A11
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • THURSDAY, JUNE 3, 2021
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BRIEFING
Thelma’s Place to
reopen in Redmond
Adult day care at Thel-
ma’s Place, a Redmond
nonprofit for memory loss
individuals, will reopen
July 1.
Founded in 2008 by
Erik Berkey, Thelma’s Place
is an intergenerational
care facility in Redmond
and is under the same roof
as Country Side Living, a
38-bed live-in community,
and Whoopsy Daisy Child
Care Center.
The memory care cen-
ter closed because of
COVID-19, but the chil-
dren’s day care center re-
mained open throughout
the pandemic.
For more information
call 541-548-3049 or email
kathyd@countrysideliv-
ing.com.
p
Enchanted Forest
to reopen soon
Enchanted Forest will
officially reopen to the
public this weekend ,
welcoming guests again
for the first time in eight
months.
The Salem-area amuse-
ment park announced the
reopening Tuesday, two
weeks after delaying its
initial reopening plan due
to a public backlash over
its new policies to prevent
the spread of COVID-19.
The announcement
comes following a diffi-
cult year and a half for the
beloved attraction, which
has struggled with coro-
navirus pandemic, finan-
cial woes and an ice storm.
“You just can’t imagine
how excited we are,” park
co-manager Susan Vaslev
said of the reopening.
Enchanted Forest origi-
nally shut down at the start
of the coronavirus pan-
demic in March 2020, and
reopened that June to only
200 guests at a time. It shut
back down again only four
months later, as COVID-19
cases rose dramatically in
Oregon over the fall.
— Bulletin staff and wire reports
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Visit Bend seeks to use room taxes to support recreation
BY SUZANNE ROIG
The Bulletin
In recognition of the natural
resources that attract visitors to
Bend, the group charged with
luring visitors here wants to
use a portion of the room tax
it receives to fund shovel-ready
projects.
By this fall, an advisory
group will choose projects that
support tourism and spend up
to $500,000 of transient room
taxes to support the natural re-
sources, trailheads and other
reasons that are the primary
drivers of why people come
here. Next year the Sustain-
ability Fund, as it’s been called,
could set aside up to $750,000,
said Kevney Dugan, Visit Bend
CEO.
Visit Bend already has a
grant program for marketing
cultural events like BendFilm
and Oregon WinterFest, which
bring people to Bend. The new
fund would enable the market-
ing group to expand its sup-
port to so-called tourism-re-
lated facilities like trailheads,
bike paths and river-launch ar-
eas for adaptive sports.
“We as an industry have put
more people out there in the
natural landscape than a land
manager assumed would be
there,” Dugan said. “We feel
the responsibility. We looked at
what does it take to be respon-
sible.
“We are taking what is hap-
pening out there seriously and
doing what we can to protect
and enhance these areas so the
next generation will have the
same opportunity to recreate
here that we had.”
To do that, the group will
need Bend City Council ap-
proval. The council was con-
sidering the issue at Wednes-
day night’s meeting. The funds
could be used to maintain
trails, expand nordic skiing,
build an adaptive sports launch
area at the river or build a
parking lot. It’s a concept em-
braced by other communities.
See Visit Bend / A12
Vaccine freebies
Shot and a beer
Landlords may
apply for relief
Oregon landlords
whose tenants have fallen
behind on rent during the
coronavirus pandemic will
have one more chance
this month to apply for re-
lief from the state.
Oregon Housing and
Community Services
opened applications Tues-
day for a final round of
funding through its $150
million Landlord Com-
pensation Fund. Land-
lords can apply for relief
to cover 80% of the rent
they are owed by residen-
tial tenants dating back to
April 2020 in exchange for
forgiving the remaining
20% of unpaid rent.
Landlords will be able
to apply until June 18 .
Oregon lawmakers cre-
ated the fund in Decem-
ber . Renters until Febru-
ary 2022 to repay their
past-due rent.
However, landlords
only recently began re-
ceiving checks through
the Landlord Compen-
sation Fund, which was
hampered by technical
issues.
Still, the state ultimately
approved nearly $33 mil-
lion in assistance through
its first round of funding
to cover the unpaid rent of
nearly 12,000 households
Unlike in previous
rounds of the program,
landlords will be allowed
to apply for funds to cover
the unpaid rent of former
tenants .
