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FUNLAND
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memories of taking the var-
ious youth sports teams he
has coached to the park for
after-game celebrations. His
wife, a physical therapist,
often takes young patients
there and watches them play
to assess their mobility.
“It’s amazing how many
different types of people are
there,” he said.
The cause of the fire that
started about 2:45 a.m. on
Friday is still under inves-
tigation, but most peo-
ple who talked about
rebuilding assumed it was
human-caused.
The fire that burned the
original playground on
July 28, 2001 was ruled an
act of arson, but no arrests
were ever made. Hermiston
Police Chief Jason Edmis-
ton said the department had
a “prime suspect” at the
time but was never able to
gather enough evidence to
arrest the person. He said
police and the fire marshal
were working hard to gather
evidence.
“It’s very much an uphill
battle for us, but we have
HEMP
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toward this.”
The plan is for Colum-
bia Basin Extraction to
spend the summer retro-
fitting the former vege-
table-processing plant to
accommodate a cold-ex-
traction method with
denatured ethanol. Some-
time between October and
December the extraction
plant should be online.
Cleaver said he will likely
have 30 to 40 employ-
ees working shifts on the
floor plus a few office and
administrative staff.
The real increase in
jobs will come from the
fields, he said, as indus-
trial hemp is a “high-in-
put” crop that takes a lot
of labor to produce.
solved uphill battles before,”
he said.
Parks and recreation
director Larry Fetter told
the Hermiston Herald that
the city was interested in
rebuilding a playground that
retained the character of the
first two iterations but were
made out of compressed
plastic, metal or other