OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 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
OUR VIEW
Mayor Larson
leaves a much
improved Seaside
easide has always been popular, com-
bining an amazing Pacific Northwest
seashore, entertaining business districts
and cozy residential neighborhoods. All this
was true 14 years ago and is still true today. So
just how much difference has departing Mayor
Don Larson made?
Bad mayors sow discord, let things drift and
act from self-interest. They are so obvious you
Don Larson
can almost smell them coming down the street.
In contrast, good mayors lead quietly and build support for the
valid ideas that percolate up from the public. Good mayors are
most apparent in the form of countless, often unnoticed signs that
the complex economic and civic interactions in a city are going
well. People begin looking around and saying, gee, this is a cool
place.
Larson obviously is a good mayor. His near decade and a half
in office have been a time of urban renaissance in Seaside. Though
some of the city’s achievements are the subtle victory of not mess-
ing up a good thing, many are positive acts that would not have
happened in the absence of a progressive and engaged team of
elected officials and citizens. Such teamwork is almost impossible
to sustain without a supportive mayor.
Parts of Seaside’s downtown were showing signs of wear and
tear in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The under-utilized building
stock could have become a blight when the Great Recession dug
in its claws in 2008. Certainly Seaside, like most American towns,
had its struggles in that bad spell. But instead of slipping back-
ward, it manifestly improved in many tangible ways.
Our story on Larson’s retirement announcement summarized
some of this good stuff: a skate park, a new library and the North
Holladay Drive renovation. The boat ramp at Broadway Park.
Upgrades to city buildings. Four bridges, built to tsunami stan-
dards and the Recycling Center on Avenue S. In addition, it’s
important to note that other successes would have been difficult
in the absence of forward-thinking city leadership. These include
a thriving business community and the recently passed bond to
build a safe new school complex. Success breeds success.
Above all, Larson is a firm and enthusiastic believer in Seaside.
Speaking with him, one comes away with the impression that any-
place fortunate enough to keep and attract such a mayor must be a
place worth visiting, living in and investing in.
Can Seaside stand improvement? Certainly. Everyplace can.
Traffic congestion, affordable housing, seismic safety and other
pressing issues will keep city leaders and staff busy for years to
come. But thanks to Don Larson, they are starting with a city that
already is an example of excellence.
S
Fish and Wildlife must
continue river gillnetting
t was good to see at last week’s Oregon Department of Fish
and Wildlife Commission meeting in Salem that Lower
Columbia River commercial fishermen still have a fire in the
belly to preserve their way of life.
Jobs that produce original economic value are increasingly pre-
cious things in rural America. Salmon have been a source of fam-
ily income in places like Astoria, Warrenton and Ilwaco, Wash.,
for generations. Fishermen have invested lifetimes and life sav-
ings in the boats, gear, permits and expertise needed to carefully
tend gillnets, which have been fine-tuned for more than a century
to catch their intended targets while preserving naturally spawning
salmon and other nontargeted species.
There is at least some remaining acknowledgment on the state
level of the decades of promises made to the fishing families and
communities of the Lower Columbia. As the Fish and Wildlife
commission chairman said last week, state law requires that
salmon management “enhance the economic viability of recre-
ational and commercial fisheries and the communities that rely on
them. That’s a dual mandate.”
All the port towns on the Columbia estuary explicitly recog-
nize and treasure the vital role that recreational fishing plays in our
economies and cultures. Many choose to visit and live here spe-
cifically in order to partake in our world-famous sport fisheries for
salmon, albacore and other species.
But we can appreciate and encourage private and charter sport-
fishing, while still working to preserve the commercial fishing that
built these towns, and which still puts paychecks in local pockets
and delicious salmon on local dinner tables.
The commission must continue with plans to extend gillnet-
ting on the river’s mainstem, at least until such time as alternative
gears and off-channel sites are adequate, and until state lawmakers
keep the other commitments they have made to ensure fairness for
the commercial fleet.
I
Gwen Ifill’s life and example
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
S
martphones change death.
When I heard that Gwen Ifill
had died on Monday, I pulled
out my phone and scrolled through
the photo album.
There were pic-
tures of Gwen and
her “NewsHour”
colleague Judy
Woodruff laugh-
ing uproariously
together, doing little exploding
fist-bumps, which I sneakily took
while she was heroically covering
the political conventions this year.
There was a picture of her joy-
ously driving a boat full tilt during
a “NewsHour” party a few sum-
mers ago, the wind blasting into
her clothes and face. There were
pictures of her posing with friends
of mine who had come to visit the
set. Everybody who came wanted a
picture with Gwen.
Every reminiscence you read
about Gwen will describe her
smile. It was not subtle. It shone
from her face like some sort of
spiritual explosion.
Once, during a walk through
Rock Creek Park, she told me that
if she didn’t go to church on Sun-
day she felt a little flatter for the
whole week. A spirit as deep and
ebullient as hers needed nourish-
ment and care, and when it came
out it came out in her smile, which
was totalistic and unrestrained.
Tough business
Gwen worked in a tough busi-
ness, and being an African-Amer-
ican woman in that business
brought its own hardships and
scars, but Gwen’s smile did not
hold back. Her whole personal-
ity was the opposite of reticent,
and timidity was a stranger to her.
