NEWS
MyEagleNews.com
Wednesday, January 5, 2022
A3
County allots federal COVID relief dollars
By STEVEN MITCHELL
Blue Mountain Eagle
EO Media Group
Emergency room personnel hustle to care for patients at St.
Charles Bend in August.
St. Charles gears
up for surge
BEND — St. Charles Health
System is preparing for yet
another surge in COVID-19
cases, as snow and cold weather
force people indoors.
The number of COVID-
19 cases is expected to rise,
according to recent forecasting
models. On Tuesday, Dec. 28,
the Oregon Health Authority
reported 182 cases of COVID-
19 in Deschutes County and
one death. Statewide, 1,900 new
cases were reported.
“We’re deep into this pan-
demic and we’re anticipating
another surge from the omicron
(variant) and its spread through-
out the country,” said Dr. Jeff
Absalon, St. Charles Health Sys-
tem chief physician executive.
“We are anticipating that we will
have an increase of patients in
our hospitals. The big challenge
remains staffi ng.”
St. Charles Bend, the one
hospital in the region that cares
for COVID-19 patients, is expe-
riencing a plateau of patients at
the moment, but the next seven
to 10 days could see an increase.
The question is how steeply that
will rise and how long it will
last, said Michael Johnson, St.
Charles Health System senior
data scientist.
The challenge for St. Charles,
which operates four hospitals in
Central Oregon, is the hospital
system has 911 open positions
at the moment. About 250 peo-
ple are in the process of being
hired, leaving the hospital with
661 positions unfi lled.
The hospital does have the
help of about 140 traveling
nurses that the state funded and
distributed to St. Charles, but a
contingent of Oregon National
Guard personnel recently ended
an assignment to help with non-
patient work that lasted several
months, Abasalon said.
“Every day we work to
source additional caregivers to
join our staff ,” Absalon said.
“The positions are across the
continuum of care.”
How bad it will get, depends
on how many children get vac-
cinated, adults receive their
booster shots and the transmis-
sion of the variant, which is
highly contagious, Johnson said.
Only two variables can be con-
trolled by the public: behavior
and the booster rate, he said.
“I think we’re doing pretty
well behavior wise, compared
to other places,” Johnson said.
“The one thing that makes a
huge diff erence is how the peak
will go, and that’s aff ected by
our booster rate. If we can dou-
ble the number of booster shots
between now and the second
week of January, we can signifi -
cantly bring down that curve on
the order of 20 to 30 patients a
day.”
The Center for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention has said the
booster shot provides a high
degree of protection from the
variant. The CDC also recom-
mends that everyone 18 and
older get the booster shot to pro-
tect against COVID-19 and the
variants that are circulating.
During past surges, particu-
larly this past summer when the
delta variant was circulating in
the community, the hospital was
forced to delay surgeries that
required an overnight stay. In the
wake of the waning case counts
since the peak this summer, St.
Charles has been racing to ease
the backlog of nonemergency
surgeries it had postponed due
to a lack of staff and beds. The
hospital had been delaying these
kind of surgeries since the start
of the pandemic, Absalon said.
St. Charles serves as the
regional hospital for eight coun-
ties. According to the state’s
health data website, 35% of its
intensive care unit beds and 22%
of its nonintensive care beds
were available. At times during
the peak of the last surge this
summer, there were one or two
intensive care beds available.
Abasalon urged community
members to get a vaccination, if
they haven’t yet, or get a booster
shot. The Deschutes County Fair
& Expo Center, 3800 SE Air-
port Way in Redmond will hold
a drive-thru clinic starting Jan.
4 from noon to 7 p.m. daily. It
closed Dec. 23. Information
about additional clinics can be
found on the Deschutes County
Health Services website.
“It’s incredibly diffi cult to
estimate it right now,” John-
son said. “There are indicators
that are concerning: Case rates
are going up, positivity rates are
going up and that’s confi rming
what we expected.”
WHAT’S HAPPENING
Saturday, Jan. 8
Christine Drazan
• 11:30 a.m-1 p.m., Squeeze-In Restaurant and Deck, 423 W.
Main St., John Day
State Rep. Christine
Drazan of Canby, one of
more than a dozen candi-
dates seeking the Republi-
can nomination for gover-
nor in this year’s election,
will meet with local resi-
dents and talk about her bid for
higher offi ce.
W HAT’S
HAPPENING
The Grant County Court distributed
more than $150,000 in American Res-
cue Plan Act funding during the court’s
regular session on Dec. 22 but still
has more than twice that much left to
spend.
ARPA is a federal stimulus program
designed to speed economic recovery
from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The court approved a $7,000 allo-
cation for the 911 dispatch center.
County Judge Scott Myers told
Airport $ 3,033.00
Fairgrounds $ 12,919.88
Broadband $ 96,000.00
Sheriff’s Dept $ 29,898.00
911 $ 7,000.00
Remaining $ (389,025.46)
the court that the county’s legal
counsel recommended the alloca-
tion to the dispatch center, and it
Cattle, calves rescued from deep NE Oregon snows
By BILL BRADSHAW
Wallowa County Chieftain
volunteers with the Wallowa
County Humane Society.
