Appeal Tribune Wednesday, March 8, 2017 3B
Brown to Trump: Hands off our pot biz
ANDREW SELSKY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The states that have legalized recre-
ational marijuana — a multi-billion-dol-
lar business — don’t want to hear the fed-
eral government talk about a crack-
down. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown says she
wants Oregonians left alone to “grow
these jobs.”
In Oregon alone, that’s roughly 12,500
jobs, said economist Beau Whitney of
Portland, adding that he is making a con-
servative estimate. Oregon’s attorney
general said she would be duty-bound to
fight to protect the state’s marijuana in-
dustry.
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions
has said his department is reviewing a
Justice Department memo that gives
states flexibility in passing marijuana
laws and noted “it does remain a viola-
tion of federal law to distribute marijua-
na throughout any place in the United
States, whether a state legalizes it or
not.” White House spokesman Sean Spic-
er predicted stepped up enforcement.
Underscoring how the marijuana in-
dustry is pushing job
growth in Oregon, the
Oregon Liquor Control
Commission, which regu-
lates and licenses the
state’s recreational mari-
juana industry, says it has
Kate Brown
over 12,640 applications
for marijuana worker permits. It has
also received 2,174 marijuana license ap-
plications, with over half coming from
would-be producers and the rest mostly
from those seeking to set up as retailers,
processors, wholesalers and laborato-
ries. It had activated 943 licenses by
Tuesday.
Marijuana shops are prevalent in
many Oregon cities. In the countryside,
marijuana greenhouses are not uncom-
mon.
“We now have a nascent, somewhat
successful industry,” Brown said in an
interview Tuesday with The Associated
Press and a freelance journalist. “These
are good paying jobs. It’s a pretty di-
verse business community.”
In January alone, recreational mari-
juana sales in Oregon were over $20 mil-
Parenting workshop set
on teens and social media
CHRISTENA BROOKS
SPECIAL TO THE APPEAL TRIBUNE
SILVERTON – Molalla parents Willy
and Cindy Fincher didn’t know how deep
their 17-year-old daughter’s double life
on the Internet went until she snuck
away from an aunt’s house to meet a boy
she’d chatted with online.
“She could’ve been sex-trafficked …
it was so dangerous … her mindset was
so bad,” Cindy Fincher said.
From that rock-bottom point, the
Finchers unwound their daughter’s four
years of “horrifying” experiences online
that had started innocently with simple
Internet games. She is now almost 21 and
healthy, her mother said.
The experience spurred the family to
change their parenting style, explore the
world online and to set enforceable lim-
its on social media.
Bringing 20 years experience work-
ing with youth and five years as a Certi-
fied Prevention Specialist, Cindy Finch-
er will facilitate a free two-hour work-
shop titled “How to Set Enforceable Lim-
its and Social Media” for parents at the
Silverton Community Center on Wednes-
day, March 8.
The free workshop is 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
at the center, 421 S. Water St.
“Social media is not going away,”
Fincher said. “I am going to focus on how
to create boundaries. We’ll also talk
about devices – what are the safest de-
vices and why – and what apps you can
put on those devices.”
The workshop is sponsored by Silver-
ton Together, along with Children’s Trust
Fund of Oregon and Oregon Together.
It’s free, but organizers ask attendees to
register ahead by calling 503-873-0405 or
emailing janh@wavecable.com.
Daddy-Daughter Dance set
to sparkle this Saturday
CHRISTENA BROOKS
SPECIAL TO THE APPEAL TRIBUNE
For the second year in a row, dads and
daughters are invited to attend a dance
at Silverton High School designed to
“strengthen the father-daughter rela-
tionships in our community,” organizers
said.
Silverton Rotary’s second annual
Daddy-Daughter Dance will run from 6
to 9 p.m. on Saturday, March 11, and this
year’s theme is “Moonlight Masquer-
ade.”
The event is open to girls who are
eighth grade and under and their fathers
or father figures. It will feature a live DJ,
dancing, face painting, crafts and games
and food.
Tickets are $30 per father-daughter
couple and $10 for each additional
daughter. The proceeds go toward fund-
ing the Rotary Club’s scholarship pro-
gram for local high school graduates.
Those interested can buy tickets online
at SilvertonDDD.com or in person at
Country Financial, at 204 W. Main Street
in Silverton.
