Yakama Nation Review

Yakama Nation Review Tribal Newspaper, based in Toppen*sh Washington.

10/01/2025

Youth football thriving in Wapato

WAPATO, Wash.- The Wapato Jr. Wolves 5th grade football team hosted Ellensburg on Saturday, Sept. 27 at the Dan Doornink Field at Wapato High School.
Jr. Wolves 5th grade coach Alex Olney shared why football is a positive outlet for the youth of the Yakama Nation community.

Look for the full story in the October 9th issue of the Yakama Nation Review.

09/25/2025

Wildcats race in Apple Ridge Run

YAKIMA, Wash. – The Apple Ridge Run for high schools was held Sept. 20.
The run consists of three heats for cross-country runners on different 3-mile courses of the race.
Toppen*sh’s Mari Arreola-George finished in 9th place with a time of 21:39. Her Wildcat teammates Octavia John ran the course in 22:21 to place 15th, Shayiya Tarula ran a 22:40, Julianna Calvillo ran a 23:36 and Valeria Godinez posted a 25:44 time.
For the Wildcat boys, Ian Mitchell ran the course in 18:22, Jesus Romero in 18:20, Audon Clark in 18:38, Isaiah Rios in 19:11 and Damien Ochoa in 19:31.
The Apple Ridge Run hosts school competing in 2A, 3A and 4A classes.

09/25/2025

Streamflow restoration projects to receive $40 million in funding

LACEY, Wash. – There’s up to $40 million available funding for projects aimed at improving streamflows in Washington State.
A state ecology release said that the Streamflow Restoration Competitive Grants Program funds are available through streamflow restoration competitive grants. The application process has begun for the 2026 competitive grant cycle and Ecology will start taking applications until January 15
Potential project applicants are encouraged to attend workshops, schedule pre-application meetings and start working on applications. The application period will close March 17.
Funding guidelines have been updated and published and are available now. The changes include updated scoring criteria to reflect lessons learned as well as new and emerging priorities. Those eligible to receive Streamflow Restoration Competitive Grants include Tribal governments, public entities and non-profit organizations. The grants can fund a range of water supply projects focused on improving streamflows, with priority points awarded to projects that:
A. re identified in an adopted watershed plan or rulemaking process that was completed to meet the requirements of Streamflow Restoration Law
Actively manage water to provide quantitative improvements to streamflows that will benefit instream resources
Benefit native fish or aquatic species of concern
Benefit ESA threatened or endangered salmonids
Benefit overburdened communities or vulnerable populations
To support potential applicants as they prepare their project ideas, Ecology will offer virtual applicant workshops November 4 this year and January 22, 2026. These workshops will be designed to provide potential applicants information on the funding opportunity, including funding guidelines, eligibility requirements, application requirements and how projects will be evaluated.
The November workshop will be recorded and posted on our streamflow restoration grants webpage. Preapplication meetings will also be available and remain the forum for discussing specific applicant needs.

Rip City Hoops at Celilo Village By Ronnie WashinesYakama Nation Review CELILO VILLAGE – The Portland Trailblazers Rip C...
09/25/2025

