WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2017
HERMISTONHERALD.COM • A3
LOCAL NEWS
Hermiston pays tribute to MLK Jr.
By JADE MCDOWELL
Staff writer
As the nation prepares
for Friday’s presidential
inauguration, Martin Lu-
ther King, Jr.’s words are
taking on new weight for
those who are still strug-
gling to come to terms
with the nation’s presi-
dent-elect.
“Thinking about the
Martin Luther King Days
I’ve been through, I can’t
remember one more sig-
nificant than the one today,
given the times we live in,”
Jordan Chaney said.
Chaney, a black poet
from the Tri-Cities, gave
the keynote address at
Hermiston’s annual Martin
Luther King Peace Walk.
Never before, he admit-
ted, has he been tested so
much on following the civ-
il rights leader’s teachings
about “choosing to love
when the invitations to
hate are so abundant.”
“I wanted to love as in-
discriminately as the sun
shines,” he said. “... You
ask for something, you’re
going to get tested on it,
and I failed that test sever-
al times.”
The tests came as
Chaney felt blindsided by
friends who came out in
support of a candidate who
frequently makes head-
lines for his negative com-
ments about minorities and
women. Chaney said he
also lost friendships when
he decided to join in call-
ing for the resignation of
a Kennewick city coun-
cilor who made a deroga-
tory post about Latinos on
STAFF PHOTO BY E.J. HARRIS
STAFF PHOTO BY E.J. HARRIS
Trey Rome, 6, of Hermiston watches as his grandmother, Dawn Rome, takes a video of the
Children of Polynesia sing the “Hymn of His Garment” on Monday in Hermiston.
Facebook.
When Alton Sterling
and Philando Castile, two
unarmed black men, were
shot and killed by police
within 24 hours of each
other, Chaney spent a night
praying and worrying for
his son’s safety on a Seat-
tle visit. He has never been
dragged at gunpoint out of
his car before, he said, but
that didn’t make the fear
and depression any less
real as it hung over his life.
“Inside of my depres-
sion I could feel hate form-
ing,” he said.
It was the writings and
speeches of people like
Martin Luther King, Jr.
that helped him extin-
guish that hate, he said.
The words stopped feeling
distant, like “reading a for-
tune cookie,” and became
a roadmap.
Chaney learned about
the power of love and non-
violence from King, but
he said sometimes people
have a tendency to water
down King’s legacy to the
point where they forget
that he still spoke up for
truth and still took action
for justice.
“The thing that he was
after was serving oth-
ers and giving his life for
that,” Chaney said. “A lot
of us are afraid just to lose
a friend for speaking out.”
King taught that “hu-
man progress is neither
automatic nor inevita-
ble,” and Chaney said
everyone must contin-
ue to fight for progress.
“You persist with your
message, you persist with
your course, but you don’t
let it lose your humanity,”
he said.
Before Chaney’s ad-
dress, almost 100 people
— black, white, Latino,
Polynesian — bundled up
and braved the cold and
snow for a short peace
walk around downtown
Hermiston, singing “We
Shall Overcome” and
pausing at city hall for a
short speech by Mayor Da-
vid Drotzmann.
While
waiting
for
Chaney to arrive from an-
other address in the Tri-Cit-
ies, attendees watched a
cultural performance from
the Children of Polynesia
Poet Jordan Chaney from
the Tri-Cities speaks
about Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. on Monday at the
First Methodist Church in
Hermiston.
dance group and shared
their feelings on Martin
Luther King, Jr. during an
open mic session.
Cassandra Frost said as
a half-black, half-Indian
woman who was raised
by a white woman she has
experienced racism but
has also experienced the
type of harmony and sup-
port across races that King
dreamed of.
“Keep
encouraging
each other, keep loving
each other,” she said.
Alex Hobbs took the
opportunity to share part
of King’s “Letter from Bir-
mingham Jail,” in which
he addressed white reli-
gious leaders in the South
who had called civil rights
protests “unwise and un-
timely.”
“I have almost reached
the regrettable conclusion
that the Negro’s great stum-
bling block in his stride
toward freedom is not the
White Citizen’s Councilor
or the Ku Klux Klanner,
but the white moderate,”
King wrote, “who is more
devoted to ‘order’ than to
justice; who prefers a neg-
ative peace which is the
absence of tension to a
positive peace which is the
presence of justice; who
constantly says: ‘I agree
with you in the goal you
seek, but I cannot agree
with your methods of di-
rect action’; who paternal-
istically believes he can set
the timetable for another
man’s freedom; who lives
by a mythical concept of
time and who constantly
advises the Negro to wait
for a ‘more convenient sea-
son.’”
