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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 30, 2021)
»INSIDE THURSDAY DEC. 30 2021 ON THE SUN SETS AR ANOTHER YE BUCKET LIST ADVENTURES FOR THE NEW YEAR NAMENTS PINBALL TOUR MERRY TIME BACK ON AT 6 PAGE PERFORMS POLICE BAND ’S EVE ON NEW YEAR PAGE 8 ORES EXHIBIT EXPL T HISTORY ASTORIA’S RACIS 11 PAGE PAGE 4 149TH YEAR, NO. 78 Nonprofi t hopes to partner with city on child care A collaboration on Sprouts Learning Center By NICOLE BALES The Astorian A new Astoria nonprofi t hopes to partner with the city in running Sprouts Learning Center, one of Clatsop County’s larger child care facilities. The city-run day care program serves about 30 children and operates at an unsustainable loss of around $25,000 a month. With a desire to transition into a public-private partnership, the city in October requested proposals. There were no responses by the December deadline, but in the days following, an interested group approached the city. Trudy Van Dusen Citovic, a co-owner of Van Dusen Beverages who serves on the Clatsop Community College Board, is one of the people behind the newly formed nonprofi t, Clatsop Promise. Citovic said several people started discussing a potential nonprofi t solution after learning about the city’s request for proposals. If the city maintains and owns the facility, a nonprofi t can focus on raising funds to operate, Citovic explained. With a partnership, there is no need to force a profi t out of child care , she said, and a nonprofi t can allocate more funds than the city could reasonably justify relative to the rest of its budget. See Child care, Page A2 Joanne Rideout is retiring from KMUN but will continue to produce ‘The Ship Report.’ Rideout steps away from the mic Veteran news director to retire in January By ABBEY McDONALD The Astorian After nearly 20 years of bringing the morning news to the airwaves of the North Coast , Joanne Rideout is looking forward to sleeping in. Soon, Katie Frankowicz, a former reporter at The Astorian, will be waking up early to take her place. Rideout, a longtime news director at KMUN, is retiring in January. “I’m just looking forward to sleeping late, and relaxing a bit and doing some things that I feel a lot of passion about,” she said. See Rideout, Page A2 DailyAstorian.com // THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2021 $1.50 AT ISSUE / DELTA SURGE ‘WE NEED TO DO A BETTER JOB AS A SOCIETY IN PROTECTING THOSE WHO ARE UNABLE TO PROTECT THEMSELVES.’ MARGO LALICH | INTERIM CLATSOP COUNTY PUBLIC HEALTH DIRECTOR By ERICK BENGEL The Astorian he surge of coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths in Clatsop County over the summer revealed the fragility of the system that cares for the elderly. Six of the deaths and dozens of virus cases were linked to care homes on the North Coast, which had mostly avoided outbreaks during the pandemic. “The health and well-being and the safety of community is a shared responsibility,” Margo Lalich, the county’s interim public health director, said. When it comes to the elderly, and to vulnerable pop- ulations generally, she said, “We need to do a better job as a society in protecting those who are unable to protect themselves.” Last summer was the worst of the pan- demic so far on the North Coast. The county experienced more than 1,000 virus cases and over 20 deaths from late June through late Sep- tember. Since the pandemic began, the county had recorded 2,802 virus cases and 36 deaths as of Tuesday. The Astorian obtained emails and other doc- uments under the state’s public records law to try to better understand the county’s response to the summer surge. The newspaper sought the records after the county — at the peak of the surge — declined to provide details about out- breaks and the county Board of Commissioners chose not to publicly press county leaders for more information. Unlike the virus cases at care homes, few of the outbreaks at other places met the Oregon Health Authority’s threshold for inclusion in the state’s weekly out- break report, so the details were never pub- licly documented. The records disclosed by the county do not shed any signifi cant light on the causes behind the outbreaks or what extra steps the county Public Health Department took to contain the surge. The documents also do not explain why care homes on the North Coast were more vulnerable to outbreaks over the summer than earlier in the pandemic. The summer surge of COVID-19, driven by the delta variant, arrived in the weeks after the county changed its public reporting policy on new virus cases and stopped sharing demo- graphic detail like age range, sex and whether the individual lived in the northern or southern part of the county. Through a Public Information Hub on its website, the county tried to provide the public with a weekly breakdown of new virus cases and whether the people involved were vacci- nated or unvaccinated against COVID-19 — a key metric, since the unvaccinated accounted for most of the new cases. But the county stopped sharing the breakdown in late August because of the rapid increase in new infections. T See Delta surge, Page A3 AT ISSUE/DELTA SURGE Last summer was the worst of the coronavirus pandemic so far on the North Coast. The Astorian sought emails and oth- er documents through the Oregon public records law and conducted interviews with county leaders to examine the county’s response. 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