Open Gorge: The Skamania Dispatch & Klickitattler

White Salmon's City Council voted down the dollar store moratorium with one vote in favor, then reset its budget around a one million dollar storm grant. The Planning Commission read its code to allow two duplexes on one lot after a hearing examiner ruling, and the Tree Board started writing its own ordinance. Plus: Jewett needs nine volunteers to close for Halloween, and how to get certified...

In 1949 someone drilled for oil just west of Beacon Rock, and the state's record never says the hole was sealed. Open Gorge is using public records and 1950s aerial photos to find it, and next heading to Klickitat and Dufur. Here's how you can help. In This Episode A 1949 oil test well near Beacon Rock Why old wells matter for water and air Tracks in 1950s aerial photos 17 old test holes...

National Public Lands Day is September 26. Four days later, the law behind Secure Rural Schools, a critical lifeline for our Public Lands Counties, has been written to run out. A letter from the editor of the Skamania Dispatch on what that deadline means for public lands counties like Skamania, and one phone call anyone who loves public land can make. In This Episode National Public Lands Day and...

A reported verdict in the killing of Candice Malave Delena, and why the news was forced to travel by Facebook. Plus the Skamania County Board of Commissioners and Skamania PUD in September: a smaller timber check from DNR, a new PUD commissioner, and a board split over a 2% rate increase. In This Episode The Delena verdict and the news desert DNR's lower 2026 timber forecast The Roadless Rule...

Sixty people came to a community center in Underwood to say what living inside the National Scenic Area actually costs them. Almost none of it ever becomes a court case. Meanwhile the Gorge Commission has been briefed on the 10-year rewrite of the Gorge Management Plan that could change that story, and the Forest Service says waiting until 2030 would be legal. Here is how the last rewrite worked,...

About 150 people, by Columbia Gorge News's count, came to a September 3 workshop to ask the Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners to pause data centers, and the Board took no action. We start on August 11, with the moratorium motion the Goldendale Sentinel reported and the county's own minutes did not, then follow the question through September 15. Plus the 2027 budget gap, and...

On August 18 the Skamania County Board of Commissioners adopted a moratorium on data center development, first by motion and then as Resolution 2026-22, both unanimous, after eight people at public comment asked for a pause. A week later, Public Works Director David Waymire told the Board the county had received zero applications for a data center. We walk through the two votes, what the Board hea...

The Hood River-White Salmon Bridge Authority got its first real look at how the federal government scores its billion dollar grant application, and the news was mixed. Reviewers cut the project's benefit score nearly in half over a single assumption about earthquakes. Meanwhile a price fight over eighteen test piles sent the board behind closed doors, and one unpaid invoice has been sitting a...

Goldendale's quietest month of the year still managed to leave the City Council with a question about its own rulebook that nobody at the table could answer. A resident asked for livestock to be banned from R-1 neighborhoods with no exceptions, and the discussion that followed turned on a 4-H permit the council believed sat outside its ordinance. It doesn't. We read the chapter. In This...

Stevenson's county planner counted the city's apartment-zoned land and reported back that in his opinion Stevenson does not need more of it. The Planning Commission recommended a rezone anyway, then asked to be put to work on a comprehensive plan nobody at City Hall can explain. Ten days later the City Council ended a three-year sewer fight and handed most of its 2027 housing work to Ska...

Bingen's city attorney is leaving at the end of the year for two judgeships, and nobody outside City Hall has reported it. The Bingen City Council also filed a breach-of-contract complaint over a door cut through a community mural, caught a state agency handing them another city's contract, and gave two flood-damaged businesses a two-word update. From the meetings of August 4 and August...

North Bonneville lost its only certified water and wastewater operator at the end of July, with what staff called less than twenty-four hours of notice. The mayor declared an emergency and signed a six-month contract that the City Council never got to vote on. Then the first bill arrived. This episode covers the North Bonneville City Council and the North Bonneville Planning Commission for August...

