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Tillamook Council approves waste disposal rate raise T
TILLAMOOK, OREGON • WWW.TILLAMOOKHEADLIGHTHERALD.COM
American Legion returns to Tillamook
■ See COUNCIL, Page A3
Forest Trust Lands Advisory Committee briefed on forest plans progress O
Will Chappell Editor
illamook’s City Council approved a 5% increase to trash service rates and had a lengthy discussion about a forthcoming report on inflow and infiltration in the city’s wastewater system at their April 17 meeting. Trash collection services by Walker Waste Solutions will increase by 5% across the board after the rise was approve by a 5-1 vote. The weekly base rate for trash collection will increase from $19.75 to $20.74, while recycling will go from costing $7.15 a month to $7.35. Councilor Rebekah Hopkins voted no on the increase, after expressing concern that Tillamook ratepayers were subsidizing trash collection for Walker Waste’s other customers. She noted that the company had made a 10.6% profit last year, but that in Tillamook that margin had been 14.9%. She said that this disparity was even more striking since Tillamook only accounts for 36% of Walker Waste’s service area. Walker Waste Solutions’ representative at the meeting said that the profit margin in Tillamook was within the range provided for by the city statue. He said that the small size of the Tillamook market increased the risk profile for Walker Waste should costs go up, and that was why they operated with a profit margin on the higher side. The council then heard a presentation from experts who have been working on a study of the city wastewater system’s inflow and infiltration issues. The experts said that the study identified many points of infiltration during rain events and that those have now been catalogued so that they can be added to the city’s master and capital improvement plants for remediation. They did not provide specific numbers on the infiltration and inflow but those will be in the report expected in the next few months. They said that, on the bright side. The city’s wastewater treatment plant was in good shape, capable of handling a population of 7,500 and 40 years away from needing major upgrades. The inflow and infiltration study was commissioned to help develop a new policy to address issues with the wastewater system, which have been known for years. In 2020, city council introduced an ordinance requiring inspection of properties’ lateral connections to the system upon their sale, with problems triggering a 60-day remediation window. That ordinance met with strong backlash from property owners and was rescinded in late 2021 after questions over its legality were raised by City Manager Nathan George. Hopkins expressed concern that even in the absence of that ordinance, this study would identify major, costly issues that property owners would need to address. George and the experts said that the issues were costly for the city’s ongoing operations, and by
VOL. 135, NO. 17 • $1.50
Members of the Tillamook American Legion post saying the pledge of allegiance at the reconstituted group’s first meeting on April 20, 2023, at the Tillamook Elks Lodge. The Tillamook post was originally chartered in 1920 before falling into dormancy in the 1980s or 1990s. The group hopes to serve as a new community nexus for veterans and bring its programs to help veterans to Tillamook.
Headlight Photo by Will Chappell
STR committee splits on license transferability T
Will Chappell Editor
illamook County’s Shortterm Rental Advisory Committee split on the issue of a limit on the transferability of licenses at their April 18 meeting, as the deadline for submitting their recommendations to commissioners in May looms. Committee members were able to agree to a new license issuance cap of 1% over existing levels when a pause on license issuance is lifted and compromised on neighbor notification requirements and noise regulations. The meeting began dramatically, as one committee member confronted others who have recently joined groups representing property owners opposed to shortterm rental (STR) regulation in the county. The committee member was upset that fellow committee members would join groups at loggerheads with the committee’s work and asked if it was a conflict of interest. Tillamook County’s Director of Community Development Sarah Absher said that she had been in contact with county counsel, who had advised that it was not legally a conflict of interest. She also said that the groups formed to advance STR interests had reached out to her and county commissioners to attempt to discuss the new ordinance, but that they had rebuffed such attempts instead saying those concerns should be addressed to the committee. Committee members affiliated with the new anti-regulation groups defended their ability to participate objectively on the committee, but the upset member was not mollified. After reviewing the amendments made to the parking regulations section following their previous meeting and slightly changing verbiage related to on-street parking, the committee jumped into neighbor notification. The initial draft of the ordinance had required that STR owners notify their neighbors of their operation annually via a mailing.
