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About The Bulletin. (Bend, OR) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 13, 2021)
WEDNESDAY • January 13, 2021 • Serving Central Oregon since 1903 • $1.50 SPORTS PULLOUT, A5-8 Destroyed area was project to sequester carbon for California BEND-LA PINE SCHOOLS | NEW SUPERINTENDENT Steve Cook wins unanimous vote BY JACKSON HOGAN The Bulletin Bend-La Pine Schools chose its new superintendent: Steve Cook, superintendent of Coeur d ‘Alene Public Schools in Northern Idaho. Cook will begin lead- ing Central Oregon’s largest school district on July 1, di- rectly overseeing nearly 17,500 students. Bend-La Pine’s cur- rent superintendent, Lora Nor- dquist, is serving a one-year interim term this school year after Shay Mikalson’s four-year Bellamy Cook tenure ended in June 2020. Bend-La Pine board mem- bers listed a variety of reasons why they unanimously voted to offer a contract to Cook at their Tuesday night meeting, from experience to empathy. Board chair Carrie Douglass said he fit many of the board’s wishes for a new leader. “It is not easy to find some- one that comes close to the whole package,” she said at the meeting. “(Cook) is a vision- ary leader who we believe will lead this community out of this extraordinary year … into the future.” Cook has led Coeur d ‘Alene Public Schools, a district of about 10,700 students, for two years. Before then, he spent decades as a school administrator and teacher in Colorado and Kansas, and was also an adjunct graduate school professor for the since- closed Argosy University in the Denver area from 2014-16. Cook was chosen over Kristina Bellamy, director of K-12 learning and teaching for the Anchorage School Dis- trict in Alaska. She has held multiple administrative and teaching positions in Anchor- age and the suburbs of Seattle and Los Angeles since 2002. See Superintendent / A4 BY MICHAEL KOHN The Bulletin Five years ago the Confed- erated Tribes of Warm Springs set aside 24,000 acres of forest- land for a project to sequester carbon and reduce greenhouse gases. Last summer Climate more than half of that forest went up in smoke in the dev- astating Lionshead Fire. Now tribes, which earned millions of dollars from the California Air Resources Board for the project, are hard at work assessing just how much was lost. Bobby Brunoe, general manager for the tribe’s Branch of Natu- ral Resources, so far calcu- lates that 15,000 acres of the project area were lost in the fire. Overall, the Lionshead Fire burned 204,000 acres, of which 96,000 acres are on the Warm Springs Indian Reser- vation. Warm Springs, located 70 miles north of Bend, sells car- bon credits earned through California’s Cap-and-Trade Program, by protecting its for- ests so they can continue to capture carbon. The program is a market-based form of reg- ulation that sets an upper limit, or “cap,” on carbon emissions produced by companies in Cal- ifornia. The carbon offset projects can be located outside of Cali- fornia, a policy that opened the door to participation by Warm Springs. Around the country, there are 136 forest offset proj- ects. According to the agreement, Warm Springs will maintain and build carbon stands within its project area for 100 years. At Warm Springs, the area considered for protection was zoned as “conditional use,” a designation that allowed the tribes to log it if they so de- sired, although it had not been logged before. Entering the Cap-and-Trade Program was a financial in- centive to keep the forest intact and increase its carbon intake capacity. But wildfires like Li- onshead throw a wrench in those intentions as the burned trees reverse carbon sequestra- tion, sending carbon into the atmosphere. Changed See Wildfire / A4 Correction A story headlined, “Dog- friendly group tells Bend park district: Don’t limit off-leash access,” which appeared Tues- day, Jan. 12, on Page A1, incor- rectly identified DogPAC as a political action committee. DogPAC is a nonprofit orga- nization. The Bulletin regrets the er- ror. Bend park district adds more affordable housing waivers Resolution is seen as a compromise to help remove barriers Dean Guernsey/for The Bulletin Excavation is shown well underway Tuesday on the 240-unit affordable housing complex called Stillwater Crossing at the south end of Bend. The project received 240 of Bend Park & Recreation District’s 400 affordable housing waivers for system development