In Our View: Cheers & Jeers

Cheers: To hometown heroes. Two were featured on the front page of Tuesday’s Columbian. Roxanne Esteb of La Center was at home in her basement apartment Saturday night when she heard unusual noises upstairs. When she checked, she found the main floor of the home engulfed in smoke. The living room couch was on fire, and the flames were spreading fast. Acting quickly, she first saved her landlady, 81-year-old Betty Potter, who gets around using a walker. Then she saved Betty’s son, Tracy Potter, who at first didn’t want to leave the house. “If she hadn’t been there … I think it would have been a fatal fire,” said the deputy fire marshal who investigated the blaze.

The second hero featured on the same page was Dr. Ed McAninch of Camas. McAninch served honorably in World War II, where he saw combat in Europe. On Nov. 23, 1944, he provided cover fire to an officer who ended up winning the Medal of Honor for his valor in destroying a Nazi headquarters. McAninch was later injured in a firefight, but recovered and came home to study medicine and spend four decades as a small-town family doctor, a much quieter but equally impactful form of heroism.

Jeers: To David Madore’s zoning plan. Followers of the county council shenanigans will recall that last fall Madore and Tom Mielke insisted on throwing out the county planning staff’s carefully drawn land-use alternatives. They offered as a substitution a map authored by Madore, who has zero professional planning experience, and gave very limited chance for the public to comment. This week, the county’s professional staff, now charged with cleaning up the plan to see if it will pass state muster, announced that Madore’s alternative includes at least 320 parcels with errors or omissions, affecting some 250 property owners.

“We had a bunch of places where things were screwed up,” the county’s deputy planning director said. The staff will fix them, of course, but it will take time. With a looming deadline to submit a suitable land use plan to the state, that’s something the county doesn’t have.

Cheers: To the Port of Vancouver for finding some interim uses for the former Red Lion Hotel Vancouver at the Quay property. The old hotel had a long and useful life before it closed on Oct. 31, and the port plans to eventually redevelop the site. But as anyone who has been involved in property deals knows, that always takes longer than it should.

Rather than let its old hotel become an eyesore and a magnet for transients, the port first announced a block of guest rooms would become office and laboratory space for a biotechnology company. This week, it announced a popular downtown coffee shop, Torque Coffee, would be relocating into the hotel’s old bar, which will be lightly remodeled. Though anxious to see the old hotel replaced with modern facilities, we’re glad for the interim use of the property.

Jeers: To apparent malaise within the ranks of the Washington State Patrol. More than traffic cops, this agency is the state’s elite police force. But according to a recent survey of nearly 500 troopers and sergeants, 46 percent say they feel the agency doesn’t value them. Part of their complaint is about pay, but troopers are also unhappy with scheduling and quotas for traffic stops and number of tickets to be written. The agency “is so numbers-driven, it has lost touch” with what troopers are there to do, said one respondent featured in the report. The top brass needs to embrace this report and move quickly to heal the culture, or else have Gov. Jay Inslee and lawmakers do it for them.