Rip City Hoops at Celilo Village

By Ronnie Washines
Yakama Nation Review

CELILO VILLAGE – The Portland Trailblazers Rip City Hoops put Celilo Village on their youth basketball clinic schedule Sept. 18.
The Rally Program offers a “safe and fun environment for youth to learn basketball within a respectful and supportive setting.”
The Celilo visit was held on the Celilo Village Mini Pitch Court, which can host basketball and small-scale soccer. The court was installed and dedicated last December.
The day session was open to youth 6-16 years old and about 20 showed to get special Rip City Rally t-shirts and other memorabilia.
The Hoops program had four youth coaches, including Trailblazers Youth Basketball Coach Nick Cortese.
“This is great. We personally love going out and engaging and having fun with the youth,” he said. “We bring the Motor City to them.”
The hoops camp is one of the joint efforts of the Trailblazers and the Yakama Nation, said Yakama Tribal Council Executive Board member, Jeremy Takala.
“We have an ongoing collaboration with the Trailblazers,” he said, “We have growing partnerships like this and this for Columbia River youth to get positively involved.”Cortese said there are 35 people involved with the effort of Rip City Hoops. One of them is Michelle Jalali, the Sr. Director, Strategic Impact Initiatives and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
“It’s an incredible partnership to work with tribes in the region,” she said. “Partners like the Yakama Nation that make it all possible in bringing people together.”
The day’s experience won over the student athletes who took part in the camp.
“I like it a lot,” said 12-year-old Temi Meninick. “There was some nice competition and the coaches did a great job.”
She’s a 7th grader at St. Joseph Marquette in Yakima and says she’s also in track and cross-country.
“I play in basketball tournaments with the Young Warriors,” she said. “We’ve won first and second places at them.”
The work it took to build the Mini Patch Court is a good investment, according to Celilo Village resident, Gina Meanus.
“The kids really enjoy it. It’s one of the things our grandkids are into – basketball,” she said. “They have their own little tournaments and things on it.”
The Trailblazers and the Yakama Nation acknowledged Celilo resident and elder, Karen Jim Whitford by presenting her with some gifts.
“It’s an emotional thing,” she said. “We love our children in this village, and this is good. They have a place to play, and they need to take care of it.”

09/25/2025

Lakota Music Project to take program on tour this fall

By Molly Wetsch
South Dakota News Watch

There are very few places in the world where one can listen to a violin and a cello played alongside a Lakota drum and singers.
In October, the Lakota Music Project will travel South Dakota for its Shared Vision Tour and give communities across the state a chance to hear just that.
The Lakota Music Project, an initiative of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, began as a “conviction” of Delta David Gier, music director of the symphony. Just six months after he started that role in 2004, he began to think about the community that the symphony served. When he first started reaching out to Lakota musicians, he was met with skepticism.
“It was surprising, but it was my first lesson in learning how to listen,” Gier told News Watch. “Barry LeBeau, who was working with United Sioux Tribes in Pierre, said, ‘You’re crazy, but I’d like to try to help you.’”
Gier eventually started conversations with Lakota musicians across the state with the help of LeBeau. That led him to Melvin Young Bear, of the New Porcupine Singers, a drumming group from the Pine Ridge reservation.
It would be four years after that meeting that the orchestra and the singers would play a single note on a stage together.
“There was a pivotal moment of a snowy evening in March in Pine Ridge. It must’ve been about 2007 and it was our principal string quartet, our principal woodwind quintet and the New Porcupine Singers,” Gier said. “It was really awkward like, ‘What are we doing here?’ But we just started playing music for each other. Then (Young Bear) said, ‘Our hope is that we will pass on this tradition to the next generation.’ I said ‘Bingo. That’s exactly what we do, too.’”

First tour in 2009

Now, the Lakota Music Project has been performing new programs since the inaugural tour in 2009, which saw performances on the Pine Ridge, Santee Sioux and Rosebud reservations.
The model, a concert split into two parts with individual performances from both groups followed by collaborative performances, has remained largely unchanged. The Creekside Singers, from the Pine Ridge reservation, now work in collaboration with the orchestra.
Emmanuel Black Bear, current drum keeper of the Creekside Singers, has been involved with the Lakota Music Project since its inception. He told News Watch that much of the work the group does is on building understanding alongside rehearsing and performing music.
“If we focus solely on our differences, we will probably never get along. So we have to focus on our similarities and how we make this work and how we do it in a positive way,” Black Bear said. “We’ve been doing this for so many years that a lot of us have become good friends with each other. We have that trust between us, so we’re able to come together with music.”
And there are plenty of differences between traditional Lakota music and traditional symphonic music.

