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🏛 June 2026 Klickitat County Round-Up

Agencies Covered: Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners (regular meetings June 9, 16, and 23; workshop June 18).
The Bottom Line: Routine warrant approvals masked big-picture pressure: the county is reorganizing how it answers public-records requests, bracing for a $400,000 public-health cut, rethinking what a rural jail can safely hold, and starting to field hard questions about data centers and fireworks.
The Vibe: Pragmatic and a little weary. Commissioners spent more time on staffing math, liability, and "how do we pay for this" than on ribbon-cuttings, while a few residents pushed back hard during public comment.

🔎 What Changed

• The Board agreed to fund and move the Public Records Administrator position out of Human Resources and into the Prosecuting Attorney's Office, and authorized advertising it.
• Civil Service clerk duties shift to Human Resources effective July 1.
• A draft Accessory Dwelling Unit ordinance would make backyard units an outright-permitted use, and the Board lined up a contract for short-term-rental tracking software.
• The jail is replacing a withdrawn opioid-treatment grant with a local pharmacy partnership and floated a body scanner to meet a new state search policy.

⚠ What Escalated

• A $400,000 hit to the Health Department budget, with the director warning that an even bigger state shortfall could force "hard decisions" in 2027.
• A third straight week of public-records confrontation during public comment.
• Data centers surfaced as a live local debate over water and electricity.

🧭 What's Next

• June 30: Civil Service handoff finalizes; the Assessor's appraiser-hiring request returns; an adult-probation funding stream ends.
• July: Dallesport wastewater rate hearing (in Dallesport); a July 30 workshop on the County Administrator job.
• By September: the jail must adopt a policy for searching arrestees by self-identified gender.

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Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners

🗂 A new records job, and a resident who keeps showing up

The county is changing how it handles requests for public documents. On June 16, Human Resources Director KC Sheridan brought the Board a draft resolution and a reorganized chart that would fund the long-vacant Public Records Administrator position (pay grade 71) and move it from Human Resources to the Prosecuting Attorney's Office. The Board reached consensus to put the resolution on the June 23 consent agenda and authorized advertising for the job.

• The position is essentially a coordinator: each department still pulls its own records, but the administrator becomes the single point of contact, sends the five-day acknowledgment letters, tracks deadlines, oversees redactions, and carries the county's legal exposure.
• It is structured as a swap, not a new headcount. Officials described moving an existing full-time-equivalent position rather than adding one, with some funding coming from County Road.
• Civil Service clerk duties move to Human Resources effective July 1.

The change drew sustained pushback from resident Sheri Bousquet of Husum, who called in on June 9 and again on June 16 (and, by her own count, the week before that). She argued the county is legally required to have a records officer and has failed that duty, and that hiring for it is wasteful. "It's ridiculous to spend $75,000 and plus benefits to hire a new position," she said on June 9, urging the county to "just assign it to somebody." On June 16 she went further: "I feel like the county is warring against the people."

Commissioners pushed back on the framing while acknowledging the workload is real. They said records work already consumes the equivalent of roughly five full-time staff across departments, and that a single requester accounts for several hundred requests. Commissioner Lori Zoller, returning to a "gotcha moment" remark she had made the week before, said a state Attorney General training had described someone on Vashon Island who "makes this a way of a living," waiting for an agency to miss a deadline so they can charge the entity, including school districts. "That's a sad way to make your living," she said. She also framed the new role as centralizing what is now "a decentralized" process.

This is the next beat in a story this newsletter has tracked for months under administrative capacity and transparency. The county tried to stand up centralized records handling back in 2019 and let it lapse; the workload, and the liability, have only grown since. Moving the job to the Prosecutor's Office signals the county now sees records compliance primarily as a legal-risk problem, not an HR one. The unresolved tension, voiced sharply in public comment, is whether a dedicated position is the leanest fix during a hiring freeze, or whether the duty could be absorbed by existing staff.

🏭 Data centers enter the conversation

For the first time in recent memory, data centers came up in public comment (June 16). Goldendale resident Kathy Moco asked the commissioners' opinion on proposals floated for the old aluminum-plant site and for Dallesport: "there's people saying it's good and some people say it's bad... I would think it would be good for the county."

Commissioners were deliberately noncommittal. They said the county cannot judge a project until it enters permitting, and described their role as making sure health-and-safety standards are met while capturing "as many dollars as we can for our county." They listed the upside (property tax, revenue for junior taxing districts, sales tax) against open questions about long-term electrical load and water use, including whether a facility would use closed-loop or open-loop cooling.

Online commenter Gabrielle Gilbert pressed the environmental side: "I can't drink a data center, and I certainly want to make sure that there's enough water." Companies, she said, "are coming for our landmass, but they do not get to trash our environment."

