The Pullman City Council met on March 14 to discuss tourism, a new transportation group, water easements and a new logo for the city. 

In a follow up interview, City Administrator Mike Urban said that post-pandemic the tourism economy continues to recover and some football games last year were well attended, but overall tourism is not quite back to pre-pandemic levels. 

“Are we back to pre-pandemic? No, because I think there’s some folks that are still concerned with their health,” Urban said. “But is there optimism about? Absolutely. Do people want to get back together and start going to places? Yeah, they do. I see a lot of full restaurants on weekends around here. And that excites me from, you know, being a former family business owner myself.”

He said that the city did a strategic tourism plan with a consultant who found that tourism is an important and necessary part of the local economy and it is through the hotel and motel tax that allows Pullman to continue to promote tourism. 

The Pullman City Council worked to create a Transportation Benefit District at the meeting. The district is still in the process of being created, with the first meeting “ideally” at the end of June, Urban said. Once the district is established, funding will be discussed at a later date. 

There were a lot of complaints about Pullman streets, he said, so the city hired a consulting group to do a study on the streets, which validated that the streets need repairs.

“What the onus was is, we did a pavement study. [We] hired a consultant to go around town and take video and pictures of our pavement and grade it based on the national type system. Then, when that study was presented in July of 2021, it was kind of a moment where we looked at how we are going to fund these repairs,” Urban said. 

He said that the city is on the right track with repairs with the transportation benefit district, which will help the city be able to do street repairs at a level consistent with the need. 

At the council meeting, the Whitman County Humane Society renewed its contract with the Pullman Police Department. Urban said that the code enforcement officers who work with animal control issues are different from the sworn officers who do general policing. 

Code enforcement officers additionally deal with issues of nuisance ordinances, abandoned vehicles, driveway disturbances and trash removal, he said. Code enforcement officers do receive specialized training, but they do not carry weapons and do not have the same authority as sworn officers. 

The council accepted waterline easements at two locations, Columbia Bank and Lincoln Middle School. Scott Palmer, development engineer for the City of Pullman, said that the agreement was a formality. 

“The waterlines have already been constructed. So the easement was just a bit of paperwork that was lacking that we were finally able to get from Columbia Bank,” Palmer said. 

The waterline to Columbia Bank was already functional and the fire hydrant was already in service, he said, but legally the city did not have rights to access the property if something went wrong with the waterline and hydrant before the easement. 

Lincoln Middle School had a remodel and reconstruction which rerouted the waterline, Palmer said. The city released the school from the existing easement agreement for the old waterline and granted a new easement to maintain and operate the waterline on school district property. 

The council accepted a new city logo, but one council member, Eileen Macoll, objected to the logo.

“It was way too similar to a lot of other local logos that are being used locally by businesses here in this community. And I think that would create confusion. And if I was one of those businesses that had created a logo for myself, and then the city came along and came up with something very, very similar I’d be disappointed. Because it just all looks the same. It all blends together,” Macoll said. 

She said that while she recommended the design firm for the project, she ended up being surprised and disappointed with the finalized logo. There are no features of WSU on the logo, and Macoll said that WSU alumni would be disappointed in the logo and not recognize it as being symbolic of Pullman.