Headlight Herald
TUESDAY, JANUARY 9, 2024
TILLAMOOK, OREGON • WWW.TILLAMOOKHEADLIGHTHERALD.COM
VOL. 136, NO. 2 • $1.50
Second group receives TSD North Star Awards
North Star Award Winners (from left to right) Jenna Angelini, Rachel Affolter, Becky Chidester, Mary Oleman, Maddison Oleman, Colin Walker, Emely Legorreta, Amy Johnson, Dianna Smith, Tayler howard and Jenny Sheets. PHOTO BY JESSICA VALENCIA
WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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group of eleven teachers and staff members from the Tillamook School District was honored with North Star Awards at a
ceremony held on January 2, to kick off the new year and semester. Mentors across the district and teachers who had recently completed educational achievements were also honored at the
ceremony, as Superintendent Matt Ellis tries to promote a culture of positivity and recognition in the district. “We’re going to start off the new year with celebration,” Ellis said at the ceremony, noting that often
the New Year was a time of setting resolutions that focused on shortcomings in years past. The eleven honorees joined seven staff members who received the award during a ceremony in
October in being recognized for the positive impacts that teachers and staff have on student lives. More than 100 nominations were received for the second round of awards from community, staff and families across the
district. Special Education Teacher Jenna Angelini, Academic Intervention Specialist Rachel Affolter, East Elementary School SEE NORTH STAR PAGE A2
Stock appointed Tillamook Manzanita Forester talks Mayor new modeling WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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anzanita’s city council selected councilor Kathryn Stock to serve as the city’s mayor on January 3, following the November resignation of Mayor Deb Simmons. The council also heard an update on the city’s trails and the impacts of recent court rulings on their accessibility and work being undertaken by the public works to mitigate those impacts. Stock was the only applicant to fill the mayoralty following the resignation of Deb Simmons in November after she moved away from the city. Stock brings experience from a career working as a supply chain specialist with Nike, where she said she learned about the importance of communication. Stock was appointed to city council in August to fill a vacancy and said that she is interested in how things work and how people come together and that she is undeterred by complexity. Stock’s appointment
leaves a vacancy on the council and applications are now being accepted, with the council planning to select a new member at their January meeting. Manzanita’s Public Works Director Dan Weitzel discussed the impacts of recent court rulings on Manzanita’s public trails. A district court ruling in a case involving a woman who fell on a path accessing a beach in the City of Newport found that the use of access trails was not inherently recreational. This meant that recreational immunity did not automatically shield governments from litigation in cases involving access trails and that juries would have to determine whether immunity existed on a caseby-case basis. This led to a scramble by city and county governments across Oregon in recent months to mitigate their risk after Citycounty Insurance Services (CIS), which insures many government entities in the state, advised closing access paths while further review was undertaken. In Manzanita, this advice impacted 17 beach access trails and a handful of others around the city, according to Weitzel. The good news for the city is that the beach access trails on city
property are very short, only running from the end of the pavement to the edge of sand dunes. Weitzel said that three of the trails at Horizon, Beeswax and Edmund Avenues had hazards that needed to be cleared, but that following that, they and the rest of the beach access trails could be reopened with the addition of signs warning users of their potential hazards. The elevated wooden pathway and stairs at Elk Meadows Park need mitigation work to reduce fall risk. Weitzel said that his staff and representatives from CIS were reviewing the situation and that he planned to work with the Lower Nehalem Trust on maintenance after the upgrades were completed during a closure. Several other ad hoc trails hewn by citizens over the years will be closed and marked as such and Weitzel plans to return to the council with updates on progressing work on signage at beach accesses in coming months. City Manager Leila Aman announced that she will be holding a state of the city speech on January 16. She also said that abatement work on the old elementary school building and Quonset hut at Underhill Plaza had come in on-budget.
WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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illamook State Forester Kate Skinner recently sat down with the Headlight Herald to discuss newly released modeling results for harvests in the state forests and the Tillamook State Forest specifically. Skinner said that harvest forecasts had been calibrated as much as possible to account for the unique and limiting elements in the Tillamook State Forest. Skinner also said that what appeared to be an over assignment of conservation areas for Northern spotted owls was a function of geographic limitations and the length of harvest rotations. The percentage of state forests being assigned for habitat conservation purposes under new plans for managing state forests became a point of concern at a joint meeting of the board of forestry and Forest Trust Land Advisory Councils in December. Federal laws being used to craft the new habitat conservation plan (HCP) that will set parameters for conservation of endangered species require that 40% of the forest be set aside for the preservation of Northern spotted owls. But the most recent modeling numbers showed that
depending on the scenario selected, between 55% and 70% of forests would qualify as habitat conservation areas. Skinner clarified that this upward departure was due to several factors, chief among them geographic restrictions and harvest length. Under current forest management practices, around 50% of the Tillamook State Forest is not harvested due to steep slopes or riparian area restrictions. Those same geographic limitations will persist under the new HCP and outstrip the 40% conservation area requirement on their own. The other factor is that as tree stands destined for harvest age, they will serve as habitat for years or decades after they become mature trees but before they are cut. “If we’re harvesting outside of the HCAs (habitat conservation areas) a 60- or 70-year-old stand, that’s habitat, and that’s part of having a permit is that we can take that habitat,” Skinner said. Another source of concern for members of the board of forestry and leaders in the trust land counties is the level of uncertainty that exists in the modeling. In Tillamook County, this concern is most centered on what some have taken to calling the “Tillamook problem” in reference to
adverse conditions caused by the Tillamook burn, the forest’s topography and tree diseases. Tillamook’s steep slopes, in addition to limiting harvest possibilities, also provide shallower soil, which in turn inhibits tree growth. Further, the forest was replanted with Douglas Fir that were nonnative to the area following the Tillamook Burn from the 1930s to 1950s, leaving trees that are not ideally suited for conditions in the forest. Finally, the forest’s Douglas Firs have been struggling with a rash of Swiss Needle Cast, a disease which sees fungus grow over the end of needles, inhibiting their functionality and, subsequently, the trees growth. Ill-advised aerial spraying in the 1970s has also caused a proliferation of so-called “zombie Alder” that have dead tops from the spraying. In total, these factors lead to per-acre harvest levels in Tillamook State Forest being significantly lower than other forests, in the range of 25,000-30,000 board feet per acre versus 70,000 board feet per acre in other Douglas Fir forests. However, that knowledge was incorporated into the most recent modeling, with the team working on the SEE NEW MODELING PAGE A2