Cape Kiwanda Renovations Page A4
May Election Info Page A9
Headlight Herald
TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 2023
TILLAMOOK, OREGON • WWW.TILLAMOOKHEADLIGHTHERALD.COM
VOL. 135, NO. 15 • $1.50
STR committee hammers out parking regs
Hunkered down ...
Beekeepers abuzz with busy spring T
Will Chappell Headlight Reporter
T
illamook County’s ShortTerm Rental Advisory Committee devoted the entirety of their four and a half hour meeting on April 3 to discussing parking regulations for short-term rental properties. The issue, one of the biggest the committee will face, brought the challenge of crafting an ordinance that will work across the many contexts in the county to the forefront but was resolved with general committee consensus. Commissioner Erin Skaar started the meeting off by addressing concerns that she had heard from committee members and citizens and offering some direction to the committee. Skaar said that the commissioners remained committed to ending the pause on new license issuance by the July 1 deadline they had set. She said that the commissioners appreciated the role that short-term rentals play in Tillamook County’s economy and were uninterested in getting rid of them. However, she told the committee that the commissioners were also not interested in allowing “unfettered” growth of the properties. She said that if the new ordinance did not include growth management tools, a group of citizens was likely to put forward a ballot measure banning short-term rentals in the county, as they had considered doing before the pause. Skaar urged the committee to readdress the growth management discussion which it had tabled previously. She said that there was a “high likelihood” some sort of tool would be included in the ordinance approved by commissioners. “We are 100% in support of a balance in our community and that’s why the committee looks the way it does,” Skaar said. She also noted that the county staff working with the committee were keeping track of the dissenting opinions during the process, which will be compiled and presented to the commissioners in a minority report. Discussion then began on parking regulations in the new ordinance. The draft of the ordinance that the committee discussed had a requirement of one parking space per bedroom at short-term rentals. It required that the spots be eight feet by 20 feet, fit within the property’s boundaries, allow for maneuverability and that a diagram of the parking be displayed in the rental. It also provided an allowance for off-site parking on a property within 500 feet of the rental. Ordinance 84, the ordinance currently regulating short-term rentals, requires one parking spot per bedroom and an additional parking spot, while allowing for two of the required spots to be on-street. Short-term rental operators expressed concern that the minimum requirement would limit certain properties from renting out all bedrooms due to lack of commensurate parking spaces. They noted
n See STR, Page A2
Headlight Herald reader Dennis Reynolds captured this photo of a Great Blue Heron on Netarts Bay recently.
Will Chappell Headlight Reporter
illamook Beekeepers Association has a busy spring ahead as it prepares for the opening of a new apiary and garden learning center and the Sixth Annual Bee Days. The Bee Days will be hosted in conjunction with the Headlight Herald’s Home and Garden Show at the fairgrounds on April 29 and 30, and the apiary and garden center is expected to open at the Port of Tillamook Bay in May. “It just kind of evolved into a neat idea,” Beekeeper Association President Brad York said about the new learning center, “instead of just talking about it you can look inside the hive.” The new $11,000 learning center will sit on half an acre that was donated by the port and was made possible thanks in part to a donation from the Tillamook People’s Utility District. York said that the group plans to give students and other interested community members a hands-on experience with bees and to help educate them on the plants that help sustain them in Tillamook. The beekeepers’ association started in the 1970s or 1980s as an informal group of hobbyists across the county. Six years ago, they formally incorporated and quickly started attracting
n See BEES, Page A3
Proposed changes to national flood insurance plan draw harsh criticism at FEMA meeting R
Will Chappell Headlight Reporter
epresentatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency updated residents of Tillamook on proposed changes to the national flood insurance plan that would greatly restrict development in the 100-year flood plain. Several dozen community members, including county government representatives, workers from the dairy, logging and fishing industries, and concerned property owners took the FEMA representatives to task over the economic impacts of the proposed change. John Graves, who manages the national flood insurance plan for FEMA in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska, started the meeting by giving the hundred-person-plus crowd an overview of the changes and the history behind them. The national flood insurance program was started in 1968 to provide subsidized insurance for homeowners against flooding. That support is conditioned on localities adopting FEMA-approved ordinances to reduce the risk of flooding through building standards and development restrictions. The currently proposed updates to the program were precipitated by a 2009 lawsuit by the Audubon Society, which claimed that the flood insurance program was causing harm to coho salmon in Oregon. The suit claimed that the program operated in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act that says government agencies shall not harm endangered species. FEMA commissioned the National Marine Fisheries Service to investigate the claim and in 2016, the fisheries service released a report saying that the flood insurance plan was causing a take of coho and other salmonids that would lead to their eventual extinction. Since that biological opinion was rendered, FEMA has been working on changes to the program that would bring it into compliance with federal laws on endangered species. The biological opinion called for the program to update the ordinances for building in flood plains to achieve zero net loss in three areas of floodplain functionality that help
