🧭 "One of the Two Purposes": A Dispute Inside the Gorge Commission - August 2026

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🏛 Columbia River Gorge Commission: August 2026 Round-Up

Quick Facts

• Agencies Covered: Columbia River Gorge Commission, through its three standing committees: Economic Vitality (August 5), Communications (August 13), and Executive (August 19). There was no full Commission meeting in August. The body meets every other month to save money.
• The Bottom Line: The federal signature the Commission has been waiting on since January arrived. Its post-fire rebuilding rules become enforceable law around October 1, which matters to every household still rebuilding after the Rowena and Burdoin fires. Meanwhile the committees spent August arguing, productively, about what this agency is actually for.
• The Vibe: Three small meetings, two thin votes, and one genuinely consequential piece of news buried in a procedural aside. Committees short of members kept working anyway.

🔎 What Changed

• The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture concurred with the Commission's disaster-recovery amendments to its land use ordinance. Counsel Jeffrey Litwak told the Executive Committee the rules will take effect around October 1.
• There will be no appeals hearing at the September 8 Commission meeting, and none is expected in November.
• The Commission is building its first public annual report, which the executive director says it has never produced, and a commissioner has volunteered to write a trial newsletter.
• The Commission has started approving AI-generated meeting summaries as its official record.

⚠ What Escalated

• Commissioner Valerie Fowler warned the incoming Forest Service supervisor that prescribed fire and smoke taint are on a collision course with roughly 110 Gorge vineyards, and asked for burn dates far enough ahead that farmers can plan.
• A real disagreement surfaced about the coming Management Plan review: whether talking to county planning departments first quietly narrows the whole exercise to land use, and leaves the economic half of the Scenic Area Act out of the room.
• The Economic Vitality Committee is down to three members after Rodger Nichols left, which means any two of them talking is a public meeting. Its September 2 meeting was canceled outright.

🧭 What's Next

• September 8: Commission meeting by Zoom. A fire update focused on how the Commission's own emergency rules have performed, plus an open session on commissioner priorities for the Management Plan.
• Around October 1: the disaster-recovery rules take effect.
• November: an in-person Commission meeting built around the 40th anniversary of the Scenic Area Act, venue not yet locked.

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⚖️ Executive Committee (August 19)

🔥 The rebuild rules cleared Washington, and almost nobody noticed

The most consequential thing said in August arrived as a footnote to a scheduling question.

Commissioners were working through what would land on the September agenda when counsel Jeffrey Litwak mentioned that county ordinance amendments were unlikely in September but probable in November. Then he added the part that matters: "we did receive the Forest Service's concurrence, the Secretary's concurrence, on the amendments to our land use ordinance. So I'll be doing the final rulemaking forms for those. And those rules will go into effect about October 1st."

That is the end of a road the Commission started down in December 2025, after the Rowena and Burdoin fires exposed how badly the Management Plan handled rebuilding. The Commission adopted the disaster-recovery amendment in January, then wrote it into the land use ordinance as Division 82 rules in July. Federal concurrence was the last gate, and it is now passed.

What this actually does for a household rebuilding after a fire:

• Extends the deadline to start rebuilding a replacement structure to 10 years, up from two.
• Creates an expedited review path for structures replaced in kind, with an allowance for a modest footprint increase.
• Lets people live in an RV on their own property while they rebuild, and store what they salvaged, without a full application. Staff prepare the site plan and requirements letter, the landowner signs, and the director's letter is itself an appealable decision.

The time between "the Commission voted" and "the rule applies to you" has been roughly nine months, and that gap is the story fire survivors have been living inside. A vote in January did not extend anyone's rebuilding window. A federal signature and a filed rulemaking form do. Anyone who was told in the spring that relief was coming can now ask a county planner a concrete question. The date deserves a hedge: October 1 is counsel's spoken estimate on a recording, not a filed notice, and we'll update when we find one.

