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About The Blue Mountain eagle. (John Day, Or.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 22, 2021)
LETTERS TO SANTA SPECIAL SECTION | INSIDE Wednesday, December 22, 2021 153rd Year • No. 51 • 18 Pages • $1.50 MyEagleNews.com HOLIDAY HAT PARADE Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian Kindergartners from Humbolt Elementary School walk along a path at Valley View Assisted Living in John Day. See story and photos on Page A8 Back to the future in 2022 Here comes another pandemic New Year for Oregonians No verdict yet on COPS grant John Day still unsure if it will restart police or pass money to sheriff By GARY A. WARNER Oregon Capital Bureau By BENNETT HALL Blue Mountain Eagle SALEM — A rapidly spreading deadly virus. Record-breaking fi res. Acrid smoke from the Pacifi c to Pendleton. A riot in the Capitol. As 2020 came to a welcome close a year ago, an exhausted Ore- gon public had hope for the New Year. The worst of the COVID-19 pan- demic seemed over with the arrival of vaccines. The Labor Day fi res were gone and the smoke that gave the state the worst air in the world some days was gone. Protesters who fought with police in the Capitol in Salem were gone with the end of the special session. Soon, 2020 would be in the rear- view mirror. An optimistic joke that the worst had passed was that “Hind- sight is 2020.” But as 2021 in Oregon winds down, it feels like a sequel of the highly unpopular horror classic, 2020 in Oregon. Dark humor dominates — rue- ful wordplay that 2021 is actually spelled as “2020 Won.” Now the question is if we are going to have a trilogy. In announcing that a sixth wave in two years of COVID-19 would arrive around Jan. 1, Gov. Kate Brown noted that another year of COVID-19 wasn’t on anyone’s wish list. “I know that bracing for a new variant as we head into our second pandemic holiday season is not what we all hoped for,” Brown said. JOHN DAY — The future of John Day’s $375,000 law enforcement grant remains uncertain. The city got word on Nov. 18 that it had been approved for the funding from the U.S. Justice Department’s Offi ce of Commu- nity Oriented Policing Services. Known as a COPS grant, the money is to be paid out over three years in $125,000 annual installments. But in October, two months after a law enforcement levy failed at the ballot box, the City Council voted unanimously to suspend police operations indefi nitely and transfer the city’s two remaining offi cers to the Public Works Department. In order to accept the COPS grant, the city would have to restart the John Day Police Department, which most city coun- cilors seem reluctant to do for budgetary reasons. There is support on the council for passing the funds to the Grant County Sher- iff ’s Offi ce, which has taken on the burden of policing inside the city limits, but it’s not clear whether the Department of Justice would allow that. It’s also not clear how soon the funds would be available, either to give to the sheriff or to begin hiring more offi cers to reboot the Police Department . City Manager Nick Green emailed the DOJ on Dec. 1 asking for clarifi cation of both those points but had not heard back prior to the Dec. 14 City Council meeting, where the COPS grant was a major point of discussion. “I’ve received no response to that inquiry,” he told the council. “I expect we’ll get an answer, but I don’t have one for you tonight.” That left law enforcement in John Day and Grant County exactly where it was before the meeting: in disarray. Dean Guernsey/Bulletin fi le photos Nurses participate in a vaccine mandate protest at St. Charles Bend on Oct. 18, the day Oregon’s strict rules requiring COVID-19 shots for many workers took eff ect. Catastrophes return Many of the catastrophes that marked 2020 as no one’s favorite year were back in 2021. The vaccines set off a mass scramble for appointments, with most people told they might have to wait until mid-summer for inocu- lation. Then demand fell off a cliff . Bottles of Pfi zer and Moderna vac- cine with fewer and fewer arms to put them in. From a high of 50,000 shots in April, demand in Oregon shrank to less than a tenth of that on days in June. Vaccination became another political wedge issue. A riot at the U.S. Capitol showed the fragil- ity of peaceful democracy. The fi res were back — earlier and more remote this year — but burning miles of scars in the land and costing million of dollars to contain. The smoke choked not just Ore- gon but jetstreams shared it with places as far as Boston. This year added a grim stretch of record-frying heat on June 28. It hit 116 degrees in Portland. Salem was 117. Tempera- tures more familiar to Death Valley than the Willamette Valley. As 2022 is about to dawn, there is little swagger that the worst is over. The cornerstone of crisis — the COVID-19 pandemic — began on the last day of 2019 with a trickle of infections