The Reflector

The Reflector Like The Reflector newspaper to keep up on news, and join the conversation, on all things North Clark County.

The Reflector newspaper began in 1909 in Ridgefield by founder Kelley Loe. The first issue was printed on Oct. 8, 1909, and consisted of eight pages. The Reflector went through seven more owners until it was purchased by Marvin and Anne Case in 1980. Marvin worked as owner, publisher, and editor of The Reflector for 30 years, and also wrote numerous stories. Marvin became very well-known in the No

rth Clark County community. The Reflector was bought by Lafromboise Communications. 11 years later it was purchased by Chad and Coralee Taylor owners of C T Publishing LLC., based in Centralia, Washington. The Reflector is currently a weekly newspaper that comes out every Wednesday. We cover North Clark County and a part of South Cowlitz County, including the communities of Battle Ground, Woodland, La Center, Ridgefield, Yacolt, and other small North County communities. The Reflector currently has a circulation of about 28,000.

"Amidst evidence of signature gatherers being harassed, Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown is offering his sup...
06/23/2026

"Amidst evidence of signature gatherers being harassed, Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown is offering his support to prosecute those trying to interfere with the initiative and referendum process. This is a refreshing and much-needed defense of the people’s sacred constitutional rights and the rule of law.

This comes after the most recent incident on June 9th when a man stole a sheet of signatures and drove off in his truck as signature gatherers for an initiative congregated outside of a Safeway in South Hill. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated event. There has been an ongoing problem, as there were arrests in 2025 for similar abuses. There have been continued reports of threats, harassment, and tearing up and stealing signature sheets.

As Attorney General Brown says in a letter to the 39 county prosecutors and more than 250 municipal attorneys:

“The people’s right to legislate is a foundational piece of our governmental structure and political culture. Washington was one of the first states in the country to enshrine in our Constitution the initiative and referenda processes, which secure our citizens’ right to propose new laws and vote on whether to approve or reject laws enacted by the Legislature. For over 100 years, Washingtonians have been able to propose initiatives and referenda by gathering sufficient signatures of registered voters to place these measures on the ballot in a general election.”'

Amidst evidence of signature gatherers being harassed, Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown is offering his support to prosecute those trying to interfere with the initiative and referendum …

While taxpayers help out by subsidizing homeless services, some have asked whether that support creates a magnet effect....
06/23/2026

While taxpayers help out by subsidizing homeless services, some have asked whether that support creates a magnet effect.

The Spokane City Council reviewed the region’s 2026 Point-in-Time Count earlier this week. The report suggests homelessness declined for the third year in a row, with 1,738 individuals recorded in January, and that 75% of them had lived in Spokane County before their most recent episode of homelessness.

“Overwhelmingly, yes, they did, 75% of them were from here,” Amanda Maritnez, a data analyst with the city’s Community, Housing and Human Services Department, told the council on Monday. “We did have 35 [individuals] that were from Idaho, and most of them were specifically from northern Idaho.”

According to the data, about 64.8% of respondents answered the question of whether they lived in the county before this episode of homelessness. Of the 1,127 people who answered, 75.6% said they lived in the county, 13.5% came from outside of Washington state, and 10.1% from other parts of the state.

As taxpayers question whether they’re subsidizing individuals who first became homeless before or after moving to Spokane, regional data suggests most lived there before their most recent episode …

Reproductive health clinics use Title X federal grant money to provide birth control, cancer screenings and testing and ...
06/23/2026

Reproductive health clinics use Title X federal grant money to provide birth control, cancer screenings and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections to people with little or no health insurance. Title X money cannot be used for abortions.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that Title X, which was signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970, has prevented almost 20 million unintended pregnancies and 9 million abortions. It has also helped reduce child poverty, according to the group, which supports abortion rights.

But President Donald Trump has taken aim at the program, which has long been a target for abortion opponents. Since regaining the White House, Trump has temporarily blocked and then restored grants to certain reproductive health clinics, and proposed a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services budget with no funding for the program.

A federal poverty-fighting program focused on reducing unintended pregnancies is about to undergo a major overhaul. Reproductive health clinics use Title X federal grant money to provide birth …

School districts contribute funds to the risk pool instead of paying for traditional liability insurance. Those dollars ...
06/23/2026

School districts contribute funds to the risk pool instead of paying for traditional liability insurance. Those dollars are pooled to pay for settlements or costly claims against individual districts, keeping rates more manageable for all.

The main driver of the jump in rates? A sudden increase in the cost of sexual abuse claims brought against districts.

In the last few years, the legal landscape has shifted in Washington for victims of sexual abuse in schools. Changes to statute of limitation laws in recent years have resulted in districts seeing claims from 20 or 30 years ago. A 2020 Supreme Court case also affirmed that school districts are strictly liable for the actions of their employees, even if they were not aware of the harm.

In mid-May, as Washington school districts were deep into developing their budgets for the next academic year, around 130 received notices that their rates for the Washington Schools Risk Management …

Elnahal’s comments came during a press conference that followed reporting by InvestigateWest detailing crowded condition...
06/22/2026

Elnahal’s comments came during a press conference that followed reporting by InvestigateWest detailing crowded conditions in the hospital’s 30-year-old neonatal ICU, or NICU, and the university repeatedly delaying plans to build a new facility.

Those plans, which would add a new wing to the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital at the university’s Portland campus, were put on pause indefinitely in April 2025 due to the lack of funding to cover its $425 million price tag.

