🗳 The Last Forum Before the Ballots: Goldendale 7/21 - Get Primary Votes in by Tonight!

Check out the podcast edition at Buzzsprout, or by looking for "Open Gorge" wherever you get your podcasts.

A special note: even though this issue primarily covers the Klickitat primaries, we wanted all of you in both counties to receive a reminder to vote by tonight, Tuesday 8/4 at 8pm. Some notes about the financials of the Skamania County congressional race can also be found at the end of this issue.

🏛 The Goldendale Forum, July 21

Races covered: Klickitat County Sheriff · County Commissioner, District 2 The Bottom Line: Third forum, third set of questions, and the sharpest of the three. Goldendale's audience asked about the jail takeover, the sheriff's posse, and whether the candidates have actually done the job lately. The answers separated the field more cleanly than the résumés do. The Vibe: Warm on the surface, pointed underneath. The moderator laughed off one question by saying "Well, there it is. Have fun with that one."

🔎 What changed

We have now covered all three Klickitat forums. This one was the only one where the sitting commissioner had to answer for the jail, and the only one where the sheriff candidates were asked to date their last shift on patrol.

⚠ What escalated

The money, and who is behind it. Final pre-primary filings show retiring Sheriff Bob Songer and his wife giving to Tony Warren in the sheriff's race and to Andy Kallinen in the commissioner's race. And at the top of Klickitat's ballot, outside groups have spent over $2.1 million supporting one congressional candidate, more than twice what she raised herself.

🧭 What's next

Ballots are due 8 p.m. Tuesday, August 4. Drop boxes close then; mailed ballots need a postmark by that date. The top two in each contested race advance to the November 3 general.

---

🚔 The Sheriff's Race

Three candidates, and Goldendale's questions found the seams.

"When was the last time you personally worked on patrol in the state of Washington?"

• John Bruce (R): "Short and sweet answer, never." He explained that he rode along with his officers as chief in Richland and made a point of joining patrol briefings, but he has not worked a Washington patrol shift himself.
• Tony Warren (R): "Two hours ago." He is the sitting investigations sergeant and said he still fills patrol shifts because of staffing.
• Dwayne Matulovich (I): "June 5th of 2023." He has spent the last three years working for the railroad, where he is now a foreman in three crafts.

That exchange is the race in miniature. Bruce is running on having run agencies, Warren on being inside this one, Matulovich on nineteen years of local road experience plus a stretch away from it.

The posse. All three support keeping it. Two would change how it looks. Bruce would make sure "their uniforms do not resemble the deputy's uniforms," and would announce the change publicly so residents can tell the difference. Matulovich went further on the reasoning: "I do not want them looking like law enforcement. I think it's a liability to them, and I think it's a liability to the department." He would steer the posse toward disaster response and put enforcement work with a strengthened reserve program instead. Warren, the only one of the three currently working alongside the posse, said he supports it about as it stands and sees mostly "little tweaks," suggesting the friction may be public misunderstanding rather than posse conduct: "We might need to do a little community education as to what a deputy is and what a posse member is."

"Would you be a constitutional sheriff like Bob?" This is where the three genuinely part company.

• Warren went furthest on declining to enforce. "If the state passes a bill that's not good for the citizens of Klickitat County, I have no issue telling them where they can go. I have no issue with not enforcing those things." Earlier he had said some state laws "should not be enforced in those counties sometimes," and that if that is what voters want, "I will not be enforcing those." He draws a narrower line on the movement itself. In an interview with Columbia Gorge News published the same day as this forum, Nathan Wilson reports that Warren said he did not know what the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association was when a voter first asked him about it, that he has no intention of going "to that extreme," and that his campaign "is not focused on a constitutional sheriff position." He said his views align instead with the Washington State Sheriff's Association. Both are on the record, and they sit closer together than they look: here he said he agrees with Songer on a lot "just not quite as vocal about it," and he told the paper almost exactly the same thing.
• Bruce put the decision in the courts, but kept the posture. "When they pass laws, we will examine them and we will decide whether or not those are good for Klickitat County. Those that need to be challenged, we're going to challenge, and we will take them to court."
• Matulovich drew the line hardest at the courthouse door. "The fight is the judicial side, on the executive branch. Where discretion is allowed, I will use it wisely." In his closing he was more explicit: "I will honor my oath to the Constitution by enforcing the laws as they were written, relying on the courts for interpretation rather than my personal bias."

All three opened by saying no one replaces Songer exactly. "Nobody can quite be like Bob," Warren said. On one point he put clear daylight between them. Asked about immigration enforcement in a county whose southwest corner has a large Latino population, Warren told Columbia Gorge News "we will not be working with ICE." The office does not call them and would not assist immigration enforcement, he said, though deputies would still respond to protect everyone's safety, residents and officers alike, if enforcement happened here. He also said he has been present when Songer offered to help federal agents round people up, and that he does not think that is right.

