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About Heppner gazette-times. (Heppner, Or.) 1925-current | View Entire Issue (March 15, 2023)
FIVE- Heppner Gazette-Times, Heppner, Oregon Wednesday, March 15, 2023 Boardman council hears concerns about rent prices PUBLIC NOTICE -Continued from PAGE ONE out that the newest rental demand,” replied Fuss. first came. I think there’s to meet our demand,” said to Port View’s website, rental prices range from $1,235 for a 522-square- foot ag studio to $2,275 for a 1,406-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment. Fuss said his research showed this compared to prices in Portland. “Why are we paying Portland prices when we’re not in Portland?” he asked. Fuss added that those prices were just for the “physical box” and did not include utilities. According to his math, he said, rent for a one-bedroom apartment at Port View took up 51 percent of individual me- dian income in Boardman in 2022, or 26 percent of median household income. Those percents were higher for two-bedroom rentals. Also, rental costs in Board- man have gone up over the past few years. He said his own rent had increased by 15 percent in 2021 and 21 percent in 2022. “If my rent goes up again, I will probably have to move home to Texas,” he said, adding that the com- munity would then lose a skilled music teacher whom the students like. He also added that his concern was for high schoolers who were looking to move out of their parents’ homes but couldn’t find affordable housing in their hometown. He said the city would likely lose those graduates. “This is not just about my future; this is about our students’ futures,” he said. Fuss also pointed property currently under construction, Tidewater, was being built by Affinity Property Management, the firm that owns Port View Apartments. This, he said, would give Affinity a su- per-monopoly for mid- to high-rent apartments. “This is not just about me. This is about our city, and the future of our city,” Fuss said. “Many of you ran to grow this city, but you guys have stunted that growth because of the super-monopoly that this property management company is going to have once these new apartments are built.” To combat the rising prices, Fuss asked for an affordable housing defi- nition in the city code, a resident rent increase cap, and possibly a rent freeze within Boardman until there is either more availability or more diversity in the market. “If a local body starts telling businesses what they can and can’t do, what they can charge and can’t charge, what are the ramifications on the other side of that?” replied Boardman Mayor Paul Keefer. “That’s the part that I struggle with. As far as government control, it seems like government gets involved in everything, and it never stops.” “Do we really want to start going that route?” asked Keefer. “Monopolies tend to be bad, because that means there’s one entity controlling the supply and “It’s not about government control, but more about diversifying the market.” Boardman Council- or Isaac Williams said he agreed with Keefer on one hand. “The other side is, we’re also here to defend our citizens,” said Wil- liams. “It is something we all hear about, the housing market, and now the rental market as well. Is there a plan that we could put in place to look into this more?” “I don’t like the price of gas,” responded Keefer. “Am I going to interject in the price of gas? I don’t like some things that are around here, but how far do we go? The state is trying to meddle into it, and we see what the state is coming up with. That just shows how hard it is to really control.” “This is what people outside of Boardman, look- ing to move into Boardman, are seeing,” replied Fuss. “That it’s really ex- pensive to live here,” said Keefer. “Yes, and even though we’re not that big of a town,” Fuss said. Boardman Councilor Karen Pettigrew said there was a time the city was con- cerned because there were only low-income rental op- tions in Boardman, so they had worked to get more housing options in the city. “I think you have to look at the whole communi- ty,” said Pettigrew. “There are options, maybe more than you had when you a reason why we, as a city, allow different housing segments for whatever type of population would like to move here.” Boardman Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Torrie Griggs, who was present via Zoom, added that the city is facing a supply-and-demand mo- ment that is driving rental costs up. “We are working on trying to provide diversi- ty in our types of homes, which would level out the high home value that we’re having. We don’t have a whole lot of lower, afford- able housing,” said Griggs. “We have subsidized hous- ing and we have middle and upper level housing. We don’t have affordable housing right now.” Shea added that the state is coming out with plans on workforce housing levels so they can lower those housing costs. “We are just kind of behind the eight ball where the City of Boardman and the Port of Morrow grew our employment pool, our employment opportunities, so high, but we didn’t ever keep up with our housing at the same time.” She said they are trying to mitigate that by bringing in different types of