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Summer
2024
North Coast Real Estate Trends
Beachfront Homes Cannon Beach, OR, photo by Bob Atiyeh. See page 3
July packed with family fun in Tillamook County
Welcome Home Inside
Kramer Walker Curated Living in Cannon Beach
Grayson Kramer, left, and Travis Walker, right, with their Westie “Lucca.” Photo by Sam Block. See page 4
Non-profit Gallery Exhibitions
Ceramic works by Mary Roberts at Hoffman Gallery for the Arts. See pages 5-7
Page A2
Heart of Cartm Repair Cafe
Local non-profit repairs, reuses and reimagines discarded materials. See page 15
Headlight Herald Headlight Herald
Citizen North Coast
Tuesday, July 2, 2024 | Vol. 136, Issue 27
Election results certified;
Shots fired at officers precede high-speed chase through Tillamook WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
A traffic stop near Fred Meyer in Tillamook took an unexpected turn when the vehicle’s driver allegedly opened fire on Tillamook County Sheriff’s Office Deputies and Tillamook City Police Officers before absconding. Joey de la Rosa Rodriguez of Damascus was spotted around 6:30 p.m. on June 26, by Tillamook Sherriff’s Deputies and Oregon State Troopers driving a white Toyota Tacoma. The officers had identified de la Rosa Rodriguez as having arrest warrants in Clackamas and Yamhill Counties for eluding law enforcement officers in recent days and pulled him over. During the stop, de la Rosa Rodriguez allegedly opened fire on the officers with a pistol, hitting multiple law enforcement vehicles. Officers from both the sheriff’s office and Tillamook City Police returned fire, before de la Rosa Rodriguez sped off to the south. After traveling nearly five miles on Highway 101, de la Rosa Rodriguez’s vehicle was partially disabled by a spike strip deployed by sheriff’s deputies, forcing him to pull into a residential driveway, where he was taken into custody. Upon apprehending de la Rosa Rodriguez, officers discovered that he had sustained an apparent gunshot wound to the arm and provided medical care until an ambulance arrived and transported him to Adventist Health Tillamook. There, he was treated for his injury before being released and taken to the Tillamook County Jail, where he was booked on multiple felony warrants from Clackamas and Yamhill Counties. As the case is an officer involved shooting by the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Office and Tillamook City Police, the Oregon State Police will be lead investigators. Involved law enforcement members have been placed on paid administrative leave. Tillamook County District Attorney Aubrey Olson told the Herald that she planned to seek charges for 17 different counts relating to the incident, including for four counts of attempted assault in the first degree with a firearm.
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Skaar, Fournier elected commissioners WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
COURTESY PHOTO
Tillamook veterans’ memorial installed the county courthouse and post office, he sprang into action to bolster those offerings. Henson Quickly landed on the triangle property between First Street and Pacific and Main Avenues that was previously home to a Shell as a site for a memorial and commissioned a preliminary design. That design allowed Henson to come up with an estimated budget of $200,000 for the project, at which point he began approaching local contractors to further dial in the cost estimate. The contractors Henson spoke with surprised him by offering to donate materials and services to the project, allowing him to quickly complete the fundraising push after several cash donations came in to cover the $83,000 purchase of the memorial itself. At that point, Henson identified OM Stone in Hillsboro as the company that should engrave the
WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
A new veterans’ memorial was installed in downtown Tillamook on June 26, honoring veterans from World War I to the present day across the county. The project was the brainchild of late Tillamook City Councilor Doug Henson, who raised more than $200,000 in donations and in-kind contributions before Tillamook City Councilor Nick Torres took over for the final stages of the project when Henson became ill. Henson told the Herald last fall that he was inspired to tackle the project when friends of a high school classmate who died in Vietnam asked him why Tillamook did not have a veterans’ memorial like other communities they had visited. When Henson found that the only commemorations for veterans in the county were two plaques at
memorial’s plinth and affix the bald eagle statue to its top and oversaw the installation of a rebar-reinforced concrete base for the memorial in November. Unfortunately, soon after completing those preparatory steps, Henson fell seriously ill and was forced to withdraw from public life, handing the project off to Torres, who saw it through. The newly installed monument features engraving on all four sides of the seven-foot-tall granite plinth, in addition to the bald eagle statue on top. The side facing First Street features a POW-MIA logo and the reverse a rifle and a helmet in honor of soldiers who died in combat. The side facing Pacific Avenue features a thank you to the memorial’s sponsors Jerry Dove, the Loren E. Parks Trust, Werner Beef Jerky, the Pastega Family Founda-
See VETERANS’, Page A10
Tillamook County Clerk Christy Nyseth certified and submitted results from the May 21 primary election to the Oregon Secretary of State’s office on June 13. The finalized results hewed to earlier releases, with Erin Skaar and Paul Fournier securing election as Tillamook County Commissioners, KaSandra Larson winning the position of Tillamook County Assessor and Cyrus Javadi holding off a primary challenge for his state house seat. 8,612 votes were tabulated and certified, representing a 40.5% turnout of the county’s 21,241 registered voters. Party-affiliated voters were significantly more likely to vote, with 55.5% of registered Democrats and 56.7% of registered Republicans returning ballots, while just 20.5% of nonpartisan voters participated in the election. Incumbent Tillamook County Commissioner Skaar won reelection to position one against a double challenge from Jeff Spink and Bruce Lovelin, receiving 53.7% of the vote, while Spink garnered 28.1% and Lovelin 17.8%. Fournier, a longtime Tillamook County Sheriff’s Deputy, beat Darcy Jones in the race for position two on the board of county commissioners, taking 70.4% of the vote to Jones’s 28.7%. Larson beat out Kari Fleisher in the race to replace Denise Vandecoevering as Tillamook County Assessor, garnering 65.0% of the votes cast. Javadi had received 76.7% of the votes cast in Tillamook County, compared to 22.9% for his opponent Glenn Gaither. Although the Oregon Secretary See ELECTION, Page A10
