GO! EASTERN OREGON MAGAZINE | INSIDE
Wednesday, January 26, 2022
154th Year • No. 4 • 14 Pages • $1.50
MyEagleNews.com
Nick Green resigns from post
John Day’s innovative but
controversial city manager
is stepping down
By BENNETT HALL
Blue Mountain Eagle
JOHN DAY — City Manager Nick
Green is on his way out.
Green, who has served as John Day’s
chief executive for 5½ years, told the
Eagle he planned to deliver a letter of
resignation to Mayor Ron Lundbom on
Tuesday, Jan. 25, and would publicly
announce his decision during his annual
State of the City speech at that night’s
City Council meeting.
In an interview last week, Green
talked about his eventful and sometimes
tumultuous tenure in John Day and his
hopes for the city’s future.
Green said his target departure date is
June 30, the end of the city’s fi scal year,
and he was making the announcement
now to give the City Council time to hire
his successor.
“There’s nothing magical about that
date other than it’s a clean way to handle
the budget,” he said.
Asked why he was stepping down,
Green said it was mainly in hopes of
fi nding a better work-life balance.
“It’s been great working for the city,
and I’ve enjoyed it, but it’s very demand-
ing,” he said, citing long hours and lots
of public meetings – often contentious
ones.
“It’s made it diffi cult to spend time
with my family the way I wanted to do
when we moved here.”
Man with a plan
Green, who has a wife and two chil-
dren aged 16 and 7, came to work as
John Day’s city manager on June 20,
2016. He started at a salary of $65,000
a year and is currently making just under
$80,000 annually.
Prior to taking the position, he had
been living in the Seattle area, where
he worked as a senior associate with the
consulting fi rm Booz Allen Hamilton
before going back to school to get a mas-
ter’s degree in public administration with
a focus on rural economic development
and local government.
His wife had grown up in John Day
and still had family in the area, which
made the city manager’s job attractive.
Almost from the beginning, Green
started shaking things up.
Faced with a shrinking population, Bennett Hall/Blue Mountain Eagle
crumbling infrastructure and a stagnant John Day City Manager Nick
tax base, Green began looking for ways Green stands outside City
to improve the city’s fi nancial prospects. Hall on Monday, Jan. 24,
2022. Green plans to step
See Green, Page A14 down at the end of June.
Grant Union Tournament
Senators
weigh in on
long-term
stewardship
contract
By STEVEN MITCHELL
Blue Mountain Eagle
Steven Mitchell/Blue Mountain Eagle
Grant Union’s Riddick Hutchison pins Irrigon’s Cyrus Piel Friday, Jan. 21, 2022, at the Grant Union High School Wrestling Tournament. Hutchison placed
fi rst in his 182 weight bracket. For full coverage, see Page A8.
BMH plans for next surge
By STEVEN MITCHELL
Blue Mountain Eagle
JOHN DAY — Two weeks after
surging COVID-19 case counts and
severe winter weather stretched Blue
Mountain Hospital to its limits, the
hospital has a new plan to handle the
next capacity crisis.
Derek Daly, CEO of the Blue
Mountain Hospital District, wrote
in an email Wednesday, Jan. 19, that
should the county experience another
surge, the hospital would look to
transfer patients to a non-traditional
hospital partner in cities such as
Reno, Nevada; Spokane, Washing-
ton; or even as far as San Francisco
or Salt Lake City.
Normally, patient transfers from
Blue Mountain go to St. Charles
Medical Center in Bend or St.
Alphonsus Regional Medical Center
in Boise.
“It really is a situation where you
call for bed availability and put in
transfer requests in multiple direc-
tions at the same time,” Daly said.
The rapidly spreading omicron
variant is putting pressure on health
systems all over the country, rais-
ing calls for additional resources.
Blue Mountain was one of a half-
dozen hospitals in Eastern Ore-
gon to receive aid from the Oregon
National Guard last week when Gov.
Kate Brown ordered a second relief
mission to support strained hospitals
across the state.
According to commanding offi -
cer Bailey Frasch, the governor dis-
patched seven guard members to
Grant County on Monday, Jan. 17.