charges last year, which prompted the park district to restructure how additional waivers will be issued. BY BRENNA VISSER • The Bulletin T he Bend Park & Recreation District increased the number of fee waivers it will give to developers who build affordable housing for the next two years, but fell short of answering the city of Bend’s Bend’s 1st Winco reveals date for opening BY SUZANNE ROIG The Bulletin The wait is over for Central Oregon residents: WinCo Foods is opening on Feb. 1 at the old Shopko site, the company an- nounced Monday. This is the employee- owned store’s first location in Central Oregon. Reno- vation began in 2019 on the 84,000 square-foot store at the Bend River Plaza. “Bend and the surround- ing area has asked for a WinCo Foods for a long time, and we can’t wait to start serving the good peo- ple who live there,” Noah Fleisher, company spokes- man said in a prepared statement. “Bend is about community, quality of life and good people, just like WinCo. We intend to work very hard every day to show that to everyone here.” The store will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Fleisher said in a statement. WinCo has hired about 200 full- and part-time people to staff the store. With the opening of the Bend store, WinCo operates 129 stores in 10 states. “The introduction of WinCo into the Bend mar- ket creates more choice and competition particularly when looking at the more affordable side of the mar- ket,” said Damon Runberg, Oregon Employment De- partment regional econo- mist. “Most of the recent growth in grocery in the region has been on the high end, such as Market of Choice, with fewer options for those shoppers on a tighter budget.” WinCo has grown tre- mendously in the past de- cade with new stores open- ing in the coming weeks in new markets of Missoula and Bozeman in Montana and Wenatchee, Washing- ton, Runberg said. The employee-owned grocery chain also has agreed to locate a new store at a former Shopko loca- tion in Eugene, bringing the total to three stores in the greater Eugene area, according to various news reports. See Winco / A4 original request to remove a cap on these fee waivers entirely. In a meeting Jan. 5, the park board unanimously approved waiving system development charges, or TODAY’S WEATHER Some sun High 48, Low 27 Page A12 SDCs, for 150 more future units of affordable housing. The approved resolution is seen by most on the board as a com- promise to help remove barriers to affordable housing while also not losing too much revenue from the fees, which help pay for the con- struction of new parks and other infrastructure. But some still feel the district could do more to help one of Bend’s most pressing issues. As a part of a pilot project prompted by the city, which waives SDCs for all affordable housing projects, the district agreed in 2019 to waive these fees for up to 400 units of affordable hous- ing through 2022. The idea is that waiving these fees removes finan- cial barriers for affordable housing projects, which often struggle to pencil out due to high land costs and lower rents to recoup costs. The {span}average SDC rate for a multifamily unit is $5,644, the park district estimates.{/span} But the district nearly reached its cap by the end of 2020, with 380 of those waivers already allocated and two years of the pilot program left to go, prompting the city to ask the district to remove it’s 400-unit cap. This happened in large part be- cause an unexpectedly large, 240- unit affordable housing project, called Stillwater Crossing, came to south Bend and received more than half of the waivers, said Mi- chelle Healy, deputy director of the park district. Before that, Bend was averaging roughly 50 afford- able housing units a year, she said. “I think no one foresaw the large one that came through,” Healy said Tuesday. So this time, the park board de- cided to cap this year and 2022 to 75 waivers each. The number of waivers was based on a project list the district received from the city this fall, showing 150 affordable housing unit projects in the pipe- line, Healy said. See Waivers / A13 INDEX Business A11-12 Classifieds A1 3 Comics A9-10 Dear Abby A7 Editorial A8 Horoscope A7 Local/State A2-3 Lottery A6 Nation/World A 13 Obituaries A4 Puzzles A10 Sports A5-7 The Bulletin An Independent Newspaper Vol. 119, No. 11, 14 pages, 1 section ù We use recycled newsprint DAILY Warm Springs evaluates loss from wildfire U|xaIICGHy02329lz[