in China. It was worldwide — a pandemic — by the end of 2020 with over 300,000 dead in the United States. Through 2021, the virus threw off variants — most little more than scientifi c curiosities. But a few — “variants of concern” — would start a roll call of names taken from the Greek alphabet. Delta brought conta- gion to a new level. Omicron is cap- ping the year as the biggest and fast- est, though hopefully less lethal, of them all. The cases in one city in one country that could be counted on two hands at the end of 2019 would See Pandemic, Page A18 Tall order When the John Day Police Department was suspended in October, the Grant County Sheriff ’s Offi ce instantly became the only local law enforcement agency in the county. But it was already stretched thin, with just four patrol deputies to cover a 4,529-square- mile area with 7,200 residents. Since then, the agency has lost one patrol deputy and has not yet been able to refi ll the open position. “We are very overwhelmed, I’ve got to tell you, but we’re doing our best,” Sher- iff Todd McKinley told the council at last week’s meeting. McKinley said he understood the budget constraints that led the city to shut down its police department, but he made no eff ort to hide his frustration at having to take on the burden of patrolling inside the city limits. “You guys threw my people under the bus,” he said. “My people are doing what yours wouldn’t do.” Budget realities Green told the councilors they could vote to bring the department back, but it would take time and money to hire a chief and a patrol offi cer to fi ll the department’s two empty slots. And even then, he said, when the COPS grant expired after three years, the city would once again be faced with a major budget shortfall. “We were one of the smallest cities in the state, maybe even in the U.S., that was try- ing to run a police department,” Green said, pointing out that the city’s population has been declining for decades and dropped to 1,664 in the most recent census. As the Eagle reported in October, at least 14 Oregon communities have dissolved their police departments since 1999, including Sis- ters and Lakeview, both of which have sub- stantially larger populations than John Day. The city has been budgeting roughly $450,000 a year to operate the department, which far outpaces property tax revenue. See Grant, Page A18 Lawsuit contests wild horse plan for Ochocos By MICHAEL KOHN The Bulletin PRINEVILLE — A group that advocates for the welfare of wild horses in the Ochoco National Forest has opened up a lawsuit against federal offi - cials, alleging that a planned reduction of the herd size is det- rimental to the species and the Ochoco ecosystem. The suit, fi led Oct. 1 by the Prineville-based Central Ore- gon Wild Horse Coalition in U.S. District Court, lists Gayle Hunt and Melinda Kestler, members of the coalition, as plaintiff s. Defendants listed in the case include Randy Moore, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, and Shane Jeff ries, supervisor of the Ochoco National Forest. The horses in the Ochocos Ryan Brennecke/Bulletin fi le Members of a herd of wild horses graze in the Ochoco National Forest near Prineville in 2018. roam a 25,000-acre territory that was established in 1975 following the Wild Free-Roam- ing Horses and Burros Act of 1971, which requires the sec- retary of agriculture to pro- tect unbranded and unclaimed horses residing on public lands. Horses started appearing in the territory in the early 1900s. According to the Forest Ser- vice, ranchers purposely turned loose quality animals to ensure a future supply of good horses, and some made a home in the Ochocos. The Forest Service says the horses had migrated to the area from Post, Mitchell and Prineville. Now the Forest Service says the herd in the Ochocos has grown too large, and the horses are consuming too much grass in riparian areas, which offi cials say degrades sensitive habitat for wildlife. Ochoco National Forest spokesperson Kassidy Kern described the riparian areas in the wild horse range as “unsat- isfactory” and “not meeting the forage goal of the Forest Plan.” “We expect that by main- taining horses within the appro- priate management level, there would be less degradation of riparian and moist meadow habitat, less streambank alter- ation, and less sediment,” said Kern. “The Forest Service must maintain a herd size that the habitat within the territory boundary can sustain.” The management level of 47 to 57 wild horses is based on analysis of existing condi- tions in the territory, said Kern. Currently, there are around 120 horses in the herd. The Cen- tral Oregon Wild Horse Coa- lition says the numbers are satisfactory. Kern adds that there are other factors that have contrib- uted to riparian degradation in the territory, including historic grazing and logging practices. “Riparian forage is often utilized by many species and See Horses, Page A18