Differences in the music

Orchestras typically play with sheet music, and Lakota musicians typically do not. The way that a piece begins will vary greatly between the two groups, with orchestras starting on the same note every time and Lakota singers following the lead of the drum keeper.
Gier said the project has been successful not only in its national prominence – the project has played at the Museum of the American Indian in Washington and for lawmakers in Pierre – but in how it has connected two musical communities in the state, which for most of history have never interacted with one another.
“There’s been a lot of tears in rehearsals, not out of frustration but out of joy. You see how hard we’re working to fuse these two traditions together to create something beautiful that people will be able to understand and come away with a sense of possibility,” Gier said.
This year, Derek Bermel, a composer from New York, is premiering work with the tour.
Bermel has worked in music composition alongside a variety of cultures, from West Africa to Belgium. His work with the Lakota Music Project was the first time composing music from a Native American perspective.
“I wanted the musicians in the Creekside Singers to feel comfortable. As long as I was focused on them feeling comfortable, I felt that the audience would also feel comfortable,” Bermel told News Watch.
“I heard this very powerful sound and I recognized that they were great melody writers. They were brilliant melodists, and that was the core. They produced these melodies that were like iron. They were solid. They were perfectly constructed. Like a tree trunk, they couldn’t be broken.”
He worked alongside the Creekside Singers and the symphony to write orchestral accompaniments and notate music that the singers gifted to the project.
“You keep trying to get closer to something that’s inevitable, which is this shared space between these two cultures musically,” Bermel said. “The most important thing was to understand the way they think about their music from a structural perspective.”

Reaching underserved communities

The program’s tour will take the music to six locations in South Dakota, three of which are on reservations: Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wagner Community School on the Yankton Indian Reservation and Lakota Tech High School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
The tour begins Oct. 13 at the Crazy Horse Memorial in the southern Black Hills and move east through the week, ending Oct. 18 at the LSS Multi-Cultural Center in Sioux Falls.
The concerts are free to attend, which is essential to reaching all members of the community, Gier said.
The performances at schools will be particularly meaningful to Black Bear, whose role as drum keeper requires that he not only protect the sacred drum but the tradition of Lakota music itself. He frequently works with youth programs to pass on critical cultural skills and ideals.
“When we talk about preservation of cultures, preservation isn’t the recording of things. It’s the teaching on. If we teach on, we’re preserving our culture, our language,” Black Bear said.
While the tour will primarily make its way through many Native communities across the state, Black Bear said that the goal – to connect communities across cultures – remains the same no matter who’s in the audience.
“If my people can see the message, we’ve done it,” Black Bear said. “If non-Native people can see the message or hear the message, we’ve also accomplished what we’re setting out to do.”

This story was originally published by South Dakota News Watch and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

09/25/2025

‘Hoop for Hope’ tourney scheduled

TOPPENISH, Wash. – A Hoop for Hope open basketball tournament will be held in honor of Candice Eyle in the Toppen*sh Community Center Oct. 10-12.
Divisions include brackets for adult co-ed and for a men’s tourney. There’s an 8-player team limit and the entry fee is $300 per team - $100 deposit saves a spot. Awards include first through third places, all-stars, MVPs, Mr. and Mrs. Hustle.
Call Arlita Eyle, (509) 985-3640 for details.

