🛬 "Runway": Gorge Commission Reopens the Management Plan - Sept '26

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

🏛 Columbia River Gorge Commission: September 2026 Round-Up

Quick Facts

• Agencies Covered: Columbia River Gorge Commission, full meeting of September 8, 2026, by Zoom.
• The Bottom Line: Staff briefed the Commission on what the National Scenic Area Act requires for the next Management Plan review. Nothing was decided. The clock opened in October 2025 and does not close until 2030, and the Forest Service said starting in 2030 would be lawful. The talks that will decide what gets reopened were already running at staff level, with the six counties and the four treaty tribes. The public is not yet in that room.
• The Vibe: A teaching meeting. Two voice votes in about three and a half hours, both housekeeping. The most useful thing said all morning was the Commission lawyer's warning about the last two attempts.

🔎 What Changed

• Staff put a recommended schedule on paper for the first time: county and tribal meetings done by winter 2026, Commission discussion from January 2027, the full review in the 2027-2029 budget cycle, an updated plan in county ordinances by 2031. Every verb is conditional.
• The rebuilt Building in the National Scenic Area Handbook is out, sixty-three pages and the first revision since 2005. Commissioner Alex Johnson asked whether its new fire-safety content had needed a vote and was told it went in at staff level, which is where the Management Plan puts that call, so long as the agencies "collaborate with the implementing counties, and solicit other agency and public input."
• The Economic Vitality Committee got a fourth member, Commissioner Abby Hall, after months its chair said it had spent without a real quorum, working by recommendation instead. The Rules Committee went down to three.

⚠ What Escalated

• A commissioner asked that every commissioner and staffer publish their financial and community ties before the plan is reopened, because it will "dramatically affect everyone who lives here." No motion, no second, no vote, no answer. The Commission adopted conflict-of-interest rules in July 2026 and already has a financial disclosure division; this would have been broader and voluntary.
• Two AI disclosures six and a half minutes apart, one volunteered by a committee chair.
• A Yakama Nation cultural specialist asked the Commission to keep She Who Watches out of any public 40th anniversary event. Chair Carina Miller suggested her own Horsethief proposal as a tribal-only event.
• Prescribed fire and Gorge vineyards collided again, and the interim forest supervisor would not commit to the advance community meetings a commissioner says her predecessor had agreed to keep.

🧭 What's Next

• October 1, 2026: the amendment to the Commission's land use ordinance carrying the post-fire disaster-recovery rules takes effect. Counsel said the amendment is still going through the states' waiting process.
• November 10, 2026: Commission meeting, 8:30 a.m., at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson and on Zoom. The agenda gives the venue, the Commission's calendar the time.
• January 2027: when, on staff's recommendation, the Commission starts deciding how the review runs.

A disclosure, up front. The writer has filed public comment with the Gorge Commission, including a July 2026 comment on accessory dwelling units, and is a full-time resident and homeowner inside the National Scenic Area, and so has inevitable personal and financial interest in the Gorge Management Plan process. Both are noted again where they touch the story.

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🛬 An hour on Gorge 2030, no motion and no vote

The Gorge Commission spent an hour on September 8 on the next rewrite of the Management Plan, and decided nothing just yet. That matters, because "Gorge 2030" is circulating as though a process has started. The typed agenda calls the item what it was: a staff "overview of the National Scenic Area Act's legal requirements for the review of the Management Plan." No motion, no vote, no asterisk marking it open for comment.

Staff have their own word for it. Executive Director Krystyna Wolniakowski said staff were compiling the counties' unaddressed Gorge 2020 comments, which she called "kind of a runway to full plan review." Counsel Jeff Litwak was blunter: "We're not yet at the point of designing a plan review process." Marin Palmer, the interim forest supervisor, summarized the law for the Forest Service, which co-manages the Scenic Area and holds a non-voting seat: "it can start now, or it could start by 2030 ... we would not be required to do it quite that soon." Staff had already told the commission they hoped to begin the review in the next budget biennium, years ahead of that outer limit. No commissioner disputed her.

