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Friday, December 20, 2019
The Chief
$1 Vol. 128, No. 35 8 Pages
Serving the Lower Columbia Region since 1891
$1,000 donated to School Share Shed
Clatskanie Middle/High School Key Club recently received a $1,000 donation from the Kiwanis Club of Clatskanie. The funds are for the School Share Shed. The Shed started out in a small room to provide basic sanitation and clothing needs for students in order to ensure students have what they need to be prepared for class. This year, the Shed has moved into a classroom and besides basic needs, the Shed allows students to obtain proper attire for job interviews, prom and more. These much-needed funds will be used to purchase items that cannot be recycled such as hygiene products, shoes, underwear and other items as needed. The students, along with members of the community have worked hard to make this project reach as many students as possible to help them thrive in school. Courtesy photo
Kristie Ward from Georgia Pacific presents $1,000.00 to the Clatskanie Middle/High School Key Club.
Rainier Cemetery District benefits from grant cemeteries throughout both Rainier and Clatskanie, has tried three times in recent years to increase the property tax which funds the district. As of now, the tax is set at seven cents per $1,000 of assessed value, a rate left over from the 1950s, according to Warren. Each time they have tried to raise the property tax, including during the most recent November election, the measure has failed. Warren said the funding the district receives from its current property tax is not much, and more funds would be needed to hire people to take care of other work that needs to get done at all the cemeteries. Kevin Crawford, the sexton and manager for the district, is usually in charge of general maintenance for all of the cemeteries, and his day-to-day tasks involve doing burials and keeping the record up to date. When he has time, he levels gravestones and clears brush, but as one person, he often can’t keep up with the work, and he said the district receives complaints from people about gravesites being overlooked, especially in outlying places. Leveling gravestones, which means straightening up grave markers that have become slanted over time, involves using a lot of good-quality dirt, Crawford explained. So the first step of the project was getting entire truckloads of it. Three, to be exact, all hauled to the main cemetery, Stewart Creek. “We used up all about a yard of it, and these are 15yard loads,” Crawford said. Leveling out the sites involved taking a tractor and lifting up headstones using four-by-four blocks, marking the place where the headstone rested, cataloging where the headstone was going to be, then packing it down and resetting it. “A lot of them had to be tipped over, some of them were just leaning. We did a
CHRISTINE MENGES chronicle2@countrymedia.net
Cyndi Warren, district manager for the Rainier Cemetery District, along with the district’s sole employee, Kevin Crawford, sexton and manager, have known for a long time they needed more assistance with general upkeep of the district’s 12 cemeteries. This past summer, they got that chance, after receiving the Internship Matching Grant, a grant from the Special Districts Association of Oregon (SDAO), for $2,700, which the district was able to match to hire an intern to assist with leveling, repairing and documenting all gravesites or markers at some of the district’s cemeteries. That intern was meant to be a college student. However, after posting the position and not getting any responses, Cyndi Warren asked the SDAO for
Photos: Kevin Crawford
One of the many grave markers Cade Warren, intern and Kevin Crawford, sexton for Rainier Cemetery District, repaired over the course of the month-long internship.
permission to expand the parameters a little and allow high school students to apply. Permission was granted,
and the chosen intern ended up being Cade Warren, Cyndi Warren’s son, who is now a senior at Clatskanie Middle/
High School. He and Crawford worked from the end of July through all of August not only doing needed work, but
also documenting each step of their progress along the way, a requirement of the grant. The district, which has
See CEMETERY Page A5