Commissioners' Report

During their meeting Tuesday, Feb. 10, the Wahkiakum County commissioners approved a VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) project with More Power in the amount of $16,655.10. According to Tuesday’s agenda, the project is broken up into four milestones that are to be paid out of the Electronic Cumulative reserve fund. The four amounts are $2,102.10 and three separate installments of $4,851.00. Emergency Management Coordinator Austin Smith then presented before the commissioners a request to approve the $7,500 quote submitted by Incident Management Partners to update the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan (CEMP). According to the meeting’s agenda, Smith has secured grant funding “to pay for a contractor to update the plan to meet state requirements.” A total of three quotes were requested and only two were received. The other quote was by Integrated Solutions Consulting in the amount of $54,300. The commissioners unanimously approved Incident Management Partners’ quote of $7,500. Following the approval, Commissioner and Chair Dan Cothren notified Smith he had spoken with a resident up on Altoona (Pillar Rock Road) and they “were stuck in behind that water issue there for about five days.” Cothren said, “We probably need to look at a road-use agreement, especially for Altoona on that one side to get up and over. There’s a water house and there’s some other property owners in there. We need to look at that because we’ve got a lot of elderly folks out there and it’s going to be Life Flight to get out of there.” Agreeing, Smith said, “I was looking back and it looks like the last agreement we had expired in 2014, so it’s been some time since we’ve had that and we have to get that up to date. I’ll work with Chuck (Beyer) and the private landowners out there.”

During the individual commissioner reports, Commissioner Lee Tischer noted two recommendations were being made regarding possible remedies for a 2024 fuel tax distribution error. The fuel tax distribution for the counties was “for road maintenance preservation and improvements.” Amounts were being withheld from counties totaling $110 million over 18 years. According to Tischer, Wahkiakum County alone is owed $654,867.27 as a result of the error. Two recommendations are being made, according to Tischer. The first would be “to make the payment increasing the direct distribution to the motor vehicle tax for all counties and make the payment of $110 million now.” The second recommendation is “to fully fund the road program at $40 million biannually through 2032, covering lost revenue over a period of time instead of one time making it right.” Regarding the “good news,” Tischer said, “I almost did a heel click.”

During his report, Cothren said, “I got a call from the congresswoman last week, and the $500,000 that she appropriated for, we got it; it’s there. We’ve got a few loops to go through, but the money’s there. That’ll be a good start for the Community Forest.”