The statute is thinner than that sounds. It says only that the Commission shall review the plan "at least every ten years," and never says whether those years run to a review's start or its end. One begun in 2030 would finish well after. The staff report calls the timing "not clear" too. The useful question is not what they decided, but when your turn comes and what will already be settled by then.

⏱ The clock opened in October 2025 and runs out in 2030

The rule is one sentence. Section 6(g) of the Act, 16 U.S.C. 544d(g), opens: "No sooner than five years after adoption of the management plan, but at least every ten years, the Commission shall review the management plan to determine whether it should be revised."

The plan was adopted October 13, 2020, so the five-year floor cleared in October 2025 and the outer limit falls in 2030. The Commission is at the front of the window, neither late nor early.

Staff's recommendation runs five steps: finish the meetings with the six counties and the four treaty tribes, revisiting Gorge 2020 comments never addressed; report back in fall or winter 2026; then, "beginning in January 2027, the Commission will begin discussing the design and focus of the next Plan review process"; run the full review during 2027-2029; and in 2029-2031 work with counties to write the revisions into ordinances, so "the updated Gorge 2030 Management Plan would be implemented by 2031."

Five of the six county meetings were done as of September 8; Klickitat's planners in Goldendale were not. Letters to the tribes were going at staff level only, formal consultation held back until formal review. Commissioner Amy Weissfeld asked for the list of topics tabled in 2020, so the Commission could decide whether to start from it or from zero. Wolniakowski agreed to compile it and called it "pretty pretty long." It has never been published.

Read that 2031 line as what it is: a staff recommendation in conditional verbs, resting on at least seven named dependencies, among them level funding in 2027-2029, no further cuts, and each county's own decision to adopt. The packet does not agree with itself either. Slide 2 carries the line "Getting Ready for Gorge 2030: November 2026 – May 2027," the staff report starts Commission discussion in January 2027, and slide 9 says the goal is "to Complete Full Review and Adoption During 2027-2030" while the report has counties adopting in 2029-2031. Gorge 2020 was planned as three years and took four.

📋 What the National Scenic Act requires of the review process

Litwak split it four ways. They must review the whole plan, not a chapter. That was litigated over the 2004 revision and the challengers lost: the Oregon Court of Appeals held the Commission had reviewed the whole plan and was then free to narrow to a list of topics, and that the special management area provisions were never the Commission's to review. They must consult with governments and tribes, and hold hearings and take comment before final adoption. Whatever they revise, the whole plan must still satisfy the Act's nine standards at 16 U.S.C. 544d(d). And Forest Service revisions to the special management areas come in without change, so a comment about that land goes to an author who does not vote here. Whether Gorge 2030 runs joint hearings or parallel is unresolved: Commissioner Nathan Reynolds asked, and staff took it as an action item.

Everything else is discretion. The staff report says the Act does not require the Commission to revise the plan at all, and what to revise is the Commission's to decide. Litwak said the same about process: "you get to decide how you want to review the plan ... how many public hearings you want to hold, how and when you take public comment, except that it needs to be prior to final adoption." So did the court in Friends of the Columbia Gorge, Inc. v. Columbia River Gorge Commission, 215 Or App 557, 171 P3d 942 (2007): "Congress plainly left those decisions to the discretion of the commission." The staff report prints another sentence from that opinion without its opening hedge. The court wrote "It appears that the commission did precisely what the law requires ... it reviewed the entirety of the management plan and developed a process for determining which provisions should be targeted for revision."

Litwak delivered the line that should hang over all of it. "In both of the two plan reviews that we've already done, we would say our eyes were bigger than our stomachs ... we started more than what we could finish. And so we had to scale back partway through the revisions process. And that's disappointing to folks who participate in the revision process, thinking that something's going to get tackled. And then we tell them we're not going to get to it."

The guidelines, the regulatory half of the plan that counties turn into ordinances, have been in force about four years. The previous two reviews started after ten years or more, with a decade of evidence about what was working. This time there is four.

