A10
News
Blue Mountain Eagle
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Katy Coba says goodbye to the Department of Ag
DOGS
Continued from Page A1
her well when Gov. Ted Kulon-
goski appointed her ag director
in 2003, Jill Thorne said.
“She brought to the direc-
tor’s ofice that background and
empathy for the work farmers
do and their care for the land,”
she said.
By Eric Mortenson
Community members
noted the majority of
dogs and pet owners in
the area are responsible
and well behaved and
said the meeting was to
deal with only a handful
of problem animals.
“We don’t want to
walk around with ball
bats,” Sharon Smith said.
“What’s an old lady like
me to do?”
Councilwoman Lisa
Weigum was in favor of
a licensing program for
dogs that would add ac-
countability for the own-
er. Additionally, licens-
ing fees and fines could
provide a financial base
to add infrastructure and
personnel to deal with
the issue.
Another major issue
brought up was the at-
titude of people toward
wayward animals, that
dogs will be dogs and
there’s no changing that.
“There’s gotta be
some incentive for social
change,”
Councilman
Paul Smith said.
Another possible part
of a solution that was
discussed was an educa-
tion program that would
inform owners of the
current ordinances in
place to help keep ani-
mals and people safe.
City Manager Nick
Green said he would
look into funding op-
tions and report back to
the council.
EO Media Group
eomediagroup.com
Debbie Ausmus
245 South Canyon Blvd.
John Day, OR 97845
OPEN WED. & THUR.
9 am - 5 pm
Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press
Katy Coba, Oregon Department of Agriculture’s
outgoing director, stands in a wheat field near
Pendleton.
an ambassador for public ser-
vice.
“I have two passions,” Coba
said during an interview in her
Salem ofice as her inal month
as ag director unwound.
“One is agriculture, the other
is public service. I believe in it.
I’m concerned about the discon-
nect between citizens and gov-
ernment, between Oregonians
and state government.”
She asked herself if she
could take the new job and make
a difference.
“I would say it grabbed me
right in the heart.”
Born to it
Jill Thorne says her daugh-
ter, Katy, and son, Todd, were
immersed in public service.
Jill and Mike Thorne were
Pendleton wheat ranchers, but
their world views extended be-
yond the blonde stubble that
covers the rolling hills of East-
ern Oregon this time of year.
Recognizing the region’s isola-
tion from Oregon decision mak-
ers in Portland and Salem, they
threw themselves into politics.
“Our theory was, we’re so
far from the Willamette Valley,
if we didn’t get involved, who
would?” Jill Thorne said.
In 1968 they found them-
selves hosting a campaign
breakfast at the ranch for Robert
Kennedy as he swung through
in a bid to win the Oregon pri-
mary and secure the Democratic
party’s presidential nomination.
Kennedy and the campaign
MONUMENT
Continued from Page A1
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“It does heighten the concern
he’s going to do it,” Jordan Val-
ley rancher Mark Mackenzie
said about the Maine declara-
tion.
The two cases are not en-
tirely the same. The Maine
parcel was gifted to the gov-
ernment by the founder of
the Bert’s Bees product line,
debbie.ausmus@
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Then it’s too late.
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Blue Mountain Eagle
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for movies
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WANTED
Information leading to conviction of
trespassers and/or poachers on Silvies Valley Ranch
$2,500
00
REWARD
A reward we’re anxious to pay. Again last year, several nice mule deer
bucks and elk were killed and left to rot on our ranch – and that’s only
what we found. Several poachers were caught and prosecuted. Please
help us catch trespassers and poachers who have no respect for private
property rights and who give all hunters a bad name. If you legally
wound an animal that comes onto any of our property, please come to
ranch headquarters at Bridge Creek and we will help you find and
clean it at no charge. Otherwise, do not go onto our property unless
accompanied by a Silvies Valley Ranch team member. We will press
charges, sue for damages, and are actively patrolling our property with
ATVs, by horseback, and videocams.
