A6 The BulleTin • Friday, FeBruary 19, 2021
NASA rover lands
on Mars to look for
signs of ancient life
PPE
Continued from A1
As Chuck Arnold — Red-
mond’s manager of economic
development and urban re-
newal who oversaw the give-
away — handed McGinty a
tote bag stuffed with protective
equipment, the store co-owner
expressed her appreciation.
“Thank you so much, we are
grateful for your support!” Mc-
Ginty told Arnold through her
face mask.
Thirty-six business own-
ers and employees received
23,000 face masks, latex gloves,
hand sanitizer dispensers and
more to keep themselves and
their customers safe. Leaving
their car wasn’t necessary — a
drive-thru setup allowed city
staff to hand them their equip-
ment through the passenger
side window, like curbside
pickup at a restaurant.
Arnold said he was happy
to help local businesses serve
people safely during the
COVID-19 pandemic.
“We felt there was an oppor-
tunity here to work and deploy
materials to people that can
help keep them safe, stay open,
or get open,” he said.
The city has distributed
more than 70,000 masks,
gloves, bottles of hand sani-
tizer, wipes and other person-
nel protection items to more
than 200 businesses in Red-
mond since the onset of the
pandemic in March 2020, ac-
cording to a city press release.
BY MARCIA DUNN
The Associated Press
Ryan Brennecke/The Bulletin
Chuck Arnold, left, and volunteer Ron Osmundson hand out personal protective equipment to local busi-
nesses at Redmond City Hall on Thursday.
The state of Oregon has given
personal protective equipment
to cities like Redmond to dis-
tribute to locals, Arnold said.
Teresa Duckworth and Susie
Brown also swung by city hall
Thursday. The duo planned to
use the protective equipment
to safeguard the senior citizens
they work with while cleaning
their apartments and taking
them grocery shopping.
“God bless them for what
they are doing,” Brown said of
city staff. “This is a blessing.”
“God bless them for what
they are doing. This is a
blessing.”
— Susie Brown
Joey Podsadecki, an employee
of Springtime Landscape and
Irrigation, called the city event
“pretty rad.” Getting lots of free
face masks, sanitizer and more
for Springtime’s large staff
helps the company financially,
he said.
“We have 60 employees, …
so buying that much PPE is a
big expense,” Podsadecki said.
“Now, we can focus on trucks
and equipment and stuff.”
Thursday’s drive-thru event
likely won’t be the last, Arnold
said.
“This is the first of what will
probably be several events,” he
said. “If demand grows, we’ll
find a way to get the supply.”
e e
Reporter: 541-617-7854,
jhogan@bendbulletin.com
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.
— A NASA rover has landed
on Mars in an epic quest to
bring back rocks that could
answer whether life ever ex-
isted on the red planet.
The space agency says the
six-wheeled Perseverance
hurtled through the thin, or-
ange atmosphere and settled
onto the surface Thursday in
the mission’s riskiest maneu-
ver yet. Mars has long been
a deathtrap for incoming
spacecraft.
Perseverance will collect
geological samples that will
be brought back to Earth in
about a decade to be analyzed
for signs of ancient micro-
scopic life.
Ground controllers at the
space agency’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Cal-
ifornia, waited nervously for
the descent of Perseverance
to the surface of Mars, long
a deathtrap for incoming
spacecraft. It took a nail-bit-
Housing
Continued from A1
Reservoir
Continued from A1
Kyle Gorman, region man-
ager for the Oregon Water Re-
sources Department, estimates
that Wickiup will be at about
110,000 acre-feet to 120,000
acre-feet on the first of April,
which would be the lowest on
record to start the irrigation
season. (One acre foot of water
is the amount of water to cover
an acre in one foot of water, or
about 325,851 gallons.)
“Wickiup is indeed in re-
ally poor shape this year,” said
Gorman. “North Unit is going
to be short of water again this
year.”
When Wickiup can’t fill to
capacity, water managers are
forced to dial back the amount
of water delivered to farmers,
who in turn must leave a per-
centage of their fields fallow.
Over the past two growing
seasons, farmers in Jefferson
County were leaving 30-40% of
their fields bare due to the wa-
ter shortage.
Ryan Brennecke/Bulletin file
Areas of sand are exposed near the base of the Wickiup Reservoir dam
Sept. 4.
