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About The Siuslaw news. (Florence, Lane County, Or.) 1960-current | View Entire Issue (April 11, 2018)
THESIUSLAWNEWS . COM ❘ / SIUSLAWNEWS C OMMUNITY V OICES ❘ @ SIUSLAWNEWS WEDNESDAY EDITION ❘ APRIL 11, 2018 ❘ $1.00 Volleyball goes undefeated in Salem SPORTS — B INSIDE — A8 128TH YEAR ❘ ISSUE NO. 29 SERVING WESTERN LANE COUNTY SINCE 1890 FLORENCE, OREGON Candidate debate draws large crowd from both camps MARK BRENNAN/SIUSLAW NEWS Candidate Nora Kent and West Lane Commissioner Jay Bozievich shake hands during a Florence City Club forum at CAT. Aerial spraying, economic development, experience all discussed in forum PHOTOS BY JARED ANDERSON/SIUSLAW NEWS Boys & Girls Club of Western Lane County Director Chuck Trent (center) shows residents the new Nan Osborne Teen Center at the campus off Airport Road. Boys & Girls Club ‘has come a long way’ BGC celebrates new facility improvements with open house, city proclamation for our club,” BGC Board President Larry Martindale said to a packed room at the main BGC facility. “We are doubling our capacity for kids with this new building addition. It’s been a long process in coming — we’ve worked on this for 18 months — so we’re excited about it.” Beyond the Teen Center, a full basketball court has been added to the grounds, as well as a bark- covered outdoor area housing picnic benches and garden beds. The grounds surrounding the buildings have also been newly landscaped, with a wide variety of flowers and shrubs lining bark B Y J ARED A NDERSON Siuslaw News T he Boys and Girls Club of Western Lane County (BGC) celebrated National Boys and Girls Club Week on Monday night with an open house to show off new improvements to the facilities, including the comple- tion of the project to move the Nan Osborne Teen Center (for- merly the Quality Child Care of Florence building) from the jun- ior high school grounds to the main BGC campus, 1501 Airport Road. “This is a momentous occasion pathways. Inside the main building, a new kitchen has been completed, replete with a full pantry and a robust selection of cooking appliances. “I remember when the Teen Center had no windows and was completely dark,” BGC teen member Sunshine Armer said. “It was all flat, no basketball court. It’s come a long way since then. Now we have TVs and volleyball courts and basketball courts. It’s just a safe place for kids to go. All the staff are helpful and when you have a problem you can go talk to them.” Guest speakers at the event included Oregon Sen. Arnie Roblan and Florence Mayor Joe Henry, who declared April 9 to 13 as Boys and Girls Club week in Florence. “People in our community, our teachers and our schools, can only do so much,” Henry said. “And the Boys and Girls Club does as much for kids in our community as anybody does. They can pick up the slack where schools leave off. I’m extremely proud of the Boys and Girls Club for everything you do.” See CLUB 10A T HE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS : P ART III There was a standing-room only crowd last Friday at the Class Act Theatre (CAT), where Jay Bozievich and Nora Kent B Y M ARK B RENNAN held their first public Siuslaw News debate. The two are com- peting for the position of West Lane County Commissioner, which will be contested in the upcoming May 15 primary. A third candidate for the office, Beverly Hills, was not in attendance, and a fourth candidate, David Goldberg, has withdrawn from the race. CAT, 509 Kingwood St. in Florence, was opened to the public a half hour before the debate and the seats inside the venue filled quickly. There were a number of discussions underway as supporters for both candidates took their seats. Among the discussions was a recent demand let- ter sent to Kent by Bozievich’s attorney, asking for a retraction of what he considered a false statement made by Kent. In the letter, Bozievich stated his opponent had misrepresented his votes on commissioner pay. The situation was resolved when Kent made a clarification to her comments that satisfied the Bozievich camp. The interest in the debate was high, due in large part to a recent decision by the county court to exclude a proposal on the May ballot. That proposal, The Freedom from Aerial Spraying of Herbicides Bill of Rights, aimed to ban aerial spraying of herbicides in Lane County. Proponents of the initiative introduced the amendment as a proposed protection to achieve clean air and water, and better public health. Being prepared for gun violence; the weaponization of statistics B Y J ARED A NDERSON Siuslaw News INSIDE “You have to come in the