🧾 A City w/o an Operator & Council w/o a Contract - North Bonneville August '26

Enjoy the audio edition on Buzzsprout, or look for "Open Gorge" wherever you get your podcasts.

🏛 North Bonneville August 2026 Round-Up

Agencies Covered: North Bonneville City Council (August 11, 18, 20 and 25) and the North Bonneville Planning Commission (August 4).

The Bottom Line: The city lost its only certified water and wastewater operator at the end of July with, staff said, less than 24 hours of notice. The mayor declared an emergency and signed a six-month contract without a council vote, because the city's code lets him. Every meeting since has been the council trying to get its hands back on that decision, and the first invoice landed in the middle of the argument.

The Vibe: Tense, and unusually specific about it. This was the month the council's long-running argument about money stopped being procedural.

🔎 What Changed

• The city is being run, at the treatment plant, by an outside contractor. OMT, LLC, which trades as Operations Maintenance Technologies, has a six-month contract for licensed oversight, an operator in the seat, staff training and written procedures.
• The council approved that contractor's first invoice, $14,200 for the first two weeks of August, on a 3 to 1 vote, over a detailed objection from Councilmember Jeff Blakeley.
• Two new public works employees were hired on August 10, and the mayor says they are picking up the work faster than he expected.
• The Planning Commission recommended the city's rewritten Title 19 and Title 20 zoning amendments for approval, and the council settled the one number the draft left blank at 50 percent.
• The Planning Commission amended its own by-laws on August 4, for the first time since January 2024.
• City Planner Richard Hall told the Planning Commission that the county planning agreement the council signed in July "will eliminate my position." His successor has been named.

⚠ What Escalated

• The August 11 minutes were rejected, 3 to 1, because the mayor adjourned that meeting without asking whether the council had further business, and a councilmember lost her closing comment as a result.
• Councilmember Mary Helms read a prepared statement accusing Councilmember Blakeley of going around the mayor to city staff and the city attorney. Blakeley asked her to file a formal complaint or withdraw it.
• The council learned that the operator vacancy had been advertised nowhere, and that the city does not belong to the statewide mutual aid network built for exactly this situation.
• Two legal questions were raised on the record in August and neither has been answered: whether the mayor could use the emergency exception to competitive bidding after the city had already started taking bids, and whether the council has ever designated who may exercise emergency powers at all.

🧭 What's Next

• The emergency resolution is still not adopted. Four things the council asked for are still outstanding: a not-to-exceed figure, written rules and procedures, a way out of the contract, and a recruitment plan.
• The master fee schedule is expected to reach a first reading at the council's next regular meeting.
• The rewritten zoning code has to come back as an ordinance, then go to the state Department of Commerce for a 60-day review. The statutory deadline is December 31, 2026.
• Staff said they intend to open recruitment for a city operator in three to four months, so a hire lands as the contract ends.

---

North Bonneville City Council

💧 The Water Emergency

North Bonneville's whole August runs downstream of one thing. The city's certified water and wastewater operator left at the end of July, and the city had nobody licensed to run the plant. Staff told the council they were "operating on less than 24 hours notice that we had to get somebody."

Under the city's emergency chapter that is the mayor's call to make alone. He declared an emergency and signed a contract, and the council does not ratify it. What the code gives the council instead, at NBMC 8.04.040, is a resolution: it "shall by formal resolution establish such special rules, regulation and procedures for handling the emergency." City Attorney Dan Curtis told the council that in most cities such a resolution is "a formality," and that North Bonneville's code asks for more. One councilmember put the position plainly: the emergency "took all control out of the council's hands, which is fine, I understand that it was an emergency. However, this is the only chance for oversight that the council has."

Two failures came out at the August 11 meeting, and they will outlast the contract.

The vacancy was never advertised. A speaker at the meeting went looking and found it posted on none of the three places an operator would look: the Association of Washington Cities job board, the state Department of Health's operator listing, and the city's own jobs page. "There was never a posting for a replacement operator," he said. "So the question has to be asked, what exactly was done?"

And the city is not in the mutual aid network built for this. North Bonneville does not belong to the Washington Water/Wastewater Agency Response Network, whose entire purpose is helping utilities that lose staff or equipment. "Even if WARN wasn't able to supply us with an operator," the same speaker said, "we didn't even have the opportunity to ask it."

