Cottage Ave residents ask Cashmere to make Halloween safer for trick-or-treaters

CASHMERE — For Diana Turner, Halloween on Cottage Avenue is one of the joys of living there. She and Delia Cooper came to the Cashmere City Council on Sept. 28 with a request: Find a way to keep the celebration fun while making the street safer for children.

Turner said her household hands out as many as 2,000 pieces of candy each year. After 18 years of watching families visit the neighborhood, she has seen children grow up and return with children of their own. She has also watched cars travel through the crowds of trick-or-treaters.

“We’re scared to death some kid’s going to get killed on that street,” Turner told the council. “We don’t want to stop the kids, because it is the joy of our year too.”

Turner and Cooper asked the city to consider closing Cottage Avenue to traffic during the busiest hours of Halloween, perhaps from 5 to 8 p.m. This year, Oct. 31 falls on a Saturday. They described children crossing between parked cars and drivers who may not see them in the dark.

“It’s a madhouse,” Cooper said. “It’s a fun madhouse, but it’s a madhouse.”

Mayor Jim Fletcher said closing the street would require a detour, potentially sending drivers onto narrower residential streets where children would also be walking. Operations Director Steve Croci said crossing guards might be a better option if the city could find enough people to cover the intersections.

Council members discussed several possibilities, including crossing guards, a detour and ways to discourage drivers from entering Cottage Avenue from the highway. Matt Tait, who joined the meeting by Zoom, suggested asking Cashmere High School football players to help at crossings. He offered to ask his son, the team’s captain, whether players would volunteer.

The council voted to direct city staff to come up with a change to the current traffic arrangement for Halloween. The motion left the choice of crossing guards, a street closure or another approach to staff. No specific closure or detour was approved at the meeting, but Mayor Fletcher assured Ward Media that some form of traffic mitigation would be coming for the holiday.

Turner said the goal is to preserve the tradition that draws so many families to Cottage Avenue.

“We just want it to be safe,” she said.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media