📧 "Idiots" Email Sparks Confrontation with Friends of the Gorge - Skamania BOCC 5/19

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🏛 May 19, 2026 Meeting

The Body: Skamania County Board of Commissioners

The Bottom Line: Significant state-level budget cuts to local public health will be absorbed by existing grants, while a tense exchange with Friends of the Gorge leadership exposed deep fractures over the group's public relations tactics and land acquisitions.

The Vibe: Frustrated but pragmatic, with commissioners tackling unfunded state mandates and forcefully pushing back against what they view as bad-faith advocacy from local conservation groups.

🔎 What Changed:

• Approved a $24,000 opioid abatement contract for a Student Assistance Professional.
• Finalized a roof repair change order for the Rock Creek Picnic Center
• Approved liquor licensing for Veiled Maiden winery.

⚠ What Escalated:

• Dangerous overflow parking at Highway 14 boat launches has surpassed local capacity.
• 21% ($293,000) cut to Foundational Public Health Services funding from the state.
• Public confrontation over FOCG social media tactics.

🧭 What’s Next:

• A June 17 multi-agency stakeholder meeting regarding Highway 14 recreation parking
• Impending public hearing to adopt Title 22 updates aligning with the Gorge Commission.

🗣 Public Comment & Recreation Pressures

• Mitch and Staci Patton addressed the board regarding escalating congestion and safety hazards at local boat launches.
• Commenters and staff noted that parking spillover onto Highway 14 and adjacent roads has created an unsustainable user situation that goes beyond commercial guiding issues.
• The congestion at Dog Mountain and launch sites has triggered a required multi-agency stakeholder response scheduled for mid-June.

The sheer volume of recreational traffic along the Gorge corridor is overwhelming county infrastructure. What began as a friction point over commercial guide usage has metastasized into a fundamental capacity crisis. Visitors are parking dangerously along highway shoulders, creating acute safety hazards. This forces the county into a reactive posture, necessitating a coordinated response from multiple agencies, including WSDOT and the Sheriff's Office, to enforce safety rules without entirely choking off river access.

⚕️ Public Health & State Budget Friction

• The county was notified of a $293,000 cut (roughly 21%) to its Foundational Public Health Services (FPHS) funding, effective July 1.
• The health department plans to strategically backfill this gap by shifting resources within existing federal grants, such as those for emergency preparedness and maternal-child health.
• Because of this maneuvering, no immediate loss of staff or public services is expected.
• Commissioners expressed intense frustration over state-level financial management, specifically citing the state's diversion of LEOFF 1 pension funds to balance the state budget instead of supporting county current expense funds.

This funding slash is part of an ongoing conflict between state mandates and local fiscal reality. Olympia's decision to cut nearly a quarter of Skamania's foundational health funding forces local staff to creatively shift resources. Fortunately, the department is leveraging existing federal grants to absorb the blow, maintaining the baseline status quo. However, the commissioners’ frustration is compounded by the perception that the state is raiding solvent pension funds for its own budget, leaving rural counties to fend for themselves amid inflationary pressures.

🌲 Public Lands & The "Friends of the Gorge" Reset

• Outgoing Friends of the Columbia Gorge (FOCG) Executive Director Kevin Gorman introduced incoming Executive Director Gabe Sheoships.
• Commissioner Rob Farris confronted FOCG leadership over recent public relations tactics, demanding the removal of an "inappropriate" video from the group's social media platforms.
• Farris publicly addressed a recently exposed email chain in which FOCG's lead lawyer referred to the Skamania County commissioners as "idiots."
• Commissioners argued FOCG’s marketing has manufactured a false public narrative that the county is attempting to defund the Gorge Commission.
• Commissioner Asa Leckie reiterated long-standing concerns that FOCG's land acquisitions erode the county's already limited tax base by removing profitable parcels from production.

What was scheduled as a polite leadership handoff quickly turned into a public reckoning over FOCG's recent advocacy tactics. Commissioners forcefully confronted the organization over aggressive social media campaigns and hostile internal communications. This flashpoint highlights an ongoing tension: local officials feel they are being unfairly attacked in the public sphere by a well-funded interest group, while grappling with the economic reality that that same group's land acquisitions directly shrink the county's tax base. Despite this severe deficit of trust, both sides verbally committed to open dialogue moving forward.

"I look forward to being in touch. This is something my third week just started here in May. So yeah, I look forward to open dialogue. And my background is kind of salmon or fisheries wild just thinking a lot about the river and how resources lay there." — Gabe Sheoships, Incoming Executive Director, Friends of the Columbia Gorge

🚧 Infrastructure & Zoning: Storedahl Quarry and Title 22

• Approximately 150 residents attended a recent Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) open house for the Storedahl Quarry.
• Commissioners identified a major blind spot in the EIS: the impact of heavy quarry trucks on the deteriorating conditions of Highway 14 West.
• Public Works finalized the redline updates for Title 22, aligning county code with the Columbia River Gorge Commission's updated management plan.

Infrastructure wear-and-tear remains a critical vulnerability for Skamania County. The Storedahl Quarry expansion threatens to drastically increase heavy industrial traffic on a stretch of Highway 14 that is already underfunded and degrading. The lack of commentary from WSDOT in the Draft EIS leaves the county vulnerable to bearing the brunt of the road's physical decline. Meanwhile, the finalization of the Title 22 redlines represents a major administrative milestone, ensuring local zoning compliance with the overarching federal and bi-state regulations of the Gorge Commission.

⚠️ Broader Context: the Taxable Land Balancing Act

• The Tax Base Squeeze: Rural counties in Washington rely heavily on property taxes, but Skamania County is over 80% public land (state and federal). This severely limits the available tax base to fund essential services like schools, roads, and law enforcement.
• SRS Volatility: Historically, rural counties were compensated for these untaxable federal lands through federal timber harvest revenues. Following the collapse of logging income, the federal government created the Secure Rural Schools (SRS) program to backfill the deficit. However, SRS funding is notoriously volatile due to unpredictable congressional reauthorization, leaving local budgets subject to devastating whiplash from delays in reauthorization.
• The Conservation Conflict: Because of this structural revenue failure at the federal level, the remaining fraction of taxable private land in the county is economically precious and politically contentious. In this fragile ecosystem, well-funded conservation groups like FOCG operate as competing landowners currently holding approximately 1,900 acres across the Gorge, with 550 of those acres inside Skamania County. When they purchase private land, it is often removed from the active tax rolls or timber production, directly impacting the county's municipal survival and requiring complex state timber offsets.

🛠 Jargon Buster

• Foundational Public Health Services (FPHS): A statewide funding model in Washington designed to ensure all residents have access to a baseline level of public health protection, regardless of where they live.
• LEOFF 1: The Law Enforcement Officers' and Fire Fighters' Retirement System Plan 1. It is a closed, fully funded state pension plan.
• EIS (Environmental Impact Statement): A comprehensive document required for certain projects that details the potential positive and negative environmental effects of a proposed action.

How to Join & Learn More

The Skamania County Board of Commissioners generally meets on Tuesdays. You can attend in person at the Skamania County Courthouse or join remotely via Zoom.

• Link to County Agendas and Zoom Information

Documenter notes are available for republishing under Creative Commons license CC by 4.0. With thanks to Columbia Gorge Documenters, powered by Uplift Local: https://upliftlocal.news/columbia-gorge/columbia-gorge-documenters/