A $500,000 gift: That’s the additional funding city hall has approved to provide the Pendleton Chamber of Commerce to promote tourism for the next two years. Though they are not requiring the chamber to develop any statistical parameters to evaluate the success or failure of their “Pendleton Comes Alive” program, they’ve been assured that this investment will bring thousands of tourists to downtown Pendleton for the free music, spending millions on food, drink and motels. I expect most will be local or from as far away as Helix, Pilot Rock, Athena and Weston.

Evidently, organizers are unaware the local area will be saturated with music events, especially in Walla Walla, a city our officials have idolized for years with their award-winning downtown area. If you’ve been there lately, you can see it’s evident that they take a lot of pride in the professional construction and attention to detail in designing those numerous parklets. I wished I could say the same about ours. That philosophy of “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right” seems to be missing.

The steady stream of rhetoric emanating from city hall for years that the city just doesn’t have adequate resources to maintain our infrastructure and more revenue is needed has resulted in the adoption of a “‘utility” fee and several attempts at instituting a gas tax. So how is it even possible that city hall can suddenly agree to fund this new program? Free money is what they call it. It’s actually a part of the millions of dollars the city has received from the federal government referred to as the “American Rescue Plan” funded by your federal income taxes.

Many cities are experiencing the same infrastructure problems with which Pendleton continues to struggle. The powers that be have given cities great latitude on how they spend those “Rescue” funds. Many have elected to use those for much-needed repairs on and upgrading infrastructure. Our city officials won’t commit.

The Convention Center manager, for instance, has been forced to seek outside sources for funding the renovation of their bar/lounge/concession area while city hall sits back flush with cash. That facility alone has been a major focal point for drawing in revenue for local businesses year-around, not one or two weeks.

You just have to ask yourself why our city officials prefer raising taxes and fees rather than use resources currently available to maintain our infrastructure.

Rick Rohde

Pendleton