📢 Cascadia Voices 07/18/26

Judging by the crop of multi-hued 18-by-24-inch signs popping up in yards and along roadsides, election season is here. You’ve got choices to make ahead of the Aug. 4 primary and again for the Nov. 3 general election. Cascadia Daily News, of course, is gearing up to provide campaign and election coverage useful to readers and voters; as we prepare, we need your help to know what you want asked of candidates for elected offices.

As we have since 2022, CDN is employing Citizens Agenda for its election coverage, a process that invites readers to identify the issues they deem most important for our elected representatives to address. We’ve outlined here how you can participate. Suggest your questions before Aug. 3, then vote for your top five.

Crowdsourcing these questions helps avoid the unhelpful and empty talking points and weasel words that candidates and their campaigns often hide behind, and puts candidates on notice that voters are paying attention.

We’ll put those questions to candidates and publish their responses as part of our Voter Guide in October. As always, the Citizens Agenda and all of CDN’s election coverage — as part of our commitment to representative democracy — are available at no charge, beyond our paywall.

For more information about Citizens Agenda, go to cascadiadaily.com/citizens-agenda.

Adam Wright, an associate professor of economics and director of the Center for Economic and Financial Education at Western Washington University, notes that the issues of artificial intelligence, affordability and economic resilience are related and need to be addressed in that fashion.

“These challenges cannot be addressed by one sector acting alone. Technology experts understand what AI systems can do. Employers understand the pressures facing their industries. Economists can clarify incentives, tradeoffs and likely consequences. Public officials must consider consumer protection, infrastructure, fiscal capacity, and the distribution of costs and benefits,” he writes in his July 12 CDN guest commentary. “What Washington often lacks is a setting in which these perspectives can inform one another.”

Representatives of those sectors, along with state and local government officials, will meet later this month at the University of Washington-Bothell for a roundtable discussion. Wright hopes for a constructive exchange: “Washington does not need another conversation built around predictions that AI will either solve every problem or destroy every job. It needs informed discussion about evidence, tradeoffs and practical choices.”

Matt Bryant’s coordination of Trash Club, a project of The Hub Community Bike Shop that organizes volunteers to patrol Whatcom Creek to the downtown corridor and collect trash and waste, has provided him with a clear view of those who struggle with homelessness and rely on that and other areas for unsanctioned camping. In a July 15 CDN guest commentary, Bryant writes that their volunteer service is helping to limit an environmental crisis, but it’s a stop-gap measure that is nearing a breaking point if the city and others don’t do more to address some basic needs:

“The underlying cause remains completely unaddressed: Our city offers no sanctioned, low-barrier outdoor spaces. According to the Whatcom County Snapshot on Homelessness, our unsheltered population was 337 individuals in 2025, with 68% in Bellingham. … The city is also moving forward with an enforcement and abatement plan to sweep the King Mountain encampment in the near future. While the conditions there are a safety concern, estimates suggest several hundred people currently live in that camp.”

Bryant urges residents to sign a petition calling on city officials to establish a managed, low-barrier, and sanctioned outdoor site before any city action at King Mountain. But even then, work will remain, Bryant writes: “A sanctioned site is not a substitute for permanent housing; it is emergency public health and environmental harm-reduction infrastructure.”

I crossed the street using one of the push/flashing lights crosswalks and narrowly missed being hit as a car raced down the road, right before I stepped out to cross. Today marks the first time I’ve walked to work, but it’s hardly the first time I’ve had close calls like this. I can only imagine what could happen, and what certainly has happened, to pedestrians who walk on a daily basis.

I’m sure you’ve seen the plethora of yellow signs around recently, located near crosswalks like the one I crossed on Ohio Street. These signs belong to a grass-roots organization by the name of Safe Streets Bellingham, which has several proposed plans on how to make our streets safer for pedestrians, bikers, and tourists, including what they call “quick-build projects,” adapted from plans the city has already made but has not yet implemented (CDN, June 28, 2026).

It’s clear that Bellinghamsters are tired of drivers who drive at unsafe speeds, ignore crosswalks and who use the bike lanes as if they’re extensions of vehicles’ right of way; which they are not.
I implore you to read this proposal and take it as seriously as you would if you, or someone you love, relied on walking or biking through Bellingham every day.

Casey Walker
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.

Area residents had their chance last weekend to pick up a memento, a hunk of the now-crumbled Bellingham Rock that, until recently, was a landmark along northbound Interstate 5. The boulder, removed for construction, was broken up, with pieces passed out to folks at Civic Field in Bellingham last weekend. Cost to taxpayers for removal and rock crushing: More than $650,000.

You make the call (127 votes total):

See you at the movies: Fitting that one of humanity’s oldest stories, Homer’s “Odyssey,” is generating excitement among movie-goers this weekend. (Also note that Pickford Film Center’s Pickford on Grand marks its first anniversary Aug. 1, as CDN’s Cocoa Laney reports.) In a New York Times guest essay, Darren Walker, a production company chief executive, remarks on the return of Generation Z to concerts, sporting events, comedy shows, gaming nights, running clubs and movie theaters, taking time to look up from their screens. He writes: “We human beings remain stubbornly, beautifully starving for one another. More surprising — and heartening — we are looking upward and outward, and returning to one another after being tethered for so long to our screens.” Boomers, and all others, take note.

Trust us on the sunscreen: KCRW’s radio show and podcast, “Question Everything,” investigates the “Sunscreen Paradox,” looking at a recent false claim prominent on social media that sunscreen, rather than preventing skin cancer, makes cancer more likely. The viral claim started this June with Nicholas Hulscher, known for his previous COVID-19 anti-vax claims, who misread and misquoted a United Kingdom study that reported a correlation — but not causation — between sunscreen use and skin cancer. Host Brian Reed talks with NewsGuard health editor John Gregory about the dangers of quoting medical studies without reading for comprehension.

Beautiful Math: With the World Cup final between Argentina and Spain set for Sunday, New York Times’ science writer Siobhan Roberts takes a mathematical — and fascinating — look at the geometrical symmetry of soccer balls. And for those who’ll say, “Well, it’s a ball, of course it’s symmetrical,” you need to look a little closer at the shapes that piece together soccer balls. The classic soccer ball, used in the 1970 and 1974 World Cups, Roberts explains, uses 12 black pentagons surrounded by 20 white hexagons, an assemblage called a “truncated icosahedron.” The soccer ball for this World Cup, however, is a variant, with its own symmetries, called a spherical tetrahedron that uses wave-shaped triangles to represent the three host countries of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Why the focus on symmetry? Roberts quotes Hannes Schaefke, football innovation lead for Adidas, which designed the classic soccer ball pattern, dubbed Telstar: “One of the most important challenges in ball design is achieving symmetry. … The mathematics behind football design starts with a simple question: How can points be distributed as evenly as possible across a sphere?” Too much math? Maybe, but it’s why that ball looks so good when it’s gobbled up in the back of the net or in the outstretched hands of the goalie.