I have been writing this column long enough to know that a slow news week is not the same as a peaceful one — I said as much a few weeks back and I meant it then and I mean it more now — because what happened this week in Skamania County is that almost nothing got written down, almost nothing got filed, almost nothing got talked about in any official capacity, and I want you to sit with that for a moment before we move on, because the people who actually live here deserve better than a public record that goes quiet right when decisions are still sitting on the table unresolved.
The Wind River Fishway closure — twelve acres, permanent, the kind of thing that used to fill a meeting room with people in barn coats and strong opinions — got one story this week, one, and apparently not even a well-read one, and I have been turning that over in my mind since Wednesday morning — because I remember when the county talked about land along the Wind River the way you talk about something that belongs to you, which it does, which it always has, and my father used to say that the minute people stop arguing about a piece of land is the minute someone else starts deciding what happens to it, and I am not saying that is what is happening here, I am just saying my father was usually right and the comment period on that closure ended April 20th and I hope you submitted something before it did, and if you didn't, well, we're going to have to circle back to that — and another thing, while I am here, the planning commission hearing that got cancelled back on April 1st with no explanation written anywhere for anyone to find — CUP-2025-001, which some of you will remember and some of you should — still has not exactly been resolved in any way I can point to and explain to a neighbor, and I bring this up because the pattern of things being proposed and then going quiet is not a coincidence, it is a habit, and habits harden into policy before you notice.
What I keep coming back to is this: thin public information is not a neutral condition — it is a condition that benefits whoever is making decisions and disadvantages the people who have to live with them — and I have watched this county change in a hundred ways I could name and a hundred more I probably should not, but the change that bothers me most is not a road or a building or a parking space turned into a loading zone, it is the slow shrinking of the record, the shortening of the comment periods, the cancelled hearings with no explanation, the stories that land with a whisper when they deserve a reckoning — and I do not know exactly who is making all these certain decisions but I will say that the people who actually live here have noticed the quiet, and quiet is not the same as agreement, and it is not the same as not paying attention, and some of us have been paying attention for a very long time.
That's all for this week. You know where to find me.