Burn ban set for Zone Two Coit Troy Stone

Coit Troy Stone passed away on May 17, 2023, in Klickitat, Washington.

Coit was born August 16, 1965. He was 57 years old at the time of his passing. He is survived by his wife of 21 years, our four children, six grandchildren (with one on the way in June), and his mother. He was preceded in death by his father, Leonard Teddy Stone, in September 2009. Coit was an avid motorcycle and car guy and was somewhat of a daredevil. He was quite a character with a great sense of humor. He was loved by many, and he will be sorely missed.

A casual celebration of life with a potluck lunch for all who had the pleasure of knowing Coit will be held at the Seventh Day Adventist Church, 457 Wahkiacus Heights Road, Wahkiacus, Washington on Sunday, June 4, 2023, at 11 a.m. Please come and share memories and stories that you may have and say goodbye to one amazing person. Hot rods are welcome.

Arrangements are under the direction of Gardner Funeral Home 156 N. East Church Avenue, White Salmon.

Klickitat County is establishing a ban on open outdoor burning for Klickitat County Burn Ban Zone Two defined as lands between the Klickitat County Fire District No. 7 eastern boundary west to the western boundaries of Klickitat County Fire Districts No. 4, 12, and 15 then north on the Klickitat River to the north county line, to include but not limited to Klickitat County Fire Districts No. 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, and 15; outside the jurisdiction of the Yakama Indian Nation; and the jurisdiction of the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission and prohibiting the issuance of burning permits except for authorized agricultural burning. Residential barbecues will be allowed. At

BAPTIST

Columbus Avenue Baptist, S.B.C.

815 N Columbus, Goldendale, 509.773.4471; Interim Pastor Paul Logue, Sun Worship 11am, Sun School 9:45 . Call for Zoom services. We’re on YouTube, FaceBook, & Instagram. Mon 6pm prayer meeting.Wed 6pm Youth & Children's groups. For updates: ColumbusABC.org, ColumbusABC@embarqmail.com, or call.

CATHOLIC - Holy Trinity Catholic 307 Schuster, Goldendale; Father William Byron, 509.773.4516. Sat Eve Mass 5:30pm; Sun Mass 9am & 10:30am. Eve of Holy Days 7pm; Holy Days 9am. Daily Mass Mon-Fri 9am CCD Classes Wed 2:15-3:30pm, K thru grade 6; Wed 7-8:30pm grades 7-12. Confessions every other Saturday noon -1pm

EASTERN ORTHODOX

Ss. Joachim & Anna Orthodox Mission 301 NW 2nd St, Goldendale, 907-317-3828; Rev John Phelps; Sat: 5:30pm Vespers; Sun: 8:15am Orthros, 9:30am Liturgy; Wed: 7pm Youth Group; Fri: 9pm Compline the discretion of the Fire Chief, Fire Protection Districts are exempt from this ban for the purposes of live fire training activities. Said ban on open outdoor burning shall be in full force and effect from Monday, June 5, until rescinded. The public is directed to check with the appropriate authorities concerning burning restrictions within the corporate limits of any city or town.

In 2018 Klickitat County Department of Emergency Management (KCDEM) in cooperation with the Klickitat County Interagency Fire Association (KCIFA) created new County Burn Ban Zone designations for establishing County open outdoor burn bans. This consists of three zones across the county starting

Church Directory

GRACE BRETHREN

Community Grace Brethren

1180 S Roosevelt, Goldendale. 509.773.3388. Sun Svc 10:30am in person. Wed: AWANA 2pm & Youth Group 5pm GoldendaleGrace.com. Watch us on Facebook

Live: Facebook.com/GoldendaleGrace

"Learning - Living - Loving JESUS."

LUTHERAN

Christ the King Lutheran S Columbus & Simcoe Dr, Goldendale; Pastor David Daugs. 773-5750. Worship services 10

Everyone welcome.

METHODIST - United Methodist Columbus & Broadway; Pastor Kendra BehnSmith; 509.773.4461. Service times: Worship 9:00am; Adult classes 10:45am; Fall & Winter Children’s Church available during worship. All are welcome. Call the church for regularly scheduled events.

NAZARENE - Church of the Nazarene in the east with Zone One then Zone Two covering the central area and Zone Three covering the west end of the county. For clarity the zone boundaries follow fire district boundaries as much as possible. Maps detailing the zone boundaries have been created and are available to view and download on the

124 W Allyn, Goldendale; Pastor Earnie Winn and Pastor Greta Sines. 509.773.4216; Sunday worship 10:45am; Sunday School all ages 9:30am; goldendalenaz@gmail.com.

