Seaside melts
Tillamook
Oscar B
arrives
SPORTS • 4A
NORTH COAST • 3A
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2015
142nd YEAR, No. 169
ONE DOLLA169
Students quiz Wyden on school costs
‘Mega
Sink’
is a
mess
The South Jetty
captures more than its
share of plastic junk
By EDWARD STRATTON
The Daily Astorian
JOSHUA BESSEX — The Daily Astorian
U.S Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., speaks to students and community members during a town hall at Astoria High School Friday. Wyden an-
swered audience questions during the event.
Astoria town hall draws crowd back to school
By EDWARD STRATTON
The Daily Astorian
‘I
always thought that the heart of this
job has been to be accessible to peo-
ple,’ U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden said Fri-
day, when asked by a student from Astoria
High School what his keys to success were.
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questions from students and community
members during his 719th town hall, part of
a promise of his 19 years ago to hold a town
hall in each of Oregon’s 36 counties, each
year. Wyden also served in the U.S. House
of Representatives from 1981 to 1996.
“I’m from Portland,” said Wyden. “I
love Portland, but I am not a United States
senator from the state of Portland, I repre-
sent the entire state.”
At the heart of his job representing the
diversity of Oregon and the U.S., Wyden
said, is problem-solving. Wyden focused
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solutions that serve differing interests
around the nation and Oregon.
Natural resources
Community members shared concerns
about the impacts of energy production,
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Wyden, a member of the Committee on
Natural Resources and Energy, was asked
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natural gas import/export facility in War-
renton and on the proposed Keystone XL
pipeline.
See TOWN HALL, Page 10A
Ron Wyden talks
LNG, port dispute,
life in the minority
Lawmaker sees chance for
‘principled bipartisanship’
By DERRICK DePLEDGE
The Daily Astorian
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, threading the politically
sensitive question of building LNG terminals in Or-
egon, said he wanted to ensure that the developers of
the Jordan Cove Energy Project at Coos Bay had the
chance to make their case as the West Coast exporter
of natural gas.
The Oregon Democrat described Oregon LNG,
which wants to build an export terminal on the Ski-
panon Peninsula in Warrenton, as “behind Jordan
Cove in the queue.”
The U.S. Department of Energy has condition-
ally authorized the Jordan Cove project and the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is review-
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export terminal would be fed with natural gas from
the Rockies through a new 232-mile pipeline from
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for export.
Oregon LNG is still navigating a host of state and
federal regulatory and legal hurdles for its proposed
export terminal in Warrenton and new 87-mile pipe-
line that would tap natural gas from Western Canada
and the Rockies through a connection in Washington
state.
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JOSHUA BESSEX — The Daily Astorian
See WYDEN, Page 10A
Sen. Ron Wyden answers questions during a Town Hall meeting at Astoria High
School.
WARRENTON — Marine plas-
tics researcher and Seaside native Marc
Ward estimated that he and more than 50
other volunteers pulled out more than a
quarter ton of microplastics Feb. 15 from
what he’s termed the “Columbia River
South Jetty Mega Sink.” And that, he
said, is probably only a third of it.
The Mega Sink is located in a tidal
inlet just north of the South Jetty and
Parking Lot C in Fort Stevens State
Park on Clatsop Spit.
Ward has discovered sinks at Ban-
don, Manzanita, Rockaway, Oswald
West, Cannon Beach and Crescent
Beach, but he said the South Jetty is
the worst he’s ever seen in 15 years of
work on microplastics. He estimates
that parts of it contain between 6 and
11 pounds of material per square meter.
“This is the largest environmen-
tal crisis that most people don’t know
about,” said Ward, the co-founder of
Sea Turtles Forever with his wife, Ra-
chel. Ward splits his time between the
North Coast, where he works on sys-
tems to clean Oregon’s shores of the
microplastics and other debris washing
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The material in the sink, he said,
comes almost entirely from the Great
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a slow-moving, clockwise, circular
ocean current that shoots straight at Or-
egon before turning south, periodically
dumping its beaches with debris.
“It’s not tsunami debris,” said Ward.
“This is just stuff from the gyre that has
been out there for decades.”
Most of the material in the gyre is
microplastics, at sea for years, broken
down by ultraviolet rays of light and
biodegration.
See ‘MEGA SINK’, Page 10A
Submitted photo
Volunteers Rachel Tillman, left,
and Rachel Ward used horses to
help pack out more than a quar-
ter ton of debris Feb. 15 from a
tidal inlet just north of the South
Jetty at Fort Stevens State Park.
Ken McQuhae makes his quiet voice heard
Retired engineer gets involved at City Hall
CANNON
BEACH
— Ken McQuhae may be
soft-spoken, but he is outspo-
ken.
In his retirement years,
the part-time Cannon Beach
resident has championed an
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cal causes — even if it means
courting controversy at City
Hall.
The 74-year-old McQuhae
— who now sits on the city’s
Affordable Housing Task
Force and supports the effort
to establish a charter school in
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with city issues when he led
the charge to remove Cannon
Beach from the Sunset Em-
pire Park and Recreation Dis-
trict in 2011 and 2012.
He discovered that he be-
longed to a group of Cannon
Beach residents who unwit-
tingly paid for parks twice —
to both the city parks budget
and to Sunset — because their
properties partially stood in
territory that had been coun-
ty property before the city
annexed it. This brought por-
tions of Cannon Beach, which
had already voted not to join
SEPRD, into Sunset’s taxing
district, and the city had ne-
glected to take them out of it.
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eventually voted to remove
the annexed territory from the
taxing district. The next year,
McQuhae and some of his
neighbors saw their property
taxes decrease.
“A lot of people who
owned these lots who were
paying both (city and Sun-
set taxes) didn’t realize that
the rest of the lots in the city
weren’t paying,” he said. He
added that few people cared
about the extra tax, even when
they noticed it, because peo-
ple often assume that “taxes
are inevitable.”
Dune grading
The skirmish with Sunset
may have provoked objec-
ERICK BENGEL — EO Media Group
tions from certain quarters,
but the Cannon Beach citizen-
ry seemed mostly to side with
McQuhae, he said.
See McQUHAE, Page 10A
Ken McQuhae, a retired
engineer, can make out
Haystack Rock from his
Chapman Point home. He
worked in the semiconduc-
tor industry for 30 years,
first in Ottawa, Canada,
then in Hillsboro.