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Headlight Herald
Tuesday, January 7, 2025 | Vol. 137, Issue 1
Skaar discusses admin changes, TLT increase
Fournier focused on boosting county revenues
Up in Smoke
WILL CHAPPELL
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Headlight Editor
illamook County Commissioner Erin Skaar sat down with the Headlight Herald in December to discuss accomplishments in 2024 and plans for 2025. Skaar said that she thought the decision by commissioners to form a central services department Erin Skaar and appoint Rachel Hagerty Chief Administrative Officer would be the most impactful changes of the year and laid out plans to ask voters to approve a 5% increase in the county’s transient lodging tax (TLT) in May. “This is a really significant shift that I think will allow the county to run more smoothly because there will be process and procedure created that doesn’t require a meeting of the three commissioners every time you want to talk about it,” Skaar said. “You can actually have that done by administrative professionals, you know, leaders who are actually running departments and Rachel, who’s got her finger on the pulse of all of that.” The move to a central services department was precipitated by an internal strategic plan that the county undertook in the first half of 2024. After soliciting feedback from all the county’s employees, the team working on the plan found that employees thought the county was headed in the right direction and suggested the move to the central services model. The new department will oversee human resources, information services, facilities and legal services for county departments going forward, as well as the board of commissioners’ office and be overseen by Hagerty, previously the county’s chief of staff. In addition to increasing internal efficiency, Skaar said that this will allow Hagerty to come up with processes and procedures and bring them to the commissioners for approval, rather than leaving the commissioners to work out those policies and procedures on their own in public meetings. The upshot, according to Skaar, See SKAAR TO, Page A3
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WILL CHAPPELL
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Photo provided
A vehicle fire forced a temporary closure of around an hour on Oregon Highway 6 on December 31, 2024, as the Tillamook Fire District responded and extinguished the blaze at milepost 31
Bell talks parks, environmental policy, central county services WILL CHAPPELL
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Headlight Editor
ollowing a busy year in which she served an extended stint as interim parks director, Commissioner Mary Faith Bell sat down with the Headlight Herald to discuss successes in that role and look forward to 2025. Bell said that she was proud of the changes made to the entrance at Barview Jetty during her tenure and Mary Faith Bell looks forward to more to come, extolled the creation of a central services department for the county and opined on the shortcomings of federal environmental policy. “It was an unexpected, cool opportunity to come in with totally fresh eyes and no attachment to how things have always been done and that almost never happens,” Bell said of her time as parks director. Bell assumed the role of parks director in October 2023 and continued in the position until Dan Keyes was hired to fill the role this May. Bell’s first order of business on taking over the position was to evaluate the department’s staffing, which led her to decide to hire some of the seasonal employees who had worked for the county over the course of many years as full-time employees. “It became clear to me that if we’re hiring those people repeatedly for years, they should just be our employees,” Bell said. After completing the employ-
ee evaluation, Bell undertook a review of the department’s facilities to identify areas of need, with one, the entrance to the Barview Jetty Campground, springing to the fore. Under its then-configuration, the entrance was often overwhelmed by arriving visitors on busy summer days, leading to backups onto Highway 101 and consternation among visitors, who often became abusive towards staff, leading at least one to walk off the job. To address these throughput issues, Bell had parks staff change the traffic at the entrance to one-way in and out, instead of intermingled, added a second lane at the fee booth for check in and contracted with a company to operate a kiosk selling firewood and other camper essentials inside the park, removing the need for visitors to return to the entrance. Bell said that these changes had paid dividends last summer and that work will soon occur to repave the entrance and move the fee booth deeper into the park. Another area of focus for Bell in 2024 was environmental policies and their impacts on Tillamook County, with both the habitat conservation plan for western Oregon state forests and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s floodplain development ordinance update demands taking center stage. Bell said that in both instances she had become convinced that the science being used to force cuts in timber harvests on state lands and curtail flood plain development was flawed and needed to be reevaluated. In the case of timber, Bell pointed to federal lands, where logging has been severely
limited since the 1980s to protect northern spotted owls and marbled murrelets without seeing any rise in either’s population. Bell said that in conjunction with the huge increase in wildfires in recent years, this was especially galling, and that it was time for counties to try to force a reevaluation by the United States Forest Service. Similarly, Bell said that she had serious doubts about the scientific underpinnings of the National Marine Fisheries Services Biological Opinion that said development in areas of special flood hazard was causing a take of anadromous fish species, including Coho salmon. Bell’s brother is a fisherman in Alaska, and she said that even in the essentially pristine conditions there where there are still far larger salmon runs than in Oregon, numbers of salmon are still decreasing. Bell said that this had led her to the conclusion that the issues facing salmon must not all be related to human development and activity on the land but also to issues occurring in the ocean. “They have declining king salmon runs, but where he is, there’s nothing and so it really isn’t what’s happening on the land at all, it has to be what’s happening in the ocean,” Bell said. Bell also mentioned that she had been impressed by Tillamook County residents’ response to the proposed changes and encouraged by the support she and other commissioners received in choosing an offthe-board option and moving forward with a lawsuit against the agency. See BELL TO, Page A3
Headlight Editor
ince his victory in the May primary election, Tillamook County Commissioner-elect Paul Fournier has been preparing for the position and honing his vision for the county’s future. After running on a platform of boosting the county government’s revenues to counteract perennial budPaul Fournier get crunches, Fournier has a host of ideas he hopes to implement to achieve that goal by leveraging the large number of tourists already visiting Tillamook. “It’s not about bringing more down here; it’s about capturing the money that we’re not capturing, and we do that through better facilities we can charge for,” Fournier said. Fournier, a long-time sheriff’s deputy, won election to the board in the May primary, defeating Darcy Jones with 71% of the vote. Since then, in addition to continuing as public information officer at the sheriff’s office, Fournier has been attending the board of commissioners’ meetings to get up to speed on the issues facing the county and attended the Association of Oregon Counties annual conference in the fall. “The current board and all the staff have been great about onboarding and getting me in the meetings and executive sessions so I can get a kind of handle on all they’re working on,” Fournier said. Now, as he is set to assume office on January 6, Fournier is champing at the bit to start championing some of the revenue-generating ideas on which he campaigned. Fournier said that his biggest goal is to begin using funding from the county’s transient lodging tax (TLT) to build facilities that will generate revenue for the county and provide benefit to residents. The biggest project Fournier imagines is the construction of a hotel and conference center at the Tillamook County Fairgrounds. Fournier said that in talking with businesses in the county they had expressed their support for the idea and desire to host conferences locally and noted that the fairground’s master plan envisaged such a facility. Fournier said that the county could build the facility using TLT funds and then turn the operations over to a concessionaire and that in addition to generating lease payments, the hotel would also increase TLT revenues. “The idea is we need this; it could be self-sufficient, it’ll build itself, it’s not coming out of the general fund and then it produces income one way or the other,” Fournier said. Other potential revenue-generating ideas Fournier proposes include building a paid parking structure See FOURNIER TO, Page A3
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