city developments that are offering different types of housing. “I think once we get caught up, you’ll see a dif- ference in these rental pric- es, because people will ei- ther be able to move out or we have enough availability Griggs. “I think there’s a lot of moving parts to this.” Boardman City Coun- cilor Cristina Cuevas said that, since the council does have a say in whether to al- low certain development to come into the city, she felt that gave the city a certain amount of responsibility. “It might be worth our while just to get more infor- mation,” she said. Boardman City Coun- cilor Heather Baumgartner added that codifying the rent level and increases could help stabilize rent and that, since it would be part of the city code, build- ers would know about it going in. “Builders would know going into it that we are looking out for our com- munity,” Baumgartner said, adding that the state had done something similar with property tax increases. Boardman City Man- ager Pro Tem Rick Stokoe said it was important to realize the state was trying to address housing through Senate Bill 608. SB 608, which passed in 2019, al- lows landlords to raise the rent seven percent plus inflation per year. That rate for 2023 is 14.6 percent. “There are methods in place for people who feel they are being taken advan- tage of to file complaint and remedy that issue. 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Contact Nathan @ 360-953-1318 Lancasterfencingllc.com Licensed & Bonded 9-7-TFN Print & Mailing Services *Design *Print *Mail Sykes Publishing 541-676-9228 WWW.HEPPNER.NET Submit News, Advertising & Announcements Letters To The Editor Send Us Photos Start A New Subscription Morrow County seeks $1.3 million in funding for water nitrate solutions -Continued from PAGE THREE of design work.” “When there’s so many options and so many vari- ables on how to solve this issue, it becomes an in- credibly complicated doc- ument,” he added, “so we really wanted to put a lot of time and energy into giving the engineering team a lot of runway to just nail down those alternatives.” Iglorio also pointed out that, within the scope and budget of the proposal, they listed a key task of communications with the well owners and the public water systems. “Which I think is going to be an important part of the whole study and coming up with solutions,” said Iglorio. “The technical part of the work is probably in some ways the easier part. Getting that agreement and folks on the same page with those solutions will be a key part of the effort.” “And to not do this af- ter doing the work for this year, doesn’t even really make sense, right?” asked Morrow County Commis- sioner Roy Drago. “If we’re going to do this work for this year, we really need to piggyback and go into next year and the year after.” “I think that’s right, and I think that’s also the public’s expectation,” re- plied Mabbott, though she added that some people had asked why the county needs to study anything fur- ther. “We’re talking about systems the county doesn’t own, nobody owns. “No entity applies for a grant to construct a ma- jor infrastructure system without going through a lot of collaboration of de- sign and then, finally, the engineering piece. This wouldn’t even cover the final design,” she added. “We need to see if the city partners, some of those private landowners want to look at building a whole new community water sys- tem. It takes time.” “When the nitrate issue came to a head,” said Mor- row County Commissioner Chair David Sykes, “I was a little frustrated because I pictured a single solution. I’ve come to appreciate much more now that there’s multiple solutions, multiple results.” “I think you guys are going in the right direc- tion,” he added. “There’s going to be clusters of high-impact areas and clusters further away,” agreed Drago. “Ev- eryone’s unique. And I think that’s why going sec- ond set with just Morrow County is going to make it easier for us to attack the problem.” Mabbott also added that the issue involves both groundwater and public health issues, and the proj- ect is a hybrid of both, so Morrow County Health Dept. Director Robin Can- aday is also involved in the work. While the topic at the March 1 meeting was congressional spending, she said they’ve also been coordinating with the Ore- gon Health Authority in the sense that they are work- ing to solve the problem, and more funding would be coming through that agency. “So piecing out who’s doing what has been a chal- lenge,” said Mabbott. “But I hope we’re going the right direction.” “The county has a health department that looks after the health of our citizens,” responded Sykes. “We don’t have a department of fixing the LUBGWMA (Lower Uma- tilla Basin Groundwater Management Area). I think they are connected, but we have to watch how far the county goes.” He added that the LUB- GWMA is a two-county entity, and the state needs to be involved. “And they need to be involved in providing clean water to our citizens, which is our health department’s task,” said Sykes. “But I think they need to be more heavily involved in doing more to fix the nitrate in LUBGWMA. That’s a little beyond the county’s regular things that we do.” Also