The other side of it is that the city has been losing this race for years. Prior administration "left us with four applications, and in seven months we lost them all," one voice said, and staff noted the city has trained something like 17 people who then take their certificates elsewhere.

🧾 The $14,200 Invoice

For most of August the council was arguing about a number nobody had. "Nobody knows the numbers," one member said at the August 20 workshop. "We haven't even got a bill yet." Another warned that "this is gonna tank the budget if it's on the high end."

The bill has since landed, and it is a public document. For the first fortnight the city was charged:

• Monthly operations oversight, August 2026: $6,400.00, billed for the full month.
• Operator weekend, August 1 to 2: 8 hours at $125.00, or $1,000.00.
• Operator in training, August 3 through 14: 80 hours at $85.00, or $6,800.00.
• Total: $14,200.00, no tax, due August 29.

The contractor also logged work it did not bill: 16 hours of orientation, 48 hours from the company's principal folded into the monthly charge, and 7 hours preparing for a state Department of Ecology visit. Timesheets show 143 hours on site between August 1 and 14, and 16 hours in July that were never invoiced at all.

Three things in that document are worth pulling out.

The council's own math was built on the wrong rate. At the August 20 workshop everyone worked from $125 an hour for a full-time operator, eight hours a day, and every projection followed: roughly $24,000 a month, $50,000 inside two months. The invoice bills the weekday operator at $85.00. The $125 rate applies only to the weekend.

The person in the seat is an operator in training. Not a certified operator. That is the same gap the emergency was declared over, and it appears on no recording of any August meeting. It is on the bill.

Blakeley's objections check out. He raised three on August 25, before the document was public, and the invoice supports each: the city was billed the full $6,400 for August against a contract he read as starting August 3; it was billed $1,000 for August 1 and 2, before that date; and in the seven days from August 1 to 7 it was billed 48 hours, against the contractor's statement to the council, which Blakeley quoted from the meeting video, that "what you will see is just the 40 hours a week."

Curtis advised that the crew "showed up and began working August 1st, under the pretense that there would be a contract," and "not as volunteers," so if the council declined to pay it should find another way to compensate them. Staff called the start date a clerical error.

Blakeley won a vote to pull the invoice out of the voucher packet. The rest of the packet passed at $23,848.90. Then the council voted 3 to 1 to pay the $14,200, Blakeley the only no, Councilmember Norm Woods absent.

Sabo voted yes and asked for something on the way. "You guys will get audited on this contract," she said. "The auditor will be upset that we were outside of a contract with the dates, whether it's a clerical error or not, they don't care. So make sure that when this is audited next year in two years, we had this discussion. Don't want another failed audit."

This is the fault line this council has argued along all year. In June, Blakeley's motion to rotate councilmembers through a quarterly voucher review died for lack of a second, with the mayor calling it a waste of time. In July, he pulled a $7,215 item that turned out to be an invoice the city should have voided, in the meeting where the council learned its equipment fund was 99 percent spent. What changed in August is that the scrutiny stopped being one member's project: the CAO caught a contract increase herself, and Sabo voted to pay while building the audit file.

What is still missing is the contract. It is on no public record we can find. Its six-month term, its 180-day termination clause and its August 3 start date all rest on what people said about it in meetings.

🏛 A Month the City Struggled to Run Its Own Meetings

Three of the four August meetings hit process trouble, and the pattern matters more than the arguments.

The August 18 special meeting appears not to have gone ahead. The city posted recordings for the 11th, 20th and 25th and none for the 18th, and the August 18 and August 20 agendas are identical but for the date and the meeting code. At the following meeting Councilmember Ted Salka referred to "the meeting before last, when we didn't have enough time for public notification." No document on file says so outright, so read that as the likeliest explanation rather than a settled fact. Either way the workshop happened two days late.

The August 11 minutes were sent back, 3 to 1, because the mayor adjourned that meeting without asking whether the council had further business, and Councilmember Emily Sabo lost her closing comment as a result. CAO Taylor Chambers said minutes do not normally carry that kind of disclaimer and that the legal record is the recording, which she had watched: "it's very clear that that happened." The council told her to write it in anyway. It nearly repeated the same night, until Councilmember Jeff Blakeley raised a point of order asking the mayor to put the "any other business" question the council's own rules require.