🏛 No appeals hearing in September, and why that is worth noting

Asked directly whether the September appeals hearing was still on, Litwak was blunt: "There is not going to be an appeals hearing. We were just sort of calendaring that because we know that there are some appeals working their way through the counties. Those are on schedules that we have no control over."

He does not expect one in November either. January, March or May of 2027 are possible.

A process note that may answer a question you have: how do we know when an application subject to NSA review is appealed? Appeals do not start at the Commission, which is why that slot was a guess. A county planning department issues a Scenic Area land use decision, somebody appeals it, and only then does it reach the Commission. Then it reviews county decisions on the record for error under its own Rule 350-60. Six county timetables feed that pipeline and the Commission controls none of them. It also means a resident has no way to see what is coming: the Commission's appeals page lists the thirty-six cases it has decided going back to 1994, and nothing that is pending.

The discussion of this housekeeping also had an interesting edge. Amy Weissfeld's term ran out on June 12, 2025. The Commission's own roster still lists her as "2022-2025," and she has gone on sitting and voting since, including on July's two rules votes. Reappointing her, or replacing her, belongs to the Washington governor's office, not to her and not to the Commission. Nobody raised any of this in August, and we have found no record of the Commission discussing it. It matters here because an appeal is not an ordinary meeting. It is a quasi-judicial proceeding, where a party to the case can question who is sitting in judgment in a way nobody can at a regular meeting. With no appeals hearing scheduled, the question goes untested this fall. It comes back with the first one that lands.

💵 Two budgets, no room, and one page of hope

The Oregon budget went in on time at the end of July carrying exactly one policy option package: the Civic Access project that would put the Commission's records into a system the public can search. Executive Director Krystyna Wolniakowski described the goal as "full transparency and much easier than hunting through our website to find information." Washington's budget is due in mid-September, with drafts headed to the Office of Financial Management and a parallel IT decision package.

Both states have ordered flat budgets, so there is no room to ask for more. One narrow exception came up. Oregon invited a one-page concept proposal tied to Executive Order 25-26 on landscape resilience, where Climate Program Manager Lisa Naas Cook is technical lead on a draft work plan. The Commission will submit it without much hope, and Wolniakowski named the awkwardness plainly: it may end up an Oregon-only program at a bi-state agency, because Washington cannot be asked for any increases.

Asked whether single-state money has precedent, she reached for past cases. The Klickitat County planner position was Washington-funded. A small $10,000 program supported work with the Underwood Conservation District. And a past Washington commissioner accumulated their meeting stipends, never spent them, and donated the whole amount back to the Commission. Whether Oregon money could be accepted and spent the same way under the bi-state compact is an open question, and the executive director said she would look into it.

🗣 "We're not the Gorge Amphitheater"

The Commission cannot lobby for its budget until the governors publish their recommended budgets in December. Wolniakowski said she would start setting up legislator meetings in mid-to-late September anyway, on an informational basis.

Fowler pushed back on the framing itself. "I'd love to see us think of legislative outreach as not just related to the budget, because I think we've got an information deficit that will take quite a bit of addressing on both sides, especially with new officials coming in in both states after the elections," she said. "We're not the Gorge Amphitheater."

That landed. The committee split its outreach into two separate events: a November commemoration, and a legislative tour timed after the November elections. Wolniakowski favors mid-November, as soon as winners are known. Others argued for late January or February. Fowler added a practical caution from experience: newly elected officials often do not have staff in place immediately, "and oftentimes staff are the backbone and the drivers of their elected officials' schedules and sometimes decisions." Time the tour so chiefs of staff and regional representatives can come.

The Commission ran a legislative tour for its 30th anniversary, and someone at the meeting recalled it as "really successful." The recording does not identify who.

🎂 Planning a 40th birthday with no catering budget

November 17, 1986 is the day the Scenic Area Act passed, which makes this November the anniversary month. The Commission wants its November meeting held in person to mark it.

