Story by Rodger Nichols for Gorge Country Media
The Dalles City Council met last night. Mayor Rich Mays attended the session by Zoom from Washington, D.C. He is set to testify tomorrow on House Resolution 655, known as The Dalles Watershed Development Act. It involves transferring 150 acres the Forest Service owns inside The Dalles watershed to the City of The Dalles. Mays said the city needs to make improvements to Crow Creek Dam and Wicks Reservoir, and it will be a lot easier to make those infrastructure upgrades if it all can be done on the city’s own land and not having to deal with a conditional use permit and other potential red tape with the forest service.
“This is no knock on the Forest Service. They’ve been very helpful to us in our past, where we got completed the Dog River pipeline, but they have other priorities, but our main priority in this whole thing is, of course, our water supply. That’s the lifeblood of our city, and it’s very important that we get those improvements to infrastructure on our land, and not the Forest Service’s land.”
Councilors did vote on a comprehensive set of intergovernmental agreements that will upgrade the 911 system used by the city, the county and Mid-Columbia Fire and Rescue. Each entity will pay a proportional share of the costs, based on the number of teams they use the 911 dispatch. The city will pay the lion’s share at 62.7 percent, because the majority of the calls come from the city. City Manager Matthew Klebes said about one of the agreements:
“We’re going to procure software, but we need a place for that software to run and operate all of those components that make the system live. Now we have the vendor bid for that as well as a cloud-hosted environment, and the county can do it better and cheaper. And so at every turn we’ve been fortunate to find the least expensive approach to whatever the problem is, and in this case the county can provide these services for us.”
Councilors also discussed hiring a hearings officer to rule on appeals from city planning department decisions. A specific proposal is likely to be brought up in the near future.