Electric City pathway proposed

Electric City is starting a process that could lead to the building of a pedestrian pathway along SR-155, using hotel/motel tax money.

Council members have long hinted that the city would like to do a major tourism project using some $280,000 held in its hotel/motel reserve fund.

Councilman Brad Parrish talked about the project at Tuesday night’s council meeting.

The proposed pathway would go from Coulee Playland to the Causeway and connect with all three firms that develop hotel/motel tax monies, Sunbanks Resort, Skydeck Motel and Coulee Playland, and allow visitors to the area a safe and designed pathway so they could become more mobile when visiting Electric City.

A pedestrian path has long been an aspired project for the area, but no one had come up with any kind of plan to get there.

Earlier in the day Parrish had indicated that perhaps moorage at Coulee Playland could be part of the project. He didn’t bring this up at the meeting because of a meeting next week he has with Bureau of Reclamation officials in Ephrata. The moorage component would allow visitors the opportunity of mooring their boats so they could return several times during the summer and not have to pull their boats back and forth from their homes.

Electric City leases Coulee Playland from the Bureau of Reclamation and sub-leases it to Hal Rauch.

The council’s hotel/motel tax committee, John Nordine and Marie Chuinard, who had held out for the city using the reserve fund for a major local project, got some help from Parrish who started development of the plan in conjunction with an improvement project that he hopes the Bureau of Reclamation will make at Coulee Playland. That project would restore an area along CP’s shoreline that has washed away several campsites from wave action on Banks Lake.

Parrish had been working on the project idea for several months and started talking about it publicly Tuesday night.

Chamber officials were at the meeting Tuesday night and indicated they were opposed to the Parrish project and made a proposal Tuesday night requesting additional funding for this year.

The council had earlier earmarked some $13,500 to the chamber for advertising in 2015.

Chamber officials have felt strongly that the hotel/motel tax money the city has been sitting on should be released for advertising purposes and at an earlier meeting had shown the council how successful the Chamber’s advertising had been in attracting tourists.

In its “Scope of Work” report, part of Parrish’s efforts, the council would have public meetings to get the input of local citizens and that would possibly lead to the design of the pathway project and maybe later construction.

Parrish noted in material presented to council members that he would like to see a committee formed to help provide guidance.

Parrish stated that the idea is just that, an idea and a lot of details would have to be worked out.

A lengthy discussion followed on how the city’s hotel/motel money was set up for distribution with several council members leaning towards taking another look at a tourism board that would handle distribution of funds.

The newspaper’s deadline prevented a full report of the evening meeting, but it will be covered in next week’s paper.