IMNAHA — Rescue eff orts
are still underway to save doz-
ens of cattle stranded in up to 7
feet of snow on a Northeastern
Oregon grazing allotment.
The cattle — many of
which had young calves —
were mired in deep snow on
U.S. Forest Service land in
the Upper Imnaha area, Wal-
lowa County Sheriff Joel Fish
confi rmed on Friday, Dec. 31.
Fish said the sheriff ’s
offi ce is investigating and
“assisting with the retrieval
of the cattle on the Forest
Service grazing permits on
the Marr Flat C&H Allot-
ment. We have had deputies
on snowmobiles assisting.”
Numerous
volunteers
were helping in the rescue
eff orts, according to Todd
Nash, chair of the Wallowa
County Commission, and
One of the fi rst wide-
spread alerts came in a Face-
book post by Craig Stock-
dale, who was one of the fi rst
to discover the cattle on the
200 Road south of Salt Creek.
“I just came upon them
snowmobiling,” Stockdale
said Jan. 1.
He said his social media
post mobilized rescuers —
both those out fi nding the cat-
tle and those with facilities to
care for the rescued livestock.
On Dec. 29, Kathy Gisler
Reynolds, a volunteer with
the Humane Society, also
shared a post of the cattle.
Photos posted on Facebook
showed a cow up to its neck
in snow and unable to move.
“I was alerted to it yester-
day by the ranchers who have
been out there trying to save
Social media alert
them,” Reynolds said Dec. 30.
“Some were too weak to
even move,” she said of the
cattle, adding that although
rescuers were able to retrieve
calves, some of the adult
cows had to be euthanized.
Stockdale and Anna But-
terfi eld, who with her hus-
band, Mark, ranches northeast
of Joseph, confi rmed the cattle
are on the Bob Dean Oregon
Ranch managed by B.J. War-
nock. Dean lives out of town
and Warnock was unavailable
for comment Jan. 1.
County involved
Nash — who is a rancher
and president of the Oregon
Cattlemen’s Association —
said Dec. 30 information on
the situation was limited.
“The things we do know
is that this was a Forest Ser-
vice permit for the Upper Big
Sheep Creek and the Upper
Imnaha. It takes in a large area
— 72,000 acres — known as
the Marr Flat Grazing Allot-
ment. They had a viable per-
mit to go on sometime in the
spring. They were supposed
to have all cattle removed,
according to the Forest Ser-
vice permit,” Nash said.
“There is a rescue eff ort
being made right now to try
and rescue as many as possi-
ble. We’ve committed county
resources to it. There’ve been
a number of people who have
volunteered or have contrib-
uted time,” he said. “There
have been helicopters that
have fl own feed into some
that were extremely isolated,
and the rescue continues.
Those are the basic facts that
I do know.”
Compounding the heavy
snowfall that came all at
once, rain and heavy snow
brought down trees across a
lot of the access roads in the
area, Nash added.
OSU research forest plans advance
By SIERRA DAWN
McCLAIN
Capital Press
CORVALLIS — Oregon
State University, after hosting
a recent public budget meet-
ing, is a step closer to poten-
tially managing a 91,000-acre
research forest in Oregon’s
southern coastal range, span-
ning Coos and Douglas
counties.
The budget is another
milestone in the years-long
eff ort to transform the Elliott
State Forest into a publicly
owned state research forest.
The research vision is
also becoming clearer. Last
December, Oregon’s State
Land Board voted for OSU to
further explore how the forest
might be used as a research
hub. A year later, OSU has a
clearer outline for what kinds
of research will take place in
the forest.
The research forest,
experts say, could bene-
fi t OSU researchers and stu-
dents, foresters, small wood-
land owners and scientists
worldwide.
“This is a very rare oppor-
tunity to start a research for-
est of this size,” said Kathleen
“Katy” Kavanaugh, associate
dean for research in OSU’s
College of Forestry. “This
would be one of the largest
research forests in the world.”
Research would include
experiments on the role ripar-
ian areas play in the recovery
of endangered species, explo-
ration of potential new tim-
ber harvest systems and the
study of steep forest terrains,
including geological hazards.
Thomas DeLuca, dean of
forestry at OSU, said exper-
imental plots — diff erent sec-
tions of forest organized by
watershed — will be man-
aged diff erently. When a nat-
ural fi re occurs in the region,
researchers will then study
which treatments were most
fi re-resilient.
Shannon Murray, Elliott
State Research Forest direc-
tor, said the project pro-
posal includes construction
of research and laboratory
spaces, offi ces, classrooms
and living quarters for
researchers living in the for-
est on a temporary or long-
term basis.
“It’s exciting thinking
about the future of research
there,” said Murray.