Staff recommend against the "rolling update" some commissioners floated: they "cannot advise you with certainty" that it complies with the whole-plan requirement. Not mentioned at the meeting: section 6(h) lets the Commission amend the plan at any time if it finds conditions in the scenic area have significantly changed, with no timing limit. That is the authority behind the January 2026 disaster-recovery amendment.

⏳ The Stakes: what the code costs even when nobody appeals

About sixty people came to the Underwood Community Center on August 21, 2025 for the first community forum on living inside the National Scenic Area, and more than a dozen of them spoke. The published summary lists what they described: homes bought legally and later treated as abandoned, applications turned down for farm structures, wine tasting rooms, accessory dwellings for family members, and disability-related home improvements. Executive Director Krystyna Wolniakowski and Commissioner Laura Brennan Bissell were both in the room.

One of these reached the Commission in writing. In May 2026 the owner of Bee Easy Farm near Troutdale wanted to run a half-inch pipe underground from a new livestock well to a water tank, on farmland where both the well and the livestock are allowed outright. The county said it needed a full reviewed use: "what I would need to put in a carwash, costs $3,000, and most impactful, one year of permitting, a whole year where I wouldn't be able to run water to my animals."

The fires made the same point faster. Before the January 2026 amendment, people who lost houses in the Rowena and Burdoin fires could not simply park an RV on their own burned lot while they rebuilt. Wasco County Commissioner Scott Hege told the Commission on December 16, 2025: "We have residents currently living in their RVs. Technically, they're only supposed to be there for 60 days, I think." Two years was the deadline to start rebuilding at all. Four weeks later the Commission made it ten.

Even when conflicts don't escalate to a legal matter, they can cost applicants time, money, and uncertainty that can extend for years longer than anticipated. Four years in, the Commission's own appeals docket holds four decisions, and not one of them turns on a rule the 2020 rewrite wrote. A docket records only the fights that escalated, and some rules may stop people before they file at all: on the farm income test, the Economic Vitality Committee's own April 2026 summary records that staff "do receive inquiries about building homes on large-scale ag, but no one has applied for a permit because of the ag income test." Kevin Waters, who directs Skamania County's Economic Development Council, put the pattern to the Commission in January 2026. People with money, he wrote, "can wait years and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars navigating planning and engineering requirements. Most local residents cannot."

Disclosure: this writer convened that forum and co-wrote its public summary, and filed written comment with the Commission on the post-fire amendment in August and September 2025.

🗓 The History: how Gorge 2020 actually worked, start to finish

It opened with a road show. Gorge 2020 launched in October 2016, and from November 2016 through April 2017 staff gave eighteen presentations to local governments: six county commissions, ten city councils, two city planning commissions, plus three public listening sessions. Scoping, the round that asks what should be on the table at all, closed March 8, 2017 with more than 400 written comments.

In October 2017 the Commission chose the topics. Two technical updates, scenic and natural resources, and four "deep dives" for real policy work: urban area boundaries, economic vitality, land uses, recreation resources. Everything else was out of scope for three years. That meeting, a year in, decided what every later comment could be about. On staff's calendar, the equivalent moment lands in 2027.

Comment was taken at five separate phases, not one. The middle one almost nobody knows existed: three independent 30-day comment periods on individual chapters, before each went to the Commission. That is where a chapter-level suggestion had its best chance.

Then June 2020. Thirty days on a document that runs 452 pages in its current form, in the first COVID spring, with two Zoom events: a webinar June 11 and an oral comment session June 25. The session drew 17 speakers and adjourned forty-five minutes early, nobody else wanting to comment. Ten of the 17 spoke for an institution or worked for one. Getting in took pre-registration and an approval email, even to listen, with Q&A and chat disabled. Three minutes on a timer. Five of twelve voting commissioners attended each event.

Three governments asked for more time and did not get it. Staff answered by pointing at how many meetings there had been: the process "has been robust and has encouraged informed public participation throughout."

Participation peaked at a meeting that was not a comment period. On September 8, 2020, 29 people spoke and 29 more submissions came in writing, nearly twice what the noticed window drew. Six written entries came from organizations, one a Friends of the Columbia Gorge bundle. At the October 13, 2020 adoption vote the minutes say flatly: "The Commission did not take public comment on Management Plan revisions." The plan passed 9-2.

