OFF PAGE ONE
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
East Oregonian
A9
Vote:
Continued from Page A1
Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian
Pilot Rock Fire Chief Herschel Rostov, the department’s first
full-time paid fire chief, offers instruction on attaching air
tanks Nov. 18, 2021, during a training at the fire station in
Pilot Rock.
Chief:
Continued from Page A1
Rostov said he grew up in
communities south of Seat-
tle. He earned associate’s,
bachelor’s and master’s
degrees in fire and emer-
gency services and public
administration.
He started as a volun-
teer firefighter in 1992 and
joined the Mercer Island Fire
Department, Washington,
four years later. He remained
there for about 23 years, he
said, the last four of which he
was fire marshal. Out of its
two stations, the department
handled, on-average, 2,600
calls annually.
He then joined North
Whatcom Fire & Rescue
near Bellingham, Wash-
ington, for a year and a half
before applying for rural
departments. That’s how he
found Pilot Rock.
Rostov has no connec-
tion to Pilot Rock or Umatilla
County. He said he simply
wanted to work in a slow-
er-paced farming area where
neighbors help neighbors.
Searching for a job as chief,
he didn’t apply to any large
agencies.
“That community feel-
ing, everybody knows
everybody, people are will-
ing to get out there and help
each other — that’s always
appealed to me,” he said.
He said he recognizes
many challenges facing rural
departments. Recruiting and
retaining staff can be a strug-
gle. With a small tax base,
it can be difficult for small
departments to find ample,
up-to-date equipment. Much
of the department’s equip-
ment, he said, dates back
decades, including vehicles
from the 1970s.
Among Rostov’s goals
are applying for grant funds
to seek new equipment and
finding volunteers the train-
ing they need. Soon, Rostov
will attend a course at the
National Fire Academy in
Maryland, and he said he
hopes to send volunteers to
receive similar certification
and training to improve
their medical skills. He
also aims to update equip-
ment, including breathing
packs and vehicle extrica-
tion gear.
In 2016, Pilot Rock hired
its first full-time police
chief. The move to hire
Rostov is yet another step
in the community invest-
ing in public safety, Carnes
said. Rostov’s new role will
provide the public some-
where to turn if they are ever
in need.
“That’s been a high-level
need from the department’s
perspective, just having the
ability to be part of Pilot
Rock itself, as opposed to
just going on the calls and
providing service,” he said.
Already, Rostov and
Carnes said they are plan-
ning on getting him involved
in providing fire education
and recruitment at local
schools.
Carnes recalled recent
years where Pilot Rock
didn’t have an ambulance
service and residents some-
times had to wait too long
for help.
“If you’re having a heart
attack,” she said, “it’s real
nice to have somebody five
minutes away instead of 20
minutes away.”
Hiring Rostov, Carnes
said, is one more step toward
ensuring vulnerable commu-
nity members receive help
when they need it.
Salmon:
Continued from Page A1
“We have a lot of work, we’ve
only just begun really, but I know
from our experience from over
here in the Clearwater that it can
be really successful,” Johnson
said.
Between 1980 and 1996, just
89 coho salmon were counted at
the Lower Granite Dam. Due to
the reintroduction efforts, the fish
have returned in higher numbers
— though far removed from their
previous numbers, before the
construction of the eight dams
between the Pacific Ocean and the
confluence between the Clearwa-
ter River and the Snake River at
Lewiston.
“I want to put it in context,
though,” Johnson said, “because
you know coho used to be very
abundant up here just like spring
chinook and fall chinook and steel-
head. So, historically, there were
probably about 200,000 coho
that returned here (to the Lostine
River). So we’re super excited —
happy to see this return of coho
this year, but also want to contex-
tualize that this is a mere fraction
of what it used to be like here.”
According to Johnson, the
program to reintroduce coho to
the Lostine is based on the tribe’s
success in the Clearwater Basin.