This conversation did not start in August. The committee opened it on June 30, and the shape it took that day explains most of what happened since. The idea was to piggyback: if the Commission is already renting a room for a public meeting, rent it for the whole day instead of half, ask commissioners to stay on afterward, and hold the celebration in the same room. Wolniakowski framed it as stewarding resources wisely rather than as pageantry, though pageantry came up too, "and pageantry and pictures and whatnot." Someone suggested tracking down former commissioners and former staff, forty years of them, both to honor their service and to fill the room. Nichols, still a commissioner then, said the tribes had to be invited because "they are a part of what we need to have," and floated Friends of the Gorge as a possible sponsor: "they have a lot of money, maybe they could help us sponsor this." Gatz widened it to counties, communities and partners, on the grounds that the Scenic Area's success "is really grounded in the partnership of all of us coming together."

What Gorge Commission anniversaries have looked like: 

Wolniakowski described the last one from memory: "when we had our 30th anniversary back in 2016, we had a little reception afterwards. I'm not sure where we got the money. I think it was just privately funded. And so we had a little appetizer and stuff. But we had a couple of speakers that came and spoke after the general commission meeting was over." That is the template being reused, privately funded food included. The bigger one was earlier. Gatz, looking through the agency's own notes, put it plainly: "it looks like the last time there was something big was 25 years ago when there was something done at Skamania Lodge at that time."

So the 40th is being planned at 30th scale, not 25th scale, and the reason is money. Beyond the November meeting, most of what has been floated costs nothing: a 40th anniversary logo, a printed table runner for the meeting table, tabling at community festivals the Commission was going to attend anyway, and a note on staff email signatures. The anniversary runs a full year, so there is room for more if anyone finds a way to pay for it.

Finding a room is the immediate problem. August 13's plan was Skamania Lodge, which had not responded. By August 19 staff had moved on to the Cascade Locks pavilion, chosen because outside food is allowed and it sits centrally in the Gorge. Finance and Administration Manager Connie Acker had not heard back either: they were "in the middle of PCT days." Every other meeting through the fiscal year stays on Zoom unless money appears, and November is cheaper than spring. As Wolniakowski put it, May is high season and the venue alone costs double.

Fowler argued for May regardless, imagining a field trip to Mitchell Point with legislators along. Reynolds made the case for the anniversary month itself, and connected it to the budget fight: mark it publicly, "so that as budgets are discussed and elections happen and all of that is finalized, that we really are demonstrating how we operate and the need for us to be operating."

The Forest Service is planning alongside. Deputy Forest Supervisor Nicolas Granum described wanting to "bring the Forest Service vibe to it," an outdoor event at a site with history, Eagle Creek or similar. The agency also offered its new Hood River office and its larger conference room at no cost, plus zero-budget options for anything co-hosted. Someone at the meeting suggested the rebuilt Mitchell Point tunnel as weather cover, a stretch of the Historic Columbia River Highway that opened to walkers and cyclists in March 2025.

Then Litwak delivered the line that will shape whatever gets planned: "We can use public funds for public meetings and feed the commissioners and staff, but we cannot use public funds to feed the public at any sort of celebration." A reception after the meeting has to be paid for privately.

So can we, the public, come to the party?

Yes, to the meeting, which is public and which Reynolds wants promoted as such. The reception afterward is meant to be open too, including to people who cannot sit through a commission meeting. But any snacks or sips provided cannot be bought with public money, which is why a commissioner was already casting around for a sponsor in June. It is worth watching who ends up paying: the Commission spent August 13 describing a deliberately arm's-length posture toward Friends of the Gorge, and Friends is the organization that was named as the deep pocket.

🧭 The argument worth reading: what is this agency for?

Staff have been touring county planning departments ahead of the next Management Plan review, revisiting what counties raised last time and asking what has broken since. Multnomah, Hood River and Wasco are done. Skamania County was scheduled for the week of August 24 and Clark County for early September. GIS Manager Mike Schrankel is compiling the comments, with a January target to bring them to commissioners.