And the year-long argument about money turned personal. Councilmember Mary Helms read a prepared statement accusing Blakeley of going around the mayor to staff and the city attorney, and of asking the CAO "the same question 15 different times." Blakeley called it "completely out of order to blindside me with something like this," asked her to file a formal complaint or withdraw it, and defended trying to persuade his colleagues as the job itself: "I'm not an automaton. I'm not going to rubber stamp anything." Curtis told the council he is not spending unusual time on individual members.

Strip the heat off it and a real question is left, unresolved: how much one councilmember can ask of a two-person city hall before the asking is itself a cost.

🤝 The County Contract, and a Fee Schedule

The 2026 Skamania County Economic Development Council contract finally passed, 3 to 1, after being tabled in July over the awkwardness of paying a full year's dues for a year that was mostly gone. It came back prorated to September through December. Sabo credited Curtis with moving the county by raising the gift-of-public-funds problem: "I think that was kind of the nail in the coffin." Because the council amended the contract's own "three months" to "four," Curtis noted, the city has effectively made a counteroffer the EDC now has to accept.

Blakeley voted no, and two of his objections stand on the record unanswered. A $295 Small Business Development Center contribution rides in every year's contract and nobody at the table could say what it buys. And the document incorporates its own terms by reference, "sections four through 14 remain as outlined in the original agreement," without attaching them. Curtis agreed that is legally sound but that attaching them "would be good, for availability for public review."

The 2027 contract was held at a first reading, on staff's own catch. Chambers asked the council not to act: "in running some numbers, there's a significant increase in what we're paying per capita between 2026 and 2027. Numbers look the same. However, when you do the math, it's not." Blakeley put the increase at 15.6 percent by his own arithmetic. It goes back to the EDC before the budget.

Separately, the master fee schedule is in late draft as an ordinance and should reach a first read at the next regular meeting. The city has fees scattered through its code and other fees adopted by resolution over the years that never made it into the published code; the schedule reconciles them. It is the same State Auditor cleanup the city has been working through all year.

🚒 Fire, Hydrants and an Alternator

If your water ran brown in late August, Fire Chief Kalista Hamilton has the answer: training the night before drew from a hydrant near the station and stirred up sediment. Her advice is to run the tap. "We have an aquifer, so stuff settles, and when it doesn't get used on a regular basis, it's just going to happen." She is spreading training around so it is not always the same neighbourhood.

The department has now been through every hydrant in the city, exercising valves and lubricating nozzles, and has started a per-hydrant annual log for reporting to the Washington Surveying and Rating Bureau. That number reaches residents through their insurance. The city is, she reported, "a solid five this year," and "our insurance rates should not go up from that this year."

Two costs are coming: an alternator for Engine 8-1 at somewhere between $1,000 and $4,000, which she called "not a want to, it's a have to," and a towing invoice from May that surfaced only when she chased it, because she had refused to pay against an estimate and the real invoice was never sent.

🌲 Two Quieter Items

The Port is paying the engineering bill. Hall reported that the city will be reimbursed by the Port of Skamania County for the Jackson Civil Engineering charges the city has carried on Cascade Business Park work, which he called "a fairly significant sum." No figure was given.

A refuge road is back on the table. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has new staff revisiting a plan, first floated in 2023 and then shelved, to extend a private drive and gate at the west end of West Cascade Drive down into Pierce National Wildlife Refuge, the 1983 refuge on the river just past Beacon Rock. The service will come back with a fuller plan that has to meet the city's road construction code and carry a full impact evaluation.

---

North Bonneville Planning Commission

The Commission met once, on August 4, and it was a consequential eighty minutes. The recording is a Teams export with a large gap in the middle, so the public hearing itself is not in the record we hold. What we do have is the agenda, the amended by-laws, and the closing few minutes.

🏘 STEP Housing, and a Deadline in December

The Commission held its public hearing on the rewritten Title 19 and Title 20 and recommended the amendments to the council for approval. The agenda had consultant Paul Dennis walking the Commission through the changes; Allison Baker of Jackson Civil Engineering presented the same package to the council three weeks later.

