[Klickitat] 🚱The Flood They Can't Discuss - Bingen July 2026

Bingen City Council spent thirty minutes in July listening to its own residents and legally could not answer a single question. Four downtown businesses have been closed since a contractor struck a water main in April, one of them is now closed for good, and the city says it cannot lend a dollar to fix it. We walk through both July meetings, plus a rail Quiet Zone that just slipped by a year.

In This Episode

• Why the city attorney told a packed room "there will be no response, and that goes for everybody here"
• The constitutional rule that makes a city loan illegal, and why "just help them" has no legal form
• The contractor the city would not name, which the newspaper had already printed
• The city's July 20 press release, the July 6 estimates, and the resident who called it a lie
• Mugs Coffee is not reopening
• The BNSF Quiet Zone diagnostic visit finally happens, and the timeline slips to two summers out
• Bingen writes its first fence rules
• Both Public Works employees retire within a day of each other
• The public comment box that quietly went nowhere for eight months

Resources & Links

• Read the full written Dispatch at SkamaniaDispatch.com
• Bingen agendas, minutes and meeting recordings: bingenwashington.org/AgendaCenter
• Next meeting: Tuesday, August 4, 2026, 6:00 p.m., in person and by Zoom
• Our prior Bingen coverage: https://skamania-dispatch.ghost.io/a-green-light-for-the-quiet-zone-bingen-june-26-round-up/ and https://skamania-dispatch.ghost.io/water-main-breaks-red-rag-clog-mystery-in-bingen-april-26/
• Columbia Gorge News reporting cited in this episode: Sean Avery on the July 7 meeting, and Nan Noteboom on the July 21 meeting, at columbiagorgenews.com

