HOME & GARDEN SPECIAL | PAGES 11-13
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
154th Year • No. 21 • 24 Pages • $1.50
MyEagleNews.com
Wolves kill 2 calves in Grant County
By STEVEN MITCHELL
Blue Mountain Eagle
GRANT COUNTY — A rancher on the
Middle Fork of the John Day River has become
Grant County’s second producer to lose live-
stock to a confi rmed wolf depredation.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wild-
life reported Monday, May 23, that wolves in
an area known to be used by the Desolation
Pack killed two calves in the evening hours of
May 19.
Additionally, the ODFW report noted that a
GPS collar placed wolves at the kill site around
the suspected time of death of the second calf.
The report noted that the location of the bite
marks and injuries to the calves was consistent
with wolf attacks on live calves. The depreda-
tion, the report said, has been attributed to the
Desolation Pack.
According to the report, on Saturday, May
21, a livestock producer witnessed a wolf
feeding on the carcass of a 1,000-pound cow.
ODFW offi cials estimated that the cow died the
previous night and that, due to the absence of
pre-mortem bite marks or hemorrhaging, the
cow was found not to have been attacked while
it was alive.
“The cause of death was not wolf-related
and so our determination was ‘Other,’” the
report concluded.
The fi rst confi rmed wolf depredation
in Grant County occurred in May 2021 on
Roy Vardanega’s Fox Valley Ranch. Var-
danega reported that fi ve of his cattle were
attacked and killed, although only one of
the deaths was confi rmed by ODFW as
wolf-related.
According to the Oregon Wolf Conserva-
tion and Management 2021 Annual Report, the
Desolation Pack increased from fi ve wolves to
nine this year.
A pack is defi ned as more than four wolves
traveling together in the winter. The Desolation
Pack also met the criterion of having a breeding
pair. A breeding pair is an adult male and adult
female with at least two pups that survived to
Dec. 31 in the year of their birth.
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife/Contributed Photo
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
attributed the confi rmed depredation of two
calves on the Middle Fork of the John Day River
to the Desolation Pack.
County
struggles
to patch
budget
By STEVEN MITCHELL
Blue Mountain Eagle
able equipment of its member cit-
ies. These virtual motor pools would
allow resources to become available
for the entire partnership to use as
the need comes up. R3 could also
acquire assets on behalf of its mem-
bers which they would not have been
able to aff ord independently.
These strategies will allow the
small cities that make up the partner-
ship to “hunt as a pack” by providing
CANYON CITY — Grant County
offi cials continue to grapple with poten-
tial cuts in the wake of an $800,0000
“miscalculation” discovered in the midst
of deliberations on the 2022-23 budget.
During a contentious session of the
Grant County Court on Wednesday, May
18, County Treasurer Julie Ellison pre-
sented multiple options for attempting to
rebalance the budget.
One option, Ellison said, would be to
cut all general fund and elected county
employees to 36 hours a week. The sav-
ings, she said, would work out to roughly
$145,000 a year. If the county were to cut
those positions to 32 hours a week, the
savings would work out to $289,000.
An unidentifi ed county employee said
that would not come close to fi lling the
$800,000 hole in the
county’s general fund.
Department heads
and county employees
expressed their frustra-
tion with the County
Court over the coun-
ty’s unsettled fi nancial
Carpenter
status.
District Attorney Jim
Carpenter told the court that he is not
confi dent that the county knows where it
stands fi nancially.
He said he makes a budget every month
for his home and did the same thing for
his small business when he had one. He
said he could walk downstairs and show
the court a printout of his department’s
budget, including how much money the
department has and what was spent. He
is not confi dent the county could do the
same. Given that, he said, it would be
irresponsible of the county to ask depart-
ments to make cuts or make any other
decisions when they do not know how
much money they have to work with.
“If you don’t know where you are,”
Carpenter said, “you don’t know where
you can go.”
Carpenter also said he would like
to see where the County Court could
make cuts in its own department budget.
(County Judge Scott Myers has said in
the past that the court has made signifi -
cant cuts to its travel budget and that he
has not been turning in requests for mile-
age reimbursement.)
Myers began the meeting by acknowl-
edging that the budget problems have
caused some “consternation” in the Grant
County Courthouse lately and by ask-
ing those in the courtroom to show one
another respect.
“If we treated our families the way
we’ve been treating each other as a fam-
ily lately they would be breaking up,” he
said.
County Commissioner Jim Hamsher
suggested that, since the county does not
have to adopt a budget until June 30, the
county’s department heads come back
with recommended cuts to their budgets
by the next County Court session.
County offi cials have been wrestling
See Partnership, Page A18
See Budget, Page A18
Bennett Hall/Blue Mountain Eagle
A sign urges voters to reject a $4 million bond measure to fi nance a new community pool. The vote ended in a tie in early unoffi cial results.
Pool bond fi nal tally
expected Tuesday
By JUSTIN DAVIS
Blue Mountain Eagle
ANYON CITY — A fi nal count
of ballots in the pool bond elec-
tion was expected shortly after
the Eagle hits the press on
Tuesday, May 24.
One of the most controversial and con-
tentious bond proposals in recent memory
resulted in an even split in early unoffi cial
returns on May 17, with Grant County vot-
C
ers casting 787 votes in favor of Measure
12-80 and 787 ballots against.
The measure was still in a dead heat on
Wednesday, May 18, after four additional
mail-in ballots were received, bringing the
tally to 789-789.
The deadlock was broken following the
counting of nine ballots from within the
pool tax zone on Thursday, May 19. Since
then, the tally has stood at 795 against and
792 in favor of the bond measure.
Voters who dropped their ballots in the
mail on or just before Election Day will
decide the outcome. A new state law allows
elections offi cials to count ballots post-
marked by Election Day if they arrive at the
elections offi ce within one week.
County Clerk Brenda Percy told the
newspaper she expected to count the
remaining ballots that have postmarks on or
Election Day on the afternoon of Tuesday,
May 24. The race has been tight from the
See Pool, Page A18
Regional partnership taking shape
By JUSTIN DAVIS
Blue Mountain Eagle
JOHN DAY — A potential part-
nership between the cities of John
Day, Burns and Lakeview is tak-
ing shape — slowly, but it is taking
shape.
Known as Regional Rural Revi-
talization Strategies (or R3 for
short), the partnership is centered
on combining and sharing resources
that would allow the communities
to better cover costs related to fi ll-
ing housing needs and other public
improvement projects.
R3 looks to pool staff across its
member cities through virtual team-
ing arrangements, according to a
white paper on the proposal released
in February. These virtual teams
would work together on projects
for a limited duration, which would
allow the member communities to
take on larger projects than they nor-
mally would without giving up their
independence.
Pooling capital assets such as
equipment is also a part of the plans
for R3. These assets often sit unused
in one jurisdiction when they could
be put to use in another. Small cit-
John Day City Hall is shown on Friday, May 20, 2022. The city is looking into a
partnership with Burns and Lakeview that would allow the three communi-
ties to share resources in an eff ort to cut costs.
ies may lack the purchasing power
to acquire expensive equipment for
utility line and street maintenance,
among other basic needs, the white
paper noted. This lack of purchas-
ing power means rural communi-
ties often have to contract for these
types of services and may have to
pay extra due to the cost of bringing
assets to remote rural areas.
R3 Strategies looks to break this
model by assembling virtual motor
pools comprised of all the avail-