Water is currently being
discharged from the reser-
voir at a rate of 106 cubic feet
per second in order to comply
with U.S. Fish & Wildlife reg-
ulations to protect the Oregon
spotted frog. More water for
wildlife has resulted in less wa-
ter for farmers.
“The snowpack for 2021
got off to a good start and we
are all hopeful that it will con-
tinue,” said Marty Richards,
North Unit’s chairman. “But
I would anticipate a short-
age due to multiple years of
drought and one of the lowest
levels for Wickiup at the end of
the season.”
It will take time for the situa-
tion to change, said Richards.
“Even with average or bet-
ter snow and precipitation, my
sense is we will be no better
off than last year,” said Rich-
ards. “Going forward my con-
cern is that it will take multiple
good years to recover from this
drought.”
Richards added that as the
water shortage continues, he
worries about the potential
for farms to go out of business
as well as the environmental
costs, including degraded soils.
Elsewhere in the region,
Prineville Reservoir is 35% full
and Ochoco Reservoir is 16%
full.
On a more positive note, the
snowpack in the Upper De-
schutes and Crooked River re-
gion is 100% of normal. Water
year-to-date precipitation is
93% of normal. However, this
year’s snowpack will have lit-
tle effect on reservoir levels in
2021. Due to Central Oregon’s
porous soil, it can take a year
or more for melted snowpack
to reach this area’s reservoirs.
e e
Reporter: 541-617-7818,
mkohn@bendbulletin.com
The city will allocate
$625,000 to the nonprofit
Housing Works to buy ap-
proximately 5.5 acres of land
to develop affordable hous-
ing, according to a city pre-
sentation. This land was des-
ignated as a part of House
Bill 4079, which incorporated
new land east of U.S. High-
way 20 into the city’s urban
growth boundary as a part of
an affordable housing pilot
project in 2016.
About $475,000 will go to a
project called the Mary Rose
Place Apartments, which will
be located at the intersection
of Mary Rose Place and 27th
Street in northeast Bend.
The last $200,000 will go
to the Bend Heroes Founda-
tion’s Veterans Village proj-
ect. The money will go to-
ward building an emergency
shelter that will provide ser-
vices to homeless veterans.
When completed, the vil-
ing 11½ minutes for a signal
that confirmed success to
reach Earth.
The landing of the six-
wheeled vehicle marked the
third visit to Mars in just over
a week. Two spacecraft from
the United Arab Emirates
and China swung into orbit
around the planet on succes-
sive days last week.
All three missions lifted off
in July to take advantage of
the close alignment of Earth
and Mars, traveling some 300
million miles in nearly seven
months.
Perseverance, the biggest,
most advanced rover ever
sent by NASA, stood to be-
come the ninth spacecraft to
successfully land on Mars,
every one of them from the
U.S., beginning in the 1970s.
The car-size, plutoni-
um-powered rover was aim-
ing for NASA’s smallest and
trickiest target yet: a 5-by-4-
mile strip on an ancient river
delta full of pits, cliffs and
fields of rock.
lage will include a commu-
nity building for meals and
services and 30 transitional
housing units.
The city received more
than $4 million worth of re-
quests for project funding,
said Ian Schmidt, a member
of the affordable housing
committee. These projects
were chosen because they
gave the city the most “bang
for their buck” when it comes
to the total number of units
that would be built.
It is also notable that Bend
attracted another national
housing developer, Related
Northwest, which is behind
the Mary Rose Place Apart-
ments, said Matt Martino,
another member of the af-
fordable housing committee,
on Wednesday.
“This is showing what we
are doing in Bend is starting
to garner national attention
and that we are on the right
track,” Martino said.
e e
Reporter: 541-633-2160,
bvisser@bendbulletin.com
A S ENIOR M OMENT
Senior Living Solutions
Homeless
Continued from A1
The city has not posted
eviction notices at camps on
city owned property recently,
and has put out hand-washing
stations at many of the known
homeless camps within the
city, said Jon Skidmore, the
city’s chief operating officer on
Wednesday.