09/25/2025

GRID IRON REVIEW

Wapato in win, Wapsheli leads Toppen*sh, YNTS grinding it out

By Ryan Craig
KYNR News

TOPPENISH, Wash. – The Wapato High School football team picked up their first win of the season. Playing on their home Dan Doornink Field Sept. 12, the Wolfpack (1-1) defeated Wahluke (0-2) 12-9.
Wapato played at Zillah Sept. 19 and came up short to the Leopards 41-13.
Wolf scoring included Kyson Bass on a 15-yard touchdown pass from QB Beau Donahoe. Wapato got its other score on a 50-yard pass interception TD by Jacob Bobb.
The Wolves will host the Quincy Jackrabbits on Sept. 26 and travel to play College Place Oct. 3.
Zillah will host Royal in a SCAC showdown Sept. 26.
The Toppen*sh Wildcats fought hard but came up short at Prosser Sept. 12. The CWAC showdown saw the Mustangs come out on top 13-3.
The following week, Toppen*sh dominated Quincy 50-6 at Bob Winters Field at Wildcat Stadium.
Wildcat Lyle Wapsheli threw for 213 yards and three touchdowns in his first start following an injury to Jason Sanchez. He also carried four times for 27 yards.
Toppen*sh (2-1) travels to Ellensburg Sept. 26 and play at Selah Oct. 3.
The White Swan Cougars are still looking to score their first touchdown of the year.
On the road Sept. 12, White Swan was shut out by Morton-White Pass 51-0.
The Cougars faced a tough Tri-Cities Prep team Sept. 19 in White Swan and were defeated 54-0.
The Cougars showed improvement and were able to move the ball but couldn’t put any points on the board.
They travel to Cle Elum/Roslyn Sept. 26 and be back at home Oct. 3 to face league opponent Kittitas.
The Granger Spartans beat Highland Sept. 13 in Granger by a score of 30-7.
The following Saturday, Sept. 20, the Spartans traveled to play a non-league contest at Liberty-Spangle. Granger was shutout 18-0 in that game.
Granger travels to Pasco to play Tri-Cities Prep Sept. 26 and will play at Wahluke Oct. 2.
The Yakama Nation Tribal School Xwyama traveled to Moses Lake Sept. 12. YNTS faced Moses Lake Christian Academy/Covenant Christian.
“The big step we took as a team was moving the ball and being able to score on a drive,” said YNTS Head Coach Corwin Adams. “After the game, the big smiles on their faces was very much needed. They felt like they won the game.”
The Xwyama were defeated 55-8 at Moses Lake Christian, but first-year head coach Adams said his staff believes there are positive things to build on from the loss.
“The major thing that we are trying to get them to realize is that they can compete with anyone when they just believe in themselves and believe in the team,” he said.
YNTS travels to DeSales in Walla Walla Sept. 26 and will play another road game Oct. 3 at Sunnyside Christian.
YNTS’ first home game will be Oct. 10 versus Mabton. It will be Xwyama’s homecoming game.

09/25/2025

COMMON SENSE

Climate resilience won’t save us – but Indigenous Peoples’ sovereignty might

“Funding across U.S. agencies still overwhelmingly emphasizes “resilience” and “adaptation” while sidelining Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge.”

