A2
THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2021
IN BRIEF
Vaccination events canceled over
delivery disruption
The Clatsop County vaccine task force canceled three
coronavirus vaccination events this week due to a dis-
ruption in the delivery of vaccine doses.
About 1,100 people were expected to receive their
fi rst or second doses at three events on Monday, Tuesday
and Wednesday in Astoria and Seaside.
The county said everyone has been contacted about
rescheduling for future vaccination events.
People who were scheduled to receive second vac-
cine doses at one of this week’s canceled events will be
able to secure spots in one of the events next week.
As of Monday, 6,019 doses have been administered.
ICE places immigration detainer on
Seaside man charged with manslaughter
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has
lodged an immigration detainer on a Seaside man who
was arrested last week for manslaughter following a
crash that left a baby dead.
Rony Tomas-Garcia, 23, was arrested on Feb. 15 fol-
lowing a single-vehicle crash on Ecola State Park Road.
He is being held at the Clatsop County Jail on charges
of manslaughter in the fi rst degree, assault in the second
degree, reckless driving and driving under the infl uence
of intoxicants.
The immigration detainer was placed on Feb. 16.
Behind schedule, Seaside closes
in on school campus completion
SEASIDE — The Seaside School District campus
construction project “has a few more months to go but
we’re moving forward,” project manager Jim Henry said
at last week’s school board meeting.
The project dashboard shows the budget and sched-
ule behind, while scope and community engagement are
on target. The project cost is expected to reach $131 mil-
lion. To date, the school district has paid about $127 mil-
lion in expenses.
The project, authorized by voters by a bond in 2016
to move students from schools in the tsunami inundation
zone, includes completion of exterior work at the mid-
dle and high school building and interior work at Pacifi c
Ridge Elementary School.
Local offi cers to graduate
from police academy
An Astoria police offi cer and a Clatsop County Sher-
iff’s Offi ce deputy will graduate on March 4 from the
basic police class.
A graduation ceremony will be held for Dayna
Groder and Joseph Voelker at the Oregon Public Safety
Academy in Salem.
The ceremony will be closed to the public because of
the coronavirus pandemic.
— The Astorian
Cluster of small quakes would not
have triggered new alert system
A cluster of small earthquakes far off the southern
Oregon Coast and atop Mount Rainier in recent days are
common events, and would not have triggered a seismic
warning system set for a test run later this week ahead of
its rollout to the public this spring, a seismologist said.
“Neither of those sequences are of particular con-
cern,” said Paul Bodin, research professor at the Univer-
sity of Washington and manager of the Pacifi c North-
west Seismic Network.
The ShakeAlert system, which is designed to give
people and automated systems advanced warning before
signifi cant shaking starts, would not have sent an alert
for either sequence “because no one would’ve felt
them,” either because of their small magnitude or dis-
tance from population centers, Bodin said.
A handful of quakes, the largest measuring magni-
tude 5.1, struck about 175 miles west of Bandon on Sat-
urday, with smaller aftershocks Sunday morning. These
occurred on a structure called the Gorda Escarpment, at
the boundary between the Pacifi c and Juan de Fuca plates
— a strike-slip plate, which, unlike the Cascadia Subduc-
tion Zone fault, does not pose a major tsunami risk.
Mount Rainier, meanwhile, let go “a volley of really
tiny little earthquakes” last week, Bodin said, calling it
a “swarmlet.”
— Seattle Times
PUBLIC MEETINGS
TUESDAY
PUBLIC MEETINGS
Clatsop Care Health District Board, 5 p.m., (electronic
meeting).
Sunset Empire Park and Recreation District Board,
5:15 p.m., (electronic meeting).
Astoria Planning Commission, 5:30 p.m., City Hall, 1095
Duane St.
Warrenton City Commission, 6 p.m., City Hall, 225 S. Main Ave.
WEDNESDAY
Astoria Parks Board, 6:45 a.m., City Hall, 1095 Duane St.
Clatsop County Board of Commissioners, 6 p.m., (elec-
tronic meeting).
THURSDAY
Sunset Empire Transportation District Board, 9 a.m.,
(electronic meeting).
Clatsop County Recreational Lands Planning Advisory
Committee, 1 p.m., (electronic meeting).
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Climate program draws fi re for
leaving out natural gas power plants
By CASSANDRA
PROFITA
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Oregon’s plans to regulate
greenhouse gas emissions
through a new c limate p ro-
tection p rogram are facing
criticism for leaving out nat-
ural gas power plants.
Last year, Gov. Kate
Brown ordered the state
Department of Environmen-
tal Quality to create a pro-
gram that would cap green-
house gas emissions from
major industries and reduce
them over time.
