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Here are some of the stories that grabbed our readers’ attention this weekend.
A longtime worker for a Catholic health care system in the Northwest sued the organization Thursday, saying its employee insurance plan refused to cover gender-reassignment surgery for her teenage son.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington filed the discrimination lawsuit against PeaceHealth in federal court on behalf of Cheryl Enstad of Bellingham and her son, Paxton Enstad, 17. She said she and her husband eventually took out a second mortgage and dipped into Paxton’s college fund to pay more than $10,000 for his surgery last fall.
“PeaceHealth was telling me my son was undeserving of medical care simply because he’s transgender,” Cheryl Enstad told a news conference Thursday. “It’s heartbreaking. It is not fair.”
Paramedics rushed a woman to the hospital in critical condition after her neighbors found her on the ground unconscious after an apparent fall from her horse Thursday.
Clark County Fire & Rescue spokesman Tim Dawdy said firefighters were called to in the 25000 block of Northeast 18th Court in Ridgefield around 2:15 p.m.
It appeared the woman had been riding a horse and was somehow thrown off, he said.
“Fortunately, some neighbors saw her horse out in the fields without a rider on it,” he said.
Cars packed the parking lot and guests filled the lounge and restaurant at Jollie’s Restaurant and Lounge Sunday afternoon, where Kathy Marsolek has been a patron since 1974, when she went to celebrate her 21st birthday with her mother.
She did the same for her daughter, Angie Jolley, who did the same for her daughter.
“The whole restaurant, the bar, everybody’s family,” Jolley said.
Sunday was the last day for the Ridgefield-area staple, which has been in the Jollie family since opening in 1963.
Bill Jollie bought the building when it was just a tavern, after he was laid off from Lucky Lager brewery. In the 54 years since, the stop on Northeast Union Road, just east of Interstate 5, has grown to include a tavern, kitchen, restaurant and lounge.
Between parking garages for two new office buildings, the existing restaurant buildings and the Grant Street Pier, there has been a steady stream of concrete trucks at The Waterfront Vancouver.
Gramor officials said Thursday that 1,500 cubic yards of concrete has been poured into parking garages for the Block 6 office buildings just this week. A concrete truck on average contains about nine cubic yards.
“They line the trucks up and have ’em go one after the next after the next one,” said Matt Grady, vice president of Gramor Development, the Tualatin, Ore.-based developer leading the project.
Grady said all the builders in the $1.5 billion project are working to get the project done before the wet weather arrives. Blocks 9 and 12 and the Grant Street Pier are supposed to be open to the public by next summer.
