7A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2017
Furr: ‘Seeing everything clean. That’s the best’
Continued from Page 1A
from depositing trash in a pub-
lic right of way last year. He
was acquitted of offensive lit-
tering and sentenced to proba-
tion, court records show.
Furr said he has been able
to reach an agreement with
ODOT to work along High-
way 101. He hopes the high
visibility will make people rec-
ognize a problem he feels has
been forgotten.
“People clean up streams,
and they clean up beaches. But
the trash on the road is where
a lot of it comes from,” Furr
said.
Melyssa Graeper, who is
the coordinator of the Necan-
icum Watershed Council, has
been following Furr through-
out his journey and supports
him when she can.
“I’m pleased at the effort
one person is making to not
only improve his community,
but the whole coastal com-
munity,” Graeper said. “It’s
sad how much garbage there
is, but it’s impressive how
much of a difference one
person is making. His white
garbage bags are starting
to make people start asking
questions.”
Graeper said his work is
EO Media Group
Researchers are looking at plastics in shellfish.
Plastics: ‘When you eat
clams and oysters, you’re
eating plastics as well’
Photos by Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
LEFT: Dozens of bags of trash with the word ‘CARE’ written on them collected by Ray-
mond Furr can be seen along Highway 101 waiting to be picked up by the Oregon Depart-
ment of Transportation. RIGHT: Furr has been working since July along Highway 101 from
Coos Bay to Astoria picking up trash along the side of the road.
important to the watershed
council because eliminating
litter on the road can have an
overall positive impact on
local watersheds.
“It’s not intentional garbage
always — sometimes wind
tips over garbage cans, and
things fly out of truck beds,”
she said. “But all storm drains
lead to the ocean, and all this
garbage will go and flow to the
lowest point. As a council, the
next step is to stop having the
garbage end up on the road in
the first place.”
Today, Furr will end his
journey in Astoria, where he
plans to spend time with his
son for three weeks before
turning around to start picking
up trash down the other side of
the highway.
“I can’t do anything else —
I feel like I have to do this,”
Furr said. “I get a lot of ‘thank-
you’s,’ which is nice, but I
want people to do something
better. I hope I inspired you to
see all this trash.”
There are a few things he
plans to do differently the sec-
ond time around. On his three-
week break, he hopes to spray-
paint “CARE” onto all of his
garbage bags before hitting the
road, rather than doing them in
the evenings in his car.
He also hopes to make
Leaven No Trace a nonprofit
in the hopes of securing grants
to finance his cause.
But for Furr, what makes
the journey rewarding will
remain the same.
“Looking backward and
seeing everything clean,” he
said. “That’s the best.”
Pot: Agreement fuzzy in terms of what can be disclosed
Continued from Page 1A
The different approaches
are an example of how state
marijuana rules and the inter-
pretation of those rules are still
catching up to the drug’s legal-
ization, even as recreational pot
stores in Oregon have become
as familiar as gas stations.
“It’s a statewide question
of what we can disclose and
what we cannot,” said Wendy
Johnson,
intergovernmen-
tal relations associate with the
League of Oregon Cities. At
the same time, she added, cities
must comply with local budget
requirements to account for all
incoming money.
“We just need some clarity,”
she said.
Johnson expects clar-
ity could arrive next week in
the form of a legal opinion
from the state Department of
Justice, requested by the
Department of Revenue.
Not all of Oregon’s cit-
ies and counties passed local
taxes, but most of those that
did signed agreements with
the Department of Revenue for
collection.
With these kinds of taxes
there is usually a regional
breakdown, explained Joy
Krawczyk, a spokeswoman for
the Department of Revenue.
The department required con-
fidentiality agreements with
the cities it collects local mar-
ijuana taxes for in order to pro-
tect information about individ-
ual tax returns.
If a city with multiple pot
shops is also located inside a
region with just a handful of
shops, “you can back into those
amounts” if the city releases its
own revenue numbers, Kraw-
czyk said.
In some ways, the situa-
tion is similar to what Astoria
sees when the city receives its
portion of state liquor tax rev-
enue, Brooks said. “We don’t
necessarily get a blow-by-blow
of ‘XYZ liquor store reported
…’”
Still, the agreement is fuzzy
in terms of what can be dis-
closed, and to who, Johnson
said.
“For cities that have an
agreement (with the Depart-
ment of Revenue), one, it’s a
bit unclear,” she said, “and,
two, it will vary in application
because of the size of the city
and the number of shops.”
“It’s new, and it’s develop-
ing after the fact,” said Brooks.
Johnson said no one really
knows what annual reve-
nue from the local marijuana
tax and shared portions of the
state tax will look like, and the
amount will likely fluctuate.
Each quarter, cities will have to
confirm that they allow the sale
Tax: ‘No city has figured this out perfectly yet’
Continued from Page 1A
City staff have been asking
for this information, but, so far,
most travel companies have
not been forthcoming, Saw-
rey said. Often rooms are sold
at a discount to these compa-
nies, which take profit off the
sale. Without knowing which
rooms are being sold to what
company, figuring out which
company to hold account-
able for taxes on the profit is
difficult.