preserve fish habitat: flood storage, water quality and riparian vegetation. Under the new rules, any projects proposed in the 100-year floodplain would have to include mitigation efforts that would lead to no loss in any of the three fish habitat functions to receive building permits. The new regulations would allow normal agricultural, forestry and fishing activities in the floodplain but would make placing fill, adding water impervious surfaces or removing vegetation more difficult to permit and costly. Since FEMA is a federal agency and not allowed to make land use laws, it will be relying on the localities it partners with in the flood insurance program to implement the new standards. Graves said that after listening to feedback from their partner communities, FEMA had decided to offer four different options for communities to satisfy the new requirements. Localities can use a FEMA model ordinance, develop an ordinance using a FEMA checklist, develop a community compliance plan for FEMA approval or create a habitat conservation plan for review by federal agencies. Former Congressman Peter DeFazio delayed progress on the updates for three years, but with his retirement and lack of further congressional delay last year, the development process is now moving forward into its scoping phase. The Tillamook meeting was the first of five meetings to gather public feedback with three planned inperson meetings around the state and two more to be conducted virtually before the end of April. The proposed updates would affect all but five counties in Oregon. Even before the public comment section of the meeting, the disgust with the proposed changes was palpable in the room, with audience members interjecting to question assertions in Graves’s presentation. One man asked, “what about the extinction of businesses,” while Graves discussed the biological opinion’s dire predictions of salmonid extinction, and others expressed derision for the notion that these changes were not land use regulations being issued by FEMA.
After Graves completed his presentation, two other colleagues gave more specifics on the plan’s technical components and opened the meeting to public comment. Tillamook County Commissioner David Yamamoto kicked off the public comment. Yamamoto said that he had been following the progress of the biological opinion and flood insurance plan updates for six or seven years, concerned all along at the implications for Tillamook County. He said that the plan was turning FEMA into an environmental policy implementation agency, a responsibility that it was shunting onto counties and cities by making them enforce new restrictions on property owners. These restrictions will amount to property takings under the fifth amendment, according to Yamamoto, requiring the governments enforcing them to compensate property owners for lost value or face a litany of litigation seeking the same. Yamamoto said that he had asked FEMA officials if they would help pay for these costs and they had told him they would not. Yamamoto said that this left the county in a tenuous position, as noncompliance would mean not only exclusion from the national flood insurance plan but all of FEMA’s services. After laying out the urgency of the situation for the county, Yamamoto took issue with the more fundamental conclusions reached by the biological opinion about the future of salmonids. He said that Tillamook County has led the way on preserving habitat for coho salmon and other salmonids over the past thirty years. He pointed to numerous bridge updates, riparian zone rehabilitation projects, flood gate removals and other projects undertaken by the county and property owners through and said that credit was never given for those projects. Yamamoto wondered why a take of wild coho salmon was allowed in Tillamook County if the preservation situation is as dire as the new measures suggest. Yamamoto said that he had been meeting monthly with officials from FEMA for the past year and a half but that he hadn’t seen any of his
concerns addressed in updates to the proposal. Several dozen community members then proceeded to harshly criticize the plan and the impacts that it would have on Tillamook’s economy. Concerns about the impact on the dairy industry were foremost in comments with around three quarters of the dairy farms in Tillamook County lying in flood plains. While the new provisions would not impact existing structures, they would seriously complicate repairs or additions. During his presentation, Graves had noted that improvements and repairs within the footprint of existing buildings would not be subject to the new standards. However, Damian Laviolette, a business owner who has been in contact with FEMA, said that that exception would not apply in the case of “substantial” changes to the structure, which are defined as costing more than 50% of the building’s assessed value. Laviolette pointed out that this would make replacing buildings damaged in fires, floods or other natural disasters cost prohibitive, as well as effectively stopping new growth. Another group seriously concerned about the new regulations was representatives from ports. Mike Saindon, the Port of Garibaldi’s general manager, and his counterpart from the Port of Toledo both voiced concerns about impacts on their ability to dredge at their facilities. Graves confirmed that dredging was considered a development activity and that the ports would need to comply with the new ordinances to perform dredging operations. Both port managers said that this would endanger their business, as dredging was essential to continued operations and already expensive to the point where the additional regulations would make it financially impracticable. The restrictions on dredging also alarmed the dairy farmers at the meeting, who said that dredging the irrigation trenches on their properties was a normal and necessary part of their work.
n See FEMA, Page A3