mid- dle,” Florence Police Commander John Pitcher said. “If both sides don’t back off from anything they want, nothing is going to change, and kids are still going to die in school.” Pitcher, who has more than 30 years of service with the Florence Police Department, doesn’t have a side in the gun debate. “We are not pro or con, we’re always going to go where the law goes to,” he said. But the seemingly irrevocable standstill on the gun debate has Pitcher worried. “I think it’s great that there’s a conversation happening out there — because there are kids dying in schools and other people getting killed,” Pitcher said. “But I think Classifieds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . Community Voices . . . . . . . . Kid Scoop . . . . . . . . . . . . . B6 A3 A8 B5 it’s terrible that the pros and the cons are attacking each other because they don’t like opinions. You just can’t say, ‘This is my position and I won’t budge,’ and then attack the other side. “We won’t find any solutions if we do that.” Pitcher talked at length about the gun debate in America, from problems with funding back- ground check programs to how gun laws may or may not affect mass shootings. He even spoke of an incident in Florence that could have escalated into school violence but was ulti- mately prevented. Over the final articles in this special series, Siuslaw News will be looking at the experiences Pitcher provided in an effort to offer a non-partisan perspective on the gun debate. “Let’s just get in the middle and discuss it and find out what the options are,” Pitcher said. “I’m not talking about taking anybody’s guns away or banning anything. Opinion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A4 Records . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A2 Sports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B Weather Data . . . . . . . . . . . A2 We just need to find a way for kids not to die when they’re in school.” But to do that requires sifting through information for the true facts — because even the facts themselves are often up for debate. “Weaponized statistics” “I know when the Florida shooting happened, some website tracked firearms on campuses throughout the country and they threw those numbers out,” Pitcher said. “But those numbers got attacked because nobody got killed or injured. It’s sad that we have to get into that.” Pitcher was referring to num- bers provided by the gun reform advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. In early February, the group reported there had already been 18 school shootings since Jan. 1, 2018. Generally, when one thinks of “school shootings,” they think of incidents like Columbine or Parkland. But, as the Washington THIS WEEK ’ S Post pointed out in a Feb. 14 arti- cle, that wasn’t the case here. One incident included in Everytown’s statistics was a man shooting a gun in the air on the campus of Wake Forest University at 8 p.m. In this case, the shooter wasn’t aiming at anyone, and no one was injured. Another incident cited a man committing suicide with a gun on school property. The argument made against that statis- tic was that the school had been closed for seven months at the time. Both the left-leaning Washington Post as well as sever- al right-leaning websites like Breitbart attacked the numbers for misrepresenting school shootings in a way that made it appear there were more school shootings than there actually were. And the writers of the Everytown article likely intended it that way as part of a push to sup- port an agenda for gun reform. See SPECIAL SERIES 7A TODAY THURSDAY FRIDAY SATURDAY 48 41 50 43 53 44 55 44 WEATHER Full Forecast, A3 See FORUM 6A Wind causes minor damage, outages The volatile weather experienced locally this past weekend receded on Monday but will likely return during midweek. B Y M ARK B RENNAN Damage done in the Siuslaw News City of Florence during Saturday’s storm was mostly limited to minor structural issues on older buildings. Florence emergency services respond- ed to a minor accident at 35th Street and Highway 101, which briefly closed one lane of the highway. In addition, crews from Mapleton Fire and Central Lincoln PUD removed and repaired downed power lines on Highway 36. The PUD was kept busy up and down the coast with minor outages, most of which were returned to service that day. The National Weather Service is predicting that today will be rainy with south winds remain- ing steady between 10 to 20 miles per hour, with occasional gusts to 41 mph. This weather should continue through Thursday and lighten up this weekend. S IUSLAW N EWS 2 S ECTIONS ❘ 20 P AGES C OPYRIGHT 2018