Cheers: To fresh ideas for the Vancouver Navigation Center. The day shelter serving homeless people has been unexpectedly popular since it opened last November along Grand Boulevard near Fourth Plain. But the clients have brought problems to the neighborhood, and rising tensions came to a head at a city council meeting last month.
Since then, new ideas have emerged to both improve the service to clients and address neighbors’ concerns, and the Ed and Dollie Lynch Foundation has donated money to pursue an independent review of the center’s operations that may generate more helpful advice.
Among the ideas are fencing a patio area so that people must use the main entrance, hiring an additional host, adding holiday hours, and increasing police and litter patrols in the neighborhood. The new ideas seem to have merit, and we hope they will both improve service and decrease problems.
Jeers: To a government-funded $45,000 dress rehearsal. That’s how much it cost Clark County to print and mail 52,000 primary ballots to north county voters for the sole purpose of voting on the District 4 Clark County Council race. Voting is important, of course, but in this case both Republican Gary Medvigy and Democrat Adrian Cortes were automatically going to advance to the November general election, no matter the outcome of the primary. (Medvigy won.)
State law requires partisan elections to appear on primary ballots, even if there are only two candidates. This rule doesn’t apply in nonpartisan elections, such as for city councils or school boards. The rules should be made uniform, and not waste voters’ time and taxpayers’ money.
Cheers: To Cosmic Crisp apples. According to the Yakima Herald-Republic, the sky’s the limit when it comes to royalties generated by this new breed of apple developed at Washington State University. WSU President Kirk Schulz said the new variety is already producing more royalties than any other intellectual property in the university’s 129 years. That’s amazing, considering the first new Cosmic Crisps won’t even hit supermarkets until this fall. Schulz said profits are currently being used to market the apples, but in the future the proceeds can be used for scholarships, campus infrastructure and to support university reading programs.
Jeers: To decades of abusing Vancouver Lake. Never to be confused with ritzy Oswego Lake, Vancouver Lake is the wrong shade of green. It’s so bad, a group of citizens who raised money to treat a noxious weed that infests the lake had to cancel their plans. It turns out the lake is so infected with toxic blue-green algae, the Eurasian Water Milfoil has quit growing. Usually it’s so hardy it will grow anywhere, but apparently not in the opaque sludge that passes for lake water. So the citizen group’s contractor will have to wait until next spring to treat the noxious weed. Could there be any bigger embarrassment? At least the lake hasn’t caught fire yet, like Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River famously did in 1969. Today that river is cleaner than our lake.
Cheers: To everyone rallying around Camden Linton. The 4-year-old Camas boy faces inoperable brain cancer and a grim prognosis, so it was a sweet moment last week when police, business, sports and community groups conducted a “kindness sting” at a basketball tournament the Lintons were attending. There have been other happy memories too, like a “Carnival for Camden” event, and he will be a “junior Timber Joey” at an upcoming Portland Timbers game. We wish the family many more happy memories.