STR owners and operators on the committee said that the requirement was overly burdensome, noting that finding mailing addresses for neighboring property owners would be challenging and that the annual requirement seemed excessive. They suggested that the exterior signage and an online database would be sufficient to notify neighbors. Other committee members agreed that the annual requirement was unnecessary and said that they would be fine with notification happening upon the issuance or transfer of a license. However, they were insistent that mailing a letter was critical to them as a means of fostering stronger relationships between STR owners and operators and their neighbors. Absher offered that her office could provide cards with correct mailing addresses to new license holders to reduce their workload. After discussing the proposal, the committee agreed, while also reducing the boundary for notification from 250 feet to 150 feet. STR licensees will be required to sign an affidavit affirming that they sent the postcards provided by the department of community development. Focus then shifted to proposed noise abatement regulations, one of the major livability concerns that spurred the license pause and committees’ formation. The initial draft of the proposed ordinance required that any noise produced in an STR not be audible beyond the property’s lines at any point. It also called for quiet hours between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. when no amplified music, loud talking or noise audible beyond the property line would be allowed. Absher said that enforcement of any noise regulation would be exceedingly difficult, confirming that neither her department nor the sheriff’s office had the staff to proactively address the issue. Instead, it would be incumbent on neighbors to report offenses. Committee members noted that this would be difficult for average property owners but agreed that
the limitations were necessary. A discussion of how to gauge excessive noise was had, with some favoring a decibel limit and others language calling for “reasonability.” The committee settled on adding language that would ban “unreasonable sustained” noise audible outside the property limits during the day. They also agreed to change the penalty for infractions to a citation from the sheriff’s office, rather than a strike against the property’s STR license. After breaking for lunch, the group returned and dove into discussions on license growth management strategies and license transferability. Both Absher and Commissioner Erin Skaar, who is liaising with the committee, reiterated that the commissioners did not desire to reduce the extant number of licenses but would be implementing some tool to limit the issuance of new licenses. Skaar said that the county citizenry’s desire to do so was clear and had been the reason for the pause and the committee’s formation. Absher’s recommendation was that new license issuance initially be limited to a 1% increase over the number of existing licenses prior to the pause in each affected community. She and her staff would then conduct public meetings in each of those communities to set a cap that matched with residents’ wishes. The 1% interim increase would allow around 60 new STRs to be licensed across the county, with the most in Pacific City, which would be eligible to add 20 properties, while all other communities would be eligible for ten or fewer. The committee quickly agreed to the suggested plan, with the only reservations coming from members who favored delaying the community feedback process to allow more data to come in. Finally, the committee addressed a cap on the transferability of short-term rental licenses. Absher suggested that to ensure
■ See STR, Page A2
Will Chappell Editor
regon’s Forest Trust Lands Advisory Committee met on April 14 and were briefed on ongoing work on a new forest management plan and the new annual operating plan for state forests. Oregon Department of Forestry Officials revealed that the new annual operating plan contained the same harvest levels that had caused much consternation when included as part of a transitional implementation plan in January. The planned total harvest for fiscal year 2024 is set at 186.5 million board feet, with 49.6 million feet of that to be harvested from the Tillamook State Forest and 62 million board feet within Tillamook County. The overall figure represents a nearly 20% reduction from the 225 million board feet that have been harvested in state forests, on average, over the past twenty years. Committee members again expressed their dismay at the figures and the implications the harvest reduction would have on their counties’ budgets. The operations plan is now open for public comment on ODF’s website, which will end in June before the plan is implemented beginning July 1. ODF will also be conducting 300 miles of road improvement and building 25 miles of new forest road to service the planned sales as part of the operations plan. It also includes plans to maintain existing recreation facilities across the state forests and build several new trails in Tillamook State Forest. The update on the forest management plan (FMP) that is being designed focused on the process of developing that plan, which is scheduled to be complete in 2024. Past FMPs have been in force for around a decade before review and update. Tod Haren, a forest resource analyst for ODF, said that the new FMP is being based more on data than past models that relied on past harvests to project future yields. The team developing the new FMP is using a forest vegetation simulator to model growth and yield in state forests. Haren said that the vegetation simulator has a model that applies to the coastal northwest, but that out of the box it overestimates yield and growth. To account for that, ODF staffers are applying data gathered by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Forest service to calibrate the model for specific forests. The new management plan is being developed simultaneously with and to abide by a habitat conservation plan (HCP) for western Oregon state forests. The HCP will create new conservation areas and regulations for the state forests to comply with the National Endangered Species Act and protect ODF harvest activities from litigation. While the final draft of the HCP is not due until June, it has already stirred considerable concern among counties and special districts who rely on state forest timber revenues, residents of those counties, timber industry representatives and on the Board of Forestry. Those groups inferred that the harvest projections released in January as part of a transitional implementation plan and confirmed in the latest annual operating plan update, would be similar to those under new HCP guidelines. Those concerns led to a motion to restart the HCP process during the Board of Forestry’s February meeting that fell by a one-vote margin. At that point, even the members voting against the restart said that if projected harvest levels did not rise in the final draft, they would be likely to support a new process. New data from the modeling for the forest management plan will be released during the summer and the project’s timeline calls for Board of Forestry approval in January 2024.