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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (April 20, 2017)
Thursday, April 20, 2017 OFF PAGE ONE HERMISTON: Beautification group is Under court order, DHS will designing a ‘pocket park’ for Main Street restore in-home care services Page 8A East Oregonian Continued from 1A the Hermiston Downtown Association’s First Thursday events, which offer up special deals, later hours, refresh- ments and entertainment on the first Thursday of each month to draw people down- town. May’s First Thursday, for example, will include 20 percent off denim at Andee’s Boutique and a free large tote with purchases over $100 at Lucky Endz Gifts. Porricolo said the action group is working on bringing food trucks in for July’s First Thursday, and have worked with businesses like Cozy Corner Tavern to have enter- tainment and deals later into the evening during May’s celebration so people don’t just stop by at 5 p.m. and then go somewhere else for dinner. “We’re saying, ‘Stay later, have a drink, have a meal,’” Porricolo said. The building group has been compiling a list of landlords with empty or “rough” buildings to contact with offers of help painting, pursuing façade grants or making repairs. “We hope they’ll work with us to make it nicer,” Porricolo said. The beautification group is working on designing a “pocket park” in the court- yard in the 200 block of Main Street. “They’re trying to kind of activate that space,” Porri- colo said. “Nothing crazy, just maybe some benches, flowers, things like that.” She said she has also been working with the downtown association, which is now an official 501(c)3 nonprofit, on getting more business owners to agree to purchase stone flower pots to put outside their buildings, which Porri- colo will then help them fill with flowers that match the flower pots already located on the north side of Main Street. She said she recently got six new businesses to sign up. Monday’s city council meeting will include another key downtown revitaliza- tion agenda item when the council is asked to approve festival street designs from the Downtown Festival Street Committee. The city plans to install the first phase of the project along Second Street in front of city hall later this year. ——— Contact Jade McDowell at jmcdowell@eastorego- nian.com or 541-564-4536. HUTCHINS: ‘I try not to harbor any anger’ Continued from 1A Hutchins said. Students asked her about her family and their ability to adjust to America. “My mom already knew English,” Hutchins said. “My dad is not so good with languages. He got a manual labor job where he still works today. He could learn English at his own pace.” She laughs. “At first he learned mostly swear words.” She acknowledged how hard it has been for her father, who still doesn’t talk about some of his experi- ences serving as a soldier. She and her family have been back to Bosnia a few times. But increasingly, she said there is less to go back to. During and after the war, much of the country’s art and historical artifacts were destroyed. As they’ve built a life here, Hutchins said they have a harder time going to the country where their lives began. “They know some things can’t be gotten back,” she said. Returning has been difficult for her, as well. Hutchins’ hometown of Bijeljina is now technically within Serbian borders. “I try not to harbor any anger that the people who cost me my home now own it,” she said. “As a country, we have less and less to go back to,” she said. “But I don’t want anyone to have to go through that, to lose what they feel like should have been their story.” –—— Contact Jayati Ramakrishnan at 541-564- 4534 or jramakrishnan@ eastoregonian.com. PENDLETON: Commission agreed to award Dairy Queen a $53,237 façade grant Continued from 1A To make the project finan- cially feasible, Hillenbrand said the clinic will offer new services like pet daycare, luxury boarding, obedience classes and acupuncture. Hillenbrand’s long-term plan is to purchase property across the street and build a small apartment complex that could accommodate intern housing and temporary housing for veterinary staff that need to monitor animals overnight. Hillenbrand said the original estimate for the new facility was around $800,000, but that estimate has since risen to just under $1 million. She was seeking the commission’s help in covering that gap. Rather than outright approving or rejecting Hillenbrand’s ask, councilor Paul Chalmers, the chairman of the commission, recom- mended creating an entirely new program to support it. Chalmers proposed the “fresh start” grant program, which would provide 10 percent of a project’s cost up to $100,000 for newly constructed buildings or buildings that take the place of a demolished structure. Thirty percent of the grant is dispersed once the building’s foundation is set and the other 70 percent is granted once a certificate of occupancy is issued. Chalmers suggested that the program be made avail- able beginning April 1 — more than two weeks prior. That meant approving “fresh start” and the Pendleton Veterinary Clinic project could essentially become a package deal. The commission unan- imously voted to send the recommendation to its advisory committee, which would flesh out the program before sending back to the commission for final approval. ——— The Pendleton Downtown Association initially wanted a long-term commitment to provide $55,000 per year for operating expenses and to retain its program manager. What the commission ended up giving the association was much shorter. As association employee Molly Turner transitioned from an intern to a full- time executive director, association president Fred Bradbury said the nonprofit needed a consistent source of funding to cover her salary and continue to support the downtown area. Financial support from the commission would allow Bradbury time to find a more permanent source of revenue to cover the executive direc- tor’s salary and he requested the commission provide funding through 2023, the year the urban renewal district dissolves. Councilor John Brenne said the association needed to chip in some of its own money rather than solely rely on the commission. Bradbury said the $100,000 grant the asso- ciation used to get started is starting to run out and revenue from membership fees wasn’t sufficient to support the association. Councilor Scott Fairley made a motion to reduce the scope of the commission’s commitment — the associ- ation would get $55,000 for one year before returning to the commission with a report on their efforts to secure permanent funding — but even that almost ended in defeat. The commission passed Fairley’s motion 5-4, with Brenne, Chalmers and coun- cilors McKennon McDonald and Neil Brown voting against. ——— The commission also loosened its purse strings to businesses looking to access its standard funding programs. The commission agreed to award Dairy Queen a $53,237 façade grant, which