Video courtesy of Nancy Kusky of Goldendale TV. Please subscribe to her YouTube Channel.
The Goldendale City Council met last night in a session postponed from Monday due to the federally-celebrated New Year’s holiday. The meeting was the first to incorporate several changes to the city’s standard agenda. That includes a change in start time from 7 pm to 6 pm, a change the council voted on last month. The new agenda also includes two public comment periods. A closed comment period at the start of the meeting, limited to comments about anything on the agenda that evening, has been added, along with the longtime open comment period at the end of the meeting open to any topic.
Two items occupied councilors for the majority of the meeting, both dealing with the tourism dollars allocated by the city from the hotel/motel room tax. First, Dennis Schroder of the Goldendale Motorsports Association presented his concerns about those allocations, particularly funds that had been awarded to the Goldendale Chamber of Commerce in years past. He noted that ordinances require that nonprofits receiving tourism funds were required to submit receipts showing what they had spent. After filing a public records request, he said that the chamber had submitted recepts they had written themselves, not recepts from suppliers. He also tallied how much was awarded by the city to the chamber and how much was actually spent. He said he was:
“Really appalled at the fact that, as I mentioned, that there’s some sixty thousand dollars that could have been used by somebody else.”
Councilors ultimately agreed to have a work session to look at tightening reporting requirements.
The other major item was a discussion about choices the Event Committee made in awarding tourism funds for 2023. Councilor Steve Johnston was upset about the decision not to fund the Kiwanis setting up US flags on holidays. After much discussion, members of the committee revealed that the application had not qualified under the rules for tourism funds, and instead be funded from the city’s general fund, which passed.
And under staff reports, police chief Jay Hunziker gave this rundown of the cases his department handled in 2022:
“For 2022, our cases ended at 3,206. If you want to break that down, we averaged 273 cases per month, 68.2 cases per week, and 9.7 cases per day, on an average. So it’s been a very busy year. This is among the highest numbers we’ve ever had.”