✍️ What actually changed the words

By the time the June 2020 draft went out for its thirty-day window, most of the text edits had already been made. That is a fact about drafting sequence, not proof that comment did not matter. The chains are in the Commission's own documents.

A technical letter with citable science corrected an error. On June 30, 2020, EPA Region 10 wrote that Fifteenmile Creek was not a primary cold water refuge, only a stream with potential if restored. Staff recommended striking it, and the motion the Commission adopted, 8-3, names exactly seven streams with Fifteenmile gone. Staff arithmetic made the narrow version adoptable: a 200-foot buffer on every fish-bearing stream would touch 1,341 tax lots, the EPA streams alone 207.

One small business made one concrete ask and got it. Runcible Cider in Mosier wrote on June 29, 2020 about the general management area draft, where the Commission writes the rules: "Hard cider production and tasting is conspicuously absent ... Please modify the GMA draft to include cideries as equivalent to wineries regarding allowed commercial activities." A broad motion covering all beverage producers failed 3-8 in August, staff went back for narrower language, and cideries passed in September.

County and port resolutions moved a number, not a policy. The 20-acre, 1 percent cumulative cap on "minor" urban area boundary revisions was adopted 6-3 on May 26, 2020, six days before the comment draft went out. Comments and county resolutions hammered it all summer. A motion to delete it failed 5-6 on August 11, and a compromise raising it to 50 acres or 2 percent passed 11-0 the same day. The cap survived, its acreage ceiling up two and a half times, its percentage ceiling twofold.

And a commenter's own sentence walked onto the floor. The September 8, 2020 minutes record it: "Motion – Commissioner DeKay: Add language suggested by Michael Lang of Friends of the Columbia Gorge: The Commission acknowledges and regrets Oregon's history of structural racism..." It carried 10-1 and it is in the adopted plan. The takeaway here appears to be that it may help to write the sentence you want, and get it in front of a commissioner willing to help move it ahead.

Volume alone may have mattered less: a June 2020 Friends bundle of 171 verbatim-identical form letters from its membership got just one of its six asks.

The late round was not a formality. Over two days that August the Commission passed eighteen motions from the floor, three of them 6-5. Plans that are already finished do not turn on one vote, three times in two days.

And one thing simply vanished: housing. On August 12, 2020 a commissioner brought a complete, adoption-ready provision for accessory dwelling units. It was withdrawn to the workplan. No entry appeared until November 2022, and then only as an example of topics left undiscussed last time. Through December 2023 and January 2024 the work plan said the staff work behind it had not begun. In July 2025 it became one of three critical workplan issues; in May 2026 a committee recommended a working group aimed at the 2027 review. Nearly six years from a written motion to a proposed working group, and nothing adopted.

Disclosure: the writer filed a public comment with the Commission on accessory dwelling units in July 2026, including a policy report compiling the work happening across Gorge agencies on this issue.

🚪 Two hearings the law guarantees, and the second one reaches your county counter

Section 6(e), 16 U.S.C. 544d(e): "The Secretary and the Commission shall conduct public hearings and solicit public comment prior to final adoption of the management plan and the Commission shall conduct public hearings and solicit public comment prior to final adoption of land use ordinances."

The September 8 staff report and slide 4 both end that quotation at "prior to final adoption of the management plan . . . ." The ellipsis drops the second half.

Door one attaches to the revised plan, which on staff's calendar falls in 2027-2029. Door two attaches to the county land use ordinances, in 2029-2031. It decides what a landowner meets at the county counter, because the plan regulates nobody until it is written into an ordinance. In five counties that is the county's job. In Klickitat it is the Commission's, under 16 U.S.C. 544e(c).

