Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
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I SEE, I told Tim Eyman, that the Elway poll shows support has dropped for your Initiative 1053 requiring a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to increase taxes, and a Seattle legislator got a piece published in the Times calling it “undemocratic, unfair and unwise.” “It always breaks down to who turns out to vote,” he said. “People who have voted for it three times already and watched the Democrats suspend it to raise taxes and violate the will of the people will walk over glass to vote for it.” If there’s anything that’s undemocratic and unfa...
The state is awash in deficits. Cuts to the budget and efforts to raise revenues have only touched the surface. The state faces a continuing financial crisis. More adjustments to cure the imbalance between revenues and expenditures are needed. Some of these are bound to be serious and contentious. Not everybody will be pleased with the outcome, but this certainly is no time for the public to throw a monkey wrench into the recovery process. The November 2 ballot contains potential monkey wrenches. Initiative No. 1107—If the new taxes on c...
Morgan Willson continued her string of race wins Tuesday with a battle on the hilly course at St. Georges. Willson finished five seconds in front of Northwest Christian’s Christina Anderson on the SG course which includes an pull up the hills over the Little Spokane River site of the academy. Katie Largent finished 25th for Colfax with a 28:36 on the 5K course. NWC’s Maxwell Choka continued his string of league wins with a 17:24 over the tough course. Placing for the Bulldogs were Jackson Elfers, 16th 20:20; Cody Wuestney, 20th 21:04; Bro...
Beaten, bruised and broke, 17 of the area’s finest poker players walked out of the CETC building in Colfax with lighter pockets and sullen faces Saturday. “You can always rebuy,” one player exclaimed after watching a cohort stand up from his seat Not since the days the height of railroad construction had Colfax seen such a collection of card players assembled in one place. “Be careful with that camera. You know a lot of people in here are wanted by the law,” joked one player who played using a John Deere pseudonym. Demeanor of the Hullabaloo po...
Colfax volleyball players will depart for Spokane Friday to begin play in the giant cross-over tournament. Sixty-four teams will start in tournament action which begins with pool play and then sends teams to other sites, depending how they competed in their pool round. Colfax Coach Sue Doering likes to enter the Bulldogs in the big event because it provides matches against tough competition. The Bulldogs get a lot of court tests over a short period of time with most of the foes coming from larger schools. Reardan will be the only other league...
Eagle cross country runners booked two team wins last Wednesday, Sept. 29, in what turned out to be a low entry race at the Whitman Mission grounds. Runners competed on a slow course with rough trails and the hill up to the Whitman monument. The lone foes for Eagles were three runners from the hosts, Walla Walla Valley Academy. Two other teams on the original booking, Pomeroy and Asotin failed to appear. Pomeroy apparently made the trip to Walla Walla one day early. Brian Wittlake, lone boy runner for WWVA took the boys race at 20:34, just...
Lakeside’s Eagles, a team which last visited Colfax four years ago, will return Friday for a non-league collision against a high flying Bulldog grid team. Colfax will host the big Eagle team after moving their record to 4-0 with a big league win last Friday at Reardan. “Liberty will be the best team we have faced yet this year,” Coach Mike Morgan predicted. The Eagles now play in the NE-A division. Morgan said he has booked Lakeside for a two-year run to fill one of the bye weeks Colfax faced in its 2B league schedule. The NE-A league has a...
Tekoa/Oakesdale and Pomeroy added league wins to remain on top of the SE Eights volleyball campaign Tuesday when the league entered its second round of play. The two leaders stand at 7-1 with the Nighthawks traveling to Palouse and Pomeroy hosting Rosalia tonight. TEKOA/OAKESDALE Tuesday stopped St. John/Endicott in four games with a strong net game. Cassy Mendoza had 14 kills for the ‘hawks and Kaela Dewan put up four blocks. Dewan also had 24 assists and six digs. Mandy Neill hit two aces. Gretchen Van Lith had 19 digs and eight kills for the...
