145 YEARS OF HEADLINES & HISTORY Goldendale, Washington
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2024
Vol. 145 No. 4
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H&G Show to be longer, will charge admission LOU MARZELES EDITOR The Goldendale Home & Garden Show has long been a favored attraction produced by the Greater Goldendale Chamber of Commerce. This year brings some key changes designed to provide a more home-centric experience while still accommodating some crafts vendors—and for the first time the show will charge admission. The show also will be three days this year instead of the two in recent years. It runs Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, May 3, 4, and 5. “The reason for charging admission is sustainability,” says Teja Finch, executive director of the Chamber. “I believe all our events should be self-sustaining in some way, shape, or form. Admission also adds the factor of having more money available for the event in general so that we could bring more workshops and interactive experiences and just make it an overall really robust event.” The admission fee is modest. It’s $8 for the general public or $5 if you bring a non-perishable food item that will be donated to the local food bank. Seniors and children 8 and under get in free. Admission is charged only for the first two days of the show; Sunday is a shorter show day and has no workshops. “I want the show to remain accessible to everyone,” Finch states. “That’s the reason why we still have the free day, which is something the [County] Fair does. And that’s the
See Show page A8
City to revisit room tax money allocation RODGER NICHOLS FOR THE SENTINEL
The Goldendale City Council met Tuesday, January 16, postponed from its usual Monday night schedule by the federal holiday. Most of the meeting was concerned with housekeeping measures, and it clocked in at less than a half hour. Police Chief Mike Smith noted that the Nazarene Church had set up a warming shelter in case people had heating problems, and City Building Inspector Mike Hussey reported on his work, which also includes code enforcement and animal control. In 2023, he said the city had issued 162 permits, including both building and mechanical permits. The latter covers such things as furnaces, gas piping, heating or air conditioning, wood stoves, or ductwork. It took in more than $78,000 in fees for those permits. In addition, there were 67 cases of code compliance, two homes that were removed, and 10 cases where the city had to have properties cleaned up, costing more than $15,000. Most of that, he said, came from abatement on a single property. Since the new year, he said he’d issued two mechanical permits, responded to 5 dog calls, sent 12 letters notifying people of code violations, and made ar-
See City page A8
THE WORST WEATHER BRINGS OUT THE BEST IN PEOPLE: It’s been a crazy two or so weeks of wacky weather. People sent out their bat signals, and several superheroes showed up everywhere to help.
LOU MARZELES EDITOR Did you see that weird yellow glow in the sky yesterday? It’s called the sun. You might’ve forgotten what it looked like, given that it’s been snowing off and on for the last two weeks or so. Well, that was until it rained, covering those feet of snow with an icy glaze when temperatures fell again, making walking and driving even more treacherous. Toss in those sub-zero crazy freezing days, and it was definitely a localized Snowpocalypse. It was a stretch of incredible stress on lives, homes, and infra-
structure. The Klickitat PUD’s Facebook page lists 32 different power outages around the county, beginning January 10 right up to Monday. They were everywhere from one end of the county to the other, making equal opportunity stops all over the map. The utility responded admirably and quickly, working often in the most severe conditions and wee hours of the morning. On social media people posted a multitude of needs for assistance. Several reports of frozen pipes appeared, and neighbors rushed to provide water. Total strangers pulled off the road on numerous occasions to help motorists trapped in snow or sliding
on ice. There were conversations at many of the collective mailbox units around town, the gist of which went, “Any idea how to open the box when it’s frozen closed?” Some rattled the whole unit until all the snow fell off, to no avail. Successful efforts involved taking out knives to carve away the ice or pulling out a can of WD-40 and spraying the edges. Whatever it took, the community rallied to support its own. Jeremy Tatro is an electrician in Goldendale, but he’s also been known to fire up his rig and plow a lot of snow for a lot of people. He was out in High Prairie plowing through waist-deep snow. And then he heard of a family trav-
eling from Colorado mistakenly told by their GPS to get off I-84 at 97 and then to turn left onto Centerville Highway. Their car was pulling a heavy trailer. Thanks to their bewildered GPS, they ended up off the road a gazillion miles from where they were supposed to be. Tatro put in some volunteer time to rescue them. Other hometown snow heroes include Andrew Malcolm, whose rescue forays were cited with appreciation on a local Facebook page (see the picture accompanying this story). Todd Nunn and Ranch Construction Services in Bickleton also went extra miles, clearing pathways and warming hearts along the way.
Washington voters warned about deepfakes After news reports that registered voters in New Hampshire received fake phone calls simulating President Joe Biden speaking negatively about the presidential primary, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs warned Washington voters that deepfakes are an ongoing threat to elections and the voting public. A deepfake is a product of artificial intelligence used to create extremely realistic images or audio recordings generated by a kind of machine learning called “deep” (hence the name). Deepfakes are increasingly used to manipulate videos and audio to make it appear a well-known person is saying or doing something that, in actuality, never happened. It can be used to change a person’s face (a Caucasian can be made to look Asian or vice versa), make a person look a different age, and insert people into videos or images when they were not in the originals. In a recording posted by NBC News, the faked Biden voice im-
plores voters to “save your vote for the November election” rather than participate in Tuesday’s state Presidential Primary. Washington state legislation requested and supported by Hobbs in 2023 prohibited deepfake advertising by political campaigns within Washington and empowered candidates targeted by faked statements to sue for damages. “We have several high-interest elections this year, which creates a target-rich environment for these bad actors to subject voters to deepfakes and other misinformation,” Hobbs said. “I am grateful that the Legislature supported my bill to get ahead of this situation and helped us enact a law that every state ought to emulate. “The disturbing situation we’ve seen in New Hampshire’s campaign is just the tip of the iceberg for 2024,” Hobbs continued. “These false messages will get more polished and harder to tell from real ones. Voters must remain vigilant and skeptical and turn to trusted information sourc-
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EXAMPLE OF DEEPFAKE: Say you’re the guy on the left, but you’d like to look like the guy on the right. Easily done with deepfake technology, which turned this person into a phony Tom Cruise. es to verify things that just don’t seem right.” Washington’s Presidential Primary will be held March 12. Statewide offices will be on the ballot in the August 6 Primary, and decisions on the presidency and state offices will go before voters in the November 5 General Election ballot. Washington’s deepfakes law, found in RCW 42.62 and created by Secretary Hobbs’ requested Senate Bill 5152 in 2023, was one of America’s first restrictions on the use of synthetic media in political campaigning, according to
the National Conference of State Legislatures. Under it, political campaigns must disclose when using falsely generated or manipulated video, images, or audio. A failure to disclose creates a potential civil liability. “As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, we as state leaders have a responsibility to make sure our laws evolve as well to protect the public,” Hobbs said. “I will continue to work with the Legislature to keep Washington ahead of threats to the integrity of our elections.”