Washington State Department of Commerce

Capping more than three years of work, the Clark County councilors this week adopted a plan that will guide growth in Clark County over the next twenty years.

The more than four hundred page comprehensive growth management plan final update now goes to the Washington State Department of Commerce.

On Tuesday, October 13th, the council adopted Ordinance 2026-10-01 reflecting their decisions on the plan update.

The county will issue a notice of adoption of the comprehensive plan update on October 23rd, which kicks off the sixty-day appeal period.

Happened to coincide with the public facing questions and a whistleblower by the name of Cory Orvold, who had come out and started to expose some potential self-dealing going on within the organization.

Now this has to do with the community reinvestment program and funds that come from the Washington State Department of Commerce, taxpayer funds, that go to Tacoma Urban League and some other organizations that then provide grants or funding for low-interest loans to pay off student debt, all kinds of things like that, to disadvantaged communities of color.

Now, the funds are administered, as I mentioned, by Commerce.

Initially, it amounted to 200 million taxpayer dollars for the first, um, years of administering this program.

Um, the idea being some of these communities have been perpetually harmed by, you know, policies of the past, racially discriminatory policies of the past, and they said the war on drugs was another reason that some of these communities kinda just needed a little bit of extra help and a hand up to maybe become a first-time home buyer when they otherwise might not, you know, have the money to save up, uh, um, get a down payment on, uh, on a home.

But what I had uncovered is that one of the organizations that Desiree had founded, the Tacoma Black Fund, received $1.6 million And that was money that was supposed to be allocated to community, but what it was was that community members that wanted access to that money had to pay $400 to join the Tacoma Black Fund and another $50 to also join the Tacoma Urban League.

And so, um, didn't seem fair to me that, you know, it was taxpayer money, but unfortunately, that's what happened, and there were a lot of people that got the money that were closely tied to the Tacoma Urban League.

Um, as the way that Commerce set it out was that...

[laughs] Bravo.

404 Media reports that the man dressed as Doom is actually Clifford Cawthorn, a policy advisor for the Washington State Department of Commerce and a member of the local activist group Community, Not Cameras.

The group is pushing back against Seattle's use of surveillance systems from companies like Flock and Axon.

Cawthorn told 404 Media he got the idea to dress as Dr. Doom after seeing another activist dressed as Darth Vader at a San Diego City Council meeting last month.