Ephrata names new council member

EPHRATA — Insurance administrator and longtime Ephrata resident Sarah McDonnell was selected Wednesday to become the Ephrata City Council’s newest member.

“I love Ephrata, I know this is home,” McDonnell said. “I want to learn more about decision-making from a government perspective, to give back whatever I can, and share some of my local government knowledge.”

McDonnell is an administrator with Clear Risk Solutions, which manages several insurance pools for cities, school districts, counties and tribes across the state of Washington. She noted that she does not oversee the fund that covers the City of Ephrata.

McDonnell will fill the council seat being vacated by Justin Kooy, who announced he was resigning from the council after announcing he was moving 1,000 feet outside the city limits.

“I really enjoyed being on the council, and I wish I could continue, but we’re moving just outside the city,” Kooy said.

At its last meeting of the year, the Ephrata City Council raised many of the city’s fees, from building and plumbing permits to water rates and sewer rates, an average of 3 percent.

However, according to City Administrator Wes Crago, the fees for Splashzone will rise 7.5 percent, allowing the city to keep up with the voter-approved increase in the state’s minimum wage, which will rise to $12 per hour on Jan. 1, 2019, from the current $11.50 per hour.

Crago said the fee hike allows the city to pay slightly more than the minimum wage to Splashzone employees.

The council also unanimously amended its recently passed year-long moratorium on cryptocurrency operations after it became clear the original ordinance focused on the type of business and not the deleterious effects.

“We didn’t focus on the impacts,” Crago told council members. “A room full of computers mining bitcoin is the same as a room full of computers for video processing.”

The concern was less about cryptocurrency mining itself than it was the high electricity demand for both computing power and cooling as well as the noise that keeping that many computers cool causes, Crago said, and came up because a company claiming to want to process computer-animated video was looking to set up in Ephrata.

Crago said the ordinance change to focus on power use and noise would prevent someone from misrepresenting their business to get around the ordinance.

However, when Kooy said he was concerned the change might put a legitimate internet service provider out of business, Crago explained that companies like iFiber aren’t covered by this and don’t have that kind of electricity usage.

“They’re not using the equivalent of all of downtown’s power,” he said.

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