Story by Rodger Nichols for Gorge Country Media
Klickitat County Commissioners meeting today might as well have been called Meeting Lite ®. It was short one commissioner, Todd Andrews, and it was short in length, taking a single hour for the morning workshop and a bare half hour for the afternoon meeting. Even the public comment section was short, with only four people making comments.
In that morning session, Public Works Director Jeff Hunter explained why an out-of-town company was drilling holes in Knight Road. It’s to get a baseline on the condition of the road before the start of project that has a road-haul agreement.
“That is for their geo path report. We have to give them the ability to do that, so they can quantify the damages in mitigation. It still does not set the project in motion. It is one of the phases. We do this with everyone. We did the same thing on Hale Road, on East Road, on Roosevelt Grade — anyplace we have a road haul. It’s part of their requirement.
The road is tested again after the project is completed to determine the level of damage caused by the project, which the company will be required to fix. In this case, it’s a company hired by Carriger, which was granted a permit by EFSEC for a large solar farm in the county.
Commissioner Lori Zoller reported on a meeting with Klickitat County’s Prosecuting Attorney David Quesnel and Jonathan Kara, attorney for the City of The Dalles. She said they have agreed to a monthly Zoom meeting in regards to their joint ownership of the Columbia Gorge Regional Airport.
“There was a thought that we could create a new intergovernment agreement that allows the city and the county to still be on the board yet streamline the relationship that we were still owners, but we have a different way of letting the airport grow and let it have its own entity so it becomes self-sustaining, which has been the idea for a long time.”
And to set the record straight, one of the callers in the public comment section thought they had heard that local volunteer firefighters were not trained to fight house fires. That is incorrect. The firefighters working for the Department of Natural Resources, or DNR are the ones who specialize in wildland fires and are neither trained not equipped to fight structure fires. Local volunteers do train and have the equipment to fight house fires.