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7A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8, 2017 Port: Commission also voted to accept $1.5 million grant Continued from Page 1A “I’ve talked to over 60 peo- ple since last meeting,” Mushen said Tuesday. “The brick wall (for support) is $2 million.” Staff has estimated the cost of the bond at its current price at $12.88 per $100,000 in prop- erty value countywide on a three-year measure. In other news: • The Port Commission voted 4-1 to accept a $1.5 mil- lion Connect Oregon VI infra- structure grant. The Port hopes to use the grant as a local match on funding the agency is trying to secure from the Federal Emergency Manage- ment Agency to help repair damage throughout the cen- tral waterfront from a Decem- ber 2015 storm. The FEMA money would in turn cover the required $660,000 local match on the Connect Oregon grant. Fulton was the lone “no” vote, saying he was extremely concerned about the Port’s plan to cover the local match if the FEMA funds don’t materialize. • The Port Commission approved a contract with new general counsel Eileen Eakins, who attended her first meeting since being chosen. Fulton had argued the Port should table Eakins’ hiring until the inves- tigation into Property Man- ager Shane Jensen by the Ore- gon State Bar is concluded. Jensen had a complaint filed against him by an undisclosed party over a legal memo he wrote for staff about not having alternates on the Port’s Budget Committee. After some squab- bling and a 3-1-1 vote in which Fulton was the lone “no” and Commissioner Bill Hunsinger abstained, Eakins’ contract was approved. “Welcome, Eileen, to the Port,” Executive Direc- tor Jim Knight said with a bit of humor. • At the request of Fulton and Hunsinger, the Port Com- mission heard a presentation from attorney Michael Haglund on whether the Port could charge ships in the Columbia River’s Astoria anchorage a fee for services. Haglund, who had explored the issue for the Port in 2009, said the Port would need to provide a needed ser- vice. He said no other port he’s spoken with on the Colum- bia charges such fees. Mushen said the U.S. Coast Guard and Columbia River Bar Pilots have also advised against charging such fees. Director Kate Mick- elson from the Columbia River Steamship Operators’ Associa- tion, which represents shippers, also attended the meeting and cautioned that coming to the Columbia is already expensive, with shippers facing ever-in- creasing fees. Plastic: Microplastics are ‘a major problem’ Caucus: Other square meter of sand — more than two-thirds of it microplas- tics. That’s enough to fill about five 5-gallon Ziploc bags from just from one square meter of beach. The next-highest density spot on the West Coast is Cres- cent Beach — in Ecola State Park north of Cannon Beach — where Ward and his crew have collected 250 grams per square meter of sand. “That’s a lot of plastic,” he says. “You see it all the way as far as you can see,” in a 5-meter band along the high-tide line. Continued from Page 1A But these colorful bits are not natural. They’re tiny pieces of broken plastic, from dispos- able water bottles, straws, fire- works, cellophane wrappers and more. The debris gets pounded by swells and sunlight over decades, but doesn’t miner- alize, or go away over time. It breaks down into smaller pieces until they’re micro- scopic, and get ingested by sea turtles, sea birds, fish, zoo- plankton and other marine life, with fatal consequences. In 2002, Marc Ward and his wife, Rachel, founded the non- profit Sea Turtles Forever from their home base in Seaside. They’ve focused on micro- plastic debris, pieces that are 5 millimeters or less (the size of a pencil eraser), since they’re more devastating to sea life. People also affected “It is a major problem,” Ward told about two dozen members of the Portland Eco- School Network and their fam- ilies, including myself and my two sons, age 8 and 11, who’d come to Fort Stevens for a Feb- ruary service project. “Plastics affect every part of the food chain, including people,” Ward said. People can ingest it by building a fire on the beach and inhaling chemicals from the burning plastics. Scientists also are research- How to remove it? Dawn Robbins/Submitted Photo Newborn leatherback turtles are readied for release into the Pacific Ocean at a rescue opera- tion in Todos Santos, Baja California Sur this winter. ing to what extent the accumu- lated polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — banned internation- ally since 2001 — can seep from old plastic debris into organisms and travel up the food chain, according to the National Oceanic and Atmo- spheric Administration. Because of the ocean’s cur- rents, Ward says Fort Stevens is the top spot on the West Coast for microplastics — the biggest “high-density