Now I want to start by saying I understand that things get backed up — I do, I really do — and I am not unsympathetic to the idea that a government office might need to catch its breath once in a while. But the Yakima County Building Permits Office has decided that the way to fix permit delays is to be open fewer hours, and I am going to need someone to walk me through that math very slowly because I have been doing regular math my whole life and this does not add up. They are calling it a pilot program, which is what you call something when you want it to sound like science instead of what it actually is, which is closing on Fridays from now until June and hoping nobody notices — and the people who actually live here noticed, I want that on the record.
And another thing — this connects directly to something I wrote about just two weeks ago when I mentioned the wire fraud situation targeting people who were already going through the permitting process. Those folks were stressed, they were confused, they were getting phone calls from people pretending to be officials and asking for money transfers, and the reason that works — the reason that scam gets traction — is because the permitting process already feels like something you just have to survive rather than something designed to help you. You close the office on Fridays, you add another layer of mystery to the whole operation, and suddenly it is even harder for a regular person in Yakima to know what is real and what is not. I remember when my neighbor Harold — and I will not say more than that — went to pull a permit for an addition back in the late nineties and the woman at the counter knew his father's name and walked him through every single step. That is not an accident of history. That is what it looks like when an office is trying to serve the people who actually live here instead of managing its own workload.
Meanwhile — and I know this sounds like a different topic but stay with me — West Chestnut between 19th and Stanley has been closed all week for water line work and I only know that because I read it, which means I was lucky, which means everyone who drove into that closure on Tuesday morning at 7:01 was not lucky and had already had their day ruined before it started. We have talked about this. We have talked about this repeatedly in this very column. The notification situation in this city is not improving and I am starting to think that nobody is reading "Traicy's Corner" at the county courthouse, which is their loss honestly, and also a missed opportunity, because I have been very specific. You tell people before the road closes. You tell people before the office closes. You do not wait until someone is standing in front of a cone or a locked door on a Friday morning with a permit application in their hand and nowhere to go. That is not a pilot program. That is just Tuesday. Or Friday. Apparently Friday especially.
That's all for this week. You know where to find me.