4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, AUGUST 20, 2018
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM
Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Bridge needs trump all others in Seaside
G
eologist Tom Horning delivered a
90-minute presentation to coun-
cilors on the topic of substandard
bridges in 2007. At the end of his talk, a
councilor summed up: “Now let’s get on
to more important things.”
“That made me so mad,” Horning
says today.
He intends to remedy that.
“Ultimately, I want to identify the
nature of the hazard, its proximity —
how soon it will strike — and I’m going
to try to justify using room taxes to build
bridges,” he said.
New, resilient bridges, he hopes,
will help residents and
visitors survive the
wave from an even
medium-sized tsunami,
a Cascadia Subduction
Zone event in which
thousands may perish.
R.J. MARX
Tom Horning
The threat
Repairs on the 12th Avenue bridge undertaken in the late 1990s.
The city’s history of
tsunamis is carved in the land. Stretches
of sand have been washed over by rock
thrown by waves, and trees pulled from
the ground like toothpicks clogged water-
ways. All this formed moats, meadows
and other features we take for granted.
Former marshes are filled with sediment
from the Necanicum River and now serve
as land for homes. Springs near Avenue N
drain and flood houses in a nearby depres-
sion. Shoals of round rock or cobbles were
carried, swept and deposited in a north-
easterly surge corridor.
“The town gets overtopped easily,”
Horning said in a tsunami history tour in
late July. “What’s done in the past is likely
to occur in the future.”
There is no “gentle” Cascadia Subduc-
tion Zone earthquake and tsunami, Horn-
ing said.
While a tsunami originating near
Alaska or Japan might cause tidal activity
here, it’s nothing like the big one.
“We’re out at the very leading edge
of a seriously massive block of tectonic
plate that extends all the way to the Atlan-
tic Ridge.”
More than four-fifths of the buildings
in Seaside are expected to be inundated by
a medium-sized tsunami wave.
“We can’t afford to be wrong and we
don’t have much time,” he said.
But the city’s bridges haven’t kept up
with the threat. Substandard bridges will
collapse during the first earthquake, mak-
ing them useless in the 20 to 30 minutes
we have to get to high ground before the
tsunami hits. Bridges at Avenues S, U and
G all were originally built to the standards
of the early 1960s.
The extra minutes to find another
bridge — there are none considered able
to withstand the impacts of a predicted 9.0
Cascadia earthquake south of Broadway
Rebecca Herren
Tom Horning holds a sprig of edible Salicornia (pickleweed) on a tour of Neawa-
nna Point marsh in Gearhart.
— could be a matter of life and death.
“If we fix the bridges, we reduce the
fatality rate from a high number to a low
number,” Horning said. “That’s the bot-
tom line.”
According to the city’s 2011 Transpor-
tation System Plan, the bridge over the
Neawanna Creek between the two inter-
sections lies inside the 100-year flood-
plain, requires a seismic retrofit and has
“deficient facilities” for pedestrians and
bicycles.
Other bridges, built decades ago, are
equally vulnerable. The city had applica-
tions out for grants and Oregon Depart-
ment of Transportation funding to rebuild
its most vulnerable bridges.
But Seaside “often falls through the
cracks” when applying for grant money,
City Manager Winstanley told the Signal’s
Brenna Visser in a July interview. The city
is either too small to compete for projects
or has too healthy of a budget to qualify
for need-based grants intended for smaller,
rural communities.
Applications, reports and projections
from researchers, the city, state and federal
government remain on a back shelf of the
library or city offices, or more likely, in
a forgotten PDF file on a computer hard
drive.
Who will pay?
When I rented a car this summer on
my vacation in New Mexico, I got hit with
a vehicle license fee and an energy recov-
ery fee and a shocking 11.25 percent “cus-
tomer facility” charge.
It shows you that there is always one
more surcharge that can be added to
unsuspecting tourists who have little to no
leverage.
At 10 percent, Seaside doesn’t levy the
highest lodging tax in the state or even the
county — Bend’s stands at 10.4 percent;
Astoria 11 percent. Portland’s city and
county room taxes reach 11.5 percent.
In 2012, Horning asked hotels and
motels to establish a voluntary user fee
of $1 or $2, giving guests an opportu-
nity to help cover the cost of emergency
preparations. The money raised would
fund replacement of bridges in Seaside
designed as escape routes.
Horning believes that between $18
million and $35 million today could make
a big difference in improving the city’s
most at-risk bridges.
Horning has modified his “$1 a head”
plan from 2012, but still targets visitors as
the best way to go about it. With a room
tax increase, lodging owners aren’t bear-
ing the costs — tourists are.
Councilors agree it needs to be done;
the days of disputing tsunami science are
over.
But at the city’s July workshop, they
showed little appetite to passing the costs
along to visitors.
While the council has authority to raise
room tax on its own, if they decide not to,
voters could initiate a room tax hike with-
out council backing, City Manager Mark
Winstanley said early this month. “But it
would certainly be unusual,” he said.
And while it’s tempting to spend other
people’s money, I agree with Terry Bich-
sel — owner of Best Western Plus Ocean
View Resort and Rivertides Suites — this
should be a shared responsibility.
Raising the lodging tax is “always
easy,” Bichsel said at the workshop.
“Something like this should be shared,
because it does affect our community, not
just the businesses and the tourists.”
A more likely and less controversial
source of funding could come from urban
renewal funds intended to improve the
Avenue S corridor between the Highway
and Wahanna, Winstanley added.
