Headlight Herald
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2023
TILLAMOOK, OREGON • WWW.TILLAMOOKHEADLIGHTHERALD.COM
VOL. 135, NO. 46 • $1.50
Tillamook Elks honor veterans
A group of Tillamook veterans gathered for a photo at a Veterans’ Day dinner hosted by the Tillamook Elks Lodge. STAFF REPORT
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group of around 100 veterans and their families gathered at the Tillamook Elks Lodge on November 11 to celebrate Veterans’ Day. The group enjoyed a
free dinner of country fried steak, mashed potatoes and green beans before several activities honoring those who have served. First, an Elk who had spent most of his career with Northrop Grumman shared a short, social media video of
the company’s B21 bomber during its inaugural flight earlier in the day. The Tillamook VFW’s Honor Guard presented the colors before the group said the pledge of allegiance and listened to a performance of the national anthem.
Contract awarded for south jetty repairs WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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contract was recently awarded to Trade West Construction Company for $62 million in repairs to the south jetty at the entrance to Tillamook Bay. The project is expected to begin next year and be completed in 2025 and will help to restore the channel providing entrance to Tillamook Bay, making access less hazardous. “We have put a lot of time and effort into this,” said Port of Garibaldi General Manager Mike Saindon, “so, for us to finally get this going and to be able to say that the contract is awarded and they’re on their way and the corps has the funding they need is huge for us.” The south jetty is one of a pair at the entrance to Tillamook Bay that are designed to create a selfscouring channel by focusing the flow of water between them. The north jetty was built in 1914 and the south jetty was constructed between 1969 and 1979. Over time, the constant battering of the Pacific Ocean takes its toll on the jetties and necessitates repair projects to maintain the jetties’ functionality. The first of these repairs occurred in 1931, when the Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for the jetties, reconstructed and extended the north jetty and most recently, the north jetty was again reconstructed in 2009 and 2010. However, the south jetty has never received a major rehabilitation and has been in a failing condition for several decades, with between 600 and 800 feet missing from its 8,000-foot length. The failure has led to shoaling between the jetties, which has in turn increased the surf zone, removing the defined channel the jetties were designed to create and increasing the hazard of navigating in and out of the bay.
health. A veteran from each branch of the armed services then set a cap at a table set in commemoration of service members missing in action. More than a dozen items donated by the Tillamook Creamery Association
were then given to veterans including water bottles, backpacks and sweatshirts, before the group joined in singing God Bless America and departed.
FTLAC commissioners accuse ODF of ‘disinformation campaign’
Saindon said that the current situation has led to the jetty only being navigable by vessels whose captains have extensive local knowledge and expertly time the crossing. The repair and restoration of the channel will allow fishing vessels from other ports to enter the harbor and unload their catch from the fertile fishing grounds off Tillamook’s coast at the Port of Garibaldi. “Restoring all this will allow more boats to come in here by making a good, safe channel,” Saindon said. After rehabilitation work was completed on the north jetty in 2010, focus shifted to securing funding for the repairs on the south jetty. With the support of Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden and Representatives Kurt Schraeder, $62 million was appropriated for the project in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2022. Work was supposed to begin this summer, but a legal challenge to the initially awarded contract for the project by a competing bidder delayed the process. With that issue resolved, the contract has now officially been awarded to Trade West Construction Company and preparatory work is set to begin shortly on a temporary material offload facility in the vicinity of Kincheloe Point on Bayocean Peninsula. The facility will serve as a staging area to receive and store the 25-to-50-ton stones that will be SEE JETTY REPAIRS PAGE A3
An Elks member then shared the history of the group’s support for the armed services dating back to World War I. Those efforts included a hospital constructed for veterans of that war, starting a long tradition of donations to supporting veterans’
The Tillamook VFW Honor Guard presenting the colors at the Veterans’ Day event.
WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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ensions flared at the November 3 meeting of the Forest Trust Lands Advisory Committee, as trust land county commissioners accused Oregon Department of Forestry Officials of withholding information from them and misleading the public about projected harvest levels. The recriminations came in the wake of a Headlight Herald article in which Tillamook District Forester Kate Skinner said she expected harvest levels in the Tillamook State Forest to remain steady for the next 30 years. “It feels in some sense like a bit of a disinformation campaign, so, that’s really difficult for us to move forward in,” said Tillamook County Commissioner Erin Skaar. “There’s a huge trust issue that has raised its ugly head once again.” The meeting began with Oregon Department of Forestry State Forests Division Chief Mike Wilson updating the committee on modeling being done as part of the development process of a new habitat conservation plan (HCP). After continued downward projections in harvest levels in successive drafts of the HCP over the past five years, matters came to a head at a board of forestry meeting in February. At that meeeting, Board Member Joe Justice proposed a motion to restart the entire plan development process that failed in a 4-3 vote. However, members who voted
against the motion said that further decreases to projected harvest levels might sway them to support a similar motion in the future and asked staff to prioritize higher harvest levels in the next round of modelling. Wilson told the Forest Trust Lands Advisory Committee (FTLAC) commissioners that staff at ODF were working on four models in response to that request. They model a non-declining, even-flow level of harvest, a longer harvest rotation, a net-present value prioritization that would allow larger harvests in the short term and a net-present value emphasis that allows for a non-declining, even flow. All those models incorporate the restraints required by the proposed HCP. Yield tables for the models have been completed but not shared outside ODF, while work on harvest scenarios is ongoing, according to Wilson. He said that ODF is hoping to reveal the numbers at an FTLAC meeting on either December 1 or December 8, ahead of a midDecember joint meeting with the board of forestry to discuss the projected harvest levels’ impact on the counties. After delaying a decision on the HCP at its June meeting, the board of forestry had planned to make a final decision on the plan at their December meeting, although that timeline appears likely to be delayed again by the late-arriving modeling results. Wilson was able to confirm that the yield tables were lower
than those in previous rounds of modeling, although he did not offer any further specifics on the magnitude of the decrease or which districts were impacted. Clatsop County Commissioner Courtney Bangs quickly took Wilson to task over the forthcoming numbers and what she characterized as a pattern of ODF promising larger harvests than were achieved. Bangs said she believed the harvest levels under the implementation plan that went into effect in July and that ODF officials say will closely track with those under the HCP, were still overly optimistic given her understanding of the plan’s restrictions. Skaar then weighed in, bringing a September Herald interview with Tillamook District Forester Kate Skinner to Wilson’s attention. In the interview, Skinner said, “What we’re seeing right now, what we did for the modeling for our current implementation plans moving forward is in the first 30 years of the 70-year window it will be very steady for Tillamook.” Skaar said that this assessment did not jibe with the data that had been provided to the counties that showed increases in inoperable land in the forests under the HCP, which she surmised would lead to lower harvest levels. Skaar wondered if ODF had two different models, one for staff and one for the counties, and said that the disconnect was causing constituents to question commissioners’ strong opposition to SEE ‘DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN’ PAGE A3
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