Hobbs added her own
voice, saying that today
there are many civil rights
issues, from mass incarcer-
ation to immigration, that
must be addressed by peo-
ple of all races.
John Carbage, president
of the Black International
Awareness Club that has
sponsored the event for
the last 17 years, said that
in recognition of its more
diverse mission, the club
will be changing its name
in February to the Herm-
iston Cultural Awareness
Club. The group meets the
second Saturday of every
month at Starbucks at 2
p.m. and everyone is wel-
come.
———
Contact Jade McDowell
at 541-564-4536.
Downtown parking gets
the council’s attention
Ranch & Home gets development deal
Hermiston Herald
Staff writer
Before the Jan. 9 regu-
lar city council meeting, the
council held a work session
with staff to discuss down-
town parking.
Assistant city manager
Mark Morgan said a look at
Google Earth images from
the last 10 years shows —
in an admittedly unscientif-
ic study — that on average
about 44 percent of parking
spots on Main Street are
full, with somewhat similar
numbers in other areas of
downtown. However, com-
plaints about limited parking
downtown is something the
city hears “all the time” from
residents and business own-
ers who say people avoid
shopping downtown because
they think they won’t find
parking.
“Whether or not there is
an actual parking problem
downtown or not, there’s
a perception in people’s
minds,” Morgan said.
Some of that may come
from a “phobia” of parallel
parking, he said, noting Goo-
gle Earth images that show
parking lots full or almost
full even as most of the spots
along the street are empty.
One low-cost solution
that both adds spots and eas-
es peoples’ minds about hav-
ing to parallel park is turning
some of downtown’s street
parking into angled spots.
“That’s the low-hanging
fruit,” Morgan said.
He said the city’s engi-
neers had drawn up plans to
put angled parking spaces for
a block along Gladys Avenue
in front of the library. The
new configuration would add
four spots (each 19 feet long)
to the block, get rid of more
difficult parallel parking and
still leave travel lanes more
than 12 feet wide.
“We saw this as a possible
way to ease our way into try-
ing angled parking, and it’s
totally reversible if people
don’t like it,” he said.
City councilors agreed to
consider a motion at the Jan.
23 council meeting.
By JADE MCDOWELL
The Hermiston city
council approved an
agreement with Ranch
& Home on Jan. 9 to re-
imburse the retailer for
a slew of development
costs if it finishes build-
ing a store in Hermiston
by Jan. 1, 2018.
Those incentives will
increase if the company
also convinces a grocery
store to build next door
by Oct. 1, 2018.
City manager Byron
Smith said economic
development, particular-
ly bringing more retail
opportunities to Herm-
iston, is one of the top
goals the city council has
set. After a “long pro-
cess” working with own-
er George Dress in the
planning stage, Smith
said the city felt it would
be worth offering some
incentives to get the ball
rolling on construction
of a Hermiston location.
“This is a new ap-
proach,” he told the city
council.
Ranch & Home cur-
rently has two locations
in the Tri-Cities and one
in Milton-Freewater, and
sells supplies for home
and garden, livestock,
pets, sporting goods and
clothing. As a retailer,
it is not eligible for the
property tax breaks giv-
en to some businesses
that build in Hermiston’s
enterprise zone.
According to the
agreement
approved
Monday, if Ranch &
Home gets a building
permit by April 1 and an
occupancy permit by Jan.
1, 2018, the city will re-
imburse the company for
its building permit, sys-
tem development charges
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and $10,000 for extension
of water and sewer lines
that will also make it eas-
ier to develop neighboring
properties in the future.
The total package of in-
centives is estimated to be
worth about $107,800.
In addition, Ranch &
Home will have space on
its 18-acre property for ad-
ditional retail development.
If the company convinces
a grocery store of at least
25,000 square feet to agree
to build on that space by
Oct. 1, 2018, then the city
will reimburse Ranch &
Home $185,000 for road
improvements on the north-
east side of the property.
For every month that
Ranch & Home misses
those deadlines, the finan-
cial incentives will be re-
duced by 10 percent, and
the deal is off if the dead-
lines are missed by more
than six months.
Smith said parts of
Hermiston are considered a
“food desert” by the USDA
based on the ratio of gro-
cery stores to residents, and
Hermiston residents spend
an estimated $21 million
in the Tri-Cities each year
on groceries alone. He said
if Ranch & Home and a
grocery store come in, the
financial incentives would
be returned to the city,
county and school district
through property taxes in
just a couple of years.
The council unani-
mously approved the
agreement, along with
a replat of the three lots
that make up the Ranch
& Home property at 2500
S. Highway 395 near the
Wal-Mart
Distribution
Center.