KCDEM webpage. Information for Klickitat County Burn Ban Zone 3 will be released as soon as the 2023 date is finalized. The full resolution and KC Burn Ban maps can be viewed online at www.klickitatcounty. org/1242/Burn-BansZones-and-Notices.

NEW LIFE ASSEMBLY of GOD

1602 S Columbus, Goldendale; Pastor Kevin Gerchak, 509.773.4650; Sun. School 9:30 ; Morning Worship Service 10:30am; Family Night on Wed. 7pm with programs for ages 3 years through adult.

RIVER of LIFE CHURCH of GOD 2023 Pipeline Rd; Pastors Rod & Cathy Smith, 509-773-3185, Sunday Worship 10:30am; Wednesday Bible Study 7pm RiverofLife222.org

SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST

1/2 mile east on Bickleton Hwy. Sabbath School Sat. 9:30am; Worship Service 11am; Pastor Michael Smith; 509.773.4381

NON-DENOMINATIONAL

Centerville Community Church 508 Dalles Mountain Road, Centerville, WA 98613; 509-637-3068; Pastor Patti McKern; pastorpatti53@gmail.com; Sunday Worship Celebration 10am "Find refreshment for your soul and friends for your journey."

Father’s House Fellowship 207 S Klickitat Ave, 509.773.4719. Basic Bible Fellowship 9:30am; Worship 10:30am; Tue. 6:30pm Freedom Now Meeting. “A Gospel-Centered Church.”

Zachary Villar For The SenTinel

Matt Chiles owns 3,200 acres in Centerville, southwest of Goldendale, so to say that he is invested in this area would not be an overstatement. He is also Klickitat County’s chosen representative for the Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC) processing of the Carriger Solar Project application, which means he’s a voting member on the council that will decide whether or not to recommend the project. EFSEC will decide to either approve the application, approve it with conditions, or deny it.

Once that is done, this recommendation will be given to the governor, who is ultimately responsible for the final decision.

Chiles was selected to be on the council for the review of the solar project about two weeks before the in-person meeting with Cypress Creek, the company seeking to create the solar project here, that took place in Goldendale on April 25. Chiles’ job history and history of involvement in Klickitat County led him to be chosen for this position by the county. He was trained as an urban planner and is currently a ranch manager.

He’s lived in the county for 25 years and has found several things besides the solar project to be concerned about and get involved with.

On May 26, Chiles spoke to this reporter about zoning concerns in Klickitat County while sitting in a room in his house surrounded by books and Lego models built by him and his kids. “If we don’t change things, the whole valley is going to be 20-acre pieces, and farming is not going to exist, because 20 acres is too small to farm,” he said.

Chiles was appointed to the Klickitat County Board of Adjustment, representing Commissioner District No.

LAMBS from page A1 going to have a taste that you haven’t experienced before.”

The Klickitat County Wool Growers Auxiliary starting the Lamboree event in 2008 and continued it off and on until 2020, when they were forced to cancel that year’s event due to Covid. This was the first year they brought it back after the 2020 cancellation. The original idea for the event came from wanting to help educate young people. “There was a group us who were selling market lambs, and what we really saw was that our youth needed education on everything from feeding lambs to fitting lambs to showmanship, to all of that,” said Lefever-Holbrook. She said that the Klickitat County Wool Growers Auxiliary has always been focused in part on education, and they decided that they needed to incorporate all the elements of sheep ranching and marketing into one event.

“Sheep is really a wide, diverse animal,” said Lefever-Holbrook. “When you look at it, it’s the fiber, milk, meat, and all the different breeds and breed types in the sheep industry.” The purpose of the Klickitat County Wool Growers Auxiliary and events like the Lamboree wasn’t to tell people what kind of sheep is the best to raise, said Lefever-Holbrook, but to bring together people interested and involved in sheep ranching and to offer assistance and mentorship. She said that the WSU Extension used to hold more of these kinds of in-person events in the past. “They’ve started to pull back away from what we call the ‘hands-on’ types of events like this, and so they’re doing more videos or those types of classes. We find the value is being there, having the questions, learning about it, hands-on. That’s what, as a group, we felt needed to be

3, in March 2021. One of the Board of Adjustment’s responsibilities is to review conditional use permits, a kind of permit that allows the use of property for something that does not conform to normal zoning laws. When Chiles found out that the Board of Adjustments helps deal with some of the issues he was concerned with, he decided to put his name in for the running and was appointed there.