Alex Johnson, who chairs the Executive Committee and ran the meeting in Commission Chair Carina Miller's absence, asked whether "specifically the county planning departments" meant only planning departments. Told yes, he made the objection: "a lot of what I've found as enthusiasm for additions to our work are outside of that. It's forest fire resiliency, it's fisheries, it's recreation, it's rural economics." County commissioners see the whole region. Planning directors see the permit counter.

Fowler took it further, and this is the sharpest thing anyone said in August. Focusing on land use, she argued, means "focusing on one of the two purposes of the Act. And I'd like to see the economic purpose of the Act be in our conversations from the very beginning." Then the part that is really a critique of the institution: "You all know my view that we have not, as a commission, focused on the economic purpose as much as I believe the framers intended us to."

Wolniakowski defended the sequence. County commissions, city councils and planning commissions are all in the outreach plan, but after staff-level work and after commissioners set their own priorities. She also pushed back on the implication, pointing to the Economic Vitality and Communications committees: "I don't want the public to think that we're not paying attention to that."

Reynolds found the reframe that settled it. The planning-department meetings, he said, are not the start of the next plan at all. "I feel like we're closing out the last one."

The Forest Service added one thing the Commission had not raised: staff-to-staff conversations with the treaty tribes should come early, not late, because that is where the nuts and bolts get worked out.

What actually got decided:

A session goes on the September 8 agenda where commissioners state their own Management Plan priorities out loud, with no staff paper behind it. Johnson was emphatic: "I don't want any staff work. I want commissioners speaking honestly about what their top priorities are." Committees are also to be given structural roles that produce Management Plan output rather than drifting.

The Scenic Area Act has always had two purposes, protection and economic vitality, and which one an agency serves is decided less by argument than by whose calendar it fills. Fowler's point is procedural, not rhetorical: an outreach process that starts and ends with permit administrators produces a plan about permits. This same tension produced Skamania County's case to the Economic Vitality Committee in March, where a county commissioner argued conservation should be compensated rather than merely absorbed. The Commission has now put the argument on its own agenda instead of receiving it from outside.

🍇 Smoke taint, vineyards, and a promise made after the last escape

Fowler used the presence of the incoming Forest Service supervisor to raise something the agenda did not contemplate.

Prescribed fire, she said, is "a pun intended, hot topic in the gorge." Support for the concept is strong, she said. The timing is the problem. By her count there are about 110 vineyards in the area, with "tens of millions of grapes and other fruits on vines and trees that can be quite affected" by smoke. Smoke taint has come up repeatedly in recent years.

She raised the Top of the World burn as the cautionary case. In October 2024, a Forest Service prescribed burn between Bingen and Lyle, near the Coyote Wall and Catherine Creek trails, escaped its perimeter in wind and had grown to about 240 acres two days in, with Klickitat County fire districts, Washington DNR, the Oregon Department of Forestry and Mid-Columbia Fire and Rescue responding. Fowler's own recollection on the recording was smaller, "10 acres to 117 or something like that"; we use the figure Columbia Gorge News reported at the time.

Fowler lives contiguous to that property, and her complaint was about notice, not fire. Most locals, she said, learned about the burn's planning and timeline from signs posted on SR-14 and Old Highway 8. Afterward, she said, then-forest supervisor Donna Mickley and Granum promised another pre-burn public meeting, and Mickley committed to holding advance conversations with the community, not just issuing communications. Fowler asked for this fall's burn plans, and for meeting dates set far enough ahead that farmers, who are busy, can put them on a calendar.

Maren Palmer, who introduced herself at the top of the meeting as acting supervisor "roughly until November or it's possible we'll have a permanent position hired by then," agreed on communicating early and often through other venues. She drew one line: the Commission meeting itself "is not the venue that will be doing those community meetings and outreach."