But the project still has a
long way to go. 2024 is the
proposed research start date,
but several pieces of the
puzzle must snap into place
before that can happen.
The biggest piece is
ownership.
Initially, the plan was for
OSU to both own and manage
the forest, but earlier this fall
OSU backed out of its plan
to take ownership, saying the
fi nancial risk was too high.
The forest is supposed to
be fi nancially supported pri-
marily by timber harvests.
According to OSU’s mod-
els and data from Mason,
Bruce & Girard, a consulting
fi rm, harvests are expected to
start at a maximum of 1,300
acres per year for the fi rst fi ve
years, later dropping as low as
500 acres per year after most
major thinning is completed.
Although OSU offi cials
predict profi table timber har-
vests, there are too many
uncertainties, including poten-
tial logging limitations because
the Elliott provides prime hab-
itat for federally protected spe-
cies. OSU has decided not to
shoulder the risks.
The committee advis-
ing OSU and the Depart-
ment of State Lands about
the forest is now exploring
an alternative plan: having
OSU manage the forest
but another entity own it.
One possible option is
establishing a stand-alone
entity, such as a public cor-
poration or independent pub-
lic agency, to own the forest.
This would require legisla-
tion. Development of a for-
mal legislative concept for
the 2022 legislative session is
underway.
Showing Movies Since 1940!
1809 1st Street • Baker City
January 7-13
AMERICAN UNDERDOG
(PG)
Friday
Sat & Sun
Mon-Thurs
4:20, 7:20
1:20, 4:20, 7:20
7:20
SING 2
(PG)
Friday
Sat &Sun
Mon-Thurs
4:10, 7:10
1:10, 4:10, 7:10
7:10
SPIDER-MAN
NO WAY HOME
Friday
Sat & Sun
Mon-Thurs
(PG-13)
4:00, 7:00
1:00, 4:00, 7:00
7:00
**SHOWTIMES SUBJECT TO CHANGE. VISIT
OUR WEBSITE OR CALL AHEAD TO VERIFY**
S275594-1
www.eltrym.com
(541) 523-2522
SPORTS SCHEDULE
FRIDAY, JAN. 7
Prairie City Basketball @ Four Rivers, 6, 7:30 p.m. (MST)
Grant Union Basketball @ Enterprise 6, 7:30 p.m.
Grant Union Wrestling @ Joseph Invite, noon
SATURDAY, JAN. 8
Grant Union Basketball @ Heppner, 4, 5:30 p.m.
Prairie City Basketball @ Jordan Valley, noon, 1:30 p.m.
TUESDAY, JAN. 11
Prairie City Basketball @ Long Creek/Ukiah 5 p.m.
Sponsor:
Wednesday, Jan. 12
met the U.S. Treasury Department’s
guidance.
Meanwhile, according to a spread-
sheet that details ARPA allocations,
the $96,000 the county approved to
bring high-speed internet access to the
courthouse from Humbolt Elementary
School is pending documentation for
costs from the county’s broadband
coalition.
According to the spreadsheet,
the county’s remaining balance is
$389,025.46. As of Dec. 22, the court
has allocated $161,274.16 as the
county’s public health entity.
Bud Pierce
• 11 a.m.-1 p.m., main conference room, Grant County
Regional Airport, 72000 Airport Road, John Day
Dr. Bud Pierce, a candidate for the Republican nomination
for governor, will meet with area residents to discuss their ideas
for Oregon’s future. Pierce, a Salem physician, was the GOP
nominee for governor in 2016. Anyone interested in attending is
asked to RSVP via email to info@budpierce.org.
Do you have a community event in Grant County you’d like to
publicize? Email information to editor@bmeagle.com. The dead-
line is noon Friday for publication the following Wednesday.
THANK YOU
I want to thank my church family and all
my friends for the cards, telephone calls
and donations. Especially Terry & Billy Jo
George for their year-round help.
Only in Grant County can we get such help
and compassion. I also want to thank my
son Dan & Karla for being my rock through
their own grief. The death of my son Tom
has been made easier because of you all.
Thank you again,
Rosalie Averett
Dan & Karla Averett
S276239-1
S275526-1
TOM CHRISTENSEN
CHRISTENSEN
TOM
CONSTRUCTION
(541) 410-0557 • (541) 575-0192
CCB# 106077
S275583-1
REMODELS • NEW CONSTRUCTION • POLE BUILDINGS
CONCRETE EXCAVATION • SHEET ROCK • SIDING
ROOFING • FENCES • DECKS • TELESCOPING FORKLIFT SERVICES
S275613-1
Serving Eastern Oregon since 1959!
Pharmacy • Hallmark Cards • Gifts • Liquor Store
Heppner
Condon
Boardman
(541) 676-9158
(541) 256-1200
(541) 481-9474
www.MurraysDrug.com
S273979-1
By SUZANNE ROIG
The Bulletin
COUNTY ARPA
ALLOCATIONS