Serving Oregon’s South Coast Since 1878
Coos County has 4th death
Word of the year: Pandemic
COVID-19 cases continue to surge, A3
Meriam-Webster choice not surprising, A5
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Fire damages clothing pantry ZACK DEMARS The World
COOS BAY — Church leaders are looking to rebuild after a fire caused around $150,000 in damage to the Seventh-day Adventist church over the weekend. “We’re not going to allow things like this to disrupt our mission,” said Pastor Thomas Nicholas. “This is just par for the course.” The fire centered around the laundry room of the church’s clothing pantry, a separate building from the main church. The fire gutted the laundry room, shattering multiple windows and impacting the building’s electricity along the way. The cause of the fire is official-
ly “undetermined,” though fire officials have identified a few possible causes, according to Fire Chief Mark Anderson. “At this point, we’ve done pretty much what we can,” Anderson said Monday. Dispatchers received reports of a fire at the church around 8 p.m. Saturday, and crews responded to the church clothing pantry in a nearby building, according to the fire department. Crews did a preliminary knockdown of the fire from outside before entering the building and extinguishing the fire. The fire was extinguished in about 20 minutes, but crews remained on scene for another hour and a half investigating the fire and overhauling the building.
The clothing pantry typically distributes clothing to families on Tuesdays, Nicholas said. It likely won’t be open this week, but Nicholas said church leaders are making plans to reopen in some form in the next week or so. “All of that’s going to continue,” Nicholas said. “We just might have to change how we do it or where we do it.” Some of the clothes in the pantry were lost to the fire and its smoke, and some will still be usable after being washed. A collection of Christmas toys suffered some impacts from the smoke, and the neighboring food pantry went largely unscathed other than a loss of electricity. The department estimates the Please see Fire, Page A10
Zack Demars, The World
A fire destroyed part of the clothing pantry at the Seventh-day Adventist Church on Newmark Avenue. Investigators haven’t determined an official cause of the fire, but suspect it started near the external vent left of the door.
Coos Bay to consider takeover of wastewater
It’s Christmas time in the city
ZACK DEMARS The World
Photos by David Rupkalvis, The World
After lighting the community Christmas tree, Santa greets residents. Christmas season officially kicked off over the weekend as Coos Bay and North Bend residents hit local stores to stock up on Christmas gifts, and Santa Claus, the jolly old elf himself, stopped by to ring in the season. See more photos on page A10.
Businesses celebrate ‘shopping small’ ZACK DEMARS The World
COOS BAY — Jeff Dery has a background in business, not sign waving. But on Saturday, he took to the streets with a sign anyway. “Shop Small, Save BIG, 2DAY,” he waved to drivers passing him on U.S. Highway 101. Dery, the general manager for Coos Bay’s America’s Mattress, was standing on the street, celebrating Small Business Saturday, a day designed to support local
businesses after the early-bird madness of Black Friday sales. “We want to shop small because we’re supporting the local community,” Dery said. He hoped his sign would encourage passersby to visit the city’s collection of small businesses. For many business owners, “Shop Small Saturday” means more than ever during a year fraught with a pandemic, shutdowns, layoffs and stay-home orders pushing customers to online-only and delivery options. “People are now reluctant to
see — especially to try out a mattress,” Dery said. For a period during the pandemic’s first economic shutdown, Dery was the store’s only employee as he took orders by appointment. The pandemic taught him lessons about how to stock his store. His business, like many across the country, experienced supply chain problems during the pandemic — the material used to wrap mattress coils got redirected to manufacture face masks, he said.
So with longer wait times to get products in the store, Dery had to increase his selection to ensure he’d have what customers wanted. “We’ve learned from it, as far as keeping stuff in stock,” Dery said. Managing inventory was also a pandemic lesson for Suzy Gibbs, who has owned Jennie’s Shoes for about four years and worked in the store for two decades. Shoe suppliers have also ex-
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COOS BAY — The management and operation of the city’s sewer and wastewater collection system could soon leave the hands of the city’s contractor, as negotiations with the company grow challenging. On Tuesday, the city council will consider moving forward to develop a transition plan to take over the collection system. Currently, the city contracts with an outside company, Jacobs, to do the work, but city officials say contract standards aren’t being met. Concerns about the contractor’s performance came to the forefront when the city began the annual process of renegotiating its agreement with the contractor, according to City Manager Roger Craddock. The city’s main concerns included the maintenance of the wastewater system’s infrastructure, repeated exceedances of environmental quality permits and staff turnover. Those permit exceedances are the city’s responsibility, even if they’re caused by the city’s contractor. An audit found that many of the exceedances were preventable, Craddock said. In a council work session Nov. 24, Efrain Rodriguez, a representative of the company, told city councilors about improvements it’s made since the city began raising its concerns. “We started working on enhancements and additions to the contract that made that a little bit more cumbersome, and it dragged us into this situation of us having to perform, in certain cases, doing scope that is in addition to what the contract contemplates,” Rodriguez said. “In some cases, addressing new expectations — that we are happy to do, but are additional to the original contract, which all results into the situation we’re in after the fact.” Those system improvements have come at a cost: In the proposed amendment to the agreement for service, Jacobs is asking for a major fee increase, over 30%, including a retroactive increase for several months. That’d cost the city around $500,000, bringing the total contract up to around $2.4 million. Many on the city council expressed their displeasure with an Please see Wastewater, Page A10
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