News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
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More than a dozen teachers attended Monday's Grand Coulee Dam School District board meeting, where Pamela Johnson and Carrie Derr spoke on behalf of their union to make a case for higher pay to keep quality teachers in the district. Johnson and Derr, the president and vice president of the Grand Coulee Dam Education Association, took turns reciting lines from their prepared speech. "In our last school year we lost one third of our teaching staff," the speech began. "Most of these teachers have...
The Grand Coulee Dam School District may change the qualifications for a substitute teacher so that more people would qualify. According to the Office of Superintendent for Public Instruction, Washington state requires a substitute teacher to have a bachelor’s degree or higher, to have completed a teacher preparation program, an alternative route program leading to certification, or three years of out-of-state teaching with an out-of-state certificate, fingerprints, and a background check. An emergency substitute teaching certificate, on the o...
Due to complications from a new state law, the city of Grand Coulee is considering no longer issuing business licenses. The new law requires a lot of extra work for the city to coordinate with the state and the businesses, work that City Clerk Lorna Pearce feels may not justify the $4,500 a year the licenses bring into the city. If Grand Coulee chooses to continue issuing licenses, Pearce explained, their licenses would have to be issued from the state of Washington website. “We’ll have to wait for them to give us our money, pull reports fro...
After being kicked out of the Grand Coulee Dam School District in 2006 for not taking school seriously, Devin White moved to the Vancouver-Portland area, where he earned his graduation equivalency diploma and began to be classically trained in theater and film acting. White has studied at Clarke College and with the Portland Actors Conservatory, the second largest theater in Portland; the Artists Repertory Theatre; Blanche-Rooney Studios; the Actor Experiment; with Jana Lee Hamblin at ActNow...
Red tape, protocol, and a failure to communicate is keeping the Grand Gallery of Arts from reopening. Faran Sohappy owns a business called Music and Beyond. First located off of Midway Avenue across from Safeway, Sohappy was selling CDs, music equipment, movies, and more. Sohappy jumped at the opportunity to move his business to the Grand Gallery of Arts building on Main Street. The move to the new rented space would enable Sohappy to, in addition to running his shop, host music events on the stage and produce music, something he is passionate...
Better put another notch in your belt, the barbecue competition will be back at Harvest Festival. The Pacific Northwest BBQ Association will be bringing their competition to Banks Lake Park on Saturday, Sept. 15 and Sunday, Sept. 16. The event runs on Saturday from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. and on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. the public can get their fingers on the tasty morsels. You can get four samples for $10. Prizes in the competition total $6,500, in addition to trophies and ribbons for the best meat masters....
The federal Bureau of Land Management’s recent agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation and local fire districts has already paid off this fire season. The USBR turned over 200,000 acres to the BLM to manage. With Grand Coulee’s fire district already on board with the agreement, Electric City has joined up as well. Fire Chief for Electric City Mark Payne spoke to the Electric City Council last week about the benefits of the agreement. “Ninety percent of our district is bureau ground,” Payne said, “and so we had access to ground troops, cats; it...
Lace up your running shoes, Run the Dam 2018 will be held on Sept. 15. Participants can walk or run a 5k, 10k, or half-marathon distance, beginning on the east side of the Grand Coulee Dam, running across the largest concrete structure in North America, through "Old Grand Coulee" along B Street, and back along Banks Lake, finishing at North Dam Park, where Harvest Festival will be taking place. Kelly Buche, who is in her third year organizing the event, is expecting about 220 people to...
Depending on where you live and work in the area, it can be hard to choose a cell-phone service provider that has service where you are. Who better to ask about where they have coverage than local citizens? Responding to an August 9 post on the Star’s Facebook page, people weighed in on three big cell-phone companies: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. People appear happiest with T-Mobile and Verizon, with AT&T being very spotty in Coulee Dam despite working above the dam and in Nespelem. “T-Mobile [is] the only way to go,” Gary Haag commented. “Year...
Those of us who look at the Grand Coulee Dam and think “how in the hell did they manage to build that?” will have the opportunity to have that question answered in detail by an engineering expert. Raymond “Paul” Giroux will be making a free presentation on “Building Grand Coulee Dam,” Saturday, Aug. 25, at 6:30 p.m. at the Grand Coulee Dam Visitor Center. The roughly hour-long presentation will highlight the construction of the primary structure, which was completed by the spring of 1942. Giroux spoke to The Star about what made the constru...
The Inchelium softball team won the Grand Coulee Summer Softball League's Kenny Hearne Summer Classic Tournament on Saturday. Inchelium had to beat the Electric City Bar & Grill team twice on Saturday in the championship after losing to them previously in the winner's bracket. Inchelium came back from behind to win the first game of the championship 13-12. They won the second game 12-9. "The [Electric City Bar & Grill] is a very good team and very tough to beat," said Inchelium's Galen...
Local skateboard enthusiast Ben Hughes has already received outreach from skateboarding companies after The Star published an article about his ambition to improve on the current skateboarding culture. “The article that was in the paper (‘Skateboarding scene could grow in the coulee’) is a testament to how the internet works,” Hughes, a commissioner of the Coulee Area Park and Recreation District, said at their Aug. 6 meeting. “I named Zumiez in the article, and someone at Zumiez forwarded it on to someone who forwarded it on, and they cont...
