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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.
Let us know what you think in a
letter to the editor: bit.ly/2kuT0PZ