One big issue Chiles is focused on is Klickitat County Code Title 12, “Transportation Standards,” which deals with road standards in the county.

“It was last updated 10 or 15 years ago,” said Chiles. “One of the big things when it was updated was they decided that you couldn’t have development on any road unless it was at least 20 feet wide. There are a lot of roads in the county that are not 20 feet wide, so it suddenly shut off development to huge portions of the county.”

The reason Klickitat County chose to apply this law, explained Chiles, was because the state adopted the national fire code that requires 20-foot-wide roads.

“I personally looked into it,” he recalls. “The state did adopt the national fire code; however, the state did not adopt the section of the national fire code that has to do with roads and road widths. The section of the national fire code that has to do with road widths specifically says in it, ‘If your state does not adopt this specifically, then it does not apply to you.’ So, the section of national fire code having to do with roads does not apply to Washington State per the Washington State legislature.”

Chiles chalks this mistake up to a misinterpretation 15 years ago and says it has caused a lot of grief.

“For instance, Jenkins Creek Road, out of town a few miles up Highway 97— this is one of numerous preserved.”

Lisa Huebner and Janet Town were presenting the Fiber Prep and Spinning programs that day. In the morning they skirted fleece, washed it, and then carded and combed it, and in the afternoon they spun it. Back in the barn, Pierre Monat presented a program titled “Commercial Sheep Production/Small flock improvement.” The program covered five basic topics: breeding and selection, health and nutrition, basic management skills, wool production, and marketing/promotion. Monat and his wife run M&P Ranches in Goldendale where they sell lamb and wool products. He is also a lead instructor at the Washington State Shearing School in Moses Lake. He said there are several things that he liked about sheep. “They’re lighter on the land than cattle; they’re not going to tear up ground as much,” he pointed out. “Starting out as a shearer, I really value the fact that it’s an animal that can provide you with two products. The wool product is really cool; obviously the meat’s great too.”

When asked if he would like to see more people ranching sheep in the area, Monat said that in the grand scheme of things, we’d be better off transitioning some of our protein consumption to lamb instead of beef. “Lambs are a much more efficient way to produce protein.” He said he thought it would be beneficial if people starting ranching multiple species of livestock on the same land. “I went to this ranch in Texas that ran goat, sheep, and cattle together… Their place was separated into 20 different pastures, and they would rotate those three groups of animals through them, and they had found that they actually increased the for - roads in the county that has parts of it that are less than 20 feet wide. So, if you own ten acres off Jenkins Creek Road, and you want to split it into five acres—which per zoning is legal to do on Jenkins Creek Road—you cannot do that because that would be putting another buildable lot on a road that isn’t 20 feet wide. It hinders small guys who just happen to have a property they want to split, and it hinders larger developers. When you look at the long-term effect of that over the last 15 years, it means Klickitat County hasn’t been able to develop as much as it probably would have otherwise, and fancy that if we don’t have a housing shortage right now. These things all add up. They all have consequences.”

Chiles says that he and the other members of the Board of Adjustments have met as members of a committee over the last six months to write a new Title 12. He said that they passed it off to the engineering department, which worked on it for 18 months, then brought it back to the committee to age density and availability by doing that, as opposed to when they just ran cattle.”

MJ Coyne was assisting Baumgartner with his program on lamb presentation. She learned how to show lamb on Lefever-Holbrook’s ranch; then when she was older, she herself taught young people on the ranch. She said that the consumption of lamb was coming into fashion in bigger cities. “We used to have a lot of sheep up in the Simcoes,” said Coyne, pointing towards the mountains. “But they got outcompeted, and cattle came more into favor.”

This was the first year the Lamboree featured goat-themed programs. Patti Gylling presented the Goat Market Class program where she spoke about how to raise a healthy goat. All of her children raised meat goats and showed them all over the Northwest. She said goats are a good entry-level animal for young people starting out in 4-H. “They’re very personal, they’re easy to train, and you show them with a collar,” said Gylling. She said that 4-H helps kids learn many things in addition to how to raise animals. This includes public speaking, leadership, interview skills, and commitment.