Why this matters beyond the vineyards

This is a jurisdictional seam. The Gorge Commission does not run prescribed fire. The Forest Service does, on its own lands, and it answers to its own chain. But the Commission's meetings are where Gorge residents can put a question to a forest supervisor in public, on the record, and Fowler used that. Whether the promised advance meetings actually happen this fall is checkable, and we plan to do just that.

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🌾 Economic Vitality Committee (August 5)

📉 Three members, and a quorum problem that will not go away

The committee met with its chair arriving late from a Scout camp, on lodge Wi-Fi, in uniform.

It approved the July 1 meeting highlights so they can be posted, and then confronted arithmetic. Rodger Nichols, who joined the committee in July, is gone. Wasco County's board appointed him on July 15 to finish the term of Commissioner Phil Brady, who passed away in May. He serves through the end of 2026.

That drops Economic Vitality back to three members, and Chair Lach Litwer spelled out the consequence: "we can't have a two person conversation about these topics without triggering forum requirements." Two of three members talking is a public meeting under open-meetings law. The committee cannot work informally at all.

Multnomah County's Abby Hall attended as a guest to try the committee out. She has not committed. The recruiting is now explicit: "let's really work on getting a fourth member."

Then September 2's meeting was canceled outright, which pushes the next chance to fill the seat, and a hoped-for visit from Wasco County, past the September 8 Commission meeting.

🗺 What drives a county's economy, asked four ways

The committee's most substantive work is an outreach project that is simple and, so far, effective. Four standing questions go to each county's commissioners: what drives your economy, what has this Commission done or could do to help it, what do we do that creates friction, and anything else.

Commissioner Steve Hochman, Hood River County's own appointee, reported back on the first county to answer. He emailed board chair Jennifer Euwer and Commissioner Arthur Babitz.

Babitz answered in two parts. At altitude, the county is tourism driven, with agriculture and specific industrial sectors acting as stabilizers in a feedback loop. But his real point was the second half: "there's not a monolithic answer to what drives the economy within even one county." Hood River is more diversified and more resilient than Cascade Locks. The same Commission decision lands differently in each. On friction, nothing immediate, and no broad criticism of the Scenic Act. He flagged one thing on the horizon, urban growth boundary expansion in Hood River, where Scenic Area land use rules could eventually meet a county changing shape. And he gave the committee credit on wildfire response.

Euwer added the exclamation point. Affordability in Hood River is as much of a challenge as it is everywhere, and a resilient economy means room "for all strata within the economic spectrum," not "just kind of a wealthy person's playground because that's not sustainable and it's self-fragile."

Hall will run the same four questions past Multnomah County Commissioner Vince Jones-Dixon, whose East County district overlaps the Scenic Area and who is working on farmland access for people who are not from multigenerational farming families. Wasco County is still pending, complicated by chair Scott Hege running for the Oregon House this fall.

📊 A crash course in the Gorge economy

Wolniakowski reported on the first of a series of regional economic meetings run by the Mid-Columbia Economic Development District as part of its Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy update. About 60 people from across the Gorge attended. An economist presented sector-by-sector snapshots that she described as excellent and "bite-sized digestible pieces."

But a summary of those pieces is still pending. "I couldn't really repeat some of the trends that they described just off the top of my head right now," she said, and undertook to get a summary to circulate.

That exchange is worth pausing on, because it is the committee's own diagnosis of itself. Litwer's response was to call it "raw material," and Hall connected it to a question she has been asking since she joined: how do you even define economic vitality? One way looks backward at data. The other is forward and visionary, asking what economic vitality should look like in a place built on scenic, cultural, recreational and natural resources. Litwer has been making a related argument on repeat, by his own admission sounding "like a broken record": decide the policy objective, decide the intervention, and decide in advance how you will measure whether it worked, so the agency can look back honestly.

For a committee whose defining problem has been failing to reach quorum often enough to act, that is an ambitious framework. It is also the first time in this arc that the ambition has been written down as a method rather than a complaint.