Oregon’s state
parks shatter
visitation record
ZACH URNESS
STATESMAN JOURNAL
For the fourth year in a row, Ore-
gon’s state park system attracted a rec-
ord number of visitors.
Officials estimated there were 51.7
million visits to the state’s parks, histor-
ic sites, waysides and natural areas in
2016.
An additional 2.7 million camper
nights were recorded at the 57 sites
where people can camp.
Both numbers are records, Oregon
Parks and Recreation Department
spokesman Chris Havel said.
“The upside is that we’re serving
more people than ever before — and
seeing more smiles than ever before,”
Havel said in an interview earlier this
year. “At the same time, we’re having
problems keeping up with crowding,
trash, and the wear and tear on parks.”
Oregon’s state park system has bro-
ken its own record every year since
2013. The previous record for day use
visits was 48.4 million, recorded in
2015.
In terms of percentages, the biggest
jumps have been in the Columbia River
Gorge and Central Oregon areas, Ha-
vel said. However, the largest raw num-
bers come from the Oregon Coast,
where visits increased to 28.6 million,
up from 21.4 million in 2011.
One possible reason for the increase
is weather. Spring of 2015 and ’16
brought some of the warmest in state
history, leading to 20 percent increases
in visitation during April.
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OPRD is taking steps to address the
increase at parks facing the biggest is-
sues.
At Smith Rock State Park, where
visitation jumped from 401,212 in 2009
to 744,380 in 2016, officials are revising
the park’s master plan with a focus on
how to deal with the new visitors.
They’re considering everything from
expanding the parking lot to instituting
a limited entry system that would cap
the number of people allowed to visit.
“Everything is on the table right
now,” park manager Scott Brown said
in an interview earlier this year. “On
busy weekends, we have parking over-
flowing into our neighbor’s yards, ex-
tremely long lines at restrooms and an
overflowing septic system, and a lot of
issues with our first-come, first-served
campground.”
The increasing crowds also factor
into OPRD’s budget. Havel said a prior-
ity for the department is rebuilding its
field staff — hiring more park rangers.
“People may be under the impres-
sion parks don’t take much work to op-
erate,” Havel said. “(But) keeping it
clean, maintaining facilities and help-
ing people directly and through pro-
grams takes a well-trained team.”
Zach Urness has been an outdoors
writer, photographer and videographer
in Oregon for eight years. He is the au-
thor of the book “Hiking Southern Ore-
gon” and can be reached at
zurness@StatesmanJournal.com
or
(503) 399-6801. Find him on Twitter at
@ZachsORoutdoors.
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Washington and California and Alaska
and Nevada, and there’s a few other
states, have voted to legalize marijuana.
On the West coast alone, that’s 49 million
people.”
Oregon Attorney General Ellen Ro-
senblum indicated she would go to court
to protect those jobs. Currently, the Cole
Memorandum, which provides guidance
for federal marijuana enforcement, re-
stricts it to a few areas, including pre-
venting distribution to minors and pre-
venting marijuana from being trans-
ported from pot-legal states to other
states. Under the Cole Memorandum,
states where marijuana is legal have
been largely been left alone.
“If the Cole memorandum is pulled, or
replaced with other guidance, we would
evaluate it immediately,” Rosenblum
said in a recent interview with AP. “Pos-
sibly if we felt we had a basis, we would
push back against that, because we have
a burgeoning industry here, very suc-
cessful so far with some bumps in the
road … so that would be important for
the attorney general to take a stand.”
lion, with medical marijuana generating
about $2.8 million more, the OLCC said.
In Oregon, Washington state and Colo-
rado, marijuana tax revenues totaled at
least $335 million in either the last calen-
dar year or the last fiscal year.
Whitney, who has been involved in
several marijuana businesses and has
advised state government, estimates
that workers in the marijuana industry
in Oregon earn a total of $315 million per
year. That’s based on workers earning an
average of $12 per hour. He noted that
the wage scales vary widely, with har-
vesters earning less than processors and
chemists. Their wages are pumped back
into the local economies.
If the Trump administration moves
against legalized recreational marijua-
na, it would be going against its own ob-
jectives, Oregon’s governor said.
“This administration very clearly
wants to grow the economy and create
jobs, and the other piece that they want is
to have the states be the laboratories of
democracy,” Brown said. “There is no
better type of laboratory than the initia-
tive process, and voters in Oregon and
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