One more thing voters should have, and it did not come from this forum. 

A week before the primary, Columbia Gorge News reported on Warren's eleven years at the Bingen-White Salmon Police Department, working from city records.

Two items are documented. In January 2014, then-Chief Tracy Wyckoff suspended Warren for two days without pay after he called in sick minutes into a New Year's Day shift on which he was the only officer scheduled. Wyckoff's report said Warren had been drinking the night before and had first given a different reason. Warren does not dispute it: "I had too much to drink that night, and I didn't feel good the next day, so I called in sick. I didn't show up drunk. It shouldn't have happened. I made that mistake."

In April 2019, current Chief Mike Hepner opened an internal investigation into Warren for "Dereliction of Duty, Conduct Unbecoming and Violating the Bingen-White Salmon Police Department's Core Values." Warren resigned a week later, citing personal reasons and other opportunities. He told the paper the complaints came from his then-wife around their divorce, that some were "completely false," and that "there's nothing in there that jeopardized my certification, or nothing there that would have warranted a termination from the department."

What the record does not show matters as much. It is not known what the 2019 allegations were, or whether the investigation was ever completed; the department does not discuss personnel matters. On Warren's separation notice to the state Criminal Justice Training Commission, Hepner indicated the department was not aware of any disqualifying misconduct. Neither incident interrupted his career, and he has been a Klickitat County deputy since 2021.

---

🗳 County Commissioner, District 2

Andy Kallinen is a Washington State Parks ranger and a commissioned peace officer, 33 years in the county, with a National Guard background that included company command. His pitch is process. Asked how he would have handled the jail, he described military mission analysis: "Oftentimes in civilian government, I see big things done that appear as solutions looking for problems. Let's find the problem first."

Lori Zoller is the incumbent, seeking a second term. She ran on continuity and on the county's three-year budget plan: preserving jobs through a state downturn, a completed reorganization, and a repaired working relationship with Olympia and with the Yakama Nation. "When the state goes into this next year, it's going to be a bumpy ride."

Gene Klejeski has been the county building inspector for ten years and spent 35 years in construction before that. He was the most candid about what he does not yet know, saying of fire districts, "I don't really know a lot about it, but like most things as an inspector, I'm willing to do the research on it." He is against new levies, noting that many of the people he inspects for are on fixed incomes.

The jail question

The bluntest question of the night, read from an audience card: "Why did you do a hostile takeover of a jail instead of talking to the sheriff about it?"

Zoller rejected the premise. She said there had been discussions over several months about jail problems, and that the situation "fell off the cliff" after a death in custody produced a lawsuit against the commissioners. As the county's legislative and financial authority, she said, the board had to act to limit what taxpayers would owe. The settlement came with conditions the county had to meet: assuming operational control of the jail, hiring a jail commander from outside, and submitting to an outside review that the plaintiffs' attorneys approved. She said the jail today is fully staffed with commissioned officers, in compliance, within budget, with better health care and food service.

What we can confirm, and what we are not printing. The shape of that account checks out against a typed record. In a May 5 briefing to the Trout Lake Community Council, Commissioner Ron Ihrig described a wrongful-death suit roughly three years earlier, a settlement that requires a yearly audit of the jail, a requirement for increased on-site medical services, and a jail that had "just added 3 new employees" after years of low staffing and heavy overtime. He also confirmed the food-service change: the jail moved to the state Department of Corrections food program at about half the previous cost.

The dollar figures are a different matter. Our recording of the forum is a machine transcription, and the settlement numbers in it do not reconcile with each other. We are not printing them until we have the county's typed record. Zoller described a claim in the tens of millions negotiated down sharply, and said the new food contract saved the county money. Those are her characterizations. The specific amounts, including the savings figure, are not yet confirmed by any document in our archive, and we would rather be late than wrong. If you are weighing this race on the jail, the underlying settlement documents are public and worth requesting.

Deputy staffing

An audience card asserted that deputy positions have not increased in 20 years while the population has grown. Zoller's answer is worth reading closely, because it assigns the responsibility: the commissioners funded two positions inside the sheriff's org chart across three budget years, she said, and those positions were never filled. Under Washington law the sheriff builds and administers that budget; the board approves a total. "All the county can do is approve the requested budget or make suggestions, but that budget belongs to and is administered by the sitting sheriff."

Nobody at the forum contested that. It is a claim from one side of a long-running dispute, and it is the first thing to ask the next sheriff about.

---

💵 The Final Pre-Primary Filings

These come straight from the Public Disclosure Commission, current through each candidate's last reported receipt.