Approved in 2017, funds of up to
$62.4 million — more if matched by
state funds or grants — could help build
bridges, add traffic enhancements and
provide infrastructure needs for Seaside
School District’s new campus.
“I would think that would be an area
the urban renewal agency would be very
interested in doing work,” Winstanley said
this month. “That’s right in the middle of
the urban renewal district.”
Another pathway could come through
a road levy, initiated by residents or mem-
bers of the City Council, he added.
For concerned residents and visitors, is
there a Plan B?
If necessary, Horning is ready to “wait
a while and try again,” he said. “There
are fees you can generate, road levies —
but then you have to go through the polit-
ical process of convincing people to sup-
port it.”
R.J. Marx is The Daily Astorian’s South
County reporter and editor of the Seaside
Signal and Cannon Beach Gazette.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Vote Herman for
Astoria City Council
am writing in support of Joan Herman to rep-
resent Ward 3 on the Astoria City Council.
While I live in Ward 1, I run a business down-
town in Ward 3, and believe Joan would make
an excellent representative.
I have had the pleasure of working with her
on the Coast Community Radio Board, and I’m
repeatedly impressed with her skills both to run
an organization (she is the current chairwoman
of the board), and relate to people.
Years ago, she helped start and run Bikes and
Beyond, and understands not only the ins and
outs of business ownership, but how far Asto-
ria has come, and how much more potential
remains. Joan gets how important it is that Asto-
ria retain its small-town livability, while care-
fully managing the inevitable changes it will see
in the coming years.
Please join me in supporting her candidacy
and voting for her this November.
JACK HARRIS
Astoria
I
Collusion versus conspiracy?
have been trying to get my head around the
difference between collusion and conspiracy,
so I consulted two dictionaries. The unabridged
edition of an older (circa 1970s) Random House
Dictionary of the English Language defines
those two words this way: collusion — a secret
agreement for fraudulent or treacherous pur-
poses, conspiracy; collude — act together in a
secret agreement; and conspiracy — fraud.
The other dictionary I looked at was the Lit-
tle Oxford Dictionary. Because it’s little, the
definitions are shorter but you get the meanings.
Collude means conspire, and conspire means
to combine secretly for unlawful or harmful
purpose.
In each of these dictionaries there are also
secondary definitions but they expand on the
primary words. These two words obviously
I
mean illegal activity, no matter how you cut it,
unless these dictionaries are so out of date the
meanings are no longer valid.
RUSSELL THOMPSON
Astoria
Regatta festival
was a huge success
he 124th Astoria Regatta Festival was once
again a wonderful celebration and reminder
of our community’s special history and tra-
ditions, and gave us an opportunity to come
together to experience and enjoy who we are.
This year’s festival had a new sponsor for
the “Regatta Square,” Columbia Memorial
Hospital and its CEO, Erik Thorsen. They cre-
ated a venue that became a festive, fun, fam-
ily event. Bounce houses reflected our nautical
theme, including a pirate and Titanic ship with
awesome slides. They also had an enormous
climbing wall tower. The menu was absolutely
scrumptious. The live entertainment was excep-
tional, and vendors did a superb job contribut-
ing healthy choices. Well done, CMH and Erik
Thorsen. You outdid yourselves.
As a past eight-year chairwoman of this
event, I believe you really do deserve the “Best
in West” award. Thank you all for your hard
work and effort. It clearly was a huge success.
Though I’ve not been involved with Regatta
for three years, due to a leave of absence, I
was pleased that our overall festival is doing
well. However, I have become concerned after
observing the diminished number of events and
participation. I can’t emphasize enough how
crucial it is for our community to step up not
only financially, but as active participants.
I encourage everyone to be a Regatta Associ-
ation member. Let us continue to celebrate the fact
that Astoria has the “ Oldest Festival West of the
Rockies,” and reflect on what our future commu-
nity would be like without our beloved Regatta.
NANCY KENNELL
Astoria
T
Don’t restrict water
sports on Sunset Lake
he Oregon State Marine Board wants
to restrict towed water sports on Sun-
set (Neacoxie) Lake. The proposed amended
rule would restrict towed water sports on
all Clatsop County bodies of water where
there is a 10 mph speed restriction. The cur-
rent rule, 250-020-004, limits the speed to
10 mph.
I know many of you (like me) tow tubes
on Sunset Lake without incident. The lake has
little motorized boat activity, and is very well
self-regulated.
The south end of the lake has plenty of
room to pull our kids and grandkids around
without boater conflict or endangering public
safety. We view the lake every day, and boat
traffic is limited to an occasional kayak, fish-
ing boat or tube being towed.
The restriction removes an activity that
T
many homeowners in the area have enjoyed
for years.
Losing it also removes a valued amen-
ity attached to the homes and property in the
area.
Please join me in opposition to this ruling. In
the Oregon State Marine Board’s own words,
“The towed water sport restriction is needed
to support the current regulations, enhance
safety and assist in the reduction of boater
conflict in light of changing boating use and
We do not need this restriction on Sunset (Nea-
coxie) Lake and I do not want to lose the val-
ued activity.
Written comments can be sent by Sept. 30
by mail to June LeTarte, Rules Coordinator,
Oregon State Marine Board, 435 Commercial
St. N.E., Salem, OR 97301; by fax to 503-378-
4597, or by email to osmb.rulemaking@ore-
gon.gov
PATRICK DUHACHEK
Warrenton