OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
Water
under
the bridge
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
10 years ago this week — 2006
A federal proposal would slash the critical habitat in Oregon, Washing-
ton and California set aside under the Endangered Species Act for the mar-
bled murrelet, a threatened sea bird, by about 95 percent, to 221,692 acres.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday the bird already is pro-
tected by other plans such as the Northwest Forest Plan and state and tribal
management plans on the 3.37 million acres that would lose the critical
habitat designation.
It is studying a proposal to delist the bird altogether.
Early projections of harvest levels in the Clatsop, Tillamook
and other state forests contained in the state’s 2001 Forest Man-
agement Plan are proving overly optimistic as the document
begins to be implemented on the ground.
From original estimates of as much a 279 million board feet a
year, the Oregon Department of Forestry is now predicting that
on average about 40 percent less timber will come out of the for-
ests annually.
That could translate to big cuts in revenue to Clatsop County,
which receives about $4 million a year in timber revenues, as
well as other smaller taxing districts in the county and elsewhere.
Clatsop Community College has been named the sole beneiciary of a
$700,000-plus trust through one of its earliest supporters.
College directors agreed to undertake the Towler Trust established by
John W. Towler, son of long-time principal and superintendent of Astoria
schools Emmett D. Towler, at the monthly meeting Tuesday.
50 years ago — 1966
Fourteen trawlers and two factory ships of the Russian leet
were hovering close about the mouth of the Columbia River,
just beyond the lightship, when George Moskovita brought his
boat Mitkof in from a cruise after tuna Tuesday afternoon, he
reported.
“One of the trawlers was alongside a factory ship and the cut-
ter Yocona was just coming out of the river,” Moskovita said.
“Both the Russians took off and headed farther out to sea. It
looked as though they suspected they were inside the 12-mile
limit they had agreed to respect.”
Bumble Bee Seafoods corporation, which broke sales records again last
iscal year, is off to a good start this year and “we look for a better year,”
President Malcolm MacNaughton, Honolulu, of parent company Castle
and Cooke, Inc,. said at a luncheon here Tuesday.
Clatsop Plains Pioneer Presbyterian Church will celebrate its
120th anniversary next week. The church was organized Sep-
tember 19, 1846, at the home of William H. Gray. To commem-
orate the event, open house will be held Sunday from 2-4 p.m.
United Presbyterian Women will greet guests, according to the
Rev. John C. Evans Jr., pastor.
Paid vehicular trafic over the Astoria bridge has averaged 1,678 daily
since the Labor Day weekend, records of the Oregon Highway department
indicated Thursday.
Average for the period since the bridge opened to trafic July 29 stood at
2,560 vehicles daily for 466 days.
75 years ago — 1941
Enrollment at Astoria
public schools this morning
totaled 1418 pupils, nine less
than opening day last year,
the city schools superinten-
dent’s ofice reported, with
Capt. Robert Gray Junior
High School and Astoria High
School each showing a gain
and Lewis and Clark and
John Jacob Astor each having
a decrease.
The Navy’s new $500,000 sec-
tion base on Pier 2 of the Asto-
ria port docks went into commis-
sion Monday, with Commander
George Grant taking over super-
vision of the new defense link
which will serve as a shore unit in
support of coastal patrol vessels
operating offshore and in harbors
from Moclips, Washington, south
to Tillamook.
Fish handling facilities
of Columbia River canner-
ies Thursday afternoon were
being taxed to the limit by
one of the greatest fall runs
in a generation – described as
“enormous” by Tom Nelson,
patriarch of the river’s packers
Daily Astorian
and now associated with Point A movie poster for “Dive Bomber.”
Adams Packing company.
From Celilo falls to the sea,
every gillnetter came in loaded today. No cannery in the lower
river reported a per-boat average of less than 2000 pounds, while
major operators gave the average at 3000 pounds. At Altoona
two great ishermen, Nick Marincovich and William Weatten
had caught 11,000 pounds each by morning, obviously making
more that a single delivery apiece.
Protecting the North Coast,
wildlife an acre at a time
By R.J. MARX
The Daily Astorian
T
here’s something magical
about the huge swaths of land
stretching for miles, mountain
and sea. That’s what the North Coast
is all about: a stunning and unique
visual scenery.
This summer, a 360-acre parcel
on Tillamook Head was transferred
from timber property to conser-
vation corridor. The North Coast
Land Conservancy and GreenWood
Resources closed
on the Boneyard
Ridge property for
$1.3 million. The
purchase creates
3,500 connected
acres from the
summit of Tillamook Head to the
Necanicum River Valley.
Boneyard Ridge — named
because of elk bones found on the
property — serves as a link between
Ecola State Park, stretches along the
Tillamook Head shoreline and land
conservancy’s Circle Creek Habitat
Reserve in the Necanicum River
loodplain west of U.S. Highway
101 at the south end of Seaside.
Katie Voelke, the conservan-
cy’s executive director, calls the
Boneyard Ridge acquisition “the
last piece of the puzzle,” connecting
Ecola State Park to Circle Creek and
the corridor of protected lands along
the Neawanna and the Necanicum.
