📢 Cascadia Voices 07/12/26

If you’ve been downtown during the last three weeks for any of the World Cup games, you’ve likely been in earshot of the cheers of celebration, the “ohhs” of near-goals and the low rumble of happy fans at the city’s various beer gardens, watering holes and watch parties.

It’s an infectious vibe that has drawn in even those who never considered themselves soccer fans, and it’s an encouraging counterpoint to recent reports regarding business closures and retail vacancies.

Special events and summer festivals are great for drawing foot traffic, but the Downtown Bellingham Partnership is hoping to build on those opportunities with additional efforts, write DBP officials Linda Payne Johnstone and Jenny Hagemann in a guest commentary this week (CDN, July 10, 2026). The pair write about two recent programs: the Railroad Avenue District Bites, which gathered multiple eateries to create a self-guided food tour, paired with a block party, music and more; and the Local Lunch Break, which earlier this spring had downtown restaurants partnering to promote their offerings through social media, a dining guide and a gift-card giveaway.

The idea is, rather than struggling alone to keep a business running, to encourage those businesses to work together to get customers downtown. And it’s working. They write: “What continues to stand out is the willingness of businesses, partners and public agencies to collaborate. Downtown success is never the result of a single program or organization. It happens when people align around shared goals and invest in the bigger picture, creating stronger public spaces, a more resilient economy, and a downtown that reflects community values.”

CDN is pleased to share guest commentaries by readers of all ages, including two pairs of Fairhaven Middle School students, each addressing their general concerns for the environment and the habitat for salmon, orca and wildlife up and down the food web.

Veda Falter Jones and Feya Lodis inform readers (CDN, July 5, 2026) that what we put into stormwater is what ends up in the water that salmon swim in. “When the salmon don’t have clean water to swim in, it takes a toll on their population. This is not good for any of the rest of the ecosystem due to salmon being a keystone species in our area,” they write.

One idea for reducing that impact: Take your car to a car wash, rather than allowing detergents and oils from washing cars at home to go down the storm drain. Even if a car wash costs more, there’s still a cost to washing at home.

Brigitta Ellsworth and Greta Jung recount the struggling population of Southern Resident orcas and the roundup, capture and sale of whales to aquariums that occurred in Salish Sea waters in the 1970s (CDN, July 8, 2026). Those hunts have ended, they note, but killer whales still face difficulties in their habitat from pollution and noise: “The noise from ferries and boats scares off the killer whales and makes them leave their natural habitat and home. Orcas aren't the only thing the boats scare away; fish are also impacted by the noise, so they move away from it or hide, but when the orcas' main source of food disappears, it is extremely hard to find food and can lead to starvation and death.”

They conclude: “The orcas are important to everyone, land and sea alike. We have a connection and culture with killer whales.”

Having worked in law enforcement records management for 38 years in two different states before retiring, I had the good fortune to observe changes in attitudes regarding public records disclosure, as well as the application of the law over time as society and technological changes occurred (there were no drones or body cameras or dash cams in 1978!).

I would only ask that you point out two things in your work: first, the important distinction that the Public Records Act is also a privacy protection act. Not every word of every public record may be disclosed. Cases in point include juvenile records, health and medical records, tax records, personnel records, and any record in which a person specifically requests that their information be exempt from disclosure, or a case in which such disclosure would endanger a person.

And second, to their great credit, the Washington Courts have consistently ruled the Records Act is to be applied and interpreted liberally and broadly in favor of disclosure.

I would also point out that the Records Act can be unfortunately used as a means to harass government agencies by making purposefully irrelevant records demands that tie up personnel time and resources. I myself once devoted 10 months to one such records request, providing to the letter the requirements of the Records Act, thanks to excellent training I received to do my job.

Finally, I regret to say that some states are nowhere near as accommodating as Washington state when it comes to public records disclosure. Some go out of their way to make records disclosure difficult, if not impossible. Keep up the good work.

Linda Wolf
Bellingham

Read more letters to the editor here.

Submit a letter to the editor (250 words max) or guest commentary (500–800 words) online at cascadiadaily.com/submissions.

Just hours before the U.S. men’s team’s World Cup match against Belgium on Monday, July 6, U.S. star Folarin Balogun saw an earlier red-card suspension lifted by FIFA, a decision that might have been influenced by a call to FIFA officials by President Donald Trump, as CDN’s World Cup reporter Elliott Almond reported (CDN, July 6, 2026), leading to considerable controversy over the initial red card, FIFA's change of heart and Trump's intervention.

Bad cop: Supporters of community journalism will want to give last week’s episode of “On the Media” a listen. The public radio show and podcast rebroadcast an episode from KCRW’s “Question Everything” with its host Brian Reed on the August 2023 police raid of a small-town weekly newspaper’s offices and its mother-and-son owners' and editors' home in Kansas. Police seized records, computers and phones from the Marion County Record, related to the newspaper’s past and pending coverage. Reed’s report recounts what led to the raids and the controversy's outcomes, including the admission from the county sheriff that the raids were illegal and pending criminal charges against the city’s former police chief.

More bad cops: Hanna Rosin, host for Radio Atlantic, The Atlantic magazine’s podcast, prompted by the latest Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting in Houston, discusses with Atlantic staff writer Quinta Jurecic that shooting, along with the earlier shootings by federal immigration agents in Minnesota of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. As with Good, ICE is defending Tuesday’s shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by claiming he “weaponized” his vehicle against ICE agents. Jurecic also discusses acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s failure to properly investigate the Good and Pretti shootings, noting Blanche has a Senate confirmation hearing this week that could put him under increased scrutiny.

Goooooooooooooal! If you’re intrigued by how quickly more Americans have found excitement in “football” — what we used to call soccer — you might empathize with Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid as he traces his own evolution in sports fandom from dislike of the collective ritual to a better understanding of its social connections. “The success of the American team in the World Cup was the success of all Americans. And its defeat was our defeat. We could forget, briefly, that we are a nation divided by party or candidate. Like religion, sports are an arena of life where we bracket our normal ways of being and enter another mode of belonging. The ‘spiritual’ high we experience is temporary, but it’s something we can remember and return to.”