CALL
Silvies, Oregon
Sheriff Glenn Palmer 541-575-1131
Sheriff Dave Ward 541-573-6156
Colby Marshall 541-573-5150 x110
www.silviesvalleyranch.com
1-800-SILVIES
Loyalty
Jim Johnson, the Depart-
ment of Agriculture’s land and
water planning coordinator, is
a big man with big opinions.
He’s a ixture at public hear-
ings, frequently testifying as
local or state oficials wrestle
with land-use decisions that
might affect farming. By public
employee standards, he is un-
usually self-assured, direct and
plain-spoken. It’s a trait some
elected oficials don’t appreci-
ate.
He says Katy Coba is one of
the best he’s seen at managing
inter-governmental relations.
“She’s always had my back,”
he said. “She trusted me to do
my job.”
press corps descended on the
ranch. In a favorite family sto-
ry, Todd Thorne, then 3 1/2,
demanded to know who CBS
reporter Roger Mudd supported.
“If you aren’t going to vote for
Kennedy, you can’t eat breakfast
here,” he told Mudd.
Katy Thorne, then 5, sat in
Bobby Kennedy’s lap. A black-
and-white photo of her father
and Kennedy, taken during the
ranch breakfast, is in her Salem
ofice. Kennedy was assassinat-
ed in Los Angeles a month later.
Mike Thorne, now 76,
served in the state Legislature,
headed the Port of Portland and
Washington State Ferry sys-
tem, and worked on numerous
state and local civic projects in
the decades that followed. Jill
Thorne, 75 in November, was
and is equally involved, and
among other things worked for
Gov. Neil Goldschmidt.
Katy was a legislative page
as a teen, earned an economics
degree from Whitman College
and her early government work
included a stint at the ag depart-
ment and positions in the irst
Gov. John Kitzhaber adminis-
tration as chief policy adviser,
economic development and
international trade policy advis-
er and director of executive ap-
pointments.
But she worked the family
wheat harvest, too, lettered in
basketball and volleyball, com-
peted as a barrel racer and was
queen of the Pendleton Round-
Up in 1982. All of that served
Trust
Jeff Stone, executive director
of the Oregon Association of
Nurseries, said it takes a certain
skill to advocate, market and
regulate agriculture at the same
time, as the ODA director is
required to do. Katy Coba was
unique in her ability to do so, he
said.
An example: The recession
hammered Oregon’s nursery in-
dustry, as the sale of landscaping
and ornamental plants is closely
tied to development, especially
housing. In 2010, South Car-
olina began pulling aside and
inspecting trucks from Oregon,
the leading nursery state, look-
ing for plant diseases.
Stone said other states were
attempting to use the regulatory
system to protect their own mar-
kets. One thing Oregon can’t
afford, he said, is a trade war
between states. Under Coba,
the Oregon Department of Ag-
riculture worked with USDA
and other nursery states to adopt
a “presumed clean until proven
otherwise” stance.
Following that, the nursery
while the site of the proposed
Owyhee Canyonlands Na-
tional Monument is already
controlled by the Bureau of
Land Management.
Even though the Maine
monument involved private
land “and had a little differ-
ent twist to it, I didn’t sleep
very well that night,” Mack-
enzie said.
Opponents worry a mon-
ument designation would
severely impact the county’s
No. 1 industry, ranching, as
well as mining, hunting and
recreation because of restric-
tions and regulations that
would come along with it.
“Of course the national
monument in Maine is caus-
ing concern,” Malheur Coun-
ty rancher Sean Cunningham
told Capital Press in an email.
He said a lot of his op-
eration’s recent business
decisions are taking into
consideration “whether our
backyard becomes a monu-
ment and how that’ll affect
our daily operations.”
After the OBSC ran a TV
ad on MSNBC in the Port-
land region during the Dem-
ocratic National Convention
urging people to oppose the
proposed national monu-
ment, its membership in-
creased by about 2,500 in 10
days, said Mackenzie, who is
a member of the OBSC board
of directors.