The changes are less a local policy choice than a state homework assignment. Title 19 now allows residential lot splits administratively, without the short plat process, to make it easier to add housing. Title 20 does the bigger work: it adds rules for STEP housing and allows those uses in any zone where hotels are already allowed, adds a bonus for converting an existing commercial building into housing, and lets religious organizations host homeless people temporarily on their property or build permanent affordable housing there, with rules attached about heat, electricity, lockable doors and screening.

The draft arrived with one blank in it: the density bonus the city must offer a religious organization that builds affordable housing. State law requires a bonus and leaves the size to the city. Baker recommended 50 percent above base density, noting some larger cities have gone to 100 percent and that there is no statutory floor, so "any bonus above zero would technically satisfy this."

City Planner Richard Hall, on the phone from the road, told the council that 50 percent was the Commission's settled position and his own professional recommendation, not a placeholder, and argued the bonus is smaller in practice than it sounds because the other requirements already narrow what can be built: "we're talking about spaces that already have kind of constraints in terms of the amount of property that's there to begin with." Curtis pushed back on process, not substance, telling the council the draft still carried unresolved comments and a blank code citation: "I think maybe we've skipped a step." Helms, who disclosed that she is part of the only religious organization in town, said she had only wanted to be sure a lower number would not run afoul of the statute. The council settled on 50 percent by consensus, not by vote, and sent the package back to return as an ordinance with the blanks filled.

The reason the calendar matters: under RCW 36.70A.130(5)(c), Skamania County "and the cities within those counties" have to finish this round of Growth Management Act updates on or before December 31, 2026. After the Commission's final action the state Department of Commerce gets a 60-day review before the city can codify anything. Four months is not a lot of room.

🪑 Two Seats, and a Date That Had Already Passed

The Commission also amended its by-laws, its first revision since January 2024. The signed clean copy shows the change as a strike-through, and it is a small edit with a long shadow.

Article II sets the terms of the five voting seats. It read: Positions 3 and 4 ending 12/31/2025. It now reads 12/31/2029.

So two of the Commission's five voting seats carried terms that had expired at the end of 2025, and the Commission went on meeting and voting through the entire 2026 cycle, the Critical Areas Ordinance and the Title 20 rewrite included, before the terms were moved out four years on August 4.

There is a wrinkle worth stating carefully. The by-laws' own amendment rule, Article VII, requires that a proposed amendment "have been submitted in writing at the previous regular meeting." The previous regular meeting was June 2, because the July meeting was cancelled, and neither the June 2 agenda nor the June 2 minutes mentions a by-laws amendment. The vote on August 4 falls inside the gap in the recording, so we cannot say either way. The minutes will show it.

One more thing the amended document makes visible. Article II provides for five voting members, two alternates, and one non-voting member from the City Council. The roster printed on the Commission's own August agenda shows five voting members and one alternate, and no City Council member appears in this channel's record as sitting with the Commission at all.

👋 The Planner's Last Meeting

The last item on the August 4 agenda was the county planning agreement the council had adopted the week before. Hall did not soften it.

"This is a change that will eliminate my position," he told the commissioners. The county will "basically handle all of the planning for the city," supplying "the same type of services" it already supplies to Stevenson. When that starts, nobody could say: the county was still "trying to figure out if they actually have someone that can start to transition this process and be trained so that they can take over my position." His own guess was September.

Then he listed what changes hands mid-stream. "The final year of the periodic review with the critical areas ordinance, which is very extensive." The ongoing Cascade Business Park work. And "some other folks that are in the process of evaluating some planned unit development in the city of North Bonneville," a project that appears nowhere else in our archive. He warned the commissioners they would be carrying the new staff for a while: "there's a lot of stuff that's going to have to kind of fall on new people's shoulders to pick up."

By August 25 the successor had a name: Joshua Neblock, Skamania County's Lead Land Use Planner, who already serves Stevenson. Hall said he had invited Neblock to observe the Commission's September 1 meeting, and was handing over his files and protocols. Neblock is also the county's own contact for the Skamania and Stevenson periodic update, working the same December deadline.

Then closing staff comments, and a goodbye. "For me, it's been a real pleasure being able to work with you all," Hall said. "It's been challenging at times, but really rewarding quite frequently." He named finishing the Shoreline Master Program, and seven years living in town. "Gave me a real appreciation for the uniqueness of North Bonneville and just the opportunity to be neighbors with lots of great folks. So that's been a good ride for me."

