ent • 2015
Fall Home Improvem dlightHerald.com
www.TillamookHea
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HOLIDAY EDITION 2023 FAMILY OWNED BUSINESSES SHOPPING LOCAL & EVENTS INSIDE
23 Holiday Edition 20
d Businesses Family Owne l & Events Shopping Loca
Inside: Jetty Store, pg18-19
• Barview op, pg16 • Beach Bakesh Print & Ship, pg3 • Beach Beagle pg8 • Brittney Bakes, • Cannon Beach rce, pg9 Chamber of Comme Kitchen, pg12-13 • Country Squire pg6 Dance Center, • Oregon Coast Living Senior e Prestig • Five Rivers, pg7 pg10 Lilies, • Sesame + • The Fern, pg15
2023 Celebrate ays the Holid t Highlights Special Even
Weekend Thanksgiving through Weekend New Year’s Day Pages 4-5
Citizen North Coast
d Headlight Heral
North Coast
Citizen Serving North Tillamook County since 1996
NORTHCOASTCITIZEN.COM
NOVEMBER 30, 2023
$1.50 VOLUME 30, NO. 24
Manzanita council updated on city hall work WILL CHAPPELL Citizen Editor
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anzanita City Manager Leila Aman and the project team working on a new city hall project presented a detailed update on recent work to the city council at a meeting on November 15. After the council approved moving into the second stage of the project in June, much of the work completed in the last five months took place behind the scenes but the project is now nearing the end of the design phase. There has been a slight increase in the projected budget since the last update in June, but a financing source has been secured and the project is set to move into construction next year. Design The meeting started with Aman and Chris Keane, from Bearing Architecture, telling the council about progress made on the design of the project. In February, after hazardous material studies revealed a high cost of remediating asbestos and
mold concerns in the Quonset hut and disused school building at Underhill Plaza, the council voted to demolish the buildings in favor of new construction. In June, they approved a scheme for the design that would site the combined city hall and police station in one corner of the site, at the corner of Classic and Manzanita Avenues. Since then, the team was forced to rethink placing the police station and city hall facilities in the same building after a geotechnical report showed that it would greatly increase the cost of foundation construction. The police station is being designed to serve as the emergency operations center for the city and must be built to a risk category IV specification. That means the structure must be capable of withstanding a maximum Cascadia subduction zone earthquake. Keane said that more detailed geotechnical reports completed since June showed that achieving that resiliency would require boring foundation pilings 60 feet through sand and loose dirt into bedrock.
The cost of doing so for the combined building would be prohibitive with the project’s budget, as would designing a two-foundation schematic for one building, so the team recommended separating the functions between two buildings. Councilors said that they appreciated the reasons for the separation and gave a consensus on moving forward with the plan. The police station will be slightly to the north of the city hall building with a covered pergola connecting the two. The plan still shows the building with a cedar exterior to match with community feedback indicating that it would fit better with the town’s aesthetic, though the team found that vertical siding was a significantly cheaper alternative to the initially envisioned shingles. Councilors asked about the lack of feedback on recent project developments and Aman said that the team had relied on the extensive feedback gathered at town halls and online in 2022 to inform their decisions. She also said that once the land use approval process has been completed, hopefully
Olson talks commissionership, life, county fairs
WILL CHAPPELL Citizen Editor
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oug Olson was selected in October by Tillamook County Commissioners Mary Faith Bell and Erin Skaar to complete the final year of Commissioner David Yamamoto’s term following his retirement at the end of this year. Olson recently sat down with the Headlight Herald to discuss his background, philosophy as an appointed commissioner and plans for after his tenure, among other subjects. Olson said that he will not bring an agenda to the office and instead rely on his judgment to address issues that come up. “I don’t have an agenda that says I’m going to introduce this or I want to do that, I want to change this or modify that, I don’t have that,” Olson said. “I will deal with whatever comes along and use my background and experience to say, ‘well, this sounds great to me,’ or, ‘have you thought about this?’ or, ‘this doesn’t make sense to
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me.’” Olson brings a breadth of experience to the position after a long life working in both the private and public sector, owning small businesses and volunteering and winning election to the boards of numerous charitable and civic organizations across the county. Olson was born in Hood River, and experienced a childhood beset by difficulties, with his father dying when Olson was four and his mother passing when he was 11. His grandparents took him in for several years before their own infirmity forced them into an assisted living when he was a sophomore in high school. Three different families in the Mormon community took him in for a year apiece during his final high school years. “That’s probably why I’m so darned independent, I’ve quite literally been on my own for a very long time,” Olson said. After graduating high school, Henson worked his way through college, starting at Pacific University in Forest Grove, before finishing his studies at Portland State University, graduating with a business degree and a minor in journalism in 1970. Olson started his professional career working for Montgomery Ward in their catalogue house in Portland, managing a department that handled catalogue distribution for, among other things, women’s undergarments. A promotion took Olson and his family to Chicago for several years, but the Pacific Northwesterner found that the cold winters, snow and long commutes didn’t agree with him and started looking to return to the region.
