Image provided by: Morrow County Museum; Heppner, OR
About Heppner gazette-times. (Heppner, Or.) 1925-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 6, 2013)
Courthouse plans for facelift The Morrow County Courthouse in Heppner is in the planning and bidding stages for a “facelift.” Aftercareful evaluation by engineers, it was deter mined that the courthouse’s bell tower has deteriorated and needs to be repaired in the near future. After a Bessie Wetzell Newspaper Library University of Oregon Eugene. OR 97403 5(K HEPPNER azette im es VOL. 132 N 0. 6 8 Pages Wednesday, February 6, 2013 recent wind storm, one of the neighbors commented that they could see the bell tower visibly sway in the wind. The original estimate to hire a crane and remove the bell tower, repair it, and then replace the tower was more than $500,000, and would have required closing the courthouse for extended periods of time. A lternative process es were considered, and the Morrow County Court agreed to put out bids for an aerial lift. The dome, which is estimated to weigh more than 7,000 pounds, will be lifted by helicopter and placed on a trailer, and then taken off-site for reno vations. The courthouse bell, which weighs more than 3,000 pounds, will be removed in a second lift and taken off-site for renova tions, as well. This process will not require extensive closures of the courthouse. After renovations are com plete, the bell and tower will be returned through a similar lift process. Bids for the lift will be opened by the Morrow County Court on Feb. 27 at is in operation. Because of the poplar and wheat farms in the area, Kegler said the company will be able to find all the raw material it needs within a 25 to 50 miles ra dius of the facility. He said each bone-dry ton, or BDT, o f material will produce 135 gallons of ethanol. The test facility uses about 10 BDT and the com mercial facility, when op erational, will use about 650 BDT per day. Kegler said the mar ket for ethanol is goqd, with billions of dollars in market share to be taken away from fossil fuel, a move he said will eventually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. When asked about the economic viability o f the company without the mil lions in government loans Dean Kegler briefs last week’s Heppner Chamber of Commerce on the progress of the ZeaChem plant at the Port of Morrow in Boardman. -Photo by David Sykes and subsidies it has re ceived, including a $250 m illion loan g uarantee from the Department of Agriculture, Kegler said the company can make it in the open market, especially with jet fuel. “The Departm ent o f Defense would like very much to say their jets run on wood,” he pointed out. He said jet fuel costs about six to eight dollars per gallon and that ZeaChem is more efficient than that. On the job front, Keg ler said the company cur rently has 40 full-time jobs and is actually still looking for a mechanical engineer at the plant, as well as five other people. They will be hiring 65 additional people when the new plant is built and goes into production. Eastern Oregon med student right at home at PMC By Andrea Di Salvo F o r m any O reg o n Health and Science Uni versity (OHSU) medical students who pass through Heppner for their dose of training in rural medicine, this small-town setting can seem like a different planet. For Teresa Worstell, Pio neer Memorial Clinic’s cur rent student, it’s more like a piece of home. Worstell was bom in Enterprise. OR but raised in Hermiston. That makes this comer of the state familiar stomping grounds for the 29-year-old med student. After graduating from Hermiston High School in 2000, she went on to obtain a bachelor’s degree in biol ogy from the University o f Oregon in 2004. After graduation, she moved to Portland, where she went to work for OHSU as a re search assistant, doing lab and clinical research from 2004 to 2010. Worstell says she al ways knew she wanted to end up in medicine. “I always really liked science,” she says. “I really like people, interacting with people. I thought it would be a good combination of my two interests.” She started m edical school at the university in the fall of 2010 and is now in her third year. Every third-year stu dent is required by OHSU to do a five-w eek rural health rotation, observing first-hand the differences and challenged faced by rural health practitioners versus those in larger cit ies. Despite the fact that Worstell’s parents moved away from Hermiston just last fall, the pull of friends and childhood memories made Heppner an appeal ing option when it came to choosing a location. “I put Heppner first on my list because I wanted to come back here,” she says. While here, Worstell focused on women’s health screening guidelines and recommendations. Aside from shadowing the doctors at the clinic, she spent time creating a handout with pa tient information, including care timelines and informa tion on tests such as pap smears and mammograms. She has also been working on a handout for health care providers, making sense of the variety of guidelines and recommendations made by various national organiza tions involved in women’s healthcare. ALL NEWS AND ADVERTISEMENT DEADLINE: the courthouse in Heppner at 10 a.m. After the bid has been awarded and the contractor has developed a plan of action, more de tails will be provided. It is anticipated the bids will be approximately $300,000. The Morrow County Court is considering an operating loan to finance the renova tions. The Morrow County Courthouse was completed in 1903 for a total cost of Morrow County, Heppner, Oregon Chamber updated on progress of Boardman