The Goldendale City Council was able to act on a revised recommendation from the Events Committee for lodging tax grants to help nonprofit organizations fund events to draw tourists. Last month, an unusual split vote torpedoed the Event Committee’s original suggestion. Part of that came as opposition to using the lodging tax money to sponsor the city’s Pride event, which brought in 500 people last year.
The bottom line is none of the nonprofits will be getting all they asked for, but in the changes from the previous recommendation reduced the amount for the Pride event from $2,000 to $1,250. The Kiwanis, who had asked for $1,800 to stage a kid’s golf tournament, would have had their request fully funded in the previous recommendation, now has had that cut to $1,000.
The cuts amounted to $1,600. The committee proposed adding back $1,000 of that to the Chamber of Commerce, moving their share from $26,000 to $27,000. The other $600 of the savings goes back in the fund to help with any unanticipated events.
And there was good news to share. Jan Forsberg summed up the city’s financial year this way:
“Overall, the city had a great year. Came in where they were hoping to, got some projects completed. We have a lot of good projects lined up for ’24, and we’ll get the areas that need to be updated for ’24 updated. We’ll bring that forward to the council at a later date.”
And City Administrator Pat Munyan reported on the next step in upgrades to the city’s municipal airport, announcing that the city was taking delivery today on 4,000 gallons of aviation fuel for the new tank system at the airport. He cautioned people that didn’t meen the aviation fuel would be available for use right away:
“This is a test run. What we gotta do is let it set, circulate it, test it, see how the tank’s going to act, see how much water removal is going to be necessary, so we can come up with a plan to make sure that we’re checking the facility correctly and timely to drain off any water so any water doesn’t end up into an airplane, which can be a really bad thing.”
The next meeting of the council will be on Tuesday, February 20th, following the President’s Day holiday on the 19th.