See Plan, Page A14
Steven Mitchell/Blue Mountain Eagle
WALLOWA COUNTY — Wallowa
County ranchers are concerned both for
the cattle under their care and their repu-
tations in animal husbandry, not to men-
tion the future of ranching in the county,
rancher and Wallowa County Stock-
growers President Tom Birkmaier said
last week.
Caring for the cattle
“As a whole, ranchers and livestock
owners in this county deeply care for the
health and well-being of their animals. It
is important that we view this for what
it is; an unfortunate situation brought on
by a combination of mismanagement,
poor decisions and challenging weather
conditions,” Birkmaier said in a written
statement Wednesday, Jan. 19. “As diffi -
cult as it may have been, the cows should
have been brought out of that country
a month or two sooner. Our local cow-
boys are some of the
best. They would’ve
assisted the Bob Dean
ranch hands and gotten
the cows out of there.”
Birkmaier
and
Adam Stein, another
Birkmaier
county rancher who
was instrumental in
rescuing the cattle and
spotting them from the
air, said that at least
29 cows are known to
have perished in the
deep snows and steep
terrain of the Grouse
Warnock
Creek Ranch in the
Upper Imnaha owned by Louisiana
developer Bob Dean.
B.J. Warnock, who until Wednes-
day, Jan. 26, was manager at the ranch,
said in a Jan. 2 email that when he and
his ranch hands began gathering cattle
in September, there were 1,613 mother
cows on summer range, of which 10
A diff erent approach
were unrecoverable. He said 1,548
Dean Oregon Ranches mother cows
were successfully gathered by the ranch
crew before the snow. After the snow,
34 mother cows were gathered, of
which 26 were Dean cattle; the others
were owned by neighboring ranches.
Warnock said at that time aerial and
ground searches were conducted with
the hope of bringing in the remaining
29 cows.
Stein confi rmed Jan. 20 that he took
Warnock up in his plane approximately
Dec. 21 and 27 to look for the missing
cattle.
“He talked like he was going to put
some people on it,” Stein said. “I think
they had a lot going on at the time.
That’s why I got involved because
something needed to happen.”
As for the actual number of cat-
tle lost, Birkmaier said that won’t
be known until herded cattle can be
Stewardship contracts are fun-
damentally diff erent from tradi-
tional timber sale contracts.
According to Roy Walker, a
program manager with the For-
est Service, the federal agency
awards timber contracts by iden-
tifying an area with commer-
cially marketable trees, marking
the boundaries of the proposed
timber sale, and estimating the
amount of merchantable wood in
the sale area.
Then, he said, the agency
evaluates the fair market value
of the timber and opens up a
bidding process to companies
that can meet bonding and other
requirements.
As the Forest Service
expanded its forest restoration,
fuels reduction and thinning
activities, Walker said, it melded
forest management work, which
often lacks commercial value,
with timber sales.
Stewardship brings the two
together, allowing the Forest Ser-
vice to award the commercial
value that loggers would ordi-
narily bid on to fi nance resto-
ration work on national forest
land.
See Cattle, Page A14
See Stewardship, Page A14
Oregon National Guard Cpl. Braedan
Emang sanitizes the front door of the
Strawberry Wilderness Communi-
ty Clinic at Blue Mountain Hospital
Monday, Jan. 24, 2022.
Dean debacle worries ranchers
By BILL BRADSHAW
Wallowa County Chieftain
Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff
Merkley are throwing their sup-
port behind a renewal of the
long-term stewardship contract
for the Malheur National Forest,
although not necessarily with the
same operator.
In a Thurs-
day, Jan. 20,
letter to Glenn
Casamassa,
U.S. Forest Ser-
vice regional
forester
for
Region 6, Ore-
U.S. Sen.
gon’s two U.S.
Ron Wyden
senators
said
the long-term contract has been
a “resounding ecological and
socioeconomic success.” Wyden
and Merkley wanted to know if
the Forest Service would sup-
port another contract on the Mal-
heur and what specifi c challenges
or concerns (if any) the agency
would have with implementing
another agreement.
The 10-year stewardship
contract between the Malheur
National Forest and Iron Trian-
gle is widely credited with saving
John Day’s last surviving lumber
mill, creating hundreds of jobs,
and improving forest health.
But it has also prompted crit-
icism from some who feel the
John Day-based logging com-
pany has profi ted at the expense
of smaller rivals.