present at the meeting were several mem- bers of Oregon Rural Ac- tion, a community-based organization that has been vocal on the issue of nitrates in drinking water. Boardman resident Ethan Akers asked, “How many wells are you pro- posing to test with the $1.7 and what information are you going to collect on it?” Mabbott replied that those funds were part of the grant in conjunction with Umatilla County, and they were currently in process of writing a scope of work for that. Iglorio said there was allocation from the $1.7 to do sampling and testing of domestic wells in Morrow County, but part of the process involved working with OHA, Dept. of Envi- ronmental Quality (DEQ) and other entities to create a work plan. “There’s a lot of uncer- tainty in exactly how that’s going to play out,” he said, “There’s a lot of sampling that had been completed in the past and ongoing sampling that’s been going on through the OHA state process, but we wanted to allocate some portion of this funding to support the characterization of impact to the domestic wells.” He added that they were assuming it would cost be- tween $500 and $1,000 per well for sampling. The range in cost was given to allow for uncertainty on ex- actly what parameters they would be testing for, who is going to be collecting the samples and how the process will work. He said nitrates would obviously be involved in the parameters, but there might be other water quality issues they looked at, as well. Based on that cost, though, he said they were looking at about 1,000 sampling locations between the two counties. Morrow County Com- missioner Jeff Wenholz also pointed out that the counties did not yet have the $1.7 million. Kaleb Lay asked if they could learn more about what kinds of questions the county would be trying to answer in testing the wells, and whether there would be retesting or testing new ones. Lay is a communi- ty organizer with Oregon Rural Action and lives in Union County. “We’re just looking for some information on what we can expect as communi- ty members,” said Lay. B efo re an s weri n g , Sykes asked Lay which community he was refer- ring to, whether it was West Glen or a larger area. Lay answered that he represent- ed rural well owners in the Lower Umatilla Basin. “Is that right?” replied Sykes. “You represent all the well owners in the Low- er Umatilla Basin?” “As far as the commu- nity members that we have engaged on this issue, I think we draw from a really wide base,” said Lay. “And we are advocating on behalf of and with community members throughout the Lower Umatilla. I don’t think we’re restricted to one neighborhood.” “This is an issue that touches a lot of people, and I think you guys can relate, we’re just trying to help as many folks as we can here.” “I understand that. We all are,” replied Sykes. “Our task is to help the citizens of Morrow County receive clean drinking wa- ter,” Sykes said, adding that he just wanted clarification because Lay referred to “we.” Mabbot said, in re- sponse to his question, that it was the 2023 funding she had come before the board to request approval for, and referred the question to Iglorio. Iglorio said the cur- rent proposal would build on the 2022 project. The anticipated outcome for that project would be to identify the well clusters or areas that could viably be served by connecting to or extending current public water systems. The 2023 funding would be used for follow-up and confirma- tion, as well as possibly installing test wells as they move into final planning and initial design concepts. “The testing that’s proposed for this funding request is focused around those specific issues,” said Iglorio. Lay also asked what alternatives were being considered for people who aren’t eligible for city hook- ups. “I know we’re early in the process of planning here, but as far as envision- ing for the future, where are we in accounting for those folks?” “All the options that are feasible will be on the table,” replied Mabbott. “I think we’re so early in the process that that would be an impossible question to answer,” said Sykes, “because you don’t really know what you don’t know. “That’s why Morrow County has committed funds for a water engi- neer. The Merkley-Wyden money, it’s aimed to find out, like we just specified, there’s different solutions in different areas,” Sykes went on. “As this process moves forward, that question you just asked will be answered, but that’s the purpose of everything we’re doing right now, because there’s no use trying to do things if they don’t work. “We want to know what we’re doing, where to go for the infrastructure, whatever kinds of grants or money is available,” Sykes finished. “Tamra and her people that she’s working with can’t answer these things until they have a clear picture with very good information of where to move next.” Now’s the Right Time Take advantage of the new 30% Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) with PWRcell, Generac’s fully-integrated solar + battery storage system. PWRcell will help you save money on your electric bill and be prepared for utility power outages. Plus it’s compatible with most existing solar arrays. 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