The MCEDD summary from our own public meetings archive:

The meeting was July 23 at the Hegewald Center in Stevenson, and MCEDD has the materials posted. The economic and demographic presentation comes from the Institute for Policy Research and Engagement at the University of Oregon, with county-level data tables behind it. The short version: across MCEDD's six counties, a wider footprint than the Scenic Area, the number of firms grew about 15 percent in the decade to 2024 while employment grew about 3 percent. The deck's own headline is that wages are growing while the availability of jobs stagnates. Locally, the session agenda shows Skamania County Chair Brian Nichols gave the welcome, and the county's Economic Development Council and Port presented local priorities. All of it is now in our archive. The next session is September 24 at the Goldendale Observatory, on industry clusters and how resilient each one is, and registration is open.

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📣 Communications Committee (August 13)

🤖 The Commission is now approving AI-written summaries as its record

Two of four members made a quorum, joked about calling it 51 percent, and approved the June 18 meeting summary. What they approved is the notable part.

The summary was generated by running the meeting notes through AI, with Hochman producing a second AI version. Acker noted the obvious limitation with good humor: "AI doesn't know how to spell my name, for example." Someone replied that humans have that problem too.

The committee stated a protocol on the record. AI drafts, humans verify. One member called that "sort of typical of the status of AI summaries, is that it does a great job, and you have to check it." Another added that "you can't count on it being a hundred percent." The recording does not label either voice. Johnson placed it in context: AI note-taking has become ubiquitous in the last few months, "now every meeting is recorded, people send around transcripts," and from a risk management perspective this is "very much in the strength zone for what a public agency can and should be using."

The practice is expanding. Wolniakowski has started using AI to produce full Commission meeting minutes and will extend it to committees. Acker, as Zoom host, holds the raw transcripts and the summary tooling, and will send recent Executive, Rules and Economic Vitality summaries to Hochman.

This is a small agency solving a real staffing problem with an available tool, and doing it more carefully than most: the protocol was said out loud, the failure mode was named, and a human is assigned to check. It is still worth watching, because a meeting summary is not a convenience. For meetings with no minutes and no posted recording transcript, the summary is the public record of what a government body did. The verification step is the entire safeguard, and verification steps are exactly what erode when staff are stretched. This newsroom builds its own archive from these recordings, so the question is not academic for us either.

📰 A newsletter, and the first annual report in 40 years

Wolniakowski confirmed something surprising: in her tenure the Commission has never produced a public annual report. There have been two or three page summaries for legislators, without formatting, without headlines.

The proposal is an eight-page annual report, modular so sections can go to legislators with particular interests, ready for the January legislative sessions. Hochman will take a first pass at a newsletter built from the committee summaries, with staff vetting before anything goes out. Vital Signs Program Manager Sage Ebel, who is half time, has the design skills and the enthusiasm but not the hours, which is why a volunteer commissioner is what makes both projects possible at once.

The distribution list already exists: about 600 addresses, categorized into county commissioners, staff, ports and tribal leaders, so mailings can be targeted. Johnson has scoped platforms and found an $8 per month tier adequate. The Commission's social media is modest and growing: as reported at the meeting, Facebook has gone from about 20 followers to 132, with roughly 250 on LinkedIn. The Forest Service, which uses Facebook only, will cross-share anniversary posts. Johnson advised against paying to boost posts at current funding levels, while noting a couple thousand dollars a year would be a good buy for an agency that could afford it.

Get Commission news by email:

There's a "Sign up for our mailing list" form at the bottom of gorgecommission.org. Worth knowing: staff noted the list is technically a public record.

🕯 Public comment: do it like the 25th, and start planning the 50th now

Lynn Burditt, who spent her Forest Service career on the Scenic Area and now comments regularly at Commission meetings, offered the committee a memory it did not have.