bio-fuel company By David Sykes The ZeaChem ethanol bio-refinery in Boardman is now up and running and producing small quantities o f acetic acid and ethyl acetate for production of paints, lacquers and jet fuel. Administration Man ager Dean Kegler told the Heppner Chamber of Com merce last week. The plant is a small test version of a larger production facility scheduled to be built later at the Port of Morrow. Kegler said the refinery is currently getting its raw material from the poplar tree farms near Boardman, where they harvest the trees after five years. The refinery can also use wheat straw to produce up to 50 million gallons per year once the main production facility The dome and bell of the historic Morrow County Courthouse are a familiar sight, visible, and certainly audible, through out much of Heppner. Their age is showing, though, and the dome and bell are being prepped for major surgery, as bids will be accepted this month for a “lift” to repair and renovate the structure. -Photo by Andrea Di Salvo $56,990.10. The current in surance replacement value of the building is more than $4 million. Upon opening of the courthouse, it was declared as “...all modem and first class and large enough to accommodate all future demands.” The Courthouse is on the National Historic Regis try. All renovation is being completed in coordination with the Oregon State His toric Preservation Office. ‘American Sniper’ killed in shooting “I’m happy that every body's OK. I like a happy e n d in g ,” said H eppner native Scott McEwen of “American Sniper” Chris Kyle in a recent interview. Those words have be come tragically ironic as news of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle’s murder has spread across the nation. Kyle, 38, and his friend Chad Littlefield, 35, were shot multiple times at a gun range at Rough Creek Lodge west of Glen Rose, about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth, TX, Erath County S heriff Tommy Bryant said Sunday after noon. Both men left behind young families. Police arrested Eddie Ray Routh, a 25-year-old Marine who had served tours in Iraq and Haiti, for the shooting. Friends said Kyle sometimes men tored other veterans, taking them to the gun range as a kind of therapy. Officials said Routh's motive was unknown, but Routh is be lieved to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which may have been why Kyle and Little field had taken him to the range. At a news conference Sunday, authorities said the three men entered Rough Creek Lodge, a remote gun range about 77 miles south west of Fort Worth between Glen Rose and Hico, at 3:15 p.m. Saturday. No one heard any disturbance but, at 5 p.m., a hunting guide discovered two men near the range who appeared to have been shot. The guide called 911. Police later captured and arrested Routh, who was charged with one count of capital murder and two charges of murder. A semi automatic handgun found at Routh’s home in Lancaster, TX might have been the weapon used Saturday to kill the two men, Bryant said, though ballistic tests were not complete at last notice. The U.S. military con firmed Sunday that Routh was a corporal in the Ma rines, serving on active duty from 2006 to 2010. His current duty status is listed as reserve. Construction begins on Tillamook plant expansion in Boardman OHSU med student Teresa Worstell explains the details of one of the handouts she created while on her rural-health rotation at Pioneer Memorial Clinic. -Photo by Andrea Di Salvo “Which bodies nation- ally make which recom mendations and where they m atch, and w here they might be different,” she explains. Worstell also says she had a good time getting out o f the clinic and into the community. She mentions one such outing with Dr. Betsy Anderson, in which she and Anderson visited the elementary school to speak with fifth-graders on the subject of smoking. “It’s fun to see com munity involvement in dif ferent ways like that,” she says. Now in her fifth and MONDAYS AT 5:00 P.M. final week at PMC, Worstell says she has enjoyed her time in Heppner. “It’s been really great. The doctors here provide comprehensive care— ER to clinic to hospital—and I’ve had a great time seeing how they manage all those different areas of practice,” says Worstell. “That’s pretty unique to rural medicine.” from whey (which is sepa rated from milk in order to make cheese) are increas ingly being recognized for their high nutritional value and used in products like in fant formula, performance nutrition products and prod ucts that help manage some of the impacts of aging. “Our farm-family own ers have committed a sig nificant investment to en hancing our infrastructure in Boardman so that we can maximize the value we derive from every pound of milk we produce,” said Pat rick Criteser, president and CEO of TCCA. “We look After several months of planning, the Tillamook County Creamery Associa tion (TCCA), producers of Tillamook Cheese, have broken ground and begun construction on a more than 63,000-square-foot expan sion project at its produc tion facility in Boardman, the company announced last week. The facility expansion will add whey processing capabilities to Tillamook’s existing cheese-m aking plant in Boardman. The demand for such capability has grown significantly in the last several years, as the lactose and high-quality protein components derived -See TILLAMOOK PLANT EXPANSION/PAGE FIVE GREEN FEED & SEED IN HEPPNER: s Day Is Com ing 20% OFF ontapa Silver A m ontana * m s n .VHRSMITHS .VK1 14 Morrow County Grain Growers Green Feed A Seed 242 W. Linden Way, Heppner • 676-9422 • 989-8221 (MCOO main office) I