🔒 Inside the county jail

The June 23 workshop featured the most candid department briefing of the month, from Jail Administrator Bill Frantz.

• The jail population is down to about 27 a day, from a more typical 33. But more of those inmates arrive with substance-use disorders and serious mental illness, which are far harder and costlier to manage.
• Frantz introduced a roughly $170,000 Tek84 body scanner. He framed it as both a contraband-screening tool and a way to comply with a new state policy, due in September, requiring arrestees to be searched according to their self-identified gender, which raises practical questions about who can search whom.
• The new Department of Corrections food-service model is, by his account, saving money, staff time, and liability, a marked turn from last summer, when Frantz was flagging rising costs and limited menu variety in inmate meals. He blind-tested the new meals on staff: "if you come to the Klickitat County Jail, you have to write home and say, hey, on Mondays and Fridays they serve me Salisbury steak."
• Two recruits, plus a corporal returning from military leave, should bring the jail to full staff for the first time since Frantz arrived.

The hardest part of his update was a single case. A person with dementia and serious untreated infections landed in the jail on a judicial hold, unable to be charged (they were found incompetent to stand trial) and impossible to release safely (no facility would take them). "From inside their cell you could smell the infection," Frantz said. He described a revolving door: medical release, a neighbor's call, re-arrest. "The jails become the dumping ground for that."

On opioid treatment, the county changed course. After withdrawing its application for the federal 1115 Medication for Opioid Use Disorder waiver (citing sanctuary-state conflicts and "pay to play" concerns), the jail has partnered with the Goldendale Pharmacy to prescribe the medications locally, with the jail's physician's assistant supporting. Frantz called keeping it local "a win-win," since people arrested locally can continue that care after release.

 This newsletter has tracked the MOUD effort and its roadblocks since spring; June 23 is the pivot from a stalled federal grant to a homegrown pharmacy partnership. The dementia case puts a face on a structural gap the Board keeps circling: rural jails are absorbing people the mental-health and long-term-care systems have nowhere to put. The body scanner and food-service savings may represent real efforts at greater efficiencies, but they sit alongside a liability the county cannot buy its way out of.

🩺 Public Health absorbs a $400,000 cut

Also June 23, Public Health Director Erinn Quinn walked the Board through roughly $400,000 in budget reductions. The state dictated $147,000 of it, including fully eliminating a $64,000 environmental-health data program the county had never been able to spend down. Quinn's team then chose where another $233,000 would come from, plus a separate $20,000 cut to Group B water-system funding.

• The county gave back all of its substance-use and overdose funds, reasoning that opioid-settlement dollars now fill that gap.
• It trimmed (but did not zero out) immunization, communications, emergency-preparedness, climate, and "Safe and Healthy Communities" funding.
• Quinn deliberately kept some money in every funding category so that no "bucket" disappears for good: "I felt strongly that if we gave back an entire bucket, we would never see that bucket again."

She does not expect relief. Citing a state public-health conference, she said officials are bracing for an additional shortfall, reported around $8 billion, in the next biennium: "I'm absolutely anticipating going through this exact same exercise in a year," after which "some hard decisions are going to have to be made" for 2027. This is not a new alarm: Quinn warned a year ago that youth mental health was the county's "bigger structural crisis," in a county with zero practicing psychiatrists, and families still face two-year waits for developmental-disability services.

Why it matters: This is the local arithmetic behind a number this newsletter has carried abstractly for months, the state's Foundational Public Health Services shortfall. Quinn's "keep a dollar in every bucket" strategy is a defensive move against permanent program loss, and her 2027 warning tells residents the lean years are not over.

📝 Editor's Note: A County Cutting Care, and a Jail Left Holding It

Two of June's biggest items sit uncomfortably side by side. On June 23, the Health Department detailed roughly $400,000 in cuts, including handing back all of its substance-use and overdose funding and trimming behavioral-health-adjacent programs. The same week, the jail asked the Board to weigh a roughly $170,000 body scanner and described needing more tools to manage inmates in mental-health and addiction crisis. The county did not invent this trade-off; the state dictated much of the health cut, and the scanner answers a new state search mandate as well as contraband and overdose screening. But the net effect on the ground is hard to miss: the public-health side of the safety net is contracting while the jail absorbs more of the people who fall through it.