CFTLC briefed on HCP revenue replacement schemes WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
Following ten months of negotiations with the governor’s office, members of the Council of Forest Trust Land Counties were briefed on three proposed solutions for revenue reductions projected to be caused by the habitat conservation plan for western Oregon state forests on June 28. A group of five county representatives worked with three representatives from the governor’s office to hammer out the options, landing on reducing contributions to either the counties and special districts or Oregon Department of Forestry, or moving school districts in the counties from timber funding to the state’s special equalization fund. The process began last August, when Governor Tina Kotek’s office reached out to staff from the Council of Forest Trust Land Counties (CFTLC) to initiate discussions about the economic impact of the proposed habitat conservation plan (HCP) on member counties. The CFTLC selected one commissioner from each of its five regions, David Yamamoto from Tillamook County, Courtney
Bangs from Clatsop County, Jerry Willey from Washington County, William Tucker of Linn County, and John Sweet of Coos County, to participate in small table meetings. Tillamook County Commissioner Erin Skaar replaced Yamamoto when he retired at the end of last year. To begin the process, CFTLC commissioners discussed what they wanted to accomplish, agreeing that they hoped to see statutes changed to ensure that county governments’ revenues remained steady. CFTLC staff then worked to develop forecasts of the revenue impacts to the counties using historical harvest and stumpage price data, showing a projected drop of a little over $22 million in revenue county and special district revenues across the 14 impacted counties. The small group then solicited ideas from the CFTLC’s full membership, fielding 15 proposals for revenue replacement. Those ideas were then pared down in conjunction with the representatives from Kotek’s office to the three that were presented to the full membership at the June meeting.
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The first two options involved reapportioning state forest revenues from the current split that sees 63.75% of revenues go to counties, and special and school districts, and the remaining 36.25% directed to the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF). The first option would see the share dedicated to counties and districts grow to 82% or $62.4 million, allowing their revenues to remain steady at the cost of reducing ODF’s percentage to 18% or $13.7 million, less than half of their current budget. The second option would see ODF’s share bumped to 47% of state forest revenues, allowing the department to fully support its $36.5 million budget, but would cut county and district forest revenues to just $41.2 million. The final option was to allow counties, special districts and the department to maintain current revenues by removing school districts from state forest funding. Currently, school districts in each of the counties receive around half of state forest revenues allocated to their county, with the remainder of their funding coming from property taxes and the state school equalization fund.
Under the third proposal, school districts in the counties would move to complete reliance on property taxes and the state school equalization fund. This would allow ODF to receive $35.6 million in state forest revenues annually, while counties and special districs would receive $40.5 million. Commissioners discussed the proposals, with all saying that of the options presented they would prefer the third. Sweet said that while commissioners might prefer other options they had previously suggested, the three put forward were the ones for which Kotek’s office felt they could gain legislative approval. Sweet said that he thought the third option was the best as either of the first two would require the state legislature to allocate general fund dollars to either the counties and special districts or ODF to sustain them. By contrast, the school equalization fund is an existing funding source that provides ongoing funding to schools already and the increased burden would only represent .6% of the fund’s budget. Other commissioners who had not participated in the small table group said that they would like to
see further data on the proposals before voting on a recommendation. A major question arose surrounding the four districts that currently don’t receive any funding from the stabilization fund, including Neah-Kah-Nie and Nestucca School Districts in Tillamook County. A CFTLC staffer said that department of education officials had preliminarily indicated that it would be possible to account for those districts and maintain their revenues through an in-lieu payment scheme. Skaar said that her support of any proposal would be contingent on such a mechanism being in place to maintain the current educational and extracurricular opportunities for students in those districts. The commissioners agreed that they would ask consulting firm Mason, Bruce & Girard to develop economic projections for the three proposals. They also agreed to convene a meeting of the full CFTLC in July to make a decision on which option they would endorse to allow the governor’s office to work on a draft bill that will need to be submitted by midSeptember.
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