News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
Sorted by date Results 980 - 1004 of 1840
Good luck to the Lake Roosevelt basketball teams and their fans in Richland today; win or lose (just saw that the girls won 46-43) , they may all have to take a long way home. Washington State Department of Transportation is showing I-82 closed between Yakima and Ellensburg, as well as minor state highways SR-24 and SR-241 through rural areas between here and there. SR 17 closed from Othello north, SR 21 is closed at Washtucna. That might leave US395 to Spokane and US 2 the only way home. But...
If you have not already filled out your ballot, which you should have received in the mail by now, you should do so now. Grand Coulee Dam School District is proposing yet another levy, which won’t raise your taxes any higher than they already are. That’s because it’s just part of a two-levy remedy the district is hoping to implement to make up for money lost in the wake of new school funding structures put in place in the wake of the state Supreme Court’s McCleary Decision. The levy you’ll find on the ballot for the Feb. 5 election would kee...
Local voters will soon get ballots in the mail asking them to decide on a second levy for the Grand Coulee Dam School District and may wonder why when a levy just passed last November. The November vote will only allow the district to collect a little more than a third of the tax support voters had passed in 2015. That was ancient history, before the “McCleary Fix” was passed by the state Legislature, which mandated reducing local levies, added an extra statewide tax, and leaving the local district with trying to partially make up for it wit...
Coulee Dam has a new mayor. Bob Poch was elected by the city council last week to take the place of Larry Price, who resigned Dec. 6, 2018. The council did not discuss the motion made by Councilmember Ben Alling and seconded by Councilmember Keith St. Jeor, immediately voting to seat the new mayor, who had been filling the post as mayor pro tempore since Price's resignation. "Thank you all for your confidence," he said, before launching into the rest of the regular meeting of the council. Poch...
A legislator who represents the state's 12th Legislative District, including the Grand Coulee Dam area, has been appointed to head or serve on three important committees in the House of Representatives that could have an impact on local funding struggles. Rep. Mike Steele has been selected to serve as the ranking member on the House Education Committee, his office announced Monday. He's also assistant ranking member on the House Capital Budget Committee, and will serve on the House...
Watch that first step outside Thursday morning. The National Weather Service has issued a winter weather warning, expecting up to a tenth of an inch of ice on local roads after freezing rain starts to fall around 4 a.m. and continues until about 10 a.m....
The athletic director for the Grand Coulee Dam School District got a $4,000 annual boost in pay, and a 6-percent raise for non-union classified staffers is also coming following a vote by the school board Dec. 20. But not without questions and discussion that shed light on hard decision that may be coming. Superintendent Paul Turner told the board that Athletic Director Tim Rasmussen is "really doing a bang-up job," and Turner wants him to do more. Rasmussen teaches four classes of physical...
The Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area will remain accessible to the public, but with no visitor services, during the current shutdown of the federal government. That’s according to a statement issued by the National Park Service unit on Saturday, after Congress and the president failed to compromise on a bill to keep the government fully open. “During the shutdown of the federal government due to the lapse of appropriations, national parks will remain as accessible as possible while still following all applicable laws and pro...
A Nespelem man is being held on $500,000 bond in Spokane County jail after his involvement in a deadly car crash that killed a Spokane veteran three miles west of Airway Heights Dec. 19. Ryan E. Labreck, 36, of Spokane, died at the scene Wednesday morning after his 2016 Subaru Crosstrek, which was stopped in a turn lane as he waited to turn left from U.S. 2 onto Christensen Road, was struck from behind by a 2002 Dodge Caravan driven by Thomas Aripa, 45, of Nespelem, a Washington State Patrol investigation found. Labreck’s westbound Crosstrek wa...
Nespelem School District's robotics team competed in their first regional "First Lego League Robotics Competition" the first weekend in December. With a little over a month to prepare, the small team of five middle-school students competed against 23 teams in Wenatchee, Principal Marcy Horne reports. This year's competition theme was "Out to Orbit," and the team was judged on robot design for that theme, and on core values based on "PAX," Horne said, referring to a system the school has used...
The recently resigned mayor of Coulee Dam is the subject of a sexual harassment complaint filed by a female city employee in October, according to a document obtained under the state’s Public Records Act. A Dec. 4, 2018 letter to the city’s attorney from an independent investigator hired by the city details what he found from interviews with most of Coulee Dam’s employees after the city contacted Clear Risk Solutions of Ephrata Oct. 29, regarding allegations about Mayor Larry Price. An assistant clerk/records specialist, whose name was redac...
If your child still wants a visit with Santa, you have one last shot in the community this afternoon. He, along with his elf and Elsa are at the Coulee Dam Credit Union's Coulee Dam office today (Friday, Dec. 21) until 3 p.m....
The city of Coulee Dam will oppose changes to the operation of a beach upriver from the Third Powerhouse behind Grand Coulee Dam being considered by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The city council unanimously voted last week to send a letter to that effect. The bureau is considering restricting people from driving vehicles onto the beach during low drawdowns of Lake Roosevelt, or possibly closing the area to fishing entirely. It is seeking comments to include in its decision-making process. The spot is popular with older anglers, from whom...