A free presentation on “Building Grand Coulee Dam,” by Raymond Paul Giroux, will discuss how the right conditions, people and engineering allowed it to happen at that time. The Aug. 25 program will be presented at 6:30 p.m. at the Grand Coulee Dam Visitor Center. “During the early twentieth century, the Bureau of Reclamation was charged with harnessing the water potential of the western United States,” an Aug. 13 bureau press release states. “Critical to this vision was taming the mighty Columbia River. With river flows more than 300,000 c...
Agencies that control most of the public lands in the region have issued restrictions on the use of fire. “Fire restrictions on lands administered by the Bureau of Reclamation have been modified to prohibit the building, maintaining, attending or using a fire of any type, including charcoal briquette fires,” a press release from the Bureau of Land Management states. The BLM has an agreement with the USBR to operate on their lands for fire management purposes. “An exemption is made for liquefied and bottled gas stoves and heaters, provi...
The Colville Confederated Tribes have proposed a release of salmon above Chief Joseph Dam and Grand Coulee Dam to return the once-native species to waters from which they’ve been absent since the construction of those giant barriers to their migration. The proposal is to release thousands of adult salmon and tens of thousands of juvenile salmon above the two dams in the Columbia River, as well as its tributaries. “There is a spiritual connection between salmon and Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest that is celebrated in many cer...
Turn your eyes to the sky on Aug. 13, when the Perseid meteor shower will illuminate the darkness, all the darker due to a new moon, as the National Park Service Sky Rangers give guided tours of the heavens on August 10-11. On Aug. 10, from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m., rangers will be at the Crescent Bay area, where the public is welcome to join and look at planets, constellations, and more through their telescope. “We have everything you need to look up, but you are welcome to bring your own telescopes, spotting scopes, or binoculars plus bug spray, a...
Four Lake Roosevelt wrestlers competed on Team Washington, which finished second at the U.S. Marine Corps Cadet and Junior Nationals wrestling tournament held in Fargo, North Dakota, July 12-20. Colton Jackson wrestled in the 106-pound weight class, David Crowe wrestled at 132, Kaleb Horn wrestled at 138, and Tony Nichols at 160. Horn and Nichols were both state champions this past year in their respective weight classes, wrestling for LR. "Competing in statewide freestyle and Greco Roman...
Volunteer firefighters in Grand Coulee responded quickly to local fires recently, stopping them before they could grow in size and do major damage. Firefighters responded to a fire right in Hometown Pizza's backyard on July 26, the second fire that week following a July 23 smoldering fire in a pile of manure. The Hometown Pizza fire was responded to by 14 firefighters, five fire engines, two law enforcement officers, and two Grant County PUD linemen who kept the grass and brush fire to approxima...
In the face of requests for power that total more than three times what they typically sell, Grant County PUD is considering raising electricity rates for "evolving industries" that suck up a lot of power, such as bitcoin mining operations. Atlas Blockchain Group Inc, formerly Atlas Cloud, is a Canada-based company that purchased the former Young's Welding building in Electric City to house such a facility, a decision made to take advantage of Grant County PUD's low electricity rates....
Local athlete Sean Garvin has been offered a full scholarship to play volleyball at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls, a junior college ranked third nationally in volleyball with a history of winning championships and sending athletes to play at the National Collegiate Athletics Association level. Garvin was a 12-year Lake Roosevelt student, the youngest of three children to 1992 LR graduates Shawn and Kasey Garvin. She was a four-year varsity letterman in volleyball, as well as captai...
The Grand Coulee Dam School District will have to figure out how to not go broke in four years. That was one of the darker notes presented at the district board meeting Monday night, where Business Manager Sally Ryan presented the proposed 2018-19 budget, as well as a projected budget for the next four years, which shows the district running out of money by the 2021-22 school year. The 2018-19 school year budget is $12,003,678, up from $11,250,133 last year. With a projected enrollment of 733.5 full time equivalent students (FTEs) in...
Three elementary-age girls walking down Central Drive in Coulee Dam were approached July 20 by a man who asked the girls to get in the truck with him. The girls stated that the man was persistent in his attempt to get them to get into the truck with him before he drove away. The girls described him as having short gray hair, dark red skin and driving a blue or gray pickup truck. Two dogs, one black and white and the other brown, were in the back of the truck, described as an older model Ford with poles sticking up out of it, the kind used when...
What do students think about the educational system? The system, most often run by older people who haven't been students themselves in decades, doesn't receive a lot of input from the student body, at least not in the Grand Coulee Dam School District. But students Ashlyn Olsen and Raven Clark made a presentation to the school board on Monday night. Olsen and Clark expressed their desire for change within the school dress code, making points such as the difficulty of shopping for items that fit...
The city council in Grand Coulee voted to go out to bid for the demolition of the "Vlachos building," on Spokane Way. The building, once belonging to inventor and mechanic Constantinos Vlachos, has been boarded up and abandoned for some time now. Thomas Geiger, an attorney who represents the Vlachos estate, had requested an extension to work out a deal selling the property. The city, tired of granting extensions, moved instead to seek bids to demolish the property that is in a decrepit...
Elmer City could be up to its knees in a messy problem if leaders don’t find a solution to their waste water treatment facility issue with Coulee Dam, which was discussed by the town council last week. A meeting between council members and mayors of the two towns is planned within the next weeks or so to casually discuss viewpoints on the issue in the hopes of coming to a solution. Coulee Dam is building a new wastewater treatment plant at a higher elevation than the previous facility. The increase in elevation will require new lift pumps to g...