That gap has been a theme we've followed for many months:

• A year ago, Public Health Director Erinn Quinn, the same official who presented June's cuts, warned the Board of Health that "the bigger structural crisis is mental health, especially among youth," and that Klickitat was one of 17 Washington counties with zero practicing psychiatrists. (Mental-Health Crisis Deepens, Nov. 2025)
• Families seeking developmental-disability services face assessment waits of 14 to 15 months, roughly two years end to end, in a region described as a near "childcare desert" for children with disabilities. (The 2-Year Wait for Disability Services, Apr. 2026)
• The county's justice system has been flagged as "strained" for months, with state funding cuts hitting at-risk-youth (BECCA) and juvenile programs even as public-defense costs climb. (Courts, Communications & Cost Pressures, Feb. 2026)
• And the jail's role as a de facto crisis facility is not rhetorical: by the county's own December tally, the jail ranked among the top locations for monthly mental-health crisis contacts. (Busy Winter in Klickitat, Dec. 2025)

Frantz put the consequence plainly on June 23, describing a dementia patient the system could neither treat, charge, nor place: "the jails become the dumping ground for that." But readers can judge for themselves what it means that the county is being asked to invest more in the back end of that pipeline that leaves people in medical states of emergency while incarcerated, even as the preventative front of it shrinks.

👶 Childcare keeps building

The childcare push continued through public comment. Community member and local expert Gabrielle Gilbert, who has been leading this effort, pressed for a presentation from Garfield County (a possible rural model), a feasibility study, and a series of smaller workshops. She also said Play Frontier, a nonprofit childcare center in Carson she has been coordinating with, was more than happy to give a presentation of its own. Scheduling is the snag: one commissioner said Garfield's board meets the same day as Klickitat's, and its representatives want to come in person, so the hunt is for a Tuesday when they do not have to report to their own board.

The background updates came from Gilbert as well: ESD 112 is launching a full-time preschool this fall and advertising for a teacher, she reported, and she said she had spoken that week with state Rep. Hill of the 3rd Legislative District, who sits on the House early-learning committee, about what child care can look like in rural communities.

This extends the "childcare as economic infrastructure" arc the Dispatch has tracked since the spring tour of the Neal Early Learning Center in Boardman, Oregon. The conversation has matured from "is this our problem" (yes) to "what's the model and where's the building," with residents, not just staff, driving it.

🎆 Fireworks: leaning toward a partial ban, not a full one

On June 16 the Board reviewed results from a fireworks survey sent to roughly 20 fire districts and community councils, with 12 responses.

• About 92% of respondents said fireworks pose a significant risk.
• About 58% supported restrictions or a temporary July 4 ban.
• But a similar share warned a ban would just push fireworks into hidden or remote areas, which fire and law enforcement worry they lack the staff to patrol.

The Board's emerging direction is a partial ban with fire-district-designated areas (the example raised was a riverside spot in Dallesport) rather than a countywide prohibition. No action takes effect this July 4; commissioners noted the timing would not allow it, and directed staff to re-poll the districts that did not respond, notably District 7 and the West Klickitat Regional Fire Authority. One wrinkle commissioners flagged: at least one fire department sells fireworks as a major fundraiser.

🏘 Housing and land use: ADUs, a Goldendale rezone, and STR tracking

Several housing threads advanced at once.

• A June 15 staff report put forward draft amendments to the county's Accessory Dwelling Unit ordinance. ADUs are already an outright-permitted use when criteria are met; the draft would raise the floor-area cap from 924 to 1,296 square feet, drop the two-bedroom limit, end the rule that the owner live in the main home or the ADU at least six months a year, and measure the required 200-foot separation from the ADU's nearest point rather than requiring the whole unit within it. Unchanged: one ADU per principal home, no short-term-rental use, and a restrictive covenant recorded on the property title that binds future owners.
• The Planning Commission recommended (5 to 0) rezoning parcels on the southern edge of Goldendale from general rural (five-acre minimum) to suburban residential (20,000-square-foot minimum) to steer growth toward the city. Two neighbors objected over farmland conversion. The rezone heads to the Board in the coming weeks.
• The Board lined up a contract with Deckard Technologies for its RentalScape software to monitor short-term rentals, set for the June 23 consent agenda. Community Development Director Scott Edelman put the cost at about $6,000.

These are three gears of the same machine we've tracked all year: making it easier to add housing (ADUs), focusing density near towns (the rezone), and finally getting a real count of short-term rentals before the county finalizes an STR ordinance and fee structure targeted for January 2027. The RentalScape contract is the concrete step that makes the STR timeline real.

🚧 Public works, infrastructure, and trash

Routine but consequential:

• The courthouse is being repainted for the first time in roughly 28 to 30 years, with stucco repair and rotating entrance closures. As one official put it, the fresh paint against the old shows "how badly faded the courthouse went." He added he "would not recommend waiting this long to paint the courthouse again."
• The Bickleton Highway overlay is a roughly $7 million ask. Phase one (about $3 million, three miles) is funded; phase two depends on a statewide redistribution of federal road dollars that has to clear by the end of September.
• Bridge repairs progressed on the Forest Highway bridge on Mount Adams Road, the Whitmore bridge, and Miller Road. Annual road striping was scaled back to control cost.
• On solid waste, Republic Services is chasing new contracts out of Seattle and Tacoma and a possible Whitman County extension, and officials called the Roosevelt landfill-gas-to-energy project "quite a selling point" in those bids (the renewable natural gas produced there is sold to Puget Sound Energy). A Roosevelt Landfill open house was set for June 27.
• At the June 18 workshop, the Board reviewed projected Dallesport wastewater rate changes for 2026 through 2034 and agreed to hold a rate public hearing in Dallesport in July. On June 23, Public Works flagged that it will not waive the required sewer-line video inspection for the airport project, because doing so would shift repair liability onto the county.

