Othello council talks Relay for Life fee, broken air conditioner

OTHELLO — The Othello City Council unanimously approved an agreement to allow Relay For Life to use Lions Park on Monday, but before it could do that, members had a long conversation on whether they should waive the event fee for the fundraising organization.

“We did this for the Seahawks,” said council member John Lallas, noting that the Relay For Life — which raises money for cancer treatment and research — is “a good cause.”

And there was some initial support for waiving the $200 event fee in the council for the July 21-22 Relay For Life.

But Mayor Shawn Logan wondered if waivers would soon be expected by every organization or group that rented the park.

“Everything is a good cause,” he said.

Parks and Recreation Coordinator Amy Hurlbut explained that the event fee allows the Parks Department to provide bleachers and additional trash containers, as well as cover the fees charged by the landfill for any extra trash the Relay For Life would generate.

“The fee is already built into their budget,” Hurlbut said. “And it will lead to difficult conversations when someone comes in the future and says ‘it’s a good cause.’”

Council member Genna Dorow suggested the best way to handle it would be for council members and city employees to “pass a hat” and raise enough money to cover the entrance fee, since the city cannot itself make donations.

The city council also got an update on its broken air conditioner, which has been making working in the Othello city building difficult thanks to warm, stuffy air.

According to Public Works Director Terry Clements, the current air conditioning unit is hopefully going to be replaced by the end of Wednesday. The city had to order a completely new air conditioning unit from Spokane.

“It will take a day to get it on line, to pull the old unit out and put the new one in,” Clements said.

The nature of the damage — a hole was punched in the compressor piston — means that it is cheaper at around $16,000 to buy an entire new unit than it is to repair or rebuild the current AC, Clements said.

“The old unit will likely go for salvage,” he explained to the Columbia Basin Herald. “It may be beyond rebuilding, I don’t know how much damage there is.”

Clements explained that while the city hall has proven tough to both heat and cool in the brutal climate of Central Washington — something Dorow attributed to a building design optimized for the western side of the state — he said the use of space heaters during the winter “throws the entire system off” and makes it impossible for the thermostats to work right.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.