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Interior backs off plan to increase National Park fees
The Kitsap Sun reports that the US Interior department is backing off a plan to steeply raise the price of admission to popular National Parks to $70 per vehicle. Many of the more than 100,000 comments received on the increase were negative, and the plan would have raised admission for Olympic and Mount Rainier National Parks in Washington state.
Seattle halts streetcar expansion, Vancouver gets huge transit boost
Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan announced a halt to expansion plans for the city’s streetcar system to investigate cost overruns that are pushing the project to over $200 million. Meanwhile, the Seattle city council removed strict on-site parking requirements for apartment buildings in order to reduce costs and push transit use. In other transit news, the Canadian government announced $4.1 billion in new transit funding for greater Vancouver, which will fund light rail to Surrey, a Broadway SkyTrain extension, and more than 400,000 additional hours of bus service.
Court orders Columbia & Snake dams to spill more water for salmon
OPB reports that a federal judge has ordered dam managers on the Columbia and Snake Rivers to let more water flow over dams rather than through turbines to facilitate return of salmon runs, which are critically endangered by the dams.
Co-op businesses on the rise in Vancouver
Writing for the Tyee, Rachel Sanders notes a rise in cooperative businesses throughout the Vancouver area, including a tricycle-based cargo delivery service, a gardening education service, and a company that builds furniture from reclaimed wood.
Astoria’s blue collar Fisher Poets Gathering
Knute Berger, writing for Crosscut, pays a visit to Astoria’s Fisher Poets Gathering, a distinctly blue-collar celebration of verse devoted to commercial fishing. It’s a raucous but thoughtful celebration of the rough and risky lives of commercial fishers who work the seas off Cascadia and Alaska.
Ijeoma Oluo on angry white men
Seattle’s Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race, writes at Medium about how the anger and resentment some white men direct at strong, independent women of color stems from a lie: that they have the privilege of doing anything they want: “Somebody needs to stop telling these white boys that they can be anything they put their mind to…”
That’s today’s news and culture from the Pacific Northwest. –Andrew Engelson
Photo credit: Visitors at Mount Rainier by Joe Mabel CC BY-SA 3.0