By Lala Forrest, MD

I’m tired of being called – and hearing the term – resilient.
I am waẁá acúmmááwi, an original inhabitant of the lands now commonly referred to as northeastern California. My people have been called resilient after genocide, relocation, poverty, and grief. The word is meant to be a compliment – but these days, it feels more like a dismissal.
“Resilience” has become a buzzword – celebrated in climate plans, public health programs, and mental health grants. But in Indian Country, resilience is not what we need more of. The word now praises us for surviving trauma while ignoring the systems that caused it: colonialism, environmental racism, disinvestment, extractive economies, and violence.
The burden to recover is placed on those most harmed, while the structures that created the harm remain intact. Survival and adaptation should not be the measure of success. Justice should.
Too often, resilience language justifies underinvestment: They’re tough. They’ll survive.’ That same logic fuels chronic underfunding of IHS, inadequate mental health care, and climate policies that prioritize survival strategies instead of systemic change. Indian Country doesn’t need more resilience. We need repair, equity, and sovereignty.
On climate, especially, there is a better way.
A growing body of evidence supports Indigenous land return and custodianship. A recent report on the State of Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ (IPLC) Lands found that 91 percent of lands owned and governed by IPLCs – regardless of legal status – are in good or moderate ecological condition. IPLC lands also contain 36 percent of the globe’s Key Biodiversity Areas. This is not coincidence – it’s the result of Indigenous guardianship rooted in relational, spiritual, and ecological responsibility.
Indigenous peoples are on the frontlines of climate advocacy and conservation. This frontline role often comes at great cost: in 2019, 40 percent of those killed defending the environment were Indigenous. Yet their resistance has real impact. Fossil fuel resistance blocks high-emission projects, land defense prevents deforestation and emissions, traditional fire practices reduce catastrophic wildfire risk and promote biodiversity, and the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ sovereignty enables adaptation strategies rooted in deep ecological knowledge, restoring ecosystems through regenerative practices.
Yet despite recent investments, funding across U.S. agencies still overwhelmingly emphasizes “resilience” and “adaptation” while sidelining Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge. Federal climate–health investments – across NIH, CDC, EPA, and HHS – remain framed around ‘resilience,’ yet this emphasis sidelines Tribal governance and Indigenous custodianship, reducing climate justice to endurance rather than sovereignty.
Urban planning discussions often focus on how Indigenous communities can build their resilience to environmental threats like flooding – but rarely ask how historical displacement, neglect, and infrastructure inequity created that vulnerability in the first place. That’s not just inaccurate – it’s dangerous. When resilience becomes the goal, we lose urgency to transform the systems that cause harm. We stop asking harder questions: who benefits from the way things are? Who continues to profit off Indigenous land while promoting the very ‘resilience’ demanded of those surviving on its margins?
To move toward true climate justice, we must restore Indigenous land and governance rights as foundational to climate solutions, not as charity or inclusion, but as reparative justice and ecological necessity. We must invest in Indigenous data sovereignty, including tools like the Native Land Information System, to strengthen environmental protections and redistribute decision-making power. And we must resource grassroots movements like the Indigenous Environmental Network and NDN Collective, not only to defend sacred lands but to enable long-term systems change rooted in relational, place-based knowledge.
What Indigenous communities offer is far more powerful than resilience. We offer worldviews rooted in ecological harmony, which stem from accountability to land, people, and spirit. Our responses to trauma are not about bouncing back – they are about re-rooting in who we are. As President of the Native Village of Paimiut Estelle Thomson tells us, “As long as we’re able to continue to practice our traditions, tell our stories, we will always have the basic building blocks to maintain the culture and to continue to grow it.”

Dr. Forrest is a psychiatrist in training at Yale University, a Climate and Health Equity Fellow at the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, and a member of the Pit River Tribe, and a descendant of the Modoc and Wintu Tribes. Their work focuses on Indigenous mental health, climate justice, and the decolonization of psychiatric practice. They are committed to amplifying Indigenous knowledge as essential to collective healing and planetary survival.

