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GRANT COUNTY
HUNTING JOURNAL
Grant County’s newspaper since 1868
W edNesday , a ugust 29, 2018
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School’s in session
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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.