When the Ifill incandescence came
at you, you were getting human
connection full-bore.
And you had better honor it.
After the photos, I searched Mon-
day through our email exchanges.
I don’t know how Gwen was with
her other friends, but she’d send
me short, sometimes cryptic emails
every couple of weeks. Sometimes
it was a compliment, sometimes
a bit of gossip, sometimes it was
a jokey offer to rub out someone
who’d been nasty to me, and some-
times she was just the sort of friend
who checks in: “For some reason
you have been on my mind. Are
you well?”
Gwen was ebullient, as I’ve
AP Photo/Don Emmert
PBS journalist and debate moderator Gwen Ifill and then-Democratic
vice presidential nominee, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., left, shake hands
at the end of his vice presidential debate with Republican rival, Alas-
ka Gov. Sarah Palin in St. Louis, Mo., in 2008.
mentioned, but she was not soft.
She was authoritative, an executive
and confident.
I suppose every profession has
a few people like this, people who
love the whole profession, who pay
compliments when its standards
are met and who are tough when
they are not. Gwen talked a lot
about her extended family, but also
a lot about newsrooms and who
were the great colleagues in them.
I would say she was an ambi-
tious person. She liked moderating
the big debates, even though she
was a bundle of nerves just before.
But she was not ambitious the way
some other TV people are. Gwen
was adored wherever she went, but
she let the adoration roll off her,
without it affecting her understand-
ing of what was real.
She was ambitious for quality.
She worked for low money at PBS.
She worked doggedly on her pro-
grams, and whenever I did any-
thing that diminished the “News-
Hour” she let me know directly.
Love of country
She loved her country, too. She
relentlessly promoted female and
African-American journalists. She
had a strong affinity for badass
women of all types. She kept her
journalistic distance from the
Obamas, but she knew what a step
it was to have an African-Ameri-
can president.
The night before Obama’s
inauguration in 2009, a group
of journalists met in David and
Katherine Bradley’s house. At the
end of the evening they gathered
around the piano and sang civil
rights anthems and some hymns.
Everybody knew the first stanza to
“Amazing Grace,” but only Gwen
knew the last three, which she sang
alone, in honor of the past labors
and future promise.
By 2012 she sensed that racial
ugliness was coming out into the
open. She began getting more rac-
ist reactions on social media and
she moved to support her friend
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlan-
tic, who was getting anti-Semitic
ones. Keep your head down and
keep writing, she urged Goldberg;
it’s what they don’t want you to do.
Gwen knew what was coming.
These days it is normal to bash
Washington, to want to “drain the
swamp” and to attack the main-
stream media. The populists are in
and the establishment is out.
But I confess, when I looked at
the front of The Times website on
Monday and saw a photo of Ste-
phen K. Bannon, on leave from
Breitbart as chairman and rising
in power, and then underneath it
a photo of Gwen, who is passing
from this world, I wanted to throw
up. This is not progress and this is
not good news.
Gwen’s death merits a bit of
the reaction that greeted the death
of the writer Samuel Johnson cen-
turies ago: She has left a chasm,
which nobody else can fill up and
which nobody has a tendency to
fill.
Now that Gwen is dead, who
is the next best thing? There’s
nobody. There are many great peo-
ple who will follow her example.
But nobody quite reminds you of
Gwen.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Two conclusions
wo conclusions can be drawn
from the historic 2016 elec-
tion. First, when President-elect
Trump declared that the election
was rigged, he was merely bragging
about something else he had done.
Second, a woman cannot be elected
president in this country.
WILLIAM BELL
Astoria
T
Best interests
n the recent election, where local
issues were voted on by the vot-
ers of Warrenton, the mayor of the
city, Mark Kujala, and many of the
City Council representatives recom-
mended to the voters that they not
vote for a citizens’ issue — that was
brought up for a vote by obtaining
all of the signatures of the required
number of people in Warrenton —
so that the voters could gain con-
trol of the process of selling off city
I
assets. The mayor and the council
felt that this would just cause delays
in normal city activity, for which
they are elected.
In the calendar year 2015, the
City Council came within one vote
of approving the sale of the second
most valuable asset the city of War-
renton owns to a company that is
currently leasing the property that
this company wanted to swap for
other land that they own in the War-
renton area.
Many local voters felt that this
was potentially a political favor to
this company, as it was a transac-
tion that would have no competi-
tive bids. Many citizens of Warren-
ton believe that this was, on its face,
a very unfavorable sale for the citi-
zens of Warrenton, and so a petition
was circulated in the community
by volunteers going door to door to
explain the issue and have it put to a
vote, which just occurred this week.
Local politics sometimes leads
to sweetheart deals that are wonder-
ful for the politicians, and terrible
for the voters. I feel that the pass-
ing of this issue in this last election
is a victory for the citizens of War-
renton, and a warning to all politi-
cians in the future to avoid conflicts
of interest, and work in your con-
stituents’ best interests, as you were
elected to do.
SCOTT WIDDICOMBE
Warrenton
Enforce the law
egarding the “Warrenton Police
looking into gun incident near
grade school” story in the Nov. 8
issue of The Daily Astorian: If the
police had been enforcing the law
regarding parking in fire zones near
the school, none of this would have
occurred. If the cops won’t enforce
the law, change the law.
HUGH McKENNA
Warrenton
R