The state plans to make
at least $60 million avail-
able in the final round of
funding . Landlords can
apply for relief to cover
missed rent accrued from
April 1, 2020, through the
end of June 2021.
bendbulletin.com/business
President, brewers, sports leagues and others
offering incentives to encourage vaccination
Getty
Images
BY ZEKE MILLER
Associated Press
W
ASHINGTON — Dangling ev-
erything from sports tickets to
a free beer, President Joe Biden
is looking for that extra some-
thing — anything — that will get people to roll
up their sleeves for COVID-19 shots when the
promise of a life saving vaccine by itself hasn’t
been enough.
Biden on Wednesday announced a “month
of action” to urge more Americans to get vac-
cinated before the July 4 holiday, including an
early summer sprint of incentives and a slew
of new steps to ease barriers and make getting
shots more appealing to those who haven’t re-
ceived them. He is closing in on his goal of get-
ting 70% of adults at least partially vaccinated by
Independence Day — essential to his aim of re-
turning the nation to something approaching a
pre-pandemic sense of normalcy this summer.
“The more people we get vaccinated, the more
success we’re going to have in the fight against
this virus,” Biden said from the White House. He
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
George Ripley, 72, holds up his free beer after re-
ceiving the J&J COVID-19 vaccine shot on May 6 at
The REACH at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
Free beer is the latest White House-backed incentive
for Americans to get vaccinated for the coronavirus
predicted that with more vaccinations, America
will soon experience “a summer of freedom, a
summer of joy, a summer of get togethers and
celebrations. An All-American summer.”
Biden’s plan will continue to use public and
private-sector partnerships, mirroring the
“whole of government” effort he deployed to
make vaccines more widely available after he
took office. The president said he was “pulling
out all the stops” to drive up the vaccination rate.
Among those efforts is a promotional give-
away announced Wednesday by Anheus-
er-Busch, saying it will “buy Americans 21+ a
round of beer” once Biden’s 70% goal is met.
“Get a shot and have a beer,” Biden said, ad-
vertising the promotion even though he himself
refrains from drinking alcohol.
The fine print on the Anheuser-Busch pro-
motion reveals the benefits to the sponsoring
company, which will collect consumer data and
photos through its website to register for the
$5 giveaway. The company says it will hand out
credits to however many people qualify.
See Freebies / A12
Pot producers are pushing to Largest meat producer
back online
clamp down on Delta-8 THC getting
after cyberattack
BY TIFFANY KARY
Bloomberg News
A little-known substance
derived from hemp is flying
off the shelves of U.S. gas sta-
tions and smoke shops, offer-
ing users a cheap and conve-
nient high even in states where
marijuana isn’t legal. But large
cannabis producers are now
pushing to clamp down on
Delta-8 THC amid worries
that a lack of oversight means
heavy metals and unexpected
intoxicants are cropping up in
some of the products.
The cannabis compound
has proliferated in gummies,
joints and vape pens, with
sales more than doubling in
the past year across the coun-
try. Despite being almost
chemically identical to feder-
ally outlawed forms of mar-
BY DEE-ANN DURBIN
AND FRANK BAJAK
Associated Press
E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune file
Processing hemp at the Red White and Bloom facility in Granville, Il-
linois, in 2020.
ijuana, Delta-8 has escaped
widespread scrutiny thanks to
ambiguity in U.S. laws.
That’s starting to change,
with a coalition of canna-
bis producers now pushing
federal and state regulators
to block sales of unregulated
Delta-8. More than a dozen
states have already moved to
restrict the products.
See Delta-8 / A12
DETROIT — The world’s
largest meat processing com-
pany has resumed most pro-
duction after a weekend cy-
berattack, but experts say the
vulnerabilities exposed by this
attack and others are far from
resolved.
In a statement late Wednes-
day, the FBI attributed the
attack on Brazil-based meat
processor JBS SA to REvil, also
known as Sodinokibi, a Rus-
sian-speaking gang that has
made some of the largest ran-
somware demands on record
in recent months. The FBI said
it will work to bring the group
to justice and it urged anyone
who is the victim of a cyberat-
tack to contact the bureau im-
mediately.
REvil has not posted any-
thing related to the hack on its
dark web site. But that’s not un-
usual. Ransomware syndicates
as a rule don’t post about attacks
when they are in initial negoti-
ations with victims — or if the
victims have paid a ransom.
In October, a REvil repre-
sentative who goes by the han-
dle “UNKN” said in an inter-
view published online that the
agriculture sector would now
be a main target for the syndi-
cate. REvil also threatened to
auction off sensitive stolen data
from victims who refused to
pay it.
See Cyberattack / A12