The tribe reintroduced the salmon
to the Clearwater and Snake basin
areas in the late 1990s. Before then,
the fish were extinct in the area.
The fish were bred from stock
collected at the Bonneville Dam;
however, the next phase of the
Lostine coho program will use
returned fish as brood stock for the
next generation of salmon, hoping
to make use of the fish that made
the long journey home.
“Those fish have survived,”
Johnson said. “They’ve not only
migrated out as juveniles for 600
or so miles over eight dams to the
Gerrymandering is most
often used when a govern-
ing body draws constitu-
ency boundaries to favor one
political party over another.
For instance, Oregon Repub-
licans recently accused
Democrats of gerrymander-
ing the state after proposing
and passing political maps
that are anticipated to create
strong majorities for Demo-
crats in the Legislature and
in Oregon’s congressional
delegation.
According to the Prison
Policy Initiative, prison
ger r ymandering works
by including prisons and
county jails as inmates’
place of residence when
redistricting instead of the
places they lived before
they were incarcerated.
That means people who live
near prisons and county jails
are given a greater political
voice than those that don’t by
using a population of people
who can’t vote, pay taxes or
otherwise participate in the
community they’re incarcer-
ated in.
“It gives certain people
who live close to prisons
more say in government,”
Mike Wessler, the group’s
communications director,
said in an interview.
The Prison Policy Initia-
tive claims to have ended
prison gerrymandering in
a dozen states and more
than 200 cities. Wessler
said Pendleton caught the
nonprofit’s attention because
it’s one of just two cities
in Oregon that use prison
population for its political
districts.
In 2010, EOCI contained
1,605 inmates and the
Umatilla County Jail had
254, according to the U.S.
Census Bureau and the
U.S. Department of Justice.
Given that each ward
contained approximately
5,500 people after the coun-
cil redrew ward lines in
2011, about one-third of
Ward 2 constituents were in
the custody of the Oregon
Department of Corrections
or the Umatilla County
Sheriff’s Office at the time.
Pendleton’s total inmate
population was fairly static
from 2010 to 2020, but
Wessler said these groups
are more transitory than
they seem.
About three in four
jail inmates are released
within 72 hours, accord-
ocean, but then they also turned
around and came back up those
eight dams over those 600 miles
and successfully returned, so we
want to use those genetics, you
know that stamina from those
adults for the next generation.
That’s what we did on the Clear-
water, and it’s been pretty success-
ful.”
At the same time as the record
breaking coho run, a smaller
number of chinook and steelhead
runs have made their way back up
the rivers. Steelhead trout, espe-
cially, were returning in much
lower numbers than before.
Just 39,359 steelhead have made
it past the Lower Granite Dam, in
contrast to its 10-year average of
59,147, according to the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers. The 2020
numbers for steelhead were 55,307,
according to the same data.
But the reason for the coho’s
greater numbers have flummoxed
experts.
“Coho are bonkers all the way
up the West Coast, and I don’t
really know why to be honest,”
said Kyle Bratcher, a fish biologist
with the Oregon Department of
Fish and Wildlife. “There’s some-
thing going out in the ocean that’s
changed that’s allowed them to do
well.”
The effects of the recent
drought, as well, could play a part
in the years to come, Bratcher said,
though the effect will be muted by
regional environmental factors
and the current La Niña weather
system.
It also will be some time before
the impact of the drought can be
accurately gauged, as the lifecy-
cle of chinook, coho and steelhead
vary — steelhead and chinook
can take up to six years to make a
return, while coho’s much shorter
lifespan of two to three years
means that it can act as a bell-
wether to ocean and weather condi-
tions.
“We get a little bit lucky some-
Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian
Pendleton Mayor John Turner calls the city council meeting to order Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021,
at Pendleton City Hall.
Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian
Pendleton City Councilor McKennon McDonald listens to a
planning commission report Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021, during
a city council meeting in Pendleton.
ing to the American Jail
Association. And although
prison inmates tend to be
incarcerated for longer, the
U.S. Department of Justice
reported that 42% of inmates
in 2018 were released less
than a year after entering the
prison system. Even inmates
with long-term sentences are
unlikely to stay in one place,
as three-quarters of incar-
cerated people serve time in
more than one facility.
Wessler said the discon-
nect is compounded by the
fact that most inmates return
to their home communi-
ties after completing their
sentence rather than stay in
the place where they were
incarcerated.
He added that the U.S.
Census Bu reau made
it easier for state’s and
communities to filter out
jail and prison population
data when redistricting. But
whether the Pendleton City
Council will add redistrict-
ing to its agenda is an open
question.
Redistricting not on
council’s radar
The council last redis-
tricted its wards in 2011 with
the help of Portland State
University, creating the
boundaries that exist today.
In accordance with the
Pendleton city charter, the
council drew lines for three
wards with two councilors
representing each of them.
The council is rounded off
by two at-large councilors
and the mayor.
A decade ago, the coun-
cil approved a map that only
made minor changes to
the wards. Broadly speak-
ing, Ward 1 covers down-
town Pendleton, the South
Hill and Riverside, Ward 2
covers the North Hill, West-
gate and the Eastern Oregon
Regional Airport, and Ward
3 covers everything south
of Interstate 84, including
Southgate, Tutuilla Road
and McKay Creek.
At the time, the map
drew a few complaints from
residents, but they didn’t
concern how Pendleton’s
prison and jail would affect
representation in Ward 2.
Instead, critics honed in on
how the base of North Hill
was left in Ward 1, open-
ing the door to having most
of the council living in one
neighborhood.
The council passed the
maps nonetheless, and 10
years later, the council have
left the wards intact even
as other governing bodies
adjusted their boundar-
ies. While the city charter
does require the council to
undergo redistricting from
time-to-time, it isn’t tied
to the unveiling of the U.S.
Census every 10 years like
legislative and congressional
redistricting is.
“The Council shall, by
ordinance, fix the bound-
aries of the three wards
and amend the same when-
ever required by changed
circumstances to assure fair
and equitable representation
to the citizens of Pendleton,”
the charter states.
Mayor John Turner said
he would be open to talking
about redistricting, includ-
ing gerrymandering, but it
wasn’t high on their prior-
ity list. On a scale of 1-10,
he rated the issue some-
where between 5-7 in terms
of urgency.
McDonald,
who
represents Ward 2 on the
council, said the council
is always open to hearing
from groups about issues
they care about, but she reit-
erated Turner’s point that the
council had been focusing
on other topics. She added
that this was the first time
she had heard about the
issue of prison gerryman-
dering since she started on
the council and would need
to do more research before
forming an opinion.
“It hasn’t come up as a
priority, as a thing to do
or a thing to change,” she
said.
McDonald said she would
be interested in studying
Pendleton’s population after
the 2020 census, especially
since Ward 3 has attracted
several new housing devel-
opments over the past
decade. Brandsen, Ward 2’s
other councilor, wrote in a
text message that she was
traveling and deferred to
other city officials.
A complicating factor for
redistricting is that filing is
already open for the 2022
city council elections under
the current boundaries.
McDonald has already filed
to run for a third term.
Rick Swart/Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
Coho salmon swim in Eagle Creek, Oregon, in October 2009.
times because we have the Wallowa
Mountains here, we tend to still
keep a little cool water around even
when it gets pretty bad,” Bratcher
said. “We didn’t see any of that this
year but where it’s going to hurt us
— the drought — is probably in the
next two or three years, especially
in the return.”
Alex Wittwer/EO Media Group
The Lostine River flows north from
the Minam Lake near Lostine on
Nov. 18, 2021, in the Wallowa Moun-
tains. A record breaking coho salm-
on run has made its way through
the Pacific Northwest, and some
are returning to the Lostine River,
which saw its largest coho salm-
on return after decades of the Nez
Perce tribe’s extirpation efforts.