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Paulette Pyle is a Reagan
Republican and Katy — ev-
eryone calls her Katy — is a
Robert Kennedy Democrat. But
Pyle, who for many years was
grass roots coordinator with
the pro-industry Oregonians for
Food and Shelter, loves Katy
Coba.
When Pyle deemed The Or-
egonian newspaper was picking
on Katy in its coverage of pes-
ticide mishaps, she called a re-
porter with a rival publication to
complain.
Because everybody loves
Katy.
Not literally everybody, of
course. Some in the media be-
lieve she’s been a lax regulator
of Oregon agriculture and some
in activist groups believe she’s
too friendly to what they deine
as Big Ag. But it’s fair to say
most people who have dealt
with her for more than a decade
love Katy Coba.
“We do,” Pyle said.
And as Coba leaves the Or-
egon Department of Agriculture
after 13 years as director — she’s
both the irst woman to hold the
job and the longest-serving —
people who make a living in
farming, ranching and natural
resources are bidding her bitter-
sweet goodbyes.
They hate to see Coba leave
the ag department, but they’re
pleased Gov. Kate Brown ap-
pointed her director of the state
Department of Administrative
Services and her administra-
tion’s chief operating oficer.
They hope Coba’s model of col-
laborative problem-solving and
her calm, respectful manner will
spread in state government.
Coba herself said the Gov-
ernor’s Ofice made multiple
pitches before she said yes. She
inally asked what the governor
was looking for, and the answer
swayed her. Brown didn’t want
someone focused on the internal
workings of DAS. She wanted
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association and Oregon State
University wrote a Safe Pro-
curement and Production Man-
ual to guide the industry.
“That’s a lot of trust, when it
means staying in business or not.
To have faith in the department
to solve a problem that really
could bring you to your knees,”
Stone said. “Trust between in-
dustry and the department, those
things aren’t assumed — they
are earned.”
The Future
Katy Coba, 54, says she’s
blessed to have a happy and sup-
portive family. She and her hus-
band, Marshall Coba, a lobbyist
on behalf of engineering irms,
have two grown daughters,
Claire and Meredith. She said
her parents, Mike and Jill, are
her most important role models.
They took the ideals the Kenne-
dys espoused, she said, and “put
them into action that I witnessed
and experienced.”
In her new job, she will seek
to develop leadership within
state government and attract
a younger and more diverse
workforce to public service.
She’ll push for accountability
and transparency. She wants
to restore trust in government.
The occupation of the Malheur
National Wildlife Refuge head-
quarters was an “explosion” of
the public’s angst and frustra-
tion with government, she said.
The biggest change she’s
seen in agriculture is consum-
ers’ interest in food, she said. “I
sometimes say ag suffers from
too much love,” she said. “If
you’re a farmer and igure it out
and take advantage of it, good
for you.”
Political challenges for Ore-
gon ag include labor, maintain-
ing transportation infrastructure
and continuing land-use dis-
putes and competition for water,
she said.
Ag hasn’t seen the last of
Katy Coba.
“I’ve already told the gover-
nor I’ll be an advocate for Or-
egon’s natural resource indus-
tries, I’ll be an advocate for rural
Oregon in this new job.
“And she said, ‘Good.’”
Membership now stands
at 8,100 and the coalition has
also started producing videos
that feature people who live
near where the monument
would be located explaining
in their own words why it
would be a bad idea.
Malheur County rancher
and OBSC board member
Elias Eiguren said putting a
face on the coalition’s mes-
sage makes it more personal
and allows people to under-
stand that what would hap-
pen would affect real people.
“I think as more people
see those videos ... it will
bring more awareness to
what’s going on,” he said.
If the proposed nation-
al monument is created, it
won’t be because people
didn’t know about the local
opposition to it, said Mal-
heur County Farm Bureau
President Jeana Hall.
“The Owyhee Basin
Stewardship Coalition has
done a great job of voicing
Malheur County’s opinion
on this and making sure
(people) know where we
stand,” she said.
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