The removal efforts are hap-
pening on property owned by
the department of transporta-
tion, also known as ODOT. In
the past couple of months, the
department has posted seven
to eight 24-hour eviction no-
tices at camps that sit in the
right of way of U.S. Highway
97, said Joel McCarroll, the
District 10 Manager at ODOT.
There are about 25 camps
along the section of Highway
97 known as the Bend Park-
way, he said.
McCarroll said these camps
are being moved for public
health and safety reasons, in-
cluding illegal fires, reports of
gunshots, people trespassing
on private property and hu-
man waste-related sanitation
issues.
At one location near Mur-
phy Road and west of the high-
way, a camper in August lost
control of a fire, which threat-
ened a neighborhood that sits
next to the campsite, McCar-
roll said.
“At that point we decided
that there was a safety risk to
allow people to stay,” he said.
But roughly six months later,
campers have returned, and
ODOT plans to post another
eviction notice for the area,
McCarroll said.
McCarroll said ODOT has
to react to the complaints it
receives from neighboring
properties and businesses, even
though there is general recog-
nition that people eventually
return.
“If we don’t deal with them,
we’re negligent,” McCarroll
said.
McCarroll said ODOT
needs to do a better job of
making sure camps can’t rees-
tablish again once they’ve been
moved.
But even when homeless
campers do return, the situa-
tion can improve after camps
are removed, he said. For
example, although ODOT
evicted campers at the High-
way 97 interchange at Revere
Avenue in June, campers re-
turned, McCarroll said, but the
number of complaints have
gone down considerably com-
pared to last year.
“I don’t know if people have
given up (on) complaining to
us...or if the people camping
there are a different group of
people that are not having the
negative interactions with the
neighbors,” he said.
McCarroll said ODOT part-
ners with homeless nonprofit
groups and Bend Police to
hand out trash bags to campers
to help keep properties clean.
One big difference seen at the
Revere Avenue camp now ver-
sus last year is that the campers
are keeping the site more clean,
he said.
“If they are able to minimize
the damage to the site, it’s eas-
ier to let them stay,” he said.
The issue of cleanliness is
exactly why some in the com-
munity are asking the city to
do more in the way of provid-
ing bathrooms and dumpsters
at homeless camp sites. Sev-
eral residents in emails and
during public comment asked
the council to consider putting
portable toilets at places where
homeless people congregate.
But both police and home-
less service providers warned
against having portable toilets
at campsites, Skidmore, the
chief operating officer of the
city, said Wednesday. There
are safety concerns associated
with having portable toilets
that have the ability to lock on
a property without having any
oversight or management, he
said.
Other solutions, like build-
ing permanent bathroom facil-
ities at some well-established
camp areas or having agree-
ments with neighboring prop-
erties, could be considered,
Skidmore said.
Regardless of what the coun-
cil decides to do moving for-
ward, a new grassroots group
called the Street Kitchen Col-
lective plans to keep the issue
at the forefront.
The group was formed
in the fall and is made up of
young Bend residents who
make food and distribute it
among homeless camps across
Central Oregon. The volun-
teers were moved by the death
of David Savory, a homeless
man who died in the elements
last year, said Eric Garrity, a
group member.
“There’s a lot of preconcep-
tions people have about folks
who are unhoused,” Garrity
said Thursday. “As we’ve been
doing this work, there’s a lot of
times people have tried to talk
about unhoused people as if
they are unworthy of helping
or undeserving of assistance,
and the reality is those pre-
conceptions don’t line up with
reality.”
On top of that, evictions
don’t work Garrity said. He
called them inhumane and un-
necessarily expensive.
The group rallied members
of the community over social
media to speak out against the
evictions at the council meet-
ing and over email in an effort
to push back against an an-
ti-homeless narrative. Garrity
mentioned, for example, how
a group of people in the Boyd
Acres Neighborhood in north-
east Bend protested a transi-
tional camp on Juniper Ridge
— a project that was nixed in
the end.
“When we saw that effort
fail, we saw the benefit of try-
ing to change public opinion
on that matter,” Garrity said.
Councilor Melanie Kebler
said the urgency of the com-
munity’s message was heard,
and that she intends to ask city
staff about what can be done to
solve trash and hygiene issues
without moving people.
“We need to move and the
community wants us to move,”
Kebler said.
e e
Reporter: 541-633-2160,
bvisser@bendbulletin.com
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