The agency has been
working to develop the pro-
gram for nearly a year, and
last month it convened a new
advisory committee to weigh
in on the program’s rules for
who will be regulated and
how.
The rules are far from
fi nal, but environmental
advocates say they’re already
on the wrong track with too
many exemptions that would
allow industries to continue
polluting and not enough
commitment to the gover-
nor’s interim emission reduc-
tion targets for 2035.
One of their biggest com-
plaints is that Department of
Environmental Quality staff
has decided to exclude the
entire electricity sector from
the program, including eight
natural gas power plants
across the state.
Zach Baker, with Ore-
gon Climate Solutions, who
sits on DEQ’s rule-mak-
ing advisory committee for
the program, said state data
shows greenhouse gas emis-
sions from natural gas power
plants have gone up by about
58% since 2012.
“These emissions have
actually been growing,”
Baker said. “And we have no
plan. There’s no plan in our
state to address these at this
point.”
DEQ staff says they’re
not planning to regulate natu-
ral gas power plants because
that could push utilities to
buy electricity from natural
gas plants out of state, where
the department doesn’t have
authority to extend its pro-
gram regulations.
Richard Whitman, the
director of the Department
of Environmental Quality,
told committee members at a
meeting Wednesday that his
agency is “not clear” on the
best way to get to 100% clean
electricity without help from
the Legislature, and he’s hop-
ing to see lawmakers pass a
bill this session that “would
make our work here at DEQ
much easier.”
House Bill 2995 would
put new clean energy emis-
sion restrictions on 100% of
the electricity sold in Oregon
Michael Durham
The Carty Generating Station in Boardman is a natural gas
power plant owned by Portland General Electric.
by 2035, effectively regulat-
ing greenhouse gas emissions
from all natural gas power
plants delivering electricity
to the state.
“I completely agree that
getting to 100% clean energy,
clean electricity, is a critical
part of getting control over
our climate future,” Whit-
man said. “But to ask DEQ
with its limited legislative
authority to take on, in effect,
100% clean through the lim-
ited tools we have, we think
there’s signifi cant problems
there.”
But the whole reason the
governor issued an executive
order on climate change was
because the Legislature failed
to pass a major climate bill
last year, Baker said, so rely-
ing on the Legislature to reg-
ulate greenhouse gas emis-
sions at this point is risky.
“We saw through the cap-
and-invest conversations that
we are not able to fully count
on the Legislature to pass big
ambitious climate legisla-
tion,” he said. “DEQ should
be moving forward whether
or not the Legislature is
going to act.”
‘Accounting for the
emissions’
Environmental advocates
found support for their argu-
ment that the Department
of Environmental Quality
should include the electricity
sector from Dan Kirschner,
the executive director of the
Northwest Gas Association,
who said the electric utili-
ties should be treated in the
same way as the natural gas
utilities, which are being reg-
ulated based on where their
gas is burned — not where it
originated.
“From my perspective,
it’s about accounting for the
emissions of consumption
of electricity in Oregon,”
Kirschner said. “It’s not
about where that electricity is
sourced. This program does
not concern itself with the
source of natural gas, which
all of it comes from outside
of Oregon, or almost all of it.
“If we were to focus on
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Too much on cost
containment
Environmental advocates
voiced concerns at the meet-
ing that the Department of
Environmental Quality was
focusing too much on cost
containment and wasn’t pri-
oritizing equity the way the
agency had told the public
it would last year, and some
argued including natural gas
plants in the program is a key
factor in making the program
equitable to the people who
live near gas plants.
“There’s some commu-
nities saddled with pollu-
tion from four of the six top
polluters,” Dan Serres, with
Columbia Riverkeeper, said.
“This pollution lands on Lat-
inx communities already fac-
ing prolonged periods of poor
air quality, low level ozone,
smog and VOCs. DEQ needs
to back up and look at what
affects front-line environ-
mental justice communities.
How do we meet our green-
house gas goals while miti-
gating impacts on the most
vulnerable communities? ”
The c limate p rotection
p rogram isn’t scheduled to
launch until next year after
a vote by the Environmental
Quality Commission. Whit-
man told advisory committee
members that the commis-
sion will make the fi nal call
on many of the contentious
issues critics are raising in the
rule-making process.
Tsunami Marijuana opens store in Seaside
By R.J. MARX
The Astorian
SEASIDE — Tsunami
Marijuana owners Craig
Johnson and Tom Pruitt were
best friends in college. Now
they’re partners in a new dis-
pensary on Roosevelt —
about half-a-block south of
the former high school, in a
building formerly occupied
by the Seaside Signal.
The duo will close their
store off of U.S. Highway 26
but may use it as a processing
facility to make oils, tinctures,
edibles and concentrates,
Johnson said.