---

⚠️ Editor's Notebook: Broader Context

The emergency clause did exactly what it is written to do. 

North Bonneville's code hands the mayor unilateral power in an emergency and hands the council a resolution afterwards. That sequence is normal. What is not normal is the size of what got decided in the gap: a six-month operating contract for the city's water and sewer plant, against combined water and sewer funds the city's own 2026 revenue worksheet puts at $658,463, inside an all-funds budget of $1,794,213. The first fortnight's invoice is about two percent of the year's utility money. The council's only remaining tool is a document it had still not adopted when August ended.

Two questions raised in August are bigger than this contract, and neither was answered. 

Whether the emergency exception to competitive bidding was available at all, given the city had already begun taking bids before the emergency; Curtis said a waiver is "not a formal thing that happens" but a concurrency, and undertook to research it. And Blakeley's: searching the municipal code, he could find no record that the council has ever designated who may exercise emergency powers on the city's behalf.

The staffing story and the planning story are the same story. 

A city this size runs on a handful of people. In August North Bonneville lost the only person licensed to run its plant and learned it is losing the planner who has carried its state-mandated code rewrite since 2024. Both jobs are now done by contract or by county agreement. That is a rational answer to a real problem, and it is also a city with fewer of its own hands on its own work. The interlocal the council adopted in July was presented as planning services; its first visible effect is a staff position ending.

Watch the second invoice, not the first. 

August's bill covers the fortnight when the contractor was assessing a plant it had never seen, writing procedures that did not exist, and finding lab equipment staff said had not been calibrated in two years. The mayor expected city employees to take over weekend on-call within about a week of the August 25 meeting. The invoice covering the second half of August is the one that shows whether the cost bends.

A note on the record. 

No other newsroom covered any of North Bonneville's four August meetings; we checked Columbia Gorge News, Columbia Insight, OPB, The Columbian, Columbia Community Connection, the Columbia Gorge Documenters, and the Skamania Pioneer. As Washington closes another newspaper press, we're grateful to do our small part to ensure every community's right to locally-reported news.

🛠 Jargon Buster

• STEP housing: Shelter, Transitional, Emergency and Permanent supportive housing. State law now bars cities from prohibiting these uses in zones that allow hotels or residences, and bars cities and counties from adopting moratoriums on STEP housing permits. Skamania County's Critical Area Ordinance Update page sets out the definitions and the mandates.
• Periodic update: the Growth Management Act requires every city and county to review and refresh its critical areas rules and development regulations roughly every ten years. Skamania County and its cities are due by December 31, 2026.
• OIT: Operator in Training. A certification step below a licensed operator. North Bonneville's plant needs someone at Level 2, which the contractor described as a two-year path.
• WARN: the Washington Water/Wastewater Agency Response Network, a mutual aid system that moves operators and equipment between utilities in an emergency. North Bonneville is not a member.
• Not-to-exceed clause: a spending ceiling that does not cancel a contract but forces it back to the council for a decision once costs reach the number.
• Gift of public funds: the state constitutional rule against a government giving away public money for nothing in return. Raised here against paying a full year of dues for a year that was almost over.
• Density bonus: permission to build more homes on a lot than the zone would normally allow. Washington requires cities to offer one to religious organizations building affordable housing on their land, and lets the city set the size.

📅 How to Join & Learn More

• North Bonneville City Council meets on the second and fourth Tuesdays at 7:00 p.m. at City Hall, 214 CBD Mall Drive, and by Teams. Agendas, recordings and minutes are posted at northbonneville.net. Watch that page for the corrected August 11 minutes and for the redrafted emergency resolution.
• North Bonneville Planning Commission meets on the first Tuesday of the month at 7:00 p.m. at City Hall, per its by-laws. Agendas and materials are at northbonneville.net/planning/meetings, and the periodic review documents, including the final zoning draft and the review checklist, are at northbonneville.net/planning/periodic-review.
• Comment on the zoning amendments while they are still in draft. They have to come back to the council as an ordinance before adoption, and then go to the state for a 60-day review.
• Public comment is taken at the start and end of every council meeting, in person or on Teams, with no registration required.