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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (May 18, 2018)
PENDLETON BREAKS GROUND ON FIRE STATION LOCALS HIT THE PODIUM AT STATE TRACK REGION/3A SPORTS/1B FRIDAY, MAY 18, 2018 142nd Year, No. 151 WINNER OF THE 2017 ONPA GENERAL EXCELLENCE AWARD Your Weekend One dollar PENDLETON Methadone clinic prepares to open • • • Mix it up with Oregon East Symphony BMCC athletics surplus sale Saturday Hermiston Horse Sale Sunday at EOTEC For times and places see Coming Events, 5A Weekend Weather Fri Sat 65/52 72/50 Sun 76/56 PENDLETON Kind Leaf and city talk pot business at chamber panel Clients to arrive each morning for daily dose By KATHY ANEY East Oregonian The local battle against opi- oid addiction is ramping up. A methadone clinic will open in Pendleton as soon as regulatory hurdles are cleared. The Pendleton Treat- ment Center will offer meth- adone and Suboxone — two medications used to com- bat addiction to prescription painkillers and heroin. The clinic won’t start receiving clients until the complicated regulatory pro- cess wraps up and staff mem- bers are hired, an undertak- ing that could take a couple of months or more. “The state, the feds and the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) — they all have to sign off,” said Matt Owen, managing direc- tor of associated clinics in Bend and Grants Pass. His company, ORTC, LLC, also opened a facility in Spring- field about a month ago. Someone dies from pre- scription opioids every 20 minutes in this country. The Oregon Health Author- ity reports that more Orego- nians die from prescription opioids than any other drug — including alcohol, meth- amphetamines, heroin and cocaine. Some users eventu- ally switch to heroin, another opioid which is cheaper and easier to procure. Opioid withdrawal is a notoriously nightmarish process. See CLINIC/8A Staff photo by E.J. Harris The Pendleton Treatment Center will offer metha- done and Suboxone to recovering opioid addicts, once regulatory hurtles have been cleared. A COTTONWOOD FLOW By ANTONIO SIERRA East Oregonian Two years ago, selling marijuana in Pendleton was illegal. On Wednesday, canna- bis business owners sat with the police chief and the city planner on a panel sponsored by the Pendleton Chamber of Commerce to talk about the city’s nascent marijuana industry. Brandon Krenzler and Erin Purchase of Kind Leaf Pendleton were joined by Police Chief Stuart Rob- erts and City Planner George Cress at Oregon Grain Grow- ers Brand Distillery, where they talked about the current state of cannabis rules and regulations and the industry as a whole. Krenzler addressed an ongoing trend that has affected dispensaries across the state — a massive over- supply in marijuana. Oregon growers logged more than 1 million pounds of cannabis into the state database, according to state officials. Demand is not keeping up with supply, and with Oregon growers only allowed to sell their products to Oregon dispensaries, Ore- gonians consumed less than a third of that amount last year. See PANEL/8A Staff photo by E.J. Harris Swallows fly though a cloud of cottonwood seeds as they float over the Umatilla River Thursday in Pendleton. According to The Weather Channel, grass and tree pollen will be moderate to very high through the weekend and into next week. UMATILLA COUNTY ELECTIONS Support in east county enough to push Shafer past Givens By JAYATI RAMAKRISHNAN East Oregonian Staff photo by E.J. Harris John Shafer answers a question during a forum of Umatilla County commissioner candidates on April 12 at Armand Larive Middle School in Hermiston. Shafer defeated incumbent Larry Givens in the Tuesday, May 15 election. John Shafer earned a little more than 52 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s election to defeat three-term incumbent Larry Giv- ens in a two-way race for county commis- sioner. He will take the Position 2 seat in January. Shafer, the mayor of Athena and a Uma- tilla County Sheriff’s dispatch supervi- sor, lives about 15 miles south of Givens’ hometown of Umapine in the northeastern corner of Umatilla County. A closer look at precinct data reveals that Shafer won the majority of votes in their shared corner of the county as well as in Pendleton, while Givens gathered the support in much of Hermiston and a few other rural areas. Of 45 voting precincts in Umatilla County, Shafer won 28 and Givens took 17. Shafer won handily in his hometown of Athena, with a 177-vote lead in one pre- cinct, the largest margin in any precinct for this race. But Shafer also took the lead in precincts in and around Milton-Freewa- ter, just a few miles east of Umapine, and inside Pendleton city limits. Givens won over voters in the city of Hermiston as well as north of the city and in and around Stanfield. He also led by a few votes on the Umatilla Indian Reserva- tion, as well as in the southernmost part of the county. County Elections Manager Kim Lin- dell said Umatilla County precinct lines are largely based on school district lines or city boundaries. Within the larger cities — Pendleton, Hermiston and Milton-Freewa- ter — she said the cities are broken up into wards, and precinct lines are drawn based on those boundaries. A total of 13,157 people voted in this race, out of 42,490 registered voters in the county. Shafer won by 587 total votes. Shafer said he had not yet had a chance to study the results by precinct, but said he did not tailor his message to any specific group or area. See ELECTION/8A
