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WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2015
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SOUTH LANE COUNTY'S MOST AWARD-WINNING NEWS SOURCE SINCE 1889
VOLUME 128 • NUMBER 23
County urges
Council to adopt
tobacco license
program
Freezing
Nights shelter
active during
frigid week
Points to statistics showing an
increase in teen use
BY SAM WRIGHT
The Cottage Grove Sentinel
BY JON STINNETT
The Cottage Grove Sentinel
T
hose with nowhere to go as
the days and especially nights
get colder can benefi t from Beds for
Freezing Nights, a shelter hosted for
much of last week at Our Lady of Per-
petual Health Catholic Church. Doors
opened at 7 p.m., and the shelter,
which rotates between locations at lo-
cal churches, has been offering the less
fortunate a warm place to sleep and a
hot meal for seven years.
On Sunday, Jack and Judy Anderson
of Cottage Grove were the volunteers
on duty; they said they have been help-
Champion!
BY JON STINNETT
The Cottage Grove Sentinel
E
Promotion encourages
shopping local,
page 3A
photo by Sam Wright
A total of 14 visitors took advantage of a shelter at Our Lady of
Perpetual Help Catholic Church Sunday night.
The shelter featured several rooms
for men and women separately and
also rooms for couples in need. Piled
up along the hallway were boxes of
ing out at the shelter for four years.
“It would be really awful to have
to sleep out in the cold; that’s why I
choose to volunteer,” said Judy Ander-
son, who also volunteers at events for
Community Sharing.
Please see BFN, Page 8A
Cottage Grove promotes itself well,
marketing group says
Macauley does it again
in bench press
competition, page 1B
Small Biz Sat.
T
fforts to market Cottage Grove
and surrounding areas as a tour-
ist destination are paying off, accord-
ing to representatives with Travel Lane
County, who detailed their own efforts
to promote the County’s appeal at the
Nov. 23 meeting of the Cottage Grove
City Council.
Carrie Westlund, President of Travel
Lane County, the marketing contrac-
tor for the County, told the Council
that for every dollar of transient room
tax collected by county businesses in
2014, $36 was returned to the Coun-
ty’s economy, which saw $609 mil-
lion in spending by visitors last year.
Those numbers translate to close to
10,000 local jobs, Westlund said. Data
showed that visitors spent 40 percent
of their money on food and beverages,
15 percent on retail purchases and 13
website sought out information on
Cottage Grove from homes in Eugene
and Springfi eld but also from Portland,
Seattle and San Francisco. “You’re
becoming the defi nition of a covered
bridge tour.”
“There’s no other place that can get
close to you in terms of the covered
bridges or the scenic bikeway,” she
said. “These attractions really draw
the soft adventure crowd, and promo-
tion efforts have played on the covered
bridges and access to wine country.”
Natalie Inouye, Travel Lane Coun-
ty’s Vice President of Tourism Market-
ing, said a packed schedule of summer
events also helps to ensure that there’s
always something for visitors to see
and do locally.
“You’ve done it better than most
towns,” Inouye said. You’ve got a se-
ries of events that really showcases the
heart of this community.”
percent on transportation and fuel.
Locally, Cottage Grove showcased
its fourth year of record transient room
tax collection, Westlund said, pointing
to increased local stays in hotels and
motels in addition to campgrounds,
which also collect room taxes. The
City collected $254,000 in room
tax last year, she said, contributing
$60,000 to Travel Lane County.
“We’re trying to drive overnight
stays, because overnight visitors tend
to spend more, even though the ma-
jority of overnight visitors still stay
in private homes,” Westlund said. She
said Travel Lane County is also pro-
moting package leisure vacations and
conventions. A company called Sports
Leisure Vacations, she said, is plan-
ning its third covered bridge tour in
the area in 2016.
“Your community has a lot of strong
assets,” Westlund said, pointing out
that visitors to the Travel Lane County
eenage tobacco use increased dramatical-
ly in Lane County last year, according to
the Public Health department, which sent rep-
resentatives to appear before the Cottage Grove
City Council to put forth a countywide ordi-
nance that aims to create a licensing program
for businesses that sell tobacco products.
