The superintendent of Vancouver Public Schools had a shower installed in his office restroom over the summer at a cost of about $4,000 for labor and materials.
Steve Webb will use the shower to freshen up after a long day and before he heads to an evening meeting. The shower was paid for by the district’s general fund/facilities construction budget.
With the installation of the shower, Webb is the only head of a public educational entity in Clark County with private shower facilities just outside his private office.
“For me, the installation of a small shower in the restroom adjacent to my office is about increased productivity time. The job of the superintendent often extends well beyond the regular business day,” Webb wrote in an email Monday.
A war of words has broken out in Battle Ground, following the publication of an opinion column by two city councilors.
In the column, published last week in the Camas-Washougal Post-Record and in this week’s issue of The Reflector, Councilors Mike Ciraulo and Adrian Cortes accuse their colleagues of sidestepping a public and transparent process when drafting an ordinance in July changing the city’s government structure.
The ordinance changes how councilors choose the mayor. The deputy mayor, elected among councilmembers, would automatically slip into the mayor’s position after two years.
Ciraulo was absent from the July meeting because he was hiking the Oregon portion of the Pacific Crest Trail. Cortes was at the vote and was the lone councilor voice against it.
NORTH BONNEVILLE — With every passing adult fall chinook salmon at Bonneville Dam, a monster Columbia River return becomes a new record.
On Friday, the season’s cumulative count topped the old mark of 610,000 tallied in 2003. Through Monday, the count totals 698,592.
The fall chinook run continues into December.
Why is this year’s return a record?
Stuart Ellis of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission said the strong numbers are due in part to several high spring river flows, spilling water over dams, and good ocean conditions.
“This fall chinook run is not only big, but it’s got a lot of natural-origin fish going to a lot of different places,” Ellis said.
Income and homeownership fell in Clark County between 2008 and 2012, according to estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau today.
The bureau’s American Community Survey paints a grim picture of Clark County’s recovery from the Great Recession.
“We took a nasty hit,” said Scott Bailey, regional labor economist for the state Employment Security Department.
These economic trends played out among the clothing racks at Spanky’s, a store in east Vancouver where people buy and sell used clothing.
“We’ve seen more new consignors since the downturn,” said Rachel Phillips, Spanky’s owner. “We hear, ‘I’ve never done this before, but I need the money to buy clothes for my family.’ Some people are using the money just to get by.”
The fenced-off pathway from Mountain View High School to Southeast 147th Avenue has been known as the 420 Gate for longer than anyone can remember. That number being code for “time to get high.”
But the end of the last school year and the beginning of this one have seen kids’ behavior around the gate sink lower than ever, according to neighbors. Drug dealing and consumption, littering and vandalism, menacing passersby, blocking traffic and even urinating on nearby property have become all too commonplace among the teens who congregate here, they say.
“They have gotten a lot more brazen,” said Sara Idriss, a retired nurse who lives down the block and says she’d been dealing with it for years — and she’s sick of it. “It’s really out of control. They’re like a mob.”