09/25/2025

CALM PROSE

Why erasing Native stories from our parks and public lands hurts all Americans

By Levi Rickert

The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail spans nine states and traces thousands of miles across both land and water routes.
In 1838 and 1839, more than 16,000 Cherokee men, women and children were forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland in the southern Appalachian Mountains. They were first confined in stockades and internment camps, then compelled to walk hundreds of miles to Indian Territory – what is now Oklahoma. The forced migration, marked by extreme hardship, led to widespread illness, desertion and the deaths of thousands of Native people.
The history isn’t pretty, but it is factual. It is not simply Native American history – it is American history.
The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail was established to preserve this tragic chapter in American history, honoring the routes taken and protecting the sites that commemorate the Cherokees’ forced migration.
Some of the markings that tell the history of the Trail of Tears may be at risk because of Executive Order 14253, signed by President Donald Trump on March 27, 2025. The executive order – titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” – is a sweeping policy aimed at removing what the administration calls “disparaging” or “divisive” signs, plaques, and markers on federal lands, including national parks and public monuments. Couched in language about “highlighting the beauty of the American landscape,” it’s part of the administration’s broad political attempt to sanitize U.S. history for a new generation.
For Cherokee Nation Principal Chuck Hoskin, Jr., this executive order is not about truth.
Hoskin explained that if federal officials follow the executive order’s requirements to identify sites that portray the United States negatively, the Trail of Tears would qualify – given that it involves the government rounding up people into stockades and forcing them on a deadly march across the country.
“If you take their dictate to its logical conclusion, then we can’t talk about the Trail of Tears. And that’s just wrong,” Chief Hoskin told me on Thursday in Washington, D.C.
Hoskin called the potential impact “a disservice” and believes tribal leaders need to engage directly with the Trump administration. He thinks federal officials would listen if tribes explained how the directive could result in one of the darkest chapters of American history getting pushed aside or whitewashed.
“I think they’ll say, ‘You know what? We didn’t intend for that to happen,’” Hoskin said. “We have to speak out when we can.”
What Chief Hoskin is referring to is tribal consultation. I hope there will be tribal consultation on this issue so that tribes can have their say about the federal government whitewashing history.
Many of the stories told on signs, markers, and plaques across this country are already incomplete. Most parks barely scratch the surface when it comes to telling the full story of Native presence on this land. Where our stories do appear – on interpretive panels at massacre sites, in exhibits recounting broken treaties, or on plaques explaining the displacement of our ancestors – they are the result of long, hard fights by tribal nations, historians, and allies demanding a sliver of justice through public memory.
Now, even those hard-won stories are under threat.
This executive order is a political act. It claims to promote “unity,” but it does so by denying hard truths. It promotes “patriotism,” but by silencing voices that challenge the mythology of American exceptionalism. It says it wants to “restore history,” but what it really aims to do is rewrite it – again – in the image of the colonizer.
We’ve seen this tactic before. In the boarding schools that tried to “kill the Indian and save the man.” In the textbooks that described Native peoples as “vanished.” In the maps that renamed our rivers, our hills, our homelands. This is not new. But it is dangerous.
When you remove the sign that tells the story of the Trail of Tears from a national park, what are you doing? You are not promoting unity – you are covering up a forced death march.
When you edit a plaque to downplay a massacre at Sand Creek or Wounded Knee, you are not healing – you are erasing. You are telling future generations that Native pain does not matter, that Native survival is an inconvenient footnote and that Native memory can be negotiated.
As a tribal citizen and a journalist, I’ve walked the lands where signs now stand – faint attempts to acknowledge the blood spilled, the lives lost, the cultures shattered. These markers are not perfect. But they are needed. They say: “We were here.” They say: “This happened.” They say: “Remember.”
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, under orders from the White House, has already begun reviewing park signage deemed too “negative.” Rangers have been told to report anything that paints “Americans past or present” in a bad light. But who decides what is negative? And more importantly – whose America are we talking about?
For Native peoples, America has always been a paradox. A land we love – and a government that has tried to erase us from it. We are Americans, yes. But we are also sovereign peoples. And our history – our true history – cannot be edited away for the comfort of tourists or politicians.
Hoskin is correct: tribal consultation is required before any sign should be taken down.
America deserves the truth.
Thayék gde nwéndëmen – we are all related.

Levi “Calm Before the Storm” Rickert (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation) is the founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online. Rickert was awarded Best Column 2021 Native Media Award for the print/online category by the Native American Journalists Association. He serves on the advisory board of the Multicultural Media Correspondents Association. He can be reached at [email protected].

09/25/2025

Yakama Nation
Holiday Observances

The holidays for fiscal year 2026 (Oct. 1, 2025 to Sept. 30, 2026) will be observed pursuant to Yakama Nation Personnel Policy Manual 4.1 (Holiday Leave).