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey there, and welcome back to Open Gorge. Right now we're going to go to our Bingin month end roundup because something happened at City Hall in July that's worth sitting with. On July 7th, about 40 people came to the Bingon City Council meeting. The minutes list 38 names in the audience. They came about the water. So here's the background. Back on April 15th, as some of you might remember, a contractor working on the city's crosswalk project on State Route 14 hit an 8-inch water main. Downtown flooded, and four businesses took some serious damage. Chip's Bar and Grill, Carmen's Kitchen, Muggs Coffee, and Studio CBC. Almost four months later, they're still not reopened. So people came to talk to their council, and the council couldn't say a word back. City attorney Chris Lance laid it out before the first question. Because somebody had threatened to sue, he said, quote, we have to make no comment. Former mayor Betty Barnes asked if it was a state project. Nothing. She asked who the contractor was. Lance said, quote, you could certainly ask that question, but again, cannot make any comment, unquote. City administrator Chris Deloney put it plainer later. She said, quote, if somebody hadn't threatened litigation, this could be an open discussion. Because they have, we can't say anything, unquote. So they listened for half an hour. And what they heard was very hard. Diane Murphy co-an's chips, bar and grill, and she told the council that three downtown restaurants are still closed, with quote, no timeline of when we can reopen, no timeline, unquote. Then she got to the real problem. It isn't sympathy, it's cash. She said the city's insurance pools requiring the owners to front the construction costs themselves and get paid back later. For a small business owner, she said, that's tough to finance. Larry Murphy said the crews had spaces torn out and ready to rebuild by late May, but they still couldn't get paid for the work that they had already done. Diane Buckley has worked at Ships for four years. She's been out of work now three months. She said she has savings to pull back on, and quote, had I not, I don't know what would have happened, unquote. And Sandy Dickey, who runs two small businesses in town, described the street in the morning, quote, there's not a car in town, not one car, unquote. Now I want to be fair to the council because part of this isn't about willingness to help. When one resident suggested the city could just front the money, Loney answered in two words, quote, it's illegal, unquote. And she's right. Washington's state constitution prohibits cities from giving or lending public money to private businesses. It's called the gift of public funds rule. Benjamin cannot write these businesses alone, it can't pay their contractor. The claims run through a shared insurance pool that Benjamin belongs to alongside other Washington cities, and that pool deals directly with owners, not through City Hall. So the city is essentially a bystander to its own liability. And that's why the July 7th meeting produced no motion, no vote, and frustratingly no answers. But here's the thing about the silence, it's not protecting a secret. Two days after that meeting, Columbia Gorge News named the contractor in print. Reporter Sean Avery wrote that while digging downtown on April 15th, Grade Works excavating struck the water main. He also reported that the dig went ahead using the city's outdated waterline maps, which showed the locate mark five feet away from the actual main. This is a common issue as we discussed in prior episodes with a lot of older towns, with a lot of outdated documentation, especially their mapping of their utilities. And Ben Jin's own February minutes record the city awarding that crosswalk contract GradeWorks for about $193,000. So the answer to Betty Barnes' question was already in the newspaper and already in the city's own public record. So let's move to July 21st because the city did answer in writing. Council added a standing item to every future agenda called the Downtown Flood Recovery Update, and it's real. It's right there as item 5 on the August 4th agenda. They read a press release into the record. And I want to flag something here because Benson posts its minutes at the following meeting, so as I'm recording, there are currently no approved minutes for July 21st. So everything I'm about to tell you is going to come off the meeting recording. Take it as provisional. We try our best to always update that in the written edition later. The city's account goes like this. The insurance pool found coverage and started managing claims. Owners got claim information within two days, drying finished May 5th, and then the key claim, the repair contractor, who was hired by the business owners and not by the city, did submit file repair estimates until July 6th. The city says the delay is the main reason that permanent repairs have not started. So July 6th is the day before that PAC meeting. The city also said since the end of April, the insurance pool has paid out nearly $170,000 in lost wages. Columbia Gorge News itemized it. About $71,000 to Chips, $82,000 to Carmen's Kitchen, and about $1,200 to a fifth business, antiques and oddities. Add those up and you get about $155,000, not $170,000. Neither the city nor the paper explains the gap. And the city's version did not go unchallenged in the room. A relative of two of the owners told the council that the owners had been forwarding the insurer's paperwork long before July 6th and called the published account, quote, kind of a lie. One more thing you should know, Muggs Coffee won't be coming back. Columbia Gorge News reported that Muggs announced permanent closure on June 5th and is looking for a new location. So when we talk about this recovery, we're going to be talking about a recovery for three businesses and not four. So, moving to the railroad, there's some genuinely good news that comes with a catch. On July 21st, 18 people stood at Bingon's rail crossings for the BNSF diagnostic site visit. That's the railroad and its engineers, the city and its engineers, the State Utilities and Transportation Commission, Port of Clickatat, SDS Lumber, and the Federal Railroad Administration. That sounds like quite a party. Lony had been waiting four and a half years for that meeting. Then the engineers laid out the schedule, and it's long. It's going to be months to reach to 65% design, weeks for the railroad to review, more months to 95%, a petition for each crossing, and only then did the railroad signal people start, needing at least six months to plan and six more to build. So the quiet zone that Bingin had hoped for next summer is now, in the words used at that meeting, two summers from now. And the money is tighter than it looks. The $2.2 million Senator Curtis King restored in state funds was described at the meeting as the bare minimum, cutting it pretty close. If it falls short, the options on the table are closing the Walnut Street crossing or redesign that could save $500 to $700,000. Whoop, quite a lot to ask for, some uh peace and quiet finally. Let's hope it's all going to be worthwhile. Some quick hits before we go. Minjan is writing its first ever fence rules. The city has never regulated fences at all, and as Loney put it, you can't enforce code you don't have. So that'll come back August 4th. Both of Bing's public works employees retire in spring 2027, one day apart. That's the city's whole public works crew, so the council approved job applications in July to start hiring early. And this one stuck with me. So when Benji changed website platforms back in November of 2025, the feature that forwards public comments to the city administrator was never reprogrammed. So for eight months, comments people submitted online went nowhere. Nobody caught it because it looks identical from both ends. You'll see a confirmation and the city sees a quiet month. It only surfaced because a resident said out loud that he'd sent in a letter, and the staff searched in front of the room and found nothing. It's fixed now, so if you sent something into the city on the website and never heard back, try sending it again. So here's what's next. Tuesday, August 4th, 6 p.m. is the next council meeting with the first flood recovery update. In an agreement with Click Attack County on Radio 911 dispatch and another look at those fence rules, August 6th is the completion date for the East Steuben waterline, and the draft critical areas ordinance is due at the end of August. The full written version, of course, has every figure, every source, and links to the Columbia Gorge news reporting that I cited. That's at Schemania Dispatch.com. You've been listening to a production of opengorge.org. Hum with Schemania Dispatch and the Clicka Tatler. We believe that informed communities are stronger communities. To support our work and stay up to date on everything happening in the gorge, head over to schemania dispatch.com to sign up for our newsletters. You can also find us on Facebook at facebook.comslash opengorge. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on today's episode. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll talk to you next time.