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Headlight Herald
Tuesday, July 30 | Vol. 136, Issue 31
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rep discusses NBHD breaks ground on health center and pharmacy FEMA updated floodplain WILL CHAPPELL
development ordinance timeline
Headlight Editor
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large group of community members, district staff and elected officials gathered in Wheeler on July 20, to break ground on the Nehalem Bay Health District’s new health center and pharmacy. The new $12.2-million facility, scheduled for a September 2025 opening, is being supported by a $10.25-million, voter-approved bond as well as federal and state funding, and will greatly expand the district’s capacity and offerings. It is part of a project with a total budget of $15.5 million, which is also overhauling the district’s senior care facility and will see the current health center and pharmacy demolished to make way for housing. “The vision for this facility was to create an opportunity to improve healthcare in our region with better physical facilities, including the ability to attract and retain more healthcare professionals,” said Nehalem Bay Health District (NBHD) Board Chair Marc Johnson. “More than ever, this is a celebration of what a community is capable of doing.” Progress towards the project began in 2018, when the health district undertook a strategic plan update and identified the needs to upgrade their clinical space and add housing for district staff as top priorities. Plans crystallized further when Tillamook County Commissioner Erin Skaar, who was then the director of Community Action Resource Enterprises (CARE) in Tillamook, identified the property in Wheeler as a potential site for a new health center and pharmacy.
WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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Members of the Nehalem Health Center and Pharmacy board were joined by State Senator Suzanne Weber, Tillamook County Commissioner Erin Skaar and Nehalem Bay Health District Board Chair Marc Johnson for the ceremonial groundbreaking.
Speaking at the event, Skaar said that she had been on a tour of properties that could support housing development in the county, when after visiting the current health center and pharmacy, she saw the parcel opposite Wheeler City Hall on Hospital Road. The property would require a commercial use on its first floor, but Skaar said that having participated in the strategic plan process, she thought that it could still help to advance the district’s vision. After considering the possibil-
ity of building housing on top of a clinic on the property, the district decided instead to build a new clinic and pharmacy facility that would allow them to convert their existing property up the hill into housing. “As a county commissioner I am always proud of our communities when they do work that is forward thinking and that will really serve our residents in the very best possible way and this project is the epitome of that work,” Skaar said. With the site identified and pur-
chased from a Colorado company for $260,015 in 2021, work began on building a funding package to support the project’s planning and construction, in addition to a needed overhaul of the district’s senior care facility and the demolition of the current health center to pave the way for future housing. The project received early boosts in the form of a CARE grant for site planning and due diligence, but the big break came in 2022’s See NBHD, Page A10
Kingfisher Apartments bring first workforce, multifamily housing to Pacific City
COURTESY PHOTO FROM
The building’s rear façade abuts the Nestucca River, giving residents water access, but the entirety of the structures remains out of the flood plain. WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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ince opening last October, the Kingfisher Apartments in Pacific City have offered the community’s first workforce and multifamily housing option and are now operating at full occupancy. Katie and Kevin Shluka, the couple who developed the apartments, said that while the project had faced numberous challenges, the commitment of a group of local investors, government grants and a property tax exemption had allowed them to complete the building.
“As I engage in other projects, every project is unique and there’s some sort of synchronicity that’s got to happen for everything to get done,” Kevin said. “Get the right team members, the right partners, find the building that fits in the space and so yeah, everybody’s got to thread a number of needles to make it happen.” Katie and Kevin have lived in Tillamook County for two decades, meeting each other at the Sitka Center where Katie was working before getting married and moving to Kevin’s property in Dolph. Since 2007, the couple have owned and
run Coyote Gardens, with Katie serving as landscape designer. The couple’s journey towards building the apartments began in 2019, when Kevin’s father sold a building he owned in northern California and began looking for an opportunity to reinvest the money in a project with Kevin closer to his son’s home. Knowing that the owners of Pelican Brewing, with whom they are friends, had received a $300,000 grant from Oregon Housing and Community Services to support workforce housing, the Shlukas reached out to see if they would be
interested in using those funds in support of the project. After receiving a positive response, the Shlukas began looking for properties to locate the apartments, landing on the property at the corner of Pacific Avenue and Sunset Drive, after a deal on one near Grateful Bread fell through. When the couple purchased the property in 2019, it was vacant except for a parking lot that was used by local fishermen. With the property secured, focus shifted to completing the funding
July 15 letter from the Federal Emergency Management Agency informed Oregon counties that they will need to pass interim updates to their flood plain development permitting processes as part of an ongoing update to the agency’s flood insurance plan. John Graves, branch chief for flood plain management and insurance in the northwest region, told the Headlight Herald that interim updates had not been planned originally, but that a congressional delay and protracted federal reviews led to a change in course. “As we reflected on again how long this EIS (environmental impact statement) process is likely to take, we recognized that we had some risk that we needed to address,” Graves said, “and so we decided that we were gonna do the interim measures now while we wait for the environmental impact statement to finish its process.” Progress towards the update to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) flood insurance program began when the Audubon Society sued the agency in 2009, claiming that the program was causing harm to coho salmon in Oregon. The suit triggered a National Marine Fisheries Service review of the plan, which yielded a biological opinion in 2016 that concluded that the program did cause harm to coho, in violation of the Endangered Species Act, and needed to be updated. By 2018, FEMA was ready to begin rolling out updates recommended in the biological opinion over a three-year period, but before that process could begin, then-Congressman Peter DeFazio passed a three-year implementation pause. Under the original update timeline, Hughes said that there would not have been a need to ask partnering governments to make interim code updates, but after the pause, FEMA officials began to review that decision. Recognizing that drafting, reviewing and submitting an environmental impact statement for the proposed updates and that a needed National Environmental Policy Act review would take several more years, they decided that interim updates were needed. Communities that participate in the flood insurance program were presented three options for updating their codes until those processes are finalized: adopting a model ordinance from FEMA that includes a no-net-loss standard for new development, requiring developers to obtain habitat assessment and mitigation plans for their projects showing that they meet the no-net loss standard or prohibiting development in areas of special flood hazard entirely. The model ordinance has not yet been released, but Hughes said
See KINGFISHER, Page A9
See FEMA, Page A10
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