Morning Press: Funding Pike’s campaign, highway travel times, detective retires

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In case you missed it, here are some of the top stories of the week:

Madore dominates funding for Pike

Spending for the write-in campaign for Rep. Liz Pike, R-Camas, for Clark County council chair has reached six figures — most of it from one source.

According to the Public Disclosure Commission, the Clark County Republican Party and Write In Liz Pike for County Chair political action committee have spent $106,242.83 on the campaign so far, and that number is likely to rise.

The lion’s share of the support for the campaign has come from a wealthy, and unsurprising, source: Clark County Councilor David Madore.

Since the Clark County Republican Party endorsed Pike in August, the Republican councilor has contributed $205,000 to the party. NoTolls.com, Madore’s political action committee most active during the heyday of the failed Columbia River Crossing bridge project, gave $24,000 to the party in September. David Madore for County Commissioner, which Madore listed as his committee when originally running for his seat on the Clark County commission, gave another $15,000.

The donations cannot legally be made with demands on how the money is spent, but Christian Berrigan, spokesman for the write-in campaign, verified that Madore’s donations will be spent or have already been spent on the campaign.

Read more campaign contributions.

Day center will aid Vancouver’s homeless

Local agencies are banding together to open a day center for the homeless to shower, use the bathroom, do laundry, get mail, store belongings and charge cellphones in Vancouver’s Fruit Valley neighborhood.

Open daily from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. starting in December, the 1,200-square-foot space at 1600 W. 20th St. in the Friends of the Carpenter’s warehouse will be run by Share, a local social service agency. Other local nonprofits will help with mental health counseling, general education classes, case management and job searches.

Clark County and the city of Vancouver are each contributing $122,500 to fund the day center’s operations, and the Vancouver Housing Authority is contributing $30,000 toward rent and utilities, for a total of $275,000 for the first year. The city will invest up to $250,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant funding for equipment (such as a shower trailer) and renovations.

The intent is for the day center to be a two-year interim strategy, Vancouver City Manager Eric Holmes said at Monday’s city council workshop.

“It gives us a tiny bit of breathing room for us to address other strategies,” he said.

Learn more about the day center.

Signs of the times hit area freeways

Like the flip of a switch, a new traffic tool lit up on freeways in Clark County on Thursday morning.

The Washington State Department of Transportation activated a set of new travel-time signs that will give drivers real-time data showing traffic conditions on key routes in the region. The signs will coordinate with a system already operating in the Portland area, including three new signs also launched Thursday by the Oregon Department of Transportation.

“Even though they’re different systems, they share data,” said Dennis Mitchell, an ODOT traffic engineer.

Drivers will see two types of signs in the region. In Clark County, regular message boards will display point-to-point travel times to upcoming destinations — something ODOT has done in the Portland area since last year. The other type of sign, activated for the first time Thursday, show the estimated travel times to one destination for two different routes.

In Clark County, for example, a sign north of the Interstate 5-Interstate 205 split tells southbound travelers how long it will take to reach the two freeways’ southern convergence in Oregon. One number estimates the travel time on I-5; the other on I-205.

“They’ll be able to have the information in front of them before they choose,” Mitchell said.

Read more about the signs.

Storied detective career comes to an end

If you haven’t heard of Rick Buckner, chances are you at least know his work.

As a detective, Buckner has helped put away Westley Allan Dodd, Dennis Keith Smith and Keith Hunter Jesperson, better known as the “Happy Face Killer.”

And those are just a few of the 50-plus homicide cases Buckner has investigated during his career at the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. After 35 years, Buckner retired last week.

“It still is a fun job, I still enjoy it. You interact with people, you never know what you’re going to get into,” he said. But, he added, “after 35 years, it’s time to leave.”

Buckner was a reserve at the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office as a way to give back to the community before deciding to join the Clark County Sheriff’s Office in October 1980.

Ever since, he’s had fun and never looked back. Helping the community and making a difference was rewarding, Buckner said, but he also enjoyed the drama.

“You get a front-row seat to the greatest show on Earth,” he said. “Really, we all have morbid curiosity, and it’s exciting.”

Read more about Buckner’s career.

Sounding alarm on black locust

Once you know what to look for, it seems like they’re everywhere, coming for people’s backyards and gardens, and they can’t be killed by normal means.

Lydia Casey, with her knife, jug of herbicide and Q-tip swabs, is trying to fight the menace’s spread, one black locust tree at a time.

Black locust trees are a tenacious, hard-to-kill plant and invasive weed in Southwest Washington, and in Casey’s experience, most people don’t know what they’re dealing with until they’re near-overrun.

Casey, a master gardener, has made it a small personal crusade around her Andresen-St. Johns neighborhood to root out black locust.

Once she learned about it several months ago, she said she started seeing it all over.

She works house to house helping neighbors control their black locust. Many of them, she said, didn’t know what this pesky weed was until they reached out to her.

Learn more about dealing with black locusts.