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About The Blue Mountain eagle. (John Day, Or.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 29, 2018)
INSIDE » GRANT COUNTY HUNTING JOURNAL Grant County’s newspaper since 1868 W edNesday , a ugust 29, 2018 • N o . 35 • 16 P ages • $1.00 School’s in session www.MyEagleNews.com State money will address PC water emergency Mayor: Developing Faiman Springs site is city’s best option By Richard Hanners Blue Mountain Eagle Photos by The Eagle/Angel Carpenter Humbolt Elementary sixth-grade teacher Georgia Boethin asks her students questions about classroom rules on the first day of school. New administrators and teachers announced Students in Georgia Boethin’s sixth-grade class at Humbolt Elementary are ready to answer their teacher’s question. By Angel Carpenter Blue Mountain Eagle chools in Grant County have opened their doors and children are again ready to hit the books. While each of the seven schools in the county have welcomed new students, new staff members have also joined each of the five school districts, including one superintendent, three superintendent/principals, one principal and one head teacher. Casey Hallgarth is the new superintendent/ principal of Prairie City School District 4. He said he and the staff are excited to wel- come 160 students, with attendance up by about 20 from last school year. “We have a great veteran staff that is ready to make differences in the classroom,” he said, adding that administrative assistant Susie Combs, in her 34th year, has been an integral part of the school. S Prairie City residents heard some good news at a town hall meeting at the senior center Aug. 22 — a grant and loan from the state could help move the city closer to solving its water emergency. Drought conditions have impacted the city’s water sources — both the wells and infiltration galleries on Dixie Creek — while debt from an expensive water treat- ment plant made it difficult for the city to find funding to develop a new well at Faiman Springs. Mayor Jim Hamsher has promoted the Faiman Springs site as the city’s best option for more than a decade. With a water emer- gency declared, he began calling Rep. Greg Walden, Sen. Ron Wyden and Gov. Kate Brown’s offices for assistance, and those calls might have paid off. The state will provide needed funding for developing the Faiman Springs well, Scott Fairley, Business Oregon regional development officer, told residents. With a top estimate of about $1.5 million for the project, the state could provide one-third as a grant and the rest as a 30-year loan at 1.7 percent interest. If the cost of the project comes in lower, the grant and loan would be correspond- ingly reduced, Fairley said. The original estimate to develop the Faiman Springs site was about $900,000. See WATER, Page A16 The Eagle/Richard Hanners With the round-trip to John Day and back to the dumping station at Ricco Ranch Road in Prairie City being about an hour, as many as three water tenders at a time can be seen adding water to the city’s water system. See SCHOOL, Page A16 Gilman Fire tested alert system’s effectiveness Terrain makes communication difficult By Richard Hanners Blue Mountain Eagle In the late evening of Aug. 20, as the Gilman fire was burning 12 miles north of Monument amidst thick smoke from distant and region- al fires, Grant County issued a Level 1 Pre-Evacuation Fire Advisory for northwest Grant County. While the county’s AlertSense system issued the notice to some res- idents in the Monument, Ritter, Dale and Middle and North Fork commu- nities, some residents said they did not receive the message. The Blue Mountain Eagle also never received a notification. Grant County Emergency Man- agement Coordinator Ted Williams said he will be contacting the news- paper in the future and that isolated technical failures in the alert system, such as phone calls without messag- es, also need to be addressed. He said, however, the mountain- ous terrain in that part of the county will always challenge communica- tions. The alert system The AlertSense emergency com- munication system will automatical- ly send messages Williams creates to all landlines inside a designated geographic boundary. People with cellphones or those who want email notices need to sign up online at See TEST, Page A16 The Eagle/Richard Hanners Ted Williams, the Grant County emergency management coordinator, stands in front of an incident command organization chart Aug. 24.