Sheriff

Candidate	Raised	Self-funded	Spent
Tony Warren (R)	$16,610	$784 (5%)	$11,878
Dwayne Matulovich (I)	$12,784	$5,630 (44%)	$9,818
John Bruce (R)	$9,005	$2,347 (26%)	$7,162

County Commissioner, District 2

Candidate	Raised	Self-funded	Spent
Andy Kallinen (R)	$10,521	$751 (7%)	$6,187
Lori Zoller (R)	$4,768	$3,668 (77%)	$4,984
Gene Klejeski (R)	$1,800	$1,600 (89%)	none reported

Two things stand out.

The current administration is funding Warren, and not only the sheriff. Robert Songer and Frances Finn-Songer together gave $1,200 to Tony Warren in eight contributions across four dates from November 2025 through June 2026. Undersheriff Carmen Knopes added $200 in March, which puts $1,400 of Warren's money with the sheriff's household and the county's second-ranking law enforcement officer. Bob Songer separately gave $500 to Andy Kallinen for commissioner, in three payments between April and July. In a county where the sheriff's office has been one man's for eleven years, that is as close to a formal endorsement as the filings get, and it runs in both races on the ballot.

The incumbent is being out-raised, and is largely paying her own way. Zoller has raised the least of any candidate in a contested county race except Klejeski, and 77 percent of it is her own money. Kallinen, a first-time candidate, has raised more than twice as much from other people. He also reports $950 from the Washington Federation of State Employees, which fits: he told the forum he is a member of the state parks local.

---

🇺🇸 At the Top of the Ballot: Two Different Congressional Races

Worth saying plainly, because it trips people up every cycle and our two counties are split. Klickitat County votes in the 4th Congressional District. Skamania County votes in the 3rd. A Goldendale reader and a Stevenson reader are voting in completely different congressional contests. That comes from the Secretary of State's certification of candidates, which lists the counties in each district.

Klickitat: the 4th District, an open seat

As we reported in July, Rep. Dan Newhouse is not running again after six terms, and eleven candidates filed. Federal filings through the pre-primary reporting period ending July 15 now show how lopsided the field is.

Candidate	Raised	Cash on hand
Amanda McKinney (R)	$981,820	$215,447
Jerrod Sessler (R)	$605,364	$67,765
Matt Boehnke (R)	$212,006	$63,739
John Duresky (D)	$179,020	$34,309
John C. Hughs (R)	$4,958	$714

Of the eleven certified candidates, only five have filed meaningful federal reports. Sessler's total includes $300,681 in loans from himself, about half his money. Duresky is the only Democrat in the field with a real campaign account.

The outside money dwarfs all of it. Independent expenditure filings show groups have reported spending about $2.12 million supporting Amanda McKinney, more than twice what her own campaign raised. The largest are American Mission ($779,341), Washington Rising ($728,822), and Defend American Jobs ($506,917), with smaller amounts from Conservatives for American Excellence, the WFW Action Fund, and a committee named Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter.

Another $166,490 has been reported opposing Jerrod Sessler, most of it from Conservatives for American Excellence, with spending reported as recently as July 31, three days before the primary. Matt Boehnke drew $39,919 in support from the GOPAC Election Fund.

To put that in scale: outside groups have spent more on this one congressional primary than every county candidate in Klickitat has raised, several times over.

Skamania: the 3rd District

Candidate	Raised	Cash on hand
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D, incumbent)	$6,292,683	$2,064,820
John Braun (R)	$2,035,255	$1,104,681
Brent Hennrich (D)	$258,757	$17,782
Antony Barran	$45,056	$2,578
Troy Rasband (D)	$11,049	$2,224

Gluesenkamp Perez enters the primary with roughly twice Braun's cash on hand, but Braun has banked more than half of everything he raised, which is what a candidate does when the general is the real race. His money is heavily individual: $1.53 million from individuals against $279,845 from PACs.

Outside spending here is smaller and one-directional. Together for Working People has reported $165,000 opposing John Braun and $55,000 supporting Gluesenkamp Perez, and WelcomePAC another $12,898 supporting her.

One footnote for ballot readers: Antony Barran appears on the ballot as "Prefers Cascade Party," though his FEC registration lists him as Republican. The ballot text is what governs.

---

📌 Before You Vote

• Deadline: 8 p.m. Tuesday, August 4. Drop box or postmark.
• Klickitat's contested races are Sheriff, County Commissioner District 2, and PUD No. 1 Commissioner Position 3 (Dan Christopher, Dan G. Gunkel, Logan B. Siebert). Everything else on the county ballot drew a single candidate and skips the primary.
• Single-candidate county offices this year: Assessor (Billi Jean Bare), Auditor (Heather Jobe), Clerk (Renea Campbell), Prosecuting Attorney (Rebecca Cranston), Treasurer (Greg Gallagher), and both District Court judgeships (Rick L. Hansen, East; Jeff Baker, West).
• Our earlier coverage of the July 9 and July 14 forums, with fuller candidate biographies, is here: Your Klickitat 2026 Primary Ballot Preview.