One detail for 2029. The staff report and slide 9 both print a five-column timeline of the post-adoption clock: 90, 90, 270, 90 and 90 days. Four columns match the statute. The second does not. The Act gives counties sixty days, not ninety, to say whether they intend to adopt, at 16 U.S.C. 544e(b)(1) and again at 544f(h)(1). The 270-day adoption period runs from receipt of the plan, not from the decision letter, at 544e(b)(2) and 544f(h)(2), so the two overlap instead of running end to end. Neither is ambiguous. What the record does not answer is how the Commission means to run the schedule it printed. Everything before those doors is discretionary; the Commission picks which openings to open.

What is open between them. Written comment leaves a public paper trail: comments on agenda items reach commissioners in advance and are "posted on the website with the meeting materials," under your name. Spoken comment comes at the open item near the start of every meeting and after any item marked with an asterisk. There was no Gorge 2030 comment period; that item carried no asterisk. And the Commission now meets every other month, a budget-cut consequence that halves a resident's chances to stand up in a year.

Two other routes, and it matters which is which. Any person may request a legislative amendment to the Management Plan (OAR 350-050-0040), which the Commission reviews at least once each biennium (OAR 350-050-0060). That one reaches the plan, though the same rule leaves the decision to initiate one "at the sole discretion of the Commission." A rulemaking petition does not: OAR 350-016-0070(6) excludes the plan and the Commission's ordinances. The Commission's own guidance from the last round says what moved language: name the chapter, page and paragraph, bring data, offer an alternative.

And with all that deep context, we now return to the September 2026 meeting...

🔥 Rebuilds, prescribed fire, and two AI disclosures

Rebuilding after the fires. For the Burdoin fire, as of September 1, 2026, seventeen replacement structures were approved, seven of them homes, about half of those like-for-like replacements, which staff read as a rebuild up to 10 percent larger. For Rowena, Wasco County Planning Director Daniel Dougherty reported sixteen permits approved as of September 9, 2026, an average review of about seventy days, and twelve appointments where planning, public health and building staff sit with a survivor. Columbia Gorge News covered the Rowena recovery in August, behind its subscriber wall.

Smoke, grapes, and a commitment that was not renewed. Commissioner Valerie Fowler pressed the interim forest supervisor on prescribed fire, because Gorge wine grows in microclimates a distant weather station cannot represent. Before Donna Mickley retired, Fowler said, she had mentioned she would keep up the tradition of an open community meeting before a burn. Marin Palmer said staff "will be looking at ... what is the level of interest and request for any meetings ahead of time versus just communications through other channels." That does not renew it. Palmer named Catherine Creek and an area east of Mosier as possible fall underburns, with no dates.

Two AI disclosures six and a half minutes apart. Alex Johnson, reporting for the Communications Committee, said a monthly newsletter was impossible at current staffing but Commissioner Steve Hochman had volunteered to build one for staff to check. Hochman was not at the meeting. Commissioner Laura Brennan Bissell asked why AI-derived Zoom transcripts would beat minutes "that we all agree on and are on the record," and closed the exchange: and then said, "I guess I don't see my question as a nuisance or stupid." Johnson said he didn't either, and she thanked him for the answer.

The 40th anniversary, and a request the Chair answered on the spot. The Act turns forty in November 2026, the celebration year-long and nearly budget-free. Commissioner Abby Hall raised a hike on the Washington state park side and named She Who Watches among the sites worth featuring. Chair Carina Miller picked that up and suggested an event at Horsethief, reaching out to the Columbia River tribes. A Yakama Nation cultural specialist then asked the Commission to leave She Who Watches out of it. Beliefs differ among families, bands and tribes, she said, and some will not even look at her.

Chair Miller answered immediately.

"I'm actually enrolled here in Warm Springs and I am part Yakama. And so I was actually raised to think of She Who Watches as kind of a bad omen. And so it was something that I grew up with that we really didn't have it on stuff. And it really stemmed from the museum at Warm Springs. Having it as a symbol is where I really learned about that as a child. But then as I got older, I did hear these other versions. And so I guess I want to rephrase my comment that, you know, if there's pushback on it, that's totally understandable. And we can try and make it be specifically for tribal folks who want to see her and not have it be a public open thing. I just think when I was thinking about Horsethief Park, I know when we do repatriation and we get remains from overseas or museums or things, that's the cemetery near Horsethief is where we would go to bury it. And I have relatives there. And so even though I'm from Oregon, I know Washington's important. It's just an important place. And it's somewhere my family stops to see things. And so I just wanted to say I totally understand and respect that a lot of families have a different belief. And I was raised with both. And I know a lot of Native people who also feel like we don't have access to these things as tribal folks. So I guess I'll [rescind] my comment that I wouldn't want it to be for public then and maybe working with tribal folks specifically who would want to see it."