For the 25th anniversary in 2011, she said, the Commission's goal was community leadership rather than the Commission or the Forest Service running it, with counties, cities and legislators folded in so that everyone felt ownership. She was candid that it did not come easily: "As you're experiencing now, that was one of those challenging moments." There was an event at Skamania Lodge that drew a crowd, including a lot of legislators. She thought that scale was probably out of reach for the 40th, which is why she suggested starting to think about the 50th now, and asking which community relationships are worth building in the meantime.

Her point was not nostalgia. Gatz had reached the same conclusion from inside the agency six weeks earlier, reading the Commission's own notes. She also named who sat on the Commission then. Former Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts sat on the Commission, from March 2009 to February 2013. So did Don Bonker, the southwest Washington congressman who worked with the Northwest delegation to create the Scenic Area, and who was appointed to the Commission by two governors after leaving Congress. The executive director at the time was Jill Arens. Burditt suggested the planning records from 2011 may still be in a filing cabinet somewhere in the office, and that Litwak might remember who led it.

The committee's response was to try to do this for the 40th too, and to use county-appointed commissioners as the point people for reaching their own counties. Hall and Jones-Dixon are considering a joint op-ed to mark the anniversary.

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⚠️ Editor's Notebook: Broader Context

• Two purposes, one Act. The 1986 Scenic Area Act directs the Commission both to protect the Gorge and to support the economy of its communities. Nearly all of the agency's visible machinery, the permits, the ordinance, the appeals, serves the first. That asymmetry is what Fowler was naming, and it is the live question heading into the Gorge 2030 Management Plan review.
• Quorum math is a policy constraint, not a technicality. A three-member committee where any two constitute a public meeting cannot brainstorm by phone, cannot visit a county informally, and cannot work between meetings. The Commission's committee vacancies are therefore a limit on how much work the agency can do at all, which is why they are on the September agenda.
• The Commission does not run prescribed fire. The Forest Service does, on federal land. What the Commission offers is a public table where a forest supervisor can be asked, on the record, when the burns are coming.

🛠 Jargon Buster

• Concurrence: the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture's formal agreement that a change to the Scenic Area's rules is consistent with federal law. Without it, a Commission vote does not take effect.
• Division 82: the numbered chapter of the Commission's land use ordinance holding the new disaster-recovery rules.
• Quasi-judicial: when a board stops making policy and instead decides a specific case between specific parties, like an appeal of a permit. Different rules apply, including who may sit.
• Forum requirements: open-meetings law. When enough members of a committee talk together, it is legally a public meeting and must be noticed and open, even if it is a phone call.
• Smoke taint: the flavor damage smoke does to wine grapes on the vine and other fruits, often preventing them from being safe to consume, or viable to be made into other products. It is why burn timing, not burning itself, is the fight.
• Policy option package / decision package: the budget forms Oregon and Washington use to request money above an agency's current funding level.

📌 How to Join and Learn More

• Next Commission meeting: Monday, September 8, 2026, 8:30 a.m., by Zoom. The agenda posts at gorgecommission.org when finalized, and the Zoom registration link lives inside it.
• Communications Committee: Thursday, September 10, 2026, 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., by Zoom.
• Economic Vitality Committee: the September 2 meeting was canceled. Watch the meetings page for the next date. The committee is actively looking for a fourth member.
• Agendas, invites and meeting recordings are posted per meeting at gorgecommission.org. Public comment is welcome at every regular Commission meeting.
• Rebuilding after the Rowena or Burdoin fire? Talk to your county planning department about the expedited pathway once the new rules take effect. Commission staff told the Commission in July that the Klickitat County Scenic Area office charges no permit fee, and that staff there will help fill out applications and draw site plans for applicants who need it.

🔗 Related Dispatch coverage

• Gorge Commission Passes Disaster Recovery Amendment is the explainer for what the rules taking effect in October actually change.
• Turning 40 on a Tight Budget covers the July meeting where the Commission adopted these rules and rewrote its own rulebook.
• Gorge Economic Vitality Committee Hears Skamania's Case is where the economic-purpose argument arrived from outside the agency.