Lane County Public Health appeared before
the Council last January to pitch a tobacco li-
censing ordinance; the Council questioned cer-
tain aspects of the ordinance and took its own
steps to combat tobacco use throughout 2015,
including banning the sale and use of e-ciga-
rettes to and by minors, increasing the accept-
able distance from a building that one must
stand to smoke from 10 to 25 feet and most
recently banning the use of tobacco products
in city parks. Representing the health depart-
ment, Health Offi cer Dr. Patrick Luedtke said
the County’s Board of Commissioners recently
passed an amended licensing ordinance for the
unincorporated areas of the County, and county
representatives have been visiting with city gov-
ernments again to try to convince them to adopt
the same ordinance for a uniform tobacco retail
license throughout the County.
Luedtke said that licensing can help decrease
the initiation of youth to tobacco use, of interest
because data shows that use among area 11th-
graders increased for seven of eight varieties of
tobacco products in 2014.
“The fear was that as e-cigarettes hit the mar-
ket, they would eventually be a gateway to other
products, and unfortunately we’re seeing some
of that,” he said, adding that kids who see more
tobacco advertisements are statistically more
likely to experiment.
“Kids tend to frequently stop in convenience
stores, where there are ingenious marketing
strategies including discounts, fl avored prod-
ucts, packaging that appeals to young people
and strategic ad placement,” he said.
Please see TOBACCO, Page 8A
Cooperation was key in severe 2015 fi re
season, says Department of Forestry
BY JON STINNETT
The Cottage Grove Sentinel
S
hort days, frigid temperatures and
recent rainfall may have dulled
memories of the summer of 2015 for
many, but looking back, it’s easy to re-
member that dry months followed by
intense heat created a tinder box effect
and an extremely active fi re season this
year.
The Oregon Department of Forestry
responded to many of the season’s most
dangerous blazes, and in a recent report
entitled “Oregon’s coordinated wildfi re
system pays dividends in severe 2015
season,” ODF detailed the cooperation
that it says is necessary to fi ght fi res
before their threat to lives and prop-
erty intensifi es. Calling the summer a
“witches’ brew of drought, hot weather
and dry lightning,” the report points out
that these conditions spawned more
than 2000 wildfi res in Oregon alone,
fi re camp operations. Resources such
as personnel, equipment and aircraft
came in from the U.S. Forest Service,
Bureau of Land Management, 27 states
and two Canadian Provinces.
John Wooten, Chief of South Lane
Fire and Rescue, said he saw that coop-
eration fi rsthand throughout the sum-
mer.
“The best way to attack a fi re is to
share resources,” Wooten said. “There’s
not any one single agency that possess-
es all the resources to handle a larger
fi re.”
The Department of Forestry, he said,
contracts the use of a helicopter that
can be used to dump water onto fi res, in
Sentinel fi le photo
addition to air tankers and a bulldozer, Access to equipment such as this helicopter, which helped fi ght a
equipment that South Lane could not fi re outside Lorane in August, is a welcome aspect of collaboration
afford to own.
between agencies that fi ght fi res.
“We don’t have this equipment, and
if a fi re is capable of working its way them, we have to pay for it.”
into ODF’s wooded areas, they can
Wooten explained that the Depart-
Please see FIRE SEASON, Page 11A
bring it to bear,” he said. “But if we call ment of Forestry mainly represents the
fi res that consumed “some 631,000
acres of forest and rangeland.”
“In a massive coordinated effort, the
Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF)
and its local and federal partners fought
back, stopping hundreds of new fi re
starts at small size and preventing many
large blazes from growing into mega-
fi res,” it stated, continuing that the
state’s ownership pattern, a “a spider
web of intermingled public and private
lands,” demands such cooperation.
According to the ODF news release,
the agency deployed eight incident
management teams to support fi re sup-
pression efforts across the state in 2015.
The Oregon National Guard supplied
several helicopters and fl ight crews,
other equipment and 375 personnel to
form 18 fi re hand crews. The state fi re
marshals’ offi ce provided three struc-
tural fi re teams, the Department of
Corrections provided 330 inmates from
10 institutions to fi ght fi re and support
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CONTACT US
www.cgsentinel.com
On the Internet
(541) 942-3325
By telephone
(541) 942-3328
By fax
cgnews@cgsentinel.com
By e-mail
P.O. Box 35, Cottage Grove, OR 97424
By mail
Corner of Sixth and Whiteaker, Cottage Grove
In person
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Calendar....................................... 11B
Channel Guide ............................... 5B
Classified ads................................. 7B
Obituaries....................................... 2A
Opinion .......................................... 4A
Public Safety .................................. 5A
Sports ............................................ 1B
1 Dollar