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Headlight Herald
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2023
TILLAMOOK, OREGON • WWW.TILLAMOOKHEADLIGHTHERALD.COM
VOL. 135, NO. 38 • $1.50
First annual Seafood and Spirits festival rousing success in Garibaldi LAURA SCHMIDT Port of Garibaldi Events and Tourism Coordinator
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See more event photos on A3
The main tent at the festival, where more than 600 people gathered to sample local seafood. PHOTO BY DANIEL PHELPS
he Port of Garibaldi was excited to host our inaugural Seafood and Spirits Festival this past weekend. The festival featured local spirits, wines and beer, as well as multiple seafood options served by the Fish Peddler. Over 600 guests attended the event over the weekend. Guests were able to sample many different spirits from our vendors and also taste fresh locally harvested seafood like oysters, seaweed and mussels from our demonstrators JAndy Oyster and Oregon Seaweed. Chef Maylin Chavez and Tommy Gomes filmed their demonstration and parts of the event for an upcoming episode for the Outdoor Channel tv show “The Fishmonger”. During the demo Gomes broke down a whole tuna donated to the event by the Oregon Albacore Commission and guests were able to sample the tuna prepared by Chavez. The main stage featured 8 local bands and our demo stage featured 6 educational demonstrations and seafood sampling by local seafood experts and chefs each day to include fish filleting, oyster shucking, seaweed and mussel cooking, crab
cleaning/cracking, tuna filet and cooking demo and salmon gravlax demo and sampling. The Garibaldi Portside Bistro catered two VIP seafood dinner experiences featuring a seafood buffet on Friday and a seafood boil on Saturday which everyone raved about. We had a good mix of locals and visitors attending the event and are ready to begin planning for next year’s event. Port Manager, Mike Saindon said “We hope everyone who came out enjoyed the event. We are looking forward to taking the lessons learned from this first year event and growing future events to offer a lot more of an experience for the community and guests, and to highlight what the coast has to offer.” We would like to thank all our generous sponsors for making this event possible. The festival was supported, in part, by a grant funded by Transient Lodging Tax dollars through Tillamook Coast Visitors Association along with many other sponsors including Tillamook County Cultural Coalition, Grocery Outlet, the Confederate Tribes of Siletz Indians, TLC, Fibre Federal, Vacasa, Berkshire Hathaway NW Real Estate – Garibaldi Office, Pacific Metal, the Oregon Albacore Commission, Oregon Coast Bank, and Englund Marine.
Tillamook District Forester discusses future harvest levels: ‘It will be very steady for Tillamook’ WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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illamook District Forester Kate Skinner sat down with the Headlight Herald recently to discuss conditions in the Tillamook State Forest under a transitional implementation plan that took effect in July and its outlook under a new habitat conservation plan, expected sometime early next year. The Tillamook State Forest is in a good position to maintain recent harvest levels due to a combination of historic factors and forest management decisions made by the department, according
to Skinner. “What we’re seeing right now, what we did for the modeling for our current implementation plans moving forward is in the first 30 years of the 70-year window it will be very steady for Tillamook,” Skinner said. Development of the new habitat conservation plan (HCP) for Western Oregon State Forests has been an ongoing process since 2018 but has descended into controversy this year as projected harvest levels have fallen. In recent years, across all state forests in western Oregon, between 225 and 250 million board feet (MMBF) of timber have
been harvested. But the new transitional implementation plan that has taken effect for this fiscal year will only allow for the harvest of 165 to 182.5 MMBF. Commissioners from the counties that rely on state forest timber revenue, officials from special districts that do so as well and representatives from the timber industry have repeatedly complained to the Oregon Board of Forestry about the dire economic consequences should those harvest levels be instituted long term under the new HCP. However, the picture is more complex than the headline numbers. Timber
revenues are distributed to the counties and special districts according to which entity owns the land being harvested in specific sales, linking local revenues with local harvests. While other counties are seeing decreased timber sales under the new implementation plan, the harvest for Tillamook County is expected to remain steady or increase slightly. Over the past 15 years an average of 47 MMBF has been harvested, while this year 49 MMBF is being included in sales. Factors driving the disparity in harvest impacts across state forest districts are varied and complex,
according to Skinner. The history of the Tillamook Burn and reforestation, proximity to national forest land and topography are the biggest now working in the Tillamook State Forest’s favor. The Tillamook State Forest consists of 364,000 acres of land that was donated by Tillamook County to the state after a series of four massive fires from 1933 to 1951. Following the fires, landowners defaulted on their property tax payments and allowed their land to revert to county ownership, before the counties in turn put the land in trust to be managed by the Oregon Department of
Forestry (ODF). Following the devastation, referred to as the Tillamook Burn, ODF and members of local communities came together to replant the forest. More than a billion Douglas Fir seeds were dropped from helicopters, while more than 72 million seedlings were planted by hand. The state forest was officially dedicated by Governor Tom McCall in August 1973. The result of those reforestation efforts was a homogenized forest that did not reflect the one that had burned, according to Skinner. Over the past 70 years, that has created problems with SEE FORESTER PAGE A4
Nestucca School District pays six figure settlement to former teacher WILL CHAPPELL Headlight Editor
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he Nestucca Valley School District reached a settlement with former teacher Katy Bean Bamford for more than $100,000 in November 2022 to resolve her complaints about her contract’s nonrenewal.
Bamford claimed and a Bureau of Labor and Industries Investigation concurred, that she had been subjected to heightened scrutiny and uneven absence policy application by Superintendent Misty Wharton and thenNestucca K-8 Principal Chad Holloway. “I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was in elementary school and this has changed the trajectory of my whole life,” Bamford said. “I just think that the community deserves better and the kids deserve better.”
Bamford arrived at Nestucca K-8 in 2019 to teach kindergarten with almost a decade of experience under her belt. That year, her class size fluctuated between 26 and 32 students, making teaching challenging at times, especially after the beginning of distance instruction in the spring of 2020. In March of that year, Bamford met with Wharton to discuss concerns over the size of her class, telling her that she felt it hindered her ability to best meet students’ needs. Bamford said that after the meeting, Wharton and Hol-
loway discussed dividing the 30 incoming kindergarteners into two classrooms, with one shared between kindergarten and first grade. This move would have matched the district’s policy of creating smaller class sizes for their youngest students. However, in fall 2020 as the school year was set to begin, Bamford was informed that she would be assigned a class of 30 students. Bamford believes the change was precipitated by her request for special accommodations to teach remotely due to the ongoing pandemic, although a Bureau of Labor and In-
dustries (BOLI) did not find evidence to substantiate that claim. Alarmed at the assignment, Bamford requested a meeting with Holloway to discuss the change in plans. “If all classes had about 30 kids I wouldn’t be complaining or questioning that decision,” Bamford said. “I was concerned about equity.” In the meeting with Holloway, her union representative and two other teachers, Bamford said that the principal did not engage in a discussion or address her concerns. Following the unsatisfac-
tory meeting, Bamford asked for a meeting with Wharton, which occurred just a few days later. Although Wharton did not adjust Bamford’s class size, she did respond to Bamford’s concerns about Holloway’s leadership by offering Bamford an alternate supervisor, which she accepted. As the school year began, despite her alternate supervisor, Holloway began attending Bamford’s virtual classes on a regular basis, continuing even after Bamford brought it to other district administrators’ attention. SEE SETTLEMENT PAGE A4