lawmakers were blindsided when they couldn’t secure money for a local program underway to integrate mental health, chemical dependency and physical health services for Medicaid clients. The blame cannot be placed entirely on the local delegation, but the effort to keep the approximately $7 million in reserves revealed a long-standing fissure among the Southwest Washington delegation.
