State’s driveway ban creates tempest in a wash bucket

Have you been following the great driveway car-wash saga of 2008? Gov. Chris Gregoire sure seems to want to put this “State bans driveway car-wash runoff” microstory in her rear-view mirror.

Call it a tempest in a teapot, but for Columbian reporter Michael Andersen, it created a deluge in a driveway of reader interest: “All I know is, I’ve gotten more citizen calls on this than almost anything I’ve ever written,” says Andersen, who covers county issues for The Columbian.

Here’s how it went down: A few weeks back, building industry spokesman Steve Madsen, a keen-eyed scrutinizer of state rules, sent an e-mail highlighting the state’s message to the county: People should no longer be allowed to wash their cars in their driveways, because the runoff hurts river habitats.

Andersen’s story showed the potential reach of state regulations. The next day, The Oregonian picked it up, as did the local ABC, NBC and Fox television affiliates. So did Lars Larsen, a Vancouver radio host who has a national audience.

The next week, Gregoire (director, Washington Department of Ecology, 1988-92) was on the case.

Visiting The Columbian for an interview, she volunteered — we didn’t even ask — that a ban on driveway car-wash runoff would be “ridiculous.” Her word, not ours. (Our words would be: “Drop the sponge and nobody gets hurt!”)

At 8:23 the next morning, a Department of Ecology spokeswoman called us to say they were shifting into reverse on the driveway ban: Cities and counties shouldn’t actually enforce that particular rule, though the state still says it should be law.
Made quite a splash

USA Today gave the story some coast-to-coast splash, and even reprinted the photo Andersen had taken to accompany his Columbian article. (They misspelled his name in the photo credit, by the way.)

Maybe this would be a good place to note that the county’s stormwater situation is a major policy problem that we’ve been trying to cover all year.

As of last week, how many calls (or unsolicited gubernatorial comments) had we received about that crucial water issue? Zero.

And you can call that a total washout.

Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story, or just tell a story.