During the media briefing on Tuesday, Elnahal said that while he could not speak to decisions his predecessors made on the NICU project, he is committed to getting the project across the finish line as soon as they can do so “sustainably.”

“Our staff do not accept and should not accept unsafe care environments,” Elnahal said. “We are listening to our staff, we are listening to our faculty and we will do something about this.”

When he assumed his post in August, Elnahal was tasked with steering a financial turnaround of Oregon’s flagship health system and sole academic medical center, which for years had been operating in the red.

Oregon Health & Science University President Dr. Shereef Elnahal insisted this week that an expansion to its overcrowded neonatal intensive care unit will be a top priority in the …

The state superintendent and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have tried, unsuccessfully, to implement a policy like...
06/22/2026

The state superintendent and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have tried, unsuccessfully, to implement a policy like this for the past three years. A question now is whether Ferguson putting his political weight behind legislation will make a difference.

State Sen. Marko Liias, D-Edmonds, sponsored a bill this year to ban cellphones in schools. It was watered down to call for a study from the superintendent’s office, with a deadline to submit policy recommendations by December 2027.

Then, by 2030, the bill says, the Legislature will use that information to enable school districts “to implement a bell-to-bell cellphone policy that is tailored to the needs of their community.” School districts already have that ability, Liias pointed out.

“What we did this year was the — literally the bare minimum,” Liias said. “I’m excited that it helped catalyze attention to the issue and that now we’re hopefully poised to join, you know, dozens of states to go even further with evidence-based policy.”

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson made a splashy announcement earlier this month that he would back legislation to ban student cellphone use from the first bell of the day to the last in public …

The Listening to Mothers survey, conducted by the nonpartisan nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families, was...
06/22/2026

The Listening to Mothers survey, conducted by the nonpartisan nonprofit National Partnership for Women and Families, was released earlier this month. The partnership says the survey is the largest of its kind, and it’s the fourth time the organization has published this type of survey since 2002. The organization says its survey represents approximately 90% of the childbearing population, defined as those at least age 18 who gave birth in a U.S. hospital to a single baby whom they lived with.

The survey highlighted what it called “hard-won gains” in policy changes, such as the expansion of Medicaid coverage from 60 days to 12 months postpartum in all but one state, as well as expanded state paid leave programs and new investments in maternal health and perinatal quality. But it said those gains are threatened by hospital maternity units closing in many states, as well as deep cuts to Medicaid programs at the state and federal levels.

Report: Arkansas child well-being improves in some areas but lags behind overall

“While preventing catastrophic outcomes rightly commands attention, surviving childbirth is the floor and not the ceiling,” the survey said. “Extensive evidence shows that precious few childbearing families are getting the care and support they need to truly thrive.”

A survey of more than 3,800 people nationwide who gave birth in 2023 and 2024 found those using Medicaid described worse outcomes than those on private insurance, that access to care remains limited …

The National Science Foundation this month began dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative system, a system of sens...
06/20/2026

The National Science Foundation this month began dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative system, a system of sensors that provide data on ocean conditions.

The move was a part of a broader push by the Trump administration to cut climate science operations. But after an intense bipartisan response, the federal science agency said Thursday it would halt its plans and work to redeploy the instruments it had removed.

The National Science Foundation established the system in 2016 with plans to operate it for three decades. The system includes more than 900 instruments worth $386 million located along the coasts of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland used to track waves, wind and current data. The tools also track the ocean’s salinity and can detect early marine heatwaves and El Niño-related anomalies.

The Trump administration is backing off from its plans to remove a decade-old ocean monitoring system Oregonians rely on for fishing, recreation, science and emergency services. The National …

Meta urged the justices to declare a state law unconstitutional under the First Amendment to avert the $35 million penal...
06/20/2026

Meta urged the justices to declare a state law unconstitutional under the First Amendment to avert the $35 million penalty. The social media conglomerate repeatedly hadn’t provided required records for digital political advertisements hosted on its platforms.

The divided ruling is the latest development in the multi-year litigation that began during Gov. Bob Ferguson’s time as Washington’s attorney general. Washington first sued Meta over the issue in 2018, and the company agreed to pay about $200,000 in damages at that time.

Six justices sided with the state to uphold the campaign finance law, using different legal reasoning to make their conclusions.

The justices didn’t reach a consensus on whether the fine is excessive. Three agreed with it, three ruled it was calculated incorrectly and three others said it may have been determined correctly, but is still excessive.

Facebook’s parent company must pay the largest campaign finance fine in Washington state history, the state Supreme Court affirmed in a split decision Thursday. Meta urged the justices to …

In a memo to Gray, attorney Andrew Dunmire said “the Lieutenant Governor was likely not legally justified in her decisio...
06/20/2026

In a memo to Gray, attorney Andrew Dunmire said “the Lieutenant Governor was likely not legally justified in her decision to reject Mr. Sullivan’s declaration of candidacy.”

Dan J. Sullivan of Petersburg has the same first and last name as incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan.

The Alaska Republican Party filed two complaints against the Petersburg Sullivan, saying his candidacy was merely intended to confuse voters and he was not acting as a candidate in good faith.

Dahlstrom ultimately agreed with those complaints and disqualified Dan. J. Sullivan under a state regulation that forbids the Division of Elections from listing a candidate’s name “in a manner that is confusing or misleading to voters or compromises the fairness or neutrality of the ballot.”

An attorney advising the Alaska Legislature said Wednesday that Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom may have violated the U.S. Constitution when she disqualified Petersburg’s Daniel J. Sullivan from this …

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