4-H is America’s largest youth development organization, empowering nearly six million young people with the skills to lead for a lifetime. It’s well known for its programs that involve raising animals, but Gylling pointed out that it also involves more non-animal programs than people realize, such as cooking, sewing, archery, and others. “If every kid was in 4-H, our world would be totally different,” said Gylling. She said that her youngest son paid for his private pilot license using money he made in 4-H all the public data to come in.” He said that if the solar project is written about in the newspaper, he can’t allow anything from that to affect his decision. “It has to be only stuff that was actually said at a public meeting or was submitted as public comment. And that’s it.”

Z V rubber stamp, but it was not able to be approved. He said they hadn’t fixed the 20-footwide road problem, along with several other issues. He said the new Title 12 is open for public comment at the moment, and the county commissioners will eventually vote on it. But at the time of this writing, the Klickitat County website stated comments for the Title 12 Road Standards Revision would only be accepted until May 19, 2023, at 5 p.m.

With his background as an urban planner, his long history in the area and his position on the Board of Adjustments, the county chose Chiles as the local government representative for EFSEC’s evaluation of the Carriger Solar Project. As the sole member of this council allowed to be chosen by Klickitat County, it puts Chiles into a unique position.

“When they asked me to do it I said, ‘Well, is the county for this or against this?’ And they said, ‘Well, that’s for you to decide.’ And it really is,” said Chiles. “I cannot have an opinion on it right now. I have to wait for

Chiles said when he accepted his current role on the council, he didn’t know at that point where Cypress Creek was considering installing the project. Knowing so many people in the community from his years of living here puts him in an unenviable position. “No matter what decision that I, as part of the committee, end up making, it’s going to make some people mad and some people happy,” he said. Chiles encouraged people to make comments on the solar project application being reviewed by EFSEC. He made sure to clarify that they must be official comments made to EFSEC, either at public meetings or on the website at https://comments.efsec. wa.gov/. “Letters to the editor are fine if you want to get your point across to the people, but they mean absolutely zero as far as what the EFSEC committee’s actually going to do,” he added.

Chiles said he would be reading every comment made to EFSEC regarding the Carriger Solar Project, and that he hoped everyone else on the committee would be, too. “The comments do matter, but the process is going to move pretty quickly,” he stated. “The council will be deciding if [the Carriger Solar Project] is going to need a full-blown environmental impact statement or not. According to the county, they would, but this is out of county hands right now; it’s in the state’s hands.” Chiles said the council will have a recommendation for the governor, but he or anyone else on the council can say they disagree with the recommendation. That will also go to the governor along with the reasons for their disagreement.

“I hope to be a good and honest voice for the county, and I’m allowed to do things like input my own view of the county because I live here, and my own view of things that I have knowledge of,” said Chiles. “I have a planning background; I have a farming and ranching background; I have a background that includes a lot of stuff with wildlife because as a farmer/ rancher, we have to deal with endangered species.” Chiles said it was not a terribly difficult position to be in yet, but it might be more difficult later. “It depends on how heated things get. A lot of people feel really strongly on a lot of issues, and that’s a good thing. One of the things that I feel I’m bringing to this position is, I’ve always been kind of a negotiator, and I think there are ways that we can make a lot of people happy.”

“Solar is coming,” said Chiles. “It might not be Carriger, but there’s going to be other solar stuff coming to the county. There’s a bunch of stuff in the pipeline that everyone already knows about. The more we can learn about how we want to deal with this, the better off the county’s going to be. Solar’s been coming for a long time. As a landowner, I’ve probably gotten half a dozen letters a year, at least for the past 10 or 12 years, saying, ‘Are you interested in putting solar on your place?’ As has every other large landowner in Klickitat County, I’m sure. I’m not the only one. Everyone’s watching us. I don’t think we’re going to see wall-towall solar in the future. But solar is coming, and this is our first shot at it. So I’m going to do my best to work with the EFSEC council to make sure that the right decision is made for the county, whatever that ends up being.” ing livestock. It’s this kind of wisdom that people can gain from sheep, lambs, goats, and all animals, and it’s this connection with the natural world, on top of all the invaluable education, offered that day at the Lamboree. classes and programs. Sheep could be seen roaming in flocks around the property. A young girl pointed out one of the sheep and said it was sick and it would have to be slaughtered soon. She said this not with sorrow but with the maturity and understanding gained from raisGoldendale WashinGton A8 May 31, 2023