August 2, 2018
Time to shift our ‘small town’ thinking in Camas
The phrase “small town” gets thrown around a lot in this increasingly urban neck of the Southwest Washington woods.
The phrase “small town” gets thrown around a lot in this increasingly urban neck of the Southwest Washington woods.
In this Camas Days-heavy issue, it’s pretty easy to find a few dozen things to celebrate during the month of July. But our first Cheers goes out to the the folks who help kick off the annual Camas Days celebration with the coronation of the Camas Days Queen (and sometimes King). The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) Camas-Washougal hosts a lovely coronation event each year and celebrates the best of the Camas-Washougal community by highlighting people like this year’s queen, Maxine Ambrose, who may not always get the glory despite their often lifelong commitment to the community. Ambrose, for instance, has been giving back to her community for 50 years, volunteering at the Inter-Faith Treasure House, Soroptimist International of Camas-Washougal, the Camas-Washougal Historical Society, the Two Rivers Heritage Museum, the Lost and Found Cafe, Friends of the Cemetery, Boy Scouts and her children’s’ school PTAs. This type of “behind the scenes” work is the glue that keeps a communities like Camas and Washougal running, but often goes unnoticed by those who reap its benefits. So cheers to the GFWC, to Ambrose and to the Columbia Ridge Senior Living center, which hosts the annual queen’s coronation event.
The recent news that a top voting machine maker finally admitted to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden it did indeed install remote-access software on U.S. voting machines during the early 2000s, making those machines susceptible to hacking — combined with the recent indictment of 12 Russians accused of manipulating our 2016 presidential election, fishing for access to voting machine manufacturers and actually hacking a state election board website and stealing 500,000 voters’ information — got us thinking about how good we have it here in the Pacific Northwest.
The Washougal School Board is mulling over a proposed policy that could severely limit public comment.
The nightmare of every journalist ever threatened for simply doing their job came true last week.
This month’s Cheers & Jeers is coming in a little late, so we have plenty of news to talk about. Let’s kick it off with a few well-deserved CHEERS:
Our office recently received an email offer from a company touting itself as having “Trump-friendly editorial cartoons.” Inside was their most recent, depicting a family arriving at the Mexico-United States border and stopping a few feet away with the words: “How to Avoid Being Separated From Your Children at the U.S. Border … Step 1: Stay Away. The End.”
“Not for a letter to the editor,” was how the email started. The writer didn’t want his views to go out publicly, but did want to let me know that he has lived in Washougal for 43 years and that “local members of the community” believe The Post-Record has “taken on a Vancouver and even a Portland image.”
There seems to be an influx of business leaders and developers crying out for more room at the table in local government meetings, lately.
Washougal leaders may not have realized it, but with one simple vote — to reduce speed limits on the city’s downtown Main Street to 20 mph — they joined a growing global movement to make urban areas safer, healthier and greener.
