Tri-Cities can open and Hanford is saved. Not such a bad 4th of July | Editorial

Tri-Citians had a lot to celebrate on our Independence Day holiday — even more than many may have expected.

On Thursday afternoon, just before the long Fourth of July weekend, the community received two important announcements on the Tri-Cities economy.

For starters, we were freed from a full COVID-19 lockdown.

This is the news people probably welcomed the most. Gov. Jay Inslee agreed to allow Benton and Franklin counties to move to a modified Phase 1, which means businesses can slowly get going again with restrictions.

It’s a small step, but it means a lot.

The key, however, is that more Tri-Citians must mask up.

The governor met with Tri-City elected officials and business leaders Tuesday at Columbia Basin College. In spite of getting heckled by detractors, Inslee told the media he was encouraged that community leaders want to require citizens to wear masks in public, which is our best tool to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

With that Tri-City pledge, he has agreed to let Benton and Franklin counties officially move out of complete lockdown. Although the number of COVID-19 cases have been climbing in recent weeks, if everyone does their part and wears a mask, we believe those numbers will start to drop.

And the quicker they drop, the quicker Tri-City businesses will recover.

Fewer cases also should lead to fewer deaths from the virus and more available ICU beds in our hospitals, which definitely would be something to celebrate.

Hanford Budget

Other good news came this week from Washington, D.C.

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., recently discovered that Hanford money and hundreds of Tri-City jobs were in jeopardy. It was a stressful fight, but she managed to help save the nuclear site’s cleanup budget

The threat to Hanford was quietly hatched behind closed doors, and tucked in to the nation’s defense spending bill.

The Senate Armed Services Committee inserted language into the bill that would take the Hanford budget away from Department of Energy control and give it to the Department of Defense.

That would mean a military agency would be in charge of nuclear weapons, nuclear waste cleanup and research at the nation’s national laboratories — including the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.

The idea is unsettling.

DOE provides civilian oversight, which is more reassuring than allowing the Defense Department to manage the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

In addition, about $2.5 billion a year is being spent at the Hanford site to clean up radioactive and other hazardous waste left from the past production of plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program from World War II through the Cold War.

If DOD officials took hold of the Hanford nuclear site budget, the concern is that cleanup money would be diverted to military priorities.

Fortunately, just before the holiday weekend, the Senate approved an amendment co-sponsored by Cantwell that ensures the Secretary of Energy retains final authority over DOE budget requests.

Cantwell said in a speech on the Senate floor that, “No one’s going to be surprised that the National Defense Authorization Act might include something that had not gotten the light of day shone on it, but I’m here to say to my colleagues, what’s in this act is really egregious, and we need to correct it before we continue to move forward. …This is a total jam by DOD neutering the Department of Energy on more — almost half its budget.”

Less money spent at Hanford means fewer jobs. Compounded with the economic suffering from the COVID-19 stay-home order, this would have had catastrophic consequences in the community had Cantwell not brought the DOD plan to light.

Earlier, we thought this year’s Fourth of July would be disappointing because the coronavirus forced the community to cancel the fireworks shows. But with good news for businesses and Hanford, this weekend turned out brighter than expected.

This story was originally published July 5, 2020 at 5:00 AM.