RITZVILLE – The race for the Ritzville City Council consists of two candidates, Michelle Plumb and Eric Ottmar. Plumb responded to a set of five questions presented as follows.

Q: What are two challenges do you see for the city of Ritzville and what would you like to do about them? 

A: The ability to communicate quickly with residents when needed is still sorely lacking. The city has use of the CodeRed notification system through the county that pushes text or email notifications in real time. Staff made a big push to get contact info for residents who were interested, a test alert was made, and then it just...fell by the wayside. I'd say the city is 95% of the way there, so figuring out what the final hurdle is and working through that will be a big win for residents. It will also help address the break in continuity we experienced during a recent fire.   

The new police chief is settling in and examining ways the city can get creative with hiring for the police department. Council is open to his solutions, which will hopefully see us back to adequate staffing levels in the police department - a concern on a good portion of the citizens' minds. 

Q: In what ways has the city grown in the last 10 years and what do you plan to do to help continue that growth? 

A: Ritzville has grown in literal size...in both geographical area and number of residents during my time on council. The council as a whole has done some great work making sure our infrastructure can handle some added growth with the new well and recent work completed on a sewer lift station. The focus now switches to ensuring that our potential sewer bottlenecks get fixed before the growth overwhelms them. We've taken a harder look at our system development charges after hearing feedback from developers and we are setting ourselves up to be able to mitigate added traffic from development via the Traffic Impact Fee we've put together. The rest is up to their imagination!  

Q: What are the plans for infrastructure within the city? Where would you like to make a push for the city to start making some improvements? 

A: There are some projected bottlenecking areas in our sewer infrastructure that will need to be addressed before growth is really allowed to take off in the I-90 area. We've recently updated our General Sewer Plan, which includes some paths for us to pursue for funding those projects. It's with Ecology for review at the moment, but the council was given the summary chapter and made aware of the decisions ahead of us.  

Streets are also infrastructure, and I've pushed for the city to pursue creating a Transportation Benefit District with the 0.1% (council-approved) added sales tax to start some consistent funding for things like Transportation Improvement Board (TIB) match funds or regular maintenance. The timeline is looking like we will have that in place to start a full year of collection in 2026. 

Q: Do you plan on pushing for more events within the city and if so what are the plans for that and if not then why? 

A: Events tend to come from citizens with a vision, and we have supported all of the events that want to give it a go through the hotel/motel (110) funding requests. There are a couple of well-attended weekends that events tend to center around and so far, the council tends to give the green light to those. Our 110 review process may be changing to a committee review rather than full council, so it will be exciting to see what direction they want to see those funded events go in. We do have to remember that our volunteer pool is relatively small and if the same people are asked to continually give their time, volunteer burnout can put a kibosh on things rather quickly. So "pushing" for more events is not something we do lightly. 

Q: What is something that you would like to start having the city push for as the capital of the county? 

A: Ritzville seems to be positioned to be a great meeting area, but the information about what agencies or groups can rent and for how much is not centralized anywhere that I've found. It currently involves hunting down a contact number and reaching out, hoping they're still the person in charge of the space. This task could easily fall under either chamber or Adams County Development Council's umbrella, but whichever entity tackles it will likely help bring in visitors.   

The Columbia Basin Herald has reached out to Eric Ottmar, Plumb’s opponent in the race, but received no response.