Johnson grew up in Shady
Cove and settled in Olympia,
Washington, where he has
owned an electrical contract-
ing company for 25 years.
It was Johnson’s parents
who suggested he get into the
cannabis business.
“My family was very open
in that way,” Johnson said.
“They grew marijuana when I
was a kid. So it was just part of
and always around my family.
R.J. Marx/The Astorian
Craig Johnson and Tom Pruitt of Tsunami Marijuana.
And then when it was about to
go legal, my dad was really on
me. ‘Aren’t you going to get a
grow? A store? When are you
going to get into it?’”
With legalization in Wash-
ington state in 2012, John-
son started a grow facil-
ity and Pruitt, an “ex-casino
slot guy,” at Emerald Queen
Casino launched a dispensary.
“We happened to run
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the consumption of electric-
ity and it’s associated gener-
ation mix you don’t have to
get into the whole world of
where that electricity is com-
ing from.”
But Bob Jenks, with
the Oregon Citizens Util-
ity Board, said he supports
the Department of Environ-
mental Quality’s decision to
exempt the electricity sector
because including it would
actually take pressure off
the other industries, such as
transportation fuels, that the
program would regulate.
“The electric sector
is going well beyond the
goals,” Jenks said. “They’re
phasing out coal, replacing it
with renewables and energy
effi ciency. I think the elec-
tric sector is going to be way
ahead of the game. I worry if
you bring the electric sector
in here, the head room allows
other polluters, other car-
bon emitters, other sectors,
to do less. I think removing
the electric sector is actually
an advantage. It puts pressure
on other sectors to clean up.”
Right now, Department of
Environmental Quality staff
are analyzing several policy
options for achieving green-
house gas emissions targets
for 2035 and 2050. The most
aggressive option would tar-
get a 50% reduction in green-
house gas emissions by 2035
and a 90% reduction by 2050.
The least aggressive option
would only target an 80%
reduction by 2050 without an
interim target for 2035.
Nicole Singh, a senior cli-
mate policy advisor for the
Department of Environmen-
tal Quality , walked through
an overview of the program
plans for capping emissions
at Wednesday’s rule-making
committee meeting. The state
is planning to set one over-
all emissions cap that will be
enforceable, as well as sev-
eral smaller caps for industry
sectors.
Singh said the state won’t
assign individual limits to
regulated entities, but it will
be issuing compliance instru-
ments for every 1 metric ton
of greenhouse gas emissions.
Over time, the state will issue
fewer of those permits for
greenhouse gas emissions as
it reduces the statewide emis-
sions cap.
“The cap itself says this is
the target, and we all have to
get there,” Singh explained.
“We don’t specify how you
get there. We leave it up to
each regulated entity to deter-
mine how to get to the goal.
The idea is to allow fl exibil-
ity in how entities reach the
target.”
The plans would allow
regulated entities to bank
compliance instruments and
save them for later if they
don’t need them one year
because they’ve reduced
their emissions. The plans
also allow for companies to
trade those permits among
themselves, and they also
allow companies to invest in
alternative ways of reducing
emissions, such as paying for
electric vehicles or charging
infrastructure if they can’t
reduce their own emissions
enough to meet the lower
requirements.
The program has three
stated goals to reduce green-
house gas emissions, priori-
tize equity for impacted com-
munities and contain costs for
businesses and consumers.
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into each other at dinner one
night,” Johnson said. “He said
what he’s doing and I said
what I’m doing, and we said,
‘Why aren’t we doing this
together?’”
They looked to Seaside, a
middle point between Olym-
pia and Johnson’s family in
southern Oregon.
“I was looking to build an
actual grow facility,” Johnson
said. “When I was looking
on (Highway) 26, it just hap-
pened to be one of those few
properties in Clatsop County
that you can grow on it, you
can process on it, and then
they said you can have a store
on it. I really wasn’t looking
for a store when I started it. It
just so happened the county
said I could open a store there,
too. I decided to open there
and get all licenses for that
piece of property.”
They started considering
an in-town location about a
year ago, Johnson said. “With
so many restrictions kid-
wise and spot-wise, there just
wasn’t a lot available,” he said.
“I looked at a lot of properties.
When the old high school was
closing this popped up as a
viable property.”
Johnson hopes to have six
full-time employees at the
new location. Along with can-
nabis products, they plan to
sell clothing, surfboards and
boogie boards.
“We’re going to try and
make it more of an ocean-
like destination for tourists,
but also make it the same
comfortable location we’ve
always had,” Johnson said.
Johnson will be among
those in-house. “You’ll see
me. I love being here. It’s like
a retirement job,” he said.
“We are going to give
our local Highway 26 peo-
ple a discount,” Johnson said.
“Being original customers,
we always want to make sure
they get a discount for keep-
ing us in business for all these
years.”