Football fortunes in the SE Eights looked wide open after Friday with the LW Tigercats prevailing in an air battle against Colton and the SJE Eagles ending Touchet’s early season string at four games. Garfield/Palouse, the other county entry in SE, sustained a 18-44 defeat at the hands of Liberty Christian Patriots, officially an independent team. LaCROSSE/WASHTUCNA Friday night came from behind to score with 1:23 left in the game at the Tigercat homecoming to win 18-14. “It was a great game. It’s fantastic when you can come out of a game...
The History Channel * On Oct. 13, 1953, the world’s first art museum on wheels opens in Fredericksburg, Va. It was called the Artmobile, a $20,000, 34-foot-long air-conditioned trailer with museum-quality lighting. The trailer was pulled around the state behind an enormous blue truck. * On Oct. 14, 1968, U.S. Defense Department officials announce that the Army and Marines will be sending about 24,000 men back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours because of the length of the war, high turnover of personnel and the tight supply of e...
The next step in securing a water system plan for Palouse is hiring an engineer and tracking down the proper city records useful for the plan, according to the water and sewer committee for Palouse. Committee officials met with regional Department of Health (DOH) officials Sept. 21 to go over their options for designing their own plan. The city council voted Aug. 10 to begin working on such a plan under accusations from would-be developer Nicole Wood that their lack of a plan was hindering the placement of water and sewer lines. A water system...
Purple ribbons remembering local women who died from domestic violence are tied up in several Palouse towns. Each of the 20 purple ribbons will have the names of local victims and how they died. Because October is Domestic Violence Awareness month, Alternatives to Violence on the Palouse has several ongoing events geared to educate the public on the issue. Colfax, Pullman, Moscow and Genesee have the ribbons. About 392 area victims and survivors were served by Alternatives to Violence between July 2008 and June 2009. Down the streets of...
Whitman County officials have agreed on a plan to help clear the county’s annual audit hurdles – lower the bar. Since 2002, Whitman County has assembled its annual financial statements on the intricately detailed accrual basis. County commissioners, in concert with Auditor Eunice Coker, Treasurer Robert Lothspeich and Esther Wilson, the county’s lone finance employee, now want to switch to a simpler form of reporting, the cash basis. “I think the department heads, for the most part, have been behind this for years,” said Coker. Coker, Lo...
THURSDAY U.S. regulators denied the beleaguered Postal Service an average 5.6 percent rate increase it had requested to help its financially ailing operations cope with the impact of the recession. The Postal Service had proposed raising the price of a first-class stamp to 46 cents from 44 cents. Scientists using the Keck Telescope in Hawaii spotted a new planet orbiting the dwarf star Gliese 581 that appears have a temperature just right to support life. The planet, three times the mass of Earth, has pockets of land inside blue waters....
Harold White, an engineer with the DOT regional office in Spokane, reported $215,000 has been budgeted out of a special state fund for approach ramps to the S. Main Street Bridge in Colfax. White said funds come out of a special project approved by the legislature. The Colfax project will provide handicapped access to the S. Main Bridge. At present, the bridge has a steep angle cut in the sidewalk on the south end of the east side. On the west side, the bridge has a vertical curb which cannot be negotiated by bicycle riders or wheelchairs....
Leaf collection by city crews will begin Tuesday, Oct. 19. Residents are reminded that the city will only pick up leaves which are in biodegradable bags which are available from vendors around town. Residents are asked to place leaf bags next to the curb. The bags should contain only leaves. Garbage, tree and shrub prunings and other material should not be placed in the bags. The service will continue during the autumn, and the city will issue a notice one week prior to ending the service, according to Andy Rogers, public works...
Palouse citizen Jim Farr wants to bring a gun to Palouse city council meetings as a visual protest against what he views as incompetent government. He has yet to apply for a gun permit from the county sheriff’s office, saying there are several issues on his record he must have expunged first. Farr said several times in an interview with the Gazette Oct. 1 he had no intention of discharging the gun at a meeting but simply wanted to make an overt visual protest against the workings of the city by wearing it. “I told him [city police chief Jer...
