[Klickitat] 🏘 Rules for Backyard Homes - Goldendale July 2025

Goldendale's City Council spent both July meetings fighting over one sentence in its new backyard-homes rule: whether somebody has to actually live on the property. It passed anyway. Also this month, a five-year airport engineering deal, an award-winning sewage plant, and a resident who asked the mayor point blank whether the city plans to sell its water to a data center.

In This Episode

• Goldendale adopts an accessory dwelling unit code, and why the objection that opened the hearing turned out to rest on a misreading
• The owner-occupancy clause, and the police chief's question that actually changed the ordinance
• A wider runway that starts with a culvert, and a three hundred sixty thousand dollar plan trimmed to seventy-one
• "Are we going to sell our water to the data center?"
• Six years running for the wastewater treatment plant
• Sidewalks, outdoor dining, and who actually gets blocked
• Community Days, a ceremonial key, and a centennial nobody can confirm

Resources & Links

• Read the full written Dispatch at skamaniadispatch.com
• City of Goldendale agendas, packets and minutes
• City of Goldendale City Council
• Prior coverage: Smoke, Weeds and Fireworks, Goldendale's June round-up
• Prior coverage: Data Centers Come Knocking, Klickitat County

Stay Connected with the Gorge

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To stay updated on local news, governance, and community events across the region, you can sign up for both newsletters at SkamaniaDispatch.com. For real-time updates and to join the conversation, follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/OpenGorge.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey there, and welcome back to Open Gorge. It's good to have you. Today we're on our city roundup for Goldendale in Clickitac County, where the city council spent the whole of July arguing about backyard homes, and then passed a rule about them anyway. So here's the thing that you need to know first. Goldendale's code has technically allowed accessory dwelling units for years, or ADUs. That's the second smaller home on a lot that already has a house. Might include a converted garage, an apartment above one, or a little standalone cottage out back. But the old code was one paragraph, and that paragraph pointed at development standards the city had never actually written, so it allowed something without saying how it would happen. And in July that changed. The council passed two ordinances. One added definitions, and the other adds a whole new chapter with real standards. And the standards are pretty specific. An ADU has to be between 400 and 1,000 square feet. Decks cap out at 250 square feet. One house, one ADU per lot. If it's detached, it needs 10 feet of clearance from the main house. It has to look like the neighborhood in the ordinance's words, similar in style and building and materials. And you can't rent it out short term, no vacation rentals. Almost none of it was controversial, but what was was one clause, Section S. It says either the main house or the ADU has to be owner occupied at least 183 days a year, which is half the year and somebody has to actually live there. One counselor called that overreach. Their argument was simple. If you buy a house intending to rent it out, that's your business, and the clause makes it impossible on any lot with an ADU. People defending the clause made a demographic argument that Goldendale is roughly half rentals, and as one counselor put it, quote, half those are owned by corporations and they don't live here guaranteed, and they're one of our biggest problems as far as maintenance is concerned. Somebody floated out a middle path, instead of requiring occupancy, requiring the owner to live in town or name a local property manager. It got called logical and maybe an easy change, but then nobody moved it. Now the meeting didn't start smoothly either. Before the public hearing even opened, two counselors asked the council not to open it, for different reasons. One said the drafts in the packet weren't what the ordinance committee had agreed to, and the other said drafts should have gone to the full council first. And here's where it gets interesting, because that first objection was about the ranking. The counselor said increasing affordable housing had bumped from the number one purpose down to number two, except it hadn't. In the new chapter, affordable housing is purpose number one. The number two version the counselor was reading sits inside the other ordinance in a block of text that quotes the existing code word for word before amending it. And I know this all sounds quite complicated, but you can't reorder a quotation of current law. It is a quote. So two weeks later, building official Robert Thompson walked the council through exactly that. Quote, we can't change that because that's how it needs to read, and we're amending the definitions, unquote. So the specific complaint was a misreading. The council voted to proceed with the hearing anyway, over two nays. But the objection that actually changed the ordinance came from somewhere else entirely. Police chief Mike Smith asked a question nobody had thought about. If an ADU gets rented separately from the house, how does a dispatcher tell responders which unit to go to? So, in his words, how are you going to determine to be able to get there when there's a domestic violence issue in the ADU versus the house? The draft said an additional address would be assigned if one was needed. Somebody proposed making it mandatory instead. Smith agreed, and on July 20th, a speaker called that revision necessary and appreciated. That's not the only change to the ordinance anyone described out loud between the two readings. Both ordinances passed. Counselor Lauren Meager asked them to hold two more weeks so an absent counselor could weigh in, and so the city could look at pre-approved permit ready designs and maybe work jointly on this with the other gorge towns. The council didn't disagree with the idea, just the timing. Adopt now, keep it working in committee. So, with that housing note, let's move over to the airport. The city signed a five-year engineering agreement with Precision Approach Engineering, which has been Goldendale's airport engineer since 2020, plus a first task order under it. The goal is widening the runway from 40 feet of pavement to 60 and widening the graded safety area alongside of it. But the money tells the story. The phase started as a $360,000 ass to the state. Near the end of its budget year, the state came back with about $71,000. So the work got repackaged to fit, culvert design, an updated wetland survey because the old one expired, and some early planning for wetland mitigation, possibly on land off the airport entirely. The actual mitigation work got pushed into a future phase. Now water. Here's some good news first. The Department of Ecology told the city that Goldendale's wastewater treatment plant won a statewide performance award out of roughly 300 plants in Washington. So Mayor Dave Jones read the letter out loud and says it's the sixth year running. Drinking water was a harder conversation. A resident told council that even with a senior discount, he can't afford to water his yard. Quote, no wonder people's yards are turning brown and drying up and blowing away. Nobody can afford the water. He tied it to fire danger, not just how the town looks, and he asked the mayor directly, are we going to sell our water to the data center? Mayor Jones answered no, we have no plans on doing that here in the city. That's the first time a data center has come up in this council's record, and it's worth knowing where the question comes from. Wickitac County has active data center inquiries right now, we've covered those. And the county's process is the live one. The city's answer is for now, no. So a few quick ones before we go. Downtown sidewalks. A resident told Councilor Meager that the temporary outdoor dining setups have too little room for a wheelchair or walker. She'd been to the city twice and told the permits were fine. Turns out the permits probably are fine, but the pinch comes from street trees plus vehicles parking over the curb line, which no permit can control. What got Floto is building permanent outdoor dining structures designed around the trees instead of temporary ones reassembled differently every event. Public safety. Police reported 317 calls in June, 15 arrests. Over the fourth, 14 fireworks complaints and one citation to somebody whose fireworks started a fire on the third. The fire department took four calls that holiday, and by the 20th, the fire chief's whole report was one line. The burn ban is on. Building permits are way up, 76 so far this year, 56 at this point last year, and community days ran the 10th and 11th, with the first full Main Street carnival in over a decade. The one resident used the public comment to dispute the whole premise. The city's been calling this the Hundred's Community Days. He says it started in the early 1970s. The mayor traced the 100-year figure back to a newspaper feature and admitted he's heard conflicting and admitted he's heard conflicting counts since. If you know a little bit more about this local history, the mayor would like to hear from you. So here's what's next. The council met again on Monday, August 3rd at 6 p.m. The East Broadway parking review was due back that same night, and written minutes for both July meetings can finally show up in that packet. We'll always go back and update that as soon as it becomes available. So with that, you've been listening to a production of opengorge.org, the home of the Schemania Dispatch and the Click of Tatler. You 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 open gorge. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you next time.