Such a transaction might have
been unthinkable half a century
ago, when timber companies and
environmental groups were sworn
enemies in city ofices, courtrooms
and in the ield.
The public estate
North Coast Land Conservancy
founder Neal Maine described the
frustration environmentalists felt in
the early 1980s, when conservation
came as a result of a gavel from the
courts, with two hostile sides pitted
against each other — maybe that’s
where we get the word loggerheads.
Private landowners, loggers and
ranchers argued that efforts to pro-
tect wildlife that result in restrictions
on land usage constitute a “taking”
of private property requiring
compensation.
Environmentalists posited that
wildlife, water and air are held in
trust by the government for the
public beneit.
Oregon passed the Forest
Practices Act in 1971 to ensure the
continued growing and harvesting
of trees while protecting soil, air,
water and wildlife habitat.
The federal Endangered
Species Act in 1973 — signed by
President Richard Nixon — and
the Marine Protection, Research
and Sanctuaries Act of 1972 were
enacted to oppose wanton private
use of natural resources that destroy
the “public estate.”
The laws soon showed effects on
land-use decisions in Oregon and
locally.
In 1986, property then known as
“Gearhart Ranch” — later devel-
oped into the Highlands — was
delayed by environmentalists by
the silverspot butterly, a threatened
species at home on the Clatsop
Plains.
The Northwest Forest Plan, cre-
ated in 1994, established a system
of reserves across the range of the
spotted owl — symbol of the 1980s
federal timber wars — to provide
long-term nesting habitat.
Sixteen beaches in Oregon,
including two in Clatsop County,
Submitted Photo
Map of North Coast Land Conservancy protected properties.
Neal
Maine
Katie
Voelke
were protected as management areas
for the endangered snowy plover.
Submitted Photo
A change in approach
With encouragement from
heightened public awareness and
new federal and state rules, the
Seattle-based Trust for Public
Lands encouraged the development
of local land trusts in the Paciic
Northwest.
The North Coast Land
Conservancy emerged from this
call.
“In 1985 a group of people from
Cannon Beach, Astoria, and points
between — all veterans of the envi-
ronmental battles of the 1970s and
early ’80s — assembled to consider
a new way to approach conservation
on the Oregon Coast,” the conser-
vancy states on its website.
In its irst year, the conservancy
started with a modest 3-acre marsh
to mitigate the impacts of a new
Little League ield in Seaside.
By 1987, Cavenham Forest
Industries — which had purchased
Crown Zellerbach — was con-
ferring with the Cannon Beach
Planning Commission to manage
ridgeline development as part of
urban growth planning.
Between 1999 and 2003,
Washington’s Nature Conservancy
acquired most of the 8,000 acres
that now make up the Ellsworth
Creek Preserve in nearby Willapa.
Parcels were added as the Nature
Conservancy worked primarily
with the Campbell Group and John
Hancock, each a major lumber
consortium.
In 1991, the North Coast Land
Conservancy preserved 140 acres
on Saddle Mountain, protecting
the Copes salamander and marbled
murrelet, both endangered species
threatened by logging, without a
court order.
In 2003, the conservancy
acquired Circle Creek, a strate-
gically located 364-acre parcel
in Seaside, with Sitka spruce, an
historic lood plain, wetlands and
waterways.
The purchase delivered “a vision
that dealt with connectivity, that
dealt with the community and the
The endangered marbled murrelet
benefited from land protection.
pulse of the region,” Maine said.
Beyond Boneyard Ridge
It’s fair to say that 30 years ago a
school district superintendent would
not have been writing a logging
company to thank them for a gift of
80 acres for a new campus to move
schools out of the tsunami danger
zone.
“We applaud your community
spirit and corporate philanthropy,”
Superintendent-emeritus Doug
Dougherty wrote to Weyerhaeuser
in August.
The land conservancy’s Maine
and subsequent leadership rely on
cooperation, mutual beneit and
community engagement to achieve
their goals.
Purchasing land is a “much
better way to go” than litigating for
it, Maine said.
Voelke said she hopes to learn
from the Boneyard Ridge purchase
as a model for future conservation.
“Right now we see opportunities
to do meaningful forest conserva-
tion,” Voelke said.
The conservancy is seeking to
ill the “puzzle pieces” between
Tillamook Head and Neahkahnie
Mountain.
“We are speciically looking at
the areas around the state parks,”
Voelke said. “Areas we can make a
huge contiguous corridor. That’s the
kind of thing we see as a very good
role for us.”
It used to be the conservancy
battled timber companies in court-
rooms; now they sign partnerships
in those same buildings.
“I think it’s a little bit like the
tortoise and the hare,” Maine said at
the conservancy’s 30th anniversary
picnic. “Let opportunities come to
you, let others do some dreaming —
and help them be successful.”
R.J. Marx is The Daily Astori-
an’s South County reporter and edi-
tor of the Seaside Signal and Cannon
Beach Gazette.