Palouse city council may increase water and sewer rates in 2011, 10 months after activating a six-percent utility tax on those rates last January. “In 2010, both water and sewer are operating at a loss,” said Connie Newman, the new Palouse city council member and new head of the Palouse Water and Sewer Committee. The committee is looking at a raise of no less than $3 a month and no more than $7. Proceeds would boost the city’s water and sewer accounts. The rate raise would start January of 2011. Palouse residents saw at least a $2.30 addit...
Whitman Hospital has several events in the works for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The hospital purchased 35,000 pink gloves for all staff to wear throughout the month of October. Pink is the national color for breast cancer awareness. Hospital staff will give a radio interview on breast cancer in mid-October. They’ll also be passing out flyers at Rosauers with facts on breast cancer. Whitman hospital performed 1,934 mammograms in 2009. From 2000 to 2007, cancer was one of five leading causes of death in Whitman County. Of all the w...
A motion to suppress Kristen Grindley case evidence, the final minutes of a police interview at the sheriff’s sub-station in Albion last Nov. 11, was granted Friday after a two-plus hour Miranda rights hearing in superior court. Judge David Frazier ruled the final part of the interview should be suppressed because Richard Pasma, Grindley’s former boyfriend who has been charged with failing to report an accident, expressed a desire for an attorney at the end of the Albion session. The early morning interview at Albion ended at 5:12 a.m. aft...
Voters in the Colton/Uniontown school district have less than a month to decide on the district’s proposal for a multi-million dollar overhaul of the aging Colton school building. Approximately 30 people met in Uniontown Sunday to learn about the proposal. Several citizens later said they were undecided on their vote, as they were torn between the high cost of the remodel versus the blatant need for it. “It seems like an awful lot of money at this time. They made some good arguments,” said Ed Garretson, Uniontown homeowner, the day after the m...
Whitman County is now going to look after its own finances. After relying on the Spokane accounting firm Anderson Peretti to track its finances for most of this year, county commissioners decided to eschew a contract renewal with the firm and let county employees keep the books. Esther Wilson, the county’s system administrator, said the county has paid $29,198 to Anderson Peretti for Elias Siriani’s services with bills for an expected $12,083 still to come. Wilson has been acting as the sole financial employee since the finance department was...
The three-month challenge by fired Colfax Fire Chief Ralph Walter to return to the post came to a sudden end Wednesday morning when Mayor Norma Becker announced she was reinstating him. Mayor Becker’s dramatic announcement came just before the Colfax Civil Service commission began a second day of hearing witnesses in Walter’s appeal. Reading a prepared statement, Mayor Becker said she learned Tuesday during the first day of testimony that Walter had attended a weekly meeting of the fire department volunteers last May, apologized for ill feeling...
NOTICE OF HEARING NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that the Board of County Commissioners of Whitman County, Washington, will consider the Report of the County Road Engineer for the vacation and abandonment of a portion of the File Road, County Road No. 2020 located in the SE 1/4 and SW 1/4 of Section 5 and the NE 1/4 and NW 1/4 of Section 8 all in Township 19 North, Range 44 East W.M. Whitman County, Washington. THAT A HEARING on said vacation will be held in the office of the Whitman County Commissioners in the Courthouse in Colfax, Washington on the...
These reports are from the previous four issues of the Daily Bulletin in Colfax. They are reprinted here for the benefit of Gazette readers who reside outside of Colfax. Some accounts have been updated. City votes 4-3 to pay bill Payment of a $12,116 bill from the Spokane law firm of Evans, Craven and Lackie was approved on a 4-3 vote of the city council Monday night. Council members David Nails, Jeremiah Roberts and Jeannette Solimine voted against paying the bill. The Spokane firm was hired to represent the city in the civil service appeal...