landfall site,” with 5,000 grams of plastics per But there is hope. Since 2008, Ward and his Microplastic Response Team of core volunteers have been cleaning beaches up and down the West Coast using a device they developed that can filter 99 percent of the microplastics out of the sand. The device is a portable 7-foot mesh screen that pro- duces a static charge able to fil- ter debris from the sand down to 50 to 100 microns, the size of a grain of sand. “Two years ago, we filtered the entire beach at Manzanita in six days,” he says. It took 100 volunteers, seven filtration sys- tems, and about $4,000 to cover the 1.5 linear miles of beach. A week later, they filtered the half-mile stretch of Cres- cent Beach and Oswald West State Park with just half a dozen volunteers, funded by a $3,500 donation from the Port- land Patagonia store. Yes, it’ll have to be done again. But each cleanup is sav- ing marine life in the meantime. “We’re not going to see the end of this in our lifetimes,” Ward says. “It gets more intense every year.” Unending supply Each year, 300 million tons of new plastic is produced worldwide, and less than 10 percent is recycled, accord- ing to 5 Gyres, a Los Ange- les-based advocacy group ded- icated to ridding the world’s oceans of plastic. The rest ends up as litter, in a landfill, or carried out to sea. More than 8 million tons of plastic enters the oceans yearly. Ward is taking the work global, producing and shipping the patented filtration device to organizations and governments all over the world, including the East Coast, Hawaii, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom and beyond. The filtration device doesn’t work in the rain, or in the marshy areas of Fort Stevens, so volunteers pick up debris by hand. After the end of our Presidents Day service proj- ect, we weighed our collec- tion of debris and set a record for Sea Turtles Forever for two hours of work: a whopping 428 pounds of plastics. Forum: ‘President ... has no respect for the press’ Continued from Page 1A Goldschmidt It is hardly novel, he noted, that powerful, talented people can be brought down by hubris — that power causes office- holders to lose their moral bearings and commit acts that, when publicly disclosed, hob- ble or obliterate their political careers. Goldschmidt’s career-end- ing mistake came when, 13 years after leaving the gover- norship, he took on two major assignments: chairman of the state Board of Higher Educa- tion (under his protégé, Gov. Ted Kulongoski), and a role promoting a Texas investment group’s controversial attempt to purchase Portland General Electric. His decision not to pursue a second term as gov- ernor the previous decade had mystified many people. “He had a secret,” Jaquiss said, “and if he had just stayed offstage, that secret would have probably gone to the grave with him — or at least it never would have been pub- licly revealed.” Instead, after Willamette Week uncovered the life he had destroyed, Goldschmidt resigned from his posts and retired from public life. Adams Adams’ hubris arose in neglecting to hire a staff that could effectively challenge him — that could push back on his poor decisions, Jaquiss said. Adams himself had been a strong chief of staff to Portland Mayor Vera Katz. But when his turn came, “Sam surrounded himself by people who were sycophants and yes-men and yes-women,” Jaquiss said. When Adams started hang- ing out with his teenage inam- orato, Adams’ entourage enabled his vices. “Nobody said, ‘Hey, you can’t do this. This is terrible. This is going to end your polit- ical career.’ So they couldn’t stop him — or wouldn’t stop him,” Jaquiss said. “He had forgotten every- thing that he had ever learned in politics,” he continued. “It’s OK to have relationships with people; you just can’t have inappropriate relationships with people. And, if you’re asked about them, you can’t lie about them.” Adams, who maintained his lover was 18 when sexual rela- tions began, managed to escape a criminal investigation and two recall efforts. But, Jaquiss said, Adams had crippled his long-term political prospects. “He blew this brilliant career,” Jaquiss said. Kitzhaber And Kitzhaber, the lon- gest serving governor in Ore- gon history, allowed girlfriend, Cylvia Hayes, while she served as his policy adviser on clean energy and economic devel- opment, to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in con- sulting contracts — money that benefited him. “He was really, really smart, and, I think, he was really dedi- cated to public service,” Jaquiss said. “But he had this terrible blind spot when it came to his fiancée. He allowed her to take those contracts, from which he benefited. And that was basi- cally what finished him.” Kitzhaber let this con- flict of interest fester, in part, because the governor needed the