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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, AUGUST 8, 2017
Astoria finalizes Feds want to give states more
hotel tax hike
flexibility in protecting wild bird
By KATIE
FRANKOWICZ
The Daily Astorian
Astoria’s hotel tax is offi-
cially going up to help pay
for parks.
The
City
Council
reopened a public hearing
Monday night to include
comments from hoteliers
and others in the hospi-
tality industry concerned
about the city’s decision to
raise the hotel tax, but ulti-
mately voted to approve the
tax increase and hold a final
reading of the ordinance.
The ordinance will
increase the hotel tax from
9 percent to 11 percent. The
new tax will begin in Janu-
ary. City staff estimates the
tax increase could gener-
ate approximately $410,000
annually. Under state guide-
lines, the bulk of this money
would need to go to tour-
ism-related facilities, the rest
to the city’s general fund.
City Attorney Blair Hen-
ningsgaard maintains that
since tourists often use city
parks such as the Astoria
Riverwalk or the Astoria Col-
umn, the Parks and Recre-
ation Department meets this
criteria and all the money can
go to defraying some of the
department’s costs. The City
Council accepted this inter-
pretation at a public hearing
in July.
Don West, owner of Asto-
ria Crest Motel and gen-
eral manager of the Cannery
Pier Hotel, and others who
spoke against the ordinance
Monday debated Hennings-
gaard’s interpretation of a
tourist-related facility. They
said tourists who stayed with
them did not come for Asto-
ria’s public parks or pub-
lic pool, though they might
use them while they were
in the city. Bed and break-
fast owners Loretta Maxwell
and Rebecca Greenway, who
had both spoken at the public
hearing in July, told the coun-
cil that they would lose busi-
ness over the tax increase.
“I have seen communities
tax themselves and the busi-
nesses to a point that causes
the very businesses they rely
on for a tax base to drop dra-
matically,” West said.
He said the lodging indus-
try provides thousands of
jobs in Clatsop County and
brings in hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars. He and oth-
ers said a similar tax increase
was voted in by city coun-
cilors in the early 2000s.
The money levied then was
intended to go to a confer-
ence center that was never
built; they wanted a guaran-
tee this time that the money
would go where the city said
it was going.
Before making a motion
to hold a second reading of
the ordinance, City Coun-
cilor Cindy Price assured
the people who spoke that
the council had heard their
concerns.
“I realize that there may
feel like a lack of discussion
here for some of you, but we
have been talking about this,”
she said. “We had a very long
public hearing. We’ve had
work sessions. We’ve been
talking about this for about
six months.”
She said while she and the
other councilors aren’t anx-
ious to raise taxes, they agree
that the parks are an import-
ant amenity and are part of
what makes Astoria attrac-
tive to visitors. The council
voted unanimously to hold
the second reading and final-
ize approval of the ordinance.
The proposal to increase
the hotel tax came out of var-
ious discussions about how
to sustain the parks depart-
ment for the long term as the
department struggles with
increased responsibilities and
higher costs but less full-time
staff. The council had origi-
nally considered raising the
hotel tax to 12 percent, but
settled instead on 11 percent.
that sets population objectives
for the states.”
“Wholesale changes to the
land-use plans are likely not
necessary at this time,” they
wrote in a May 26 letter.
Sage grouse
is threatened
across the West
By MATTHEW DALY
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The
Interior Department on Mon-
day unveiled a plan to protect
the threatened sage grouse that
gives Western states greater
flexibility to allow mining,
logging and other economic
development where it now is
prohibited.
Interior Secretary Ryan
Zinke announced the strategy
for the ground-dwelling bird
that has suffered a dramatic
population decline across its
11-state range, which includes
Oregon. Zinke insisted that
the federal government and
the states can work together to
protect the sage grouse and its
habitat while not slowing eco-
nomic growth and job creation.
While the federal gov-
ernment has a responsibility
under the Endangered Species
Act to protect the bird, offi-
cials also have an obligation
“to be a good neighbor and a
good partner,” Zinke said. The
new plan ensures that conser-
vation efforts “do not impede
local economic opportunities,”
he said.
The plan comes after a
60-day review Zinke ordered
in June of a 2015 plan imposed
by the Obama administration.
The plan set land-use policies
across the popular game-bird’s
11-state range intended to keep
it off the federal endangered
species list.
Mining companies, ranchers
and governors in some West-
ern states — especially Utah,
Idaho and Nevada — said the
plan ordered by former Interior
Secretary Sally Jewell would
impede oil and gas drilling and
other economic activity.
Environmental groups said
Jewell’s plan did not do enough
Task force
AP Photo/Cathleen Allison
A sage grouse is seen near Fallon, Nev., in 2005. Interior
Secretary Ryan Zinke says a new federal plan to protect
the threatened sage grouse will better align with conser-
vation efforts in 11 Western states where the bird lives.
to protect the sage grouse from
extinction.
The ground-dwelling sage
grouse, long associated with the
American West, has lengthy,
pointed tail feathers and is
known for the male’s elaborate
courtship display in which air
sacs in the neck are inflated to
make a popping sound.
Millions once roamed
Millions of sage grouse once
roamed the West but develop-
ment, livestock grazing and
an invasive grass that encour-
ages wildfires has reduced the
bird’s population to fewer than
500,000 across 11 states from
California to the Dakotas.
States affected by the plan
are California, Colorado,
Idaho, Montana, Nevada,
North Dakota, Oregon, South
Dakota, Utah, Washington and
Wyoming.
Zinke said in June that
“state agencies are really at the
forefront of efforts to maintain
healthy fish and wildlife pop-
ulations” across the country,
adding that the Trump admin-
istration is committed to ensur-
ing that state voices are heard in
decisions affecting land use and
wildlife management.
In particular, Zinke said he
has received complaints from
several Western governors
that the Obama administration
ignored or minimized their con-
cerns as the 2015 sage-grouse
plan was developed. Republi-
can governors in Idaho, Utah
and Nevada want more flexi-
bility and have urged that con-
servation efforts focus on bird
populations in a particular state
rather than on habitat manage-
ment that frequently results in
land-use restrictions.
The new plan is intended
to provide flexibility to states
instead of a “one-size-fits-all
solution,” Zinke said.
On the other side, Demo-
cratic Gov. John Hickenlooper
of Colorado and Republi-
can Gov. Matt Mead of Wyo-
ming told Zinke earlier this
year they opposed any changes
that would move “from a hab-
itat-management model to one
Hickenlooper and Mead
co-chair a federal-state sage
grouse task force that worked
to develop the 2015 plan, which
was backed by more than $750
million in commitments from
the government and outside
groups to conserve land and
restore the bird’s historic range.
Nada Culver, a senior policy
official at The Wilderness Soci-
ety, denounced the new plan as
an attempt to “abandon habitat
protection for unfettered oil and
gas development” in the West
that “puts the entire landscape
at risk.”
The 60-day review “shows
a callous disregard for nearly a
decade of research and collabo-
rative work by states and agen-
cies, while ignoring the West-
ern communities who weighed
in with millions of comments
and who simply want to see the
(Obama-era) plans left to work
as intended,” Culver said.
Kathleen Sgamma, pres-
ident of the Western Energy
Alliance, a Colorado-based
group that represents the oil and
natural gas industry, said offer-
ing states more flexibility was
a step in the right direction but
did not go far enough to rewrite
the 2015 plan.
“Until Interior bites the
bullet and starts amending
these plans, it’s merely post-
poning a real, needed correc-
tion,” she said, adding that the
revised sage grouse plan “will
cause needless job loss and loss
of economic opportunities”
throughout the West.
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