will help fund nearly $313,000 in inte- rior and exterior renovations. Oregon Grain Growers Brand Distillery received a $23,533 Jump Start loan after getting approval from the commission. The loan will cover half the cost of a sprinkler system, which is a necessary component of planned renovations that include a kitchen and an improved tasting room. ——— Contact Antonio Sierra at asierra@eastoregonian.com or 541-966-0836. By CLAIRE WITHYCOMBE Capital Bureau SALEM — The Oregon Department of Human Services will temporarily restore previous levels of in-home care services to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities under a court order won by plaintiffs who filed a federal lawsuit contesting recent cuts. DHS determines every year how many hours of in-home care someone with an intellectual or develop- mental disability is eligible for. Disability Rights Oregon, an advocacy organization that filed the suit last week, objects to how those deci- sions are made, saying the process is opaque. The lawsuit alleges that under federal law, the agency violated the civil and due process rights of Oregonians receiving these services, as well as the Medicaid requirement that the Office of Developmental Disabilities Services must provide such services “as needed.” Last year, the agency implemented a new assess- ment method on a rolling basis, which the lawsuit argues resulted in a reduction of in-home care hours for many people — although the amount of help they needed at home had not changed. Not all people receiving in-home care services have yet felt reductions, because the changes have been implemented gradually. Tom Stenson, litigation attorney with Disability Rights Oregon, said Wednes- day’s order means any new assessment method DHS wants to use “effectively requires” court approval. The lawsuit is still ongoing. DHS is “working on (its) plan to implement the agreement,” a spokeswoman said in an email. Bob Joondeph, the group’s executive director, said that his organization also wants to make sure families had a transparent avenue to challenge a needs assessment. “It’s great if they change the formula to work better,” said Joondeph, “But at the end of the day, what we want is that even with the new formula, we’d be able to explain to people why there’s a change and give them an opportunity to contest it.” Joondeph said his orga- nization had raised the issue and proposed solutions in private meetings with the agency, but filed a lawsuit after the agency did not act. In 2013, after the expan- sion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and a specific federal funding option called the Commu- nity First Choice Plan that provided funds so people with disabilities could access community-based services, there were significant increases in those eligible for in-home care — and in costs to the state. In 2015, Oregon legis- lators agreed to pay for the unanticipated costs in the upcoming budget cycle, but asked DHS to come up with a way to contain the rate of cost growth in the future. That became the method that advocates are now contesting in court. The Department of Human Services makes up a significant chunk of the state’s approximately $20 billion general fund budget, which lawmakers are busy trying to balance in the face of an approximately $1.6 billion shortfall. Reducing in-home care for people with intellectual and developmental disabil- ities by 30 percent, as DHS had planned prior to the court order, would have saved the state’s general fund $6 million in the upcoming two-year budget. Astronomers find another Earth-like planet By SETH BORENSTEIN AP Science Writer WASHINGTON (AP) — Astronomers have found yet another planet that seems to have just the right Goldilocks combination for life: Not so hot and not so cold. It’s not so far away, either. This new, big, dense planet is rocky, like Earth, and has the right tempera- tures for water, putting it in the habitable zone for life, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature . It’s the fifth such life-pos- sible planet outside our solar system revealed in less than a year, but still relatively nearby Earth. Rocky planets within that habitable zone of a star are considered the best place to find evidence of some form of life. “It is astonishing to live in a time when discovery of potentially habitable worlds is not only commonplace but proliferating,” said MIT astronomer Sara Seager, who wasn’t part of the study. The first planet outside our solar system was discovered in 1995, but thanks to new techniques and especially NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope, the number of them has exploded in recent years. Astronomers have now identified 52 potentially habitable planets and more than 3,600 planets outside our solar system. The latest discovery, called LHS 1140b, regularly passes in front of its star, allowing astronomers to measure its size and mass. That makes astronomers more confident that this one is rocky, compared to other recent discoveries. In the next several years, new telescopes should be able to use the planet’s path to spy its atmosphere in what could be the best-aimed search for signs of life, said Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau, a co-author of the study. If scientists see both oxygen and some carbon in an atmosphere, that’s a promising sign that something could be living. Outside astronomers have already put this new planet near the top of their must-see lists for new ground and space-based telescopes. “This is the first one where we actually know it’s rocky,” Charbonneau said. “We found a planet that we can actually study that might be actually Earth-like.” Make that super-sized, because it belongs to a class of planets called super-Earths that are more massive than Earth but not quite the size of giants Neptune or Jupiter. Compared to Earth, the new planet is big, pushing near the size limit for rocky planets. It’s 40 percent wider than Earth but it has 6.6 times Earth’s mass, giving it a gravitational pull three times stronger, Charbonneau said. A person weighing 167 pounds would feel like 500 pounds on this planet. While many super-Earths are too big to have the right environment for life, 1140b is just small enough to make it a good candidate. Thirty-two of the potentially habitable planets found so far are considered super-Earth sized. BUTTE CHALLENGE TWO HOURS every morning paid off my credit card debt. SATURDAY , MAY 6 , 2017 5K Run, 5K Walk, 10K Run, Kid's Butte Scoot All races begin & end at Hermiston's Butte Park DRAWINGS • FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY Become an East Oregonian Carrier. 211 SE Byers Ave. Pendleton or call: 541-276-2211 1-800-522-0255 Online registration & race information at WWW.BUTTECHALLENGE.COM Register online by April 22nd to order a custom technical race T-Shirt All proceeds benefi t THE HERMISTON CROSS COUNTRY PROGRAM THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!
