Coulee Clem is not an outlaw

The four-town community has long had a tradition of deciding to use common resources to help in a communal spring cleaning, sprucing the community up and lifting spirits after a long winter.

Back in the day, the effort even had a mascot cartoon character named Coulee Clem, who encouraged everyone to get out the brooms and rakes.

That community spirit led to the decision to encourage that behavior with a free dump day for yard waste at the Delano Landfill, now a transfer station.

That’s not a “gifting of public funds,” as some pencil pushers want to call it, it’s just public policy made by elected leaders who have the right to decide what’s good the for the community.

That’s not how the mayors of the four towns saw it after a county official in Ephrata said it would be tantamount to the dreaded gifting label. But spending local city resources is not a county decision, it’s local. And local leaders could decide to keep the tradition alive, if they wanted to.

But maybe they’d rather just kill off quaint old Coulee Clem.

Scott Hunter

editor and publisher