In Our View: Cheers & Jeers

Cheers: To a proposed city ordinance to limit truck traffic on 39th Street. This arterial street, which runs through a residential neighborhood, can be used by motorists to connect from Fruit Valley to Interstate 5 or state Highway 500. Since November 2010, the connection has been even easier thanks to a $19 million bridge that spans the BNSF Railway yard, eliminating the potential of being stopped by a parked or slow-moving freight train. As a result, truck traffic has nearly tripled.

It’s important for trucks to be able to access Fruit Valley, home to Frito-Lay, Sunlight Supply and several other manufacturing and warehousing operations. But there are other routes more suitable for trucks, including Northeast/Northwest 78th Street and Fourth Plain Boulevard. When the Mill Plain extension was built almost 20 years ago, its primary purpose was to provide a better truck route to the Port of Vancouver and Fruit Valley. Not so for the 39th Street overpass. Its primary purpose was to provide increased automobile safety while allowing BNSF to increase its railyard operations.

The proposed city ordinance would prohibit heavy trucks from moving freight along 39th Street. Smaller trucks and local deliveries would be exempted. The ordinance is due to be discussed by the Vancouver City Council on July 18. Unless new arguments are brought forward, the council should move ahead with the ban.

Jeers: To more evidence that local rental housing is becoming less affordable at a faster rate. This is a complex issue with roots that date to the Great Recession and the burst of the housing bubble that forced too many homeowners to become renters once again. Now the economy is much healthier and people are buying houses, but there is still great demand for rentals. That demand has driven rents increasingly higher, as Columbian reporter Patty Hastings reported this week.

In fact, fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Clark County increased 37 percent from 2005 to 2016, to $1,208 per month. If that sounds bad, consider this: Most of that increase came in just the last year. In contrast, incomes are up by less than 20 percent in the same time period, and likely only in the single digits this year. (C’mon, admit it, you didn’t get a 20 percent raise this year. In fact, if you rely on Social Security, you got no raise at all.)

Of course nothing goes up forever, and the rental housing market is no exception. In the meantime, though, renters are increasingly squeezed, which puts the crimp on other spending, such as cars, clothes and, in some cases, food and health care.

Cheers: To Isaiah Cooper, 16, of Compton, Calif. Cooper flew a small plane into town this week on the first leg of what he plans to be a trip around the perimeter of the continental United States. The teen pilot dreams of being the youngest person to fly solo around the world. But for Cooper, it’s not so much where he’s going, as where he’s been: one of Los Angeles’ most notorious, crime-ridden, gang-infested suburbs. Thanks to an outreach program at Tomorrow’s Aeronautical Museum, he turned his life around. His journey — physical and metaphysical — reminds us of the value of these outreach programs, several of which can be found right here in our own community.

Jeers: To the 211 drunken drivers arrested by the Washington State Patrol over the July 4 weekend. WSP’s Kyle Moore says that number might go even higher once all the reports are received. Needless to say, DUI is selfish act. In 2015, impaired driving was a primary cause in 46 percent of traffic fatalities. Fatal crashes totaled 203 last year, up from 178 in 2014.