---

🌲 And Over in Skamania

Skamania County votes the same day, on a very different ballot. Three county races are contested, each a straight two-way, so the primary sorts nobody out: both candidates advance to November regardless.

Race	Candidates
County Assessor	Gabriel P. Spencer (D, incumbent) · Cora Moser (R)
County Clerk	Grace D. Cross (D) · Olivia D. Munsch (R)
Commissioner District No. 3	Paul H. Mosbrucker (D) · Asa Leckie (R)

Four more county offices drew a single candidate and are effectively decided: Auditor Robert J. Waymire (R), Sheriff Summer Scheyer (R), Treasurer Emily Sabo (R), and Prosecuting Attorney Adam N. Kick (nonpartisan). The PUD District 3 seat, Liz Green against Addison Dillon, skips the primary entirely and goes straight to November, as nonpartisan races with two candidates do.

Here is the honest finding about the money, and it is mostly an absence.

There are no last-minute contribution reports on file anywhere in Skamania County, Klickitat County, or the 17th District. Washington requires those within 24 hours for anything over $1,000 in the final three weeks. Nobody triggered one. Whatever money was going to move in these races moved early.

And in the race Skamania is watching most closely, there is no campaign-finance record at all. Neither Gabriel Spencer nor Cora Moser has filed a single itemized contribution or expenditure. Neither has Asa Leckie in the commissioner's race, nor Waymire, Sabo, or Kick. That is not a scandal and it is not an oversight: it means they are under the state's mini-reporting threshold, which lets a small campaign skip itemized filing. It is worth saying plainly because "follow the money" is simply blind in those races, and a reader who goes looking will find empty pages and may draw the wrong conclusion from them.

Where there is money in the county races, there is not much of it, and most of it is the candidates' own:

Candidate	Raised	Self-funded	Spent
Grace D. Cross (Clerk, D)	$6,548	$4,809 (73%)	$6,197
Olivia D. Munsch (Clerk, R)	$6,479	$3,799 (59%)	$4,769
Paul H. Mosbrucker (Comm. D3, D)	$3,471	$1,894 (55%)	$2,181

The real money on Skamania's ballot is the legislative race. The 17th District covers Clark, Klickitat and Skamania, so it is on both of our counties' ballots.

Candidate	Raised	Spent	Roughly on hand
Kevin Waters (Pos. 1, R, incumbent)	$134,298	$56,082	$78,216
David Stuebe (Pos. 2, R)	$89,939	$36,689	$53,250
Diana H. Perez (Pos. 2, D)	$85,308	$52,759	$32,549
Ben Christly (Pos. 1, D)	$42,662	$36,895	$5,767
Thomas Everett Haynes (Pos. 1, Pro Gun Liberal)	$105	$35	$70

Two things worth noticing. Not one of these five put in a dollar of their own money, which is the opposite of the county pattern, where self-funding is most of the total. And Waters, the Stevenson incumbent, is funded in a way none of the others are: 60 business contributions and 44 from political action committees, led by $11,200 from the Evergreen Leadership Fund and $2,400 apiece from Premera Blue Cross, Puget Sound Energy, Microsoft, the Nisqually Indian Tribe, and Sabey Corporation, a data-center developer. That last name is one Gorge readers have seen in another context.

Only Position 1 is a real primary, with three candidates for two slots. Position 2 has two, so Perez and Stuebe both advance no matter what.

One more ballot split. We noted above that Klickitat votes in the 4th Congressional District and Skamania in the 3rd. The Legislature splits Klickitat too: part of the county is in the 17th District with Skamania, and part is in the 14th District with Benton, Franklin and Yakima. Check the top of your own ballot rather than assuming your neighbor's races are yours.

---

Sourcing note

Columbia Gorge News. Tony Warren's remarks on the constitutional-sheriff movement and on ICE come from Nathan Wilson's candidate interviews for Columbia Gorge News, Meet the three candidates for Klickitat County sheriff, published July 21, 2026 and updated July 29. Both are linked inline above. That reporting also turned up the Undersheriff Knopes contribution.

The forum. A recording of the July 21, 2026 candidate forum in Goldendale.

County money. Computed directly from PDC contribution and expenditure records, filtered to each race's jurisdiction.

Federal money. FEC bulk candidate-summary and independent-expenditure files for the 2026 cycle: candidate reports through July 15, 2026; independent expenditures reported through July 31.

---

Want to help keep the Dispatch running?

The Skamania Dispatch is a community-powered public service. Every meeting summary and audio briefing is free, and always will be. If you've been finding value in this work and want to help offset the costs of document requests and software tools, you can now join as a Community Supporter for $5/month. Zero pressure to upgrade (your readership is support enough) but if you'd like to help fuel the mission, you can do so here.