White Salmon spent August getting three big decisions ready and making none of them. The City Council pulled a dollar store moratorium off its own agenda before anyone spoke, the Tree Board decided what a mature oak is actually worth, and a storm ratification quietly revealed a funding hole close to a million dollars. We also went looking for where the city's borrowed ordinance language came...

The federal signature the Columbia River Gorge Commission has waited on since January finally landed, and it arrived as a footnote in a scheduling discussion. Post-fire rebuilding rules take effect around October 1, which matters to every household still rebuilding after the Rowena and Burdoin fires. We also get into a vineyard warning about prescribed fire, and a real argument inside the Commissi...

Public Utility District No. 1 of Skamania County runs three separate systems, and this year they went in opposite directions. Underwood closed to new commercial water while Carson sits six hundred hookups under its ceiling. We walk through what your PUD actually decides, what gets decided for it somewhere else, and what both mean for your bill and your property. In This Episode Why your base charg...

Three Washington counties hit pause on data centers this month. The Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners took up a moratorium request of its own... and chose a different tool entirely. We get into why that decision is harder than it looks, and what the county's own tax math has to do with it. In This Episode Commissioner Todd Andrews asks for a data center moratorium, and the Board...

Skamania County's PUD just froze new commercial water hookups in Underwood, and its own paperwork gives three different answers about when they start again. Meanwhile the county divided a federal pot that came up seventy-four thousand dollars short, found out its entire emergency stockpile is unusable, and heard that the timber money holding up the budget runs out after twenty thirty. In This...

Bingen City Council spent thirty minutes in July listening to its own residents and legally could not answer a single question. Four downtown businesses have been closed since a contractor struck a water main in April, one of them is now closed for good, and the city says it cannot lend a dollar to fix it. We walk through both July meetings, plus a rail Quiet Zone that just slipped by a year. In T...

Goldendale's City Council spent both July meetings fighting over one sentence in its new backyard-homes rule: whether somebody has to actually live on the property. It passed anyway. Also this month, a five-year airport engineering deal, an award-winning sewage plant, and a resident who asked the mayor point blank whether the city plans to sell its water to a data center. In This Episode Gold...

The North Bonneville City Council filled its last empty seat in a single evening, then spent the rest of the month finding problems. A typo in a five year old planning document nearly sank a grant application. The city's equipment fund turned out to be spent by January. And a long awaited Bradford Island discussion happened with the Army Corps in the room and unable to answer questions. In Th...

White Salmon's biggest land-use hearing of the summer was over in minutes, before it ever opened. Sixty-nine people had already written in about a proposed convenience store across from Rheingarten Park, staff had recommended denial, and then the applicant asked to postpone. In this episode: the White Salmon City Council, the Planning Commission, the Tree Board, the Community Development Comm...

Stevenson's Planning Commission spent an evening on half an acre, and ended up asking a question the city cannot currently answer. Meanwhile the City Council's long sewer rewrite finally got the escape hatch septic owners have been asking for since spring. This episode covers the Stevenson Planning Commission and the Stevenson City Council for July 2026. In This Episode The rezone on Sou...

Klickitat County's third and last candidate forum before the August 4 primary (vote by tonight!) happened July 21 in Goldendale, and the questions were the bluntest of the three. Three sheriff candidates were asked when they last worked patrol in Washington, and one answered "never." Klickitat County Commissioner Lori Zoller was asked to defend the Board of County Commissioners&apos...

 Overnight bridge closures are coming in August, and we've got the full schedule. Plus the Hood River-White Salmon Bridge Authority spent July untangling three separate insurance headaches at once, while the Port of Hood River made a real concession on handing over land. In This Episode: Overnight bridge closures coming August 17 through September 11 Kiewit takes the lead on test pile liabili...

July was quiet in the room at the Skamania County Board of Commissioners, and busy underneath. Commissioners closed the books on the county's old budget system, seated a batch of new volunteers, and watched two long-running fights inch forward: the Storedahl gravel quarry, whose public comment window closes July 30, and the arrival of the state's energy-siting council in the National Sce...