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
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