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By Dian Ver Valen
The Times 

Planning for Growth

Columbia County Planner Kim Lyonnais sees big changes coming in his office and the county

 


DAYTON – They say that only a planner understands what goes on in the planning office. Columbia County Planning Director Kim Lyonnais has managed planning and building departments most of his life.

But this month he’s really learning the ins and outs of daily management of his department. He’s had to – he’s been running the office on his own.

“I’ve really been enjoying it actually,” he said in an interview with The Times last week. “I like getting in and doing the work, being hands on. I’m really getting a feel for what we need as far as staffing at this point. It’s really been a wonderful opportunity.”

The office has been quiet since Melissa Shumake, who had been working as a temporary planning technician, and Jeromy Phinney, who was a building official with the county for a decade, took other jobs in the last few weeks.

With the number of projects looming – including the anticipated ground breaking for Columbia Pulp near Starbuck this spring – the Columbia County Commissioners have been worried about how Lyonnais will handle the workload in his understaffed office.

They needn’t worry, is the message Lyonnais hopes to send to his governing board. He has already hired a veteran, local planner, Greg Abramson, who has been working at Elk Drug but has 22 years of experience in planning. Abramson started in the planning office this week.

“I don’t have a crystal ball, so I don’t know if I need more of a planner or an inspector, but I do have Columbia Pulp standing over me,” Lyonnais said. “My biggest need is to replace a planner, and I’m pretty lucky and very excited that I found somebody experienced, somebody local and somebody who could start that soon.”

Columbia Pulp is in the planning office or on the phone with Lyonnais just about every day, he said. His office needs to be ready to go as soon as the pulp mill owners request their building permit.

Lyonnais has also started advertising for a full-time building inspector. Besides its unincorporated areas, the county has expanded its inspection area to include not only Waitsburg and Dayton, which has been in place for years, but also Garfield County now.

Phinney did all of Garfield County’s wind turbine inspections, Lyonnais said, and he built such a good rapport with them that when their own building inspector quit suddenly in December, they asked Columbia County to do all of their inspections.

“It’s not a big workload, but it could be,” Lyonnais said. “They still have turbine sites that could go.”

Columbia County has more potential wind turbine sites as well. And with Columbia Pulp coming into the county, Lyonnais feels strongly that it’s just a matter of time and our lives will change as we know them.

“I call them brush fires,” he said. Developers are watching and waiting, according to Lyonnais. “Economic developers look at 180 jobs, oh my. That’s not the impact. That’s not the one I’m looking at. Every job creates two and a half jobs.”

Every person that moves into the area for a job at the pulp mill needs a grocery store, a laundromat, a gas station, a hardware store and other amenities.

“I mean maybe because we’re rural and we have a Dingle’s-type atmosphere where multiple outfits locate in one building, maybe we’ll only get two new jobs, but two times 180 means we’re talking 400 jobs potentially. It’s not going to be the day they open up, but we’ll feel it. We’ll feel it right away.”

Commissioners have already approved a fourth person in the planning office, but Lyonnais is hesitant to hire for that position until the pulp plant moves forward officially. And the office has many other projects in the works, including a three-county shoreline master plan, updates to other county plans, and even a pending remodel of the county planning office itself.

The planning commission meets the second and fourth Mondays of the month at 5:30 p.m. in the county planning office at 114 S. 2nd St.

 

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