money, Jaquiss said. “So you have, on one hand, this woman, Cylvia Hayes, who was clearly interested in making money. You have a governor who doesn’t have enough money. That’s a very bad combination,” Jaquiss said. Kitzhaber succumbed to hubris when he behaved as if he lost his sense of accountability. “It wasn’t, I think, that he was so venal or evil — he’s not,” Jaquiss said. “It’s that he didn’t have any fear of losing an election, or he didn’t have an effective check from the other side of the aisle in the Republican legislators.” Trump These men — three Dem- ocrats whose futures held con- siderable promise — broke their social contract with con- stituents in different but “fun- damental and important ways,” Jaquiss said. The press’ role is to keep such public figures’ behav- ior transparent — a function whose importance is now get- ting major play on the world stage. “We have a president who clearly has absolutely no respect for the press, and no regard for the accountability and transparency that the press can bring when we do our jobs,” he said. But he believes the fight is a healthy one. The press, though it has fewer men and women on the front lines, remains a vital institution at the local, state and national levels. “Sure, the president is beat- ing up on the press. I think they can take it — we can take it. I think what you’ve seen is, reporters who do their jobs by digging up documents, find- ing people who will talk, find- ing people who will tell the truth — they’ll be able to keep that guy honest,” Jaquiss said. “If anybody can keep that guy honest, I think the press will be able to do that.” legislators have vocally criticized gillnetting break Continued from Page 1A Commercial vs. sport Gillnets are used by com- mercial fishermen to col- lect big hauls. Their use is a source of a longstand- ing dispute between sports fishermen and commercial fishermen. Environmental groups and sports-fishing interests have pushed hard to outlaw a practice they say harms pro- tected species and doesn’t distinguish between wild and hatchery fish. But commercial fisher- men say their livelihoods are undercut with each new rule limiting their use, and appeared to score a vic- tory in late January when the commission agreed to let them keep catching cer- tain portions of total permit- ted amounts, with those per- centages depending on the season. Brown told the commis- sion in February that she expected them to change course by early April and phase out gillnetting altogether. Oregon was on track to align its Columbia River gill- netting policy with Washing- ton. That agreement, referred to as the Columbia River Compact or the Kitzhaber Plan, got underway during the administration of former Gov. John Kitzhaber. Washington’s Fish and Wildlife Commission voted to eventually discontinue gillnetting in January, putting the Oregon decision later that month at odds with its neigh- bor to the north. Economic benefits Two Oregon fish and wildlife commissioners, Bruce Buckmaster, of Asto- ria and Holly Akenson, of Enterprise, who supported the decision to continue gill- netting, have pointed to leg- islation passed in 2013. They say that law required that rules adopted by the com- mission regarding fishery reforms on the Columbia River must optimize overall economic benefits to the state and enhance the “economic viability” of commercial and recreational fishermen. Caucus members argued in their letter last week that the commission made the right decision based on that factor. “As a group, we feel the commission has made a fair decision, ensuring all user groups are enhanced eco- nomically,” the letter stated. But gillnetting has been vocally criticized by other legislators. Sen. Fred Girod, R-Stay- ton, and Rep. Bill Kennemer, R-Oregon City, have both publicly spoken out against it. Kennemer, a keen sports angler, condemned the com- mission on the Oregon House floor in February — going so far as to invoke Star Trek. “As Mr. Spock said so eloquently, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” Kennemer, sporting a fish tie, said. He argued the law was intended to terminate gill- netting and that recreational fishermen, who outnumber commercial fishermen, sup- port the work of the state Fish and Wildlife Depart- ment — which has seen sig- nificant cash-flow issues in recent years. The Capital Bureau is a collaboration between EO Media Group and Pamplin Media Group. C onsult a Professional Q: Should I use hours is Q: What your practice heat or cold? open? A : A : JEFFREY M. LEINASSAR DMD, FAGD 503/325-0310 1414 MARINE DRIVE, ASTORIA www.smileastoria.com The office is open Monday through Friday and approximately one Saturday a month. We offer appointments as early as 7:00 am and as late as 7:00 pm for patient convenience. 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