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.
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