⚖️ Courts, probation, and a strong-news exception

Amid the budget gloom, Chief Adult Probation Officer Courtney Cooke delivered the month's most upbeat update (June 16). Her office filled a four-year case-manager vacancy, and she reported successful-completion rates in the 81-to-83% range. The litter crew logged about 1,400 community-service hours this year, which she estimated saved roughly $17,000 in jail costs. Cooke described the work as wellness-focused, not punitive: "we're not like felony probation officers... we take a more wellness approach to helping people, seeing them for people and not criminals," and said the job lets her "watch little miracles happen in people's lives."

One caution: a state Administrative Office of the Courts reimbursable funding stream ends June 30, with a possible gap until they can reapply. It is the latest squeeze on a justice system this newsletter has tracked as increasingly strained, where state cuts have already hit at-risk-youth and juvenile programs.

🧰 Workforce and administration

• With Robb Van Cleave serving as interim, the Board scheduled a July 30 workshop to decide how to fill and structure the permanent County Administrator job.
• The Board signaled it wants to handle the hiring freeze board-wide rather than position by position. On June 23 it held the Assessor's request to backfill a Real Property Appraiser until June 30, after learning a second appraiser position remains funded but unfilled. The Assessor noted the county picks up roughly $60 million in new construction value annually, which feeds the tax base.

💵 The money (June 16 actions)

The Board approved (all unanimous):

• Resolution 05126, an economic-development grant to the Columbia Gorge Regional Airport. Per discussion, this is $100,000 contingent on a matching contribution from the City of The Dalles, a condition Commissioner Zoller asked to put on the record.
• Resolution 05225, an economic-development grant to Klickitat Valley Health.
• The Sheriff's annual Motorola body-worn camera and portable-radio purchase with Lexipol policies.
• Change Order No. 1 for courthouse exterior painting, $84,573.35.
• Pay Estimate 2 for the Columbia Gorge Community College advanced-manufacturing facility, $89,049.15, and Pay Estimate 1 for courthouse painting, $10,770.
• Accounts payable warrants of $371,190.30 and payroll/benefit warrants of $911,333.15 (period ending June 15). The prior week's warrants were $480,171 (ending June 8), and on June 23 the Board approved a further $275,207.86 (period ending June 22).

On June 9, the Board also granted final approval to three land-use actions (Short Plats Lade and Scott, and the Barker boundary-line adjustment) and agreed to sign a letter of support for Columbia Gorge Community College's FAA aviation-maintenance workforce program. The meeting included a warm send-off for Doug Herlihy, a retiring Sheriff's Office volunteer pilot who logged "1,471 hours for the County" and reminded the room how unforgiving the terrain is: "when you're up in the upper reaches of the Klickitat River and the engine quits, and it will quit, there's no place to go."

🛠 Jargon Buster

• Restrictive covenant: A legal condition recorded on a property's title that binds current and future owners, here, promising the ADU won't be split off or used as a vacation rental.
• 1115 / MOUD waiver: A federal Medicaid pathway to fund Medications for Opioid Use Disorder (like buprenorphine) in jails. The county dropped its application and is using a local pharmacy instead.
• CDBG (Community Development Block Grant): Federal money, passed through the state, for projects that mainly benefit lower-income residents.
• Group B water system: A small shared water system serving fewer connections than a regulated "Group A" system. The county is deciding whether to keep overseeing these or hand them to private managers.

How to Join and Learn More

The Klickitat County Board of County Commissioners meets in regular session on Tuesdays at the Klickitat County Services Building, 115 West Court Street, Room 201, Goldendale, with a Zoom and call-in option (the Meeting ID and numbers are listed on each agenda). Agendas, packets, and recordings are posted at klickitatcounty.gov. Written comment can be submitted before any meeting to bocc@klickitatcounty.org.

On the calendar:

• June 27: Roosevelt Landfill / Republic Services open house, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• June 30: Civil Service handoff to HR finalizes; Assessor's appraiser request returns; adult-probation funding stream ends.
• July (later in month): Dallesport wastewater rate public hearing, in Dallesport.
• July 30: Board workshop on the County Administrator position.
• By September: jail policy due on searching arrestees by self-identified gender.