A job with May Department Stores in downtown Portland fit the bill, but the 70-hour work weeks also began to wear thin for Olson, whose three young kids were starting to play sports, and he again looked for a new job. The listing for the newly created contracting officer position with the Evergreen School District in Vancouver, Washington, caught Olson’s eye and he applied and worked for the district for several years. While in that position, Olson had his first exposure to public servants who were enthusiastic about their jobs and found purpose in them. “I found that I really enjoyed it because the people there, the teachers and administrators, had a different outlook on life,” Olson said. “It wasn’t all about the bottom line and the dollar, although you’re mindful of your budgets but they wanted to educate the kids and it was a calling.” Olson gained experience working with state legislators and other government entities and contractors in the role with Evergreen School District and in 1984 moved on to become the contracting officer for Washington County. There, he helped to write contracting rules for the county, finance bonds for and build a new county headquarters in downtown Hillsboro and began forming relationships with legislators in Salem. In 1992, Olson’s second wife, Patty, received an early retirement buy out from the United States Postal Service. The couple decided to take advantage of the stability provided by her pension to sell several investment properties they owned and make a major lifestyle change by becoming ownerSEE OLSON PAGE A3
The latest design for the new city hall and police station project, showing two separate buildings at Underhill Plaza. in December, the team plans to do more engagement to gather citizens’ feedback on the designs. Budget Aman then transitioned into a discussion of updated budget projections for the project. Since June, the total projected budget of the project has increased from
$5.79 to $6 million dollars. The increase in budget came primarily from a $500,000 increase in the project’s hard costs. The bulk of that increase came from the recent, planned transfer of $319,000 from the city’s budget to the project budget to pay for impending remediation and demolition work on the existing buildings. Consequently, those funds
were removed from the city’s projected contributions on the balance sheet to the hard costs line item. Aman told the council that the remediation work is expected to begin sometime in the weeks after Thanksgiving. The geotechnical reports’ results and upward revisions to estimates of constructing the police station’s foundation were the other SEE CITY HALL WORK PAGE A6
USACE preparing for south jetty repair
The view of the south jetty from the grassy area where stones will be weighed and stationed before their final transport and installation on the jetty. WILL CHAPPELL Citizen Editor
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embers of the United States Army Corps of Engineers are preparing to offer technical assistance during the twoyear, $52.7-million repair of Tillamook Bay’s south jetty by Trade West Construction Company. Project Manager Matt Craig and Project Engineer Colter Bennett recently gave the Headlight Herald an exclusive tour of the project site and discussed the project and its impacts on recreation at Bayocean Peninsula Park. Craig and Bennett said that the purpose of the repair project is to reinforce the root section of the jetty near the shore and repair around 490 feet at the jetty’s end, which will include the addition of a new 150-foot head. They said that the project’s goal is to restore the jetty’s functionality and that it will not have a significant impact on the navigability of the bar, stressing that those improvements could only be accomplished by dredging.
The repair project is being funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was passed with support from Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and Representative Kurt Schraeder in 2022. The total award for the project was for $62 million, with around $10 million allocated for design and oversight costs by the corps and the remaining $52.7 million going towards the construction contract with Trade West Construction Company. Preparatory work at the site is set to begin in the coming months to lay the groundwork for major work to begin once adverse weather passes in the spring. Stones weighing up to 40 tons and seven to eight feet in diameter will be transported to Kincheloe Point on barges, where they will be offloaded at a temporary staging area. From there, they will be loaded into large transport trucks and transported around a mile to a second staging area at the beach near the root of the jetty.
At that staging area, they will be weighed to determine their value for reimbursement to the supplier before being taken for placement on the jetty. The repairs near the root will utilize relatively smaller stones, while the largest will be used further out. Repairs to the trunk of the jetty will add around 340 feet of stone and a bull-nose shaped head at the end. The head will be significantly taller than the rest of the jetty at 40 feet as compared to 18 and help to prevent erosion pulling the jetty back. Once the project is complete, the jetty will be around 7900 feet in length, although there will still be a section of around 500-feet submerged after engineers determined the shorter length was sufficient to achieve the jetty’s purpose. Bennett said that the repair is expected to move the location of the large sand bar that forms at the mouth of the bay to the new endpoint of the jetty, but that the repair SEE SOUTH JETTY PAGE A2