Monday, October 13, 2025 – Tiin Ma Mu Lkwii (Indigenous People) Day
Tuesday, November 11, 2025 – Veteran’s Day
Thursday, November 27 – Thanksgiving Day
Friday, November 28, 2025 – Native American Heritage Day
Thursday, December 25, 2025 – Christmas Day
Thursday, January 1, 2026 – New Year’s Day
Monday, January 19, 2026 – Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Monday, February 16, 2026 – President’s Day
Monday, May 25, 2026 – Memorial Day
Tuesday, June 9, 2026 – Yakama Treaty Day
Friday, June 19, 2026 – Juneteenth
Friday, July 3, 2026 – Independence Day (observed)
Monday, September 7, 2026 – Labor Day
Thursday, September 10, 2026 Hope for Life Day
Friday, September 25, 2026 – Native American Day

09/25/2025

Workers at Richland national lab laid off

By Annette Cary
Tri-City Herald

Workers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory were seen being escorted off the lab’s Richland campus with their belongings on Sept. 18.
Battelle, which holds a Department of Energy contract to operate the national lab, confirmed that it had involuntary layoffs this past week. It called the number of layoffs “limited,” but declined to give a specific number.
Battelle said in a Sept. 17 statement, that it recently eliminated some vacant positions and offered a voluntary separation option to some staff.
“Unfortunately, the necessary number of volunteers was not achieved, so Battelle has made the difficult decision to move forward with a limited number of involuntary separations,” Battelle said.
Furloughs also have been reported at the national lab.
In August, workers were told that Battelle was preparing for job reductions in certain research programs due to uncertainty in the federal budget.
Shortly after that it announced it planned to eliminate 40 vacant positions at PNNL. It also asked for volunteers for layoffs for 90 people, primarily looking for employees in support positions that are paid for with overhead funds.
Friday, Sept. 12, was their last day of work if their application for a voluntary layoff was approved, according to information in a memo sent to staff.
The lab also announced in August that it is reducing medical benefits for retirees to save $4 million a year.

PNNL and Tri-Cities economy

PNNL employs about 6,400 workers, the majority of them based at its Richland campus, and it is the Tri-Cities’ single largest employer.
It had an annual payroll of $706 million as of 2023.
Together PNNL and DOE’s Hanford nuclear site adjacent to Richland, which contracts work to multiple companies, employ about 19,000 people.
The Tri-City Development Council says that the two DOE projects account for 12% to 13% of the jobs in Benton and Franklin counties but about 25% of the income.
The layoffs have not reached the level that requires Battelle to report them to the state.
In Washington state employers are required to report layoffs to the Employment Security Department if at least 500 people are laid off within 30 days or a third of a workforce of at least 150 people is laid off.
As volunteers for layoffs in the first round were ending their employment, a new memo was distributed to workers in PNNL’s program countering weapons of mass destruction for the Department of Homeland Security and its global material security and high-performance research reactor programs for the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Some of the work now being done at the Richland lab was not expected to continue into fiscal ‘26, which starts Oct. 1, the memo said.
Workers in those programs were given a week to consider applying for a voluntary layoff.
Some employees in those programs may also be furloughed.
In the voluntary layoffs in August, workers were offered a week of pay for each year of continuous employment, up to 20 weeks total.

Outlook for PNNL

PNNL leadership appeared to be more upbeat last week about the lab’s financial situation and future than they were in the spring.
In June, Steven Ashby, the laboratory director, told workers at a staff meeting that PNNL could lose 1,100 employees due to federal budget cuts proposed by President Trump for the fiscal year that starts next month, according to a member of the group Friends of PNNL who heard the talk.
Of particular concern were two programs that provide research money to PNNL – the DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program and Biological and Environmental Research program, which includes research in atmospheric science.
On Sept. 17, Ashby sent a letter to PNNL staff saying that over the past several months several actions, including job cuts, had been taken to “rightsize operations and position the laboratory for the future.”
Some of those actions are still in progress, but “our overall situation is firming up,” he said. “In general, we are gaining greater clarity on future funding, and it is looking better.”
The memo pointed out that the current fiscal year had nearrecord funding for the lab. That should help carry the lab into the spring, while the nation waits for Congress to pass a budget for fiscal‘26. A budget is not expected to be approved by Oct. 1, when fiscal ‘26 starts.

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