“It takes more time for us.
Are people not reporting? Do
they misunderstand? We don’t
know the situation if we don’t
have numbers in front of us,”
Sawrey said.
Sawrey and Herdener hope
that changing the ordinance to
require travel companies to file
directly to the city or face fines
will set clearer expectations.
Earlier this year, Airbnb
presented a voluntary agree-
ment to Seaside to collect
thousands of dollars of lodging
taxes on vacation rentals.
Some saw the agreement as
an opportunity reap the ben-
efits of previously untapped
revenue. Some in the lodging
community, however, think
the agreement gives Airbnb
an unfair advantage over other
hotel owners, and ultimately
drains affordable long-term
housing units to the vacation
rental market.
“This is an evolving area.
Cities all over Oregon are
having trouble with this,”
Herdener said. “But to who-
ever is listening, it is import-
ant to have this in our code so
(intermediaries) know they are
responsible.”
It’s hard to estimate how
much more revenue these
changes could bring in for the
city, because there is so much
variation between lodging
options. For City Councilor
George Vetter, the solution
comes from striking a balance
between keeping the property
owner and the intermediary on
the hook.
“I’m reluctant to take the
burden off the property owner,
because those are the only peo-
ple we have control over,” Vet-
ter said.
Whatever the solution to
this issue may be hard to come
by.
“No city has figured this
out perfectly yet,” Herdener
said.
TIMBERLANDS OPEN
Lewis & Clark Timberlands
are OPEN to the Public for NON-MOTORIZED
access during DAYLIGHT HOURS ONLY!
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation
during the recent extremely dry forest conditions.
For up-to-date
information
please call our
RECREATIONAL
HOTLINE
503-738-6351 Ext. 2
TIMBERLANDS OPEN
of recreational marijuana and
marijuana products within their
city limits. As different cities
change direction, the shared
tax revenue will only go to cit-
ies that still allow pot sales.
The League of Oregon Cit-
ies had advised cities to “bud-
get cautiously for the first year
and a half because it was in
such flux,” Johnson said.
Astoria didn’t include any
marijuana tax revenue projec-
tions in its budget for this fiscal
year at all.
“You’re always better off to
not plan on spending resources
you don’t know if you’re going
to get or not,” Brooks said.
The local marijuana tax is a
new revenue stream. “We don’t
have this kind of history with
this product, with these retail-
ers,” she said.
Continued from Page 1A
And lately, the shellfish
biologist is making other
unappetizing
comments
to her dinner party guests
— about plastics in those
shellfish.
In 2016, she and her stu-
dents at Vancouver Island
University planted thousands
of clams and oysters across
coastal British Columbia
and let them soak in the sand
and saltwater of the Strait of
Georgia. Three months later,
they dissolved hundreds of
them with chemicals, filtered
out the biodegradable matter,
and looked at the remaining
material under a microscope.
Inside this Pacific Northwest
culinary staple, they found
a rainbow of little plastic
particles.
“So when you eat clams
and oysters, you’re eating
plastics as well,” she said.
Funded by the Cana-
dian government and Brit-
ish Columbia’s shellfish
trade association, the project
aimed to learn whether the
shellfish aquaculture indus-
try may be contaminating
its own crop by using plas-
tic infrastructure like nets,
buoys and ropes. The experi-
ment was a response to those
claims by local environmen-
tal groups.
But tracking the origins
of tiny plastic particles in a
big ocean is new territory. So
Dudas turned to Peter Ross,
who has studied the effects
of ocean pollution on sea life
for 30 years.
“We’ve long known that
plastic and debris can be a
problem for ocean life,” said
Ross, director of the Vancou-
ver Aquarium’s Ocean Pollu-
tion Research Program.
In 2013, he began sam-
pling the coast of British
Columbia for microplastics.
The researchers found up to
9,200 particles of microplas-
tic per cubic meter of seawa-
ter — about the equivalent of
emptying a salt shaker into a
large moving box.
“So, large numbers,”
Ross said. “Rather shocking
numbers.”
Microfibers
They found plastics that
were made small, like the
polystyrene beads sold as
bean bag filler and fake snow,
and nurdles, the hard resin
pellets used as a raw mate-
rial for other plastic prod-
ucts. Microbeads, common
in toothpaste and face wash,
were also present.
But the majority of micro-
plastics in Ross’s samples
resembled those showing up
in Dudas’s shellfish. They’re
showing up by the thou-
sands along Puget Sound’s
shorelines too. They’re
microfibers.
“It’s
overwhelmingly
fibers,” Ross said. “And
they’re being readily con-
sumed at the bottom of the
food chain, in zooplankton.”
The local research is add-
ing to evidence of a problem
that touches every corner of
the planet: from the depths
of the ocean abyss to the sur-
face waters of the Arctic to
an area in the middle of the
Pacific Ocean now known
as the Great Pacific Garbage
Patch. Scientists think plastic
pollution in the ocean could
outweigh fish in the ocean by
2050.