The local chapter of the Public School Employees union voted 28-8 to ratify a 6-percent raise in the Grand Coulee Dam School District late last month and the school board approved the change last Thursday. After months of deliberations, the PSE Nov. 27 approved the raise for the roughly 75 members, plus a $2-an-hour raise for the lead mechanic position and a 50-cents-an-hour raise to the Spanish paraprofessional position. The lead paraprofessional in the preschool was made a “coordinator,” which comes with a raise of about $1.15 an hour, as...
Coulee Dam’s mayor is resigning due to health concerns, he told The Star in a text message Sunday. Mayor Larry Price was elected in November 2017 and took the helm of the town at the start of this year. Price had told The Star last month he had suffered some “mini-strokes” and that he was taking a couple weeks’ leave of absence from his duties. Mayor Pro Tempore Bob Poch has presided over the last two council meetings and other duties. He will presumably preside again tonight, Dec. 12, as the town council considers several items on the agenda....
Solutions to serious problems should not require contortions of logic that look like the loser in that old game of Twister. You know the one: where players try to reach different spots on a large surface on the floor with different parts of their bodies until one of them finally falls over. The solution the state Legislature came up with after the state Supreme Court ruled the state was neglecting its primary constitutional responsibility — basic education — was a partial solution that will not last because it does not address fundamental ine...
A Grand Coulee woman offered last week to help Coulee Dam work on getting the former Village Cinema up and running. Kimberly Christensen and her husband, Michael, who started their Coulee Kettle Corn business a year ago, moved to the area eight years ago. The coulee was new to her, but he was raised in the area, she said. Now she just wants to help improve things if she can, she offered, and Coulee Dam is the town that holds two areas of concern: the closed movie theater and the closed swimming pool, both owned by the town. Christensen said...
The death of a child is always hard, but every holiday thereafter can be especially tough on the surviving parents. Next Sunday, many of them will gather in mutual support to “honor the memory of all children gone too soon,” as The Compassionate Friends website puts it. Locally, Cindy Parra is arranging for a gathering at Lake Roosevelt Elementary. Parra’s 16-year-old daughter, Amy, died in a car wreck 16 years ago. “I guess you learn to cope with it, but you never get over it,” she said. “Holidays are hard.” Parra is arranging for locals wh...
When the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced proposed possible changes to the way it manages a local fishing beach, it used in an official document the popular name given it by the folks who use it, a name first made popular in the writings of a Star columnist. Reg Morgan wrote about all kinds of things in decades of writing Morgan’s Musings, frequently about local hunting and fishing, which he loved. During the course of those writings, Reg applied the moniker “Geezer Beach” to the shoreline on Lake Roosevelt behind the Third Power...
After a year of financial nerves and fiscal restraint, Coulee Medical Center officials delivered good news on progress toward a turnaround Monday night. Hospital commissioners passed a budget that comes close to double what it was in 2014 and projects a positive bottom line for what would be the second year in a row. Following a report by Chief Financial Officer Kelly Hughes, commissioners approved a budget that hits nearly $30 million in net patient revenue for 2019 and ends with a net gain of slightly more than $1.3 million. Hughes said it...
Vehicle crashes attributed in part to icy roads killed three people in the region in the last week, authorities said. Richard Howe, 62, of Omak, died about 8:35 p.m. Nov. 21 on SR-155 six miles south of Disautel Pass. Howe was wearing a seatbelt in the 2004 Ford F350 pickup as he lost control just after passing another vehicle, according to a Washington State Patrol investigation. The pickup, headed north, fishtailed several times, went onto the shoulder on the southbound side of the road into an embankment and struck two trees, coming to rest...
The engineer in charge of the new wastewater treatment plant in Coulee Dam says funds may be available to pay for the extra lift station needed to bring Elmer City’s effluent to the plant. With costs estimated at three quarters of a million dollars, that could be a big help to Coulee Dam, which authorized Varela engineer Daniel Cowger to look into possible finance option with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s Rural Development fund, which financed the rest of the plant. Cowger told the town council Wednesday night that his conversations with key...
Firefighters in Coulee Dam want to clean up areas of the town that could contribute to a much worse fire season than the last one under the wrong circumstances. Judah Pope told the city council Wednesday the Coulee Dam Volunteer Fire Department had its eye on several areas of town that, if ignited, could cause serious problems. Pope listed several areas, including Fiddle Creek on the west side of town, where understory brush is thick and close to homes that could easily catch fire if the area were to ignite. But Fiddle Creek is the only area...
A few years after Rod Hartman had retired as the 10-year mayor of Coulee Dam in 1996, he tried to impress upon me the absolute necessity of merging the local towns. I agreed, and always have, that it would probably make sense to do so, even if it would be complicated. But having found too many die-hard old-timers too entrenched in old arguments during the last round of discussions on consolidation, I told him I didn’t think it was time to try it again. Now it is. Hartman knew, from decades of working with city budgets and local, region-wide c...
I had a friend at the age of 10 who swore to me that she was a boy. We were just kids playing in sand and gravel of a pit behind my home outside Missoula, Montana. Her statement didn’t really make any sense to me. She looked like a girl to me, although her interests seemed to indicate she was different. Neither one of us had any idea what sex was all about. But one day she felt compelled to tell me she was really a boy, not a girl. The memory of her informs my opinions on the current international struggle in society to recognize those we now c...