We look forward to the continuing conversations on Gorge Management Plan 2030 processes, the 40th anniversary of the National Scenic Act, and the deep work of meaningfully involving the many communities whose lives are affected by its contents.

📌 How to Join and Learn More

• Commission meeting, November 10, 2026, 8:30 a.m. The September 8 agenda puts it in person at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson and on Zoom, and gives no time. The 8:30 comes from the Commission's calendar, whose page for that date listed only Zoom, no venue and no agenda, as of September 17, 2026.
• Committee dates posted as of September 17, 2026: Communications September 24, October 8, November 12 and December 10. Executive October 1, October 20 and December 29. Economic Vitality October 7, November 4 and December 2, all by Zoom. No 2027 dates were posted, and January 2027 is when the review's design comes up.
• To comment: in writing to PublicComment@gorgecommission.org by noon the day before a meeting, or out loud for three minutes on Zoom raise-hand. By mail or phone: PO Box 730, 57 NE Wauna Avenue, White Salmon, WA 98672, 509-493-3323, info@gorgecommission.org. Records requests go there too.
• The documents: the Management Plan runs 452 pages, the October 2020 revision as amended through January 2026, and the handbook is the plain-language version for anyone planning to build. The September 8 meeting page carries the agenda, staff report, all three decks and both videos. The Commission's Gorge 2020 page came down in the 2024-2025 redesign, so the last review's record lives only in the Internet Archive's capture.
• Your county planning department answers Scenic Area permit questions, unless you are in Klickitat. Multnomah 503-988-3043, Hood River 541-387-6840, Wasco 541-506-2560, Clark Community Development 564-397-2375, Skamania 509-427-3900. In Klickitat County, call the Gorge Commission in White Salmon at 509-493-3323, which administers the Scenic Area ordinance there, outside the Act's designated urban areas.
• One deadline on the archive, and a rule that disagrees. The Commission's Past Meetings page says videos come off three months after each meeting, taking the two September 8, 2026 videos down around December 8, 2026. Its own open-meetings rule says the opposite: Rule 350-011-0060(2)(a), in effect since September 1, 2026, requires recordings to stay online "for a minimum of six months," into March 2027. Which it follows is an open question. Download what you need early.

🔗 Related Dispatch coverage

• "One of the Two Purposes": A Dispute Inside the Gorge Commission, on whether starting with county planners narrows the review.
• Turning 40 on a Tight Budget, where the Gorge 2030 roadmap first surfaced.
• Gorge Commission Passes Disaster Recovery Amendment, on what the October 1 rules change for a rebuilding household.

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Outside coverage: we checked Columbia Gorge News, the Goldendale Sentinel, Columbia Insight, OPB, The Columbian, Columbia Community Connection and Uplift Local. One account of the September 8 meeting exists: a two-sentence item Uplift Local ran on September 14, pointing readers to full meeting notes by Gorge Documenter Karen Heinemann (which were not used in our write-up today but are no less appreciated). Gorge 2030 as a dated process has been reported nowhere just yet.

And an invitation. This process runs for years, across six counties, two states, four treaty tribes and a federal agency. That scale is a large part of what kept people out of the last round, and it is a lot for one small newsroom to keep an eye on. If you report, take notes, or just turn up to the meetings, we would rather not be the only ones in the room. Please reach out if you can help.

A note on sources. The Commission had not approved minutes for September 8, 2026 when this was written; its Past Meetings page says minutes go up after the Commission approves them. Dates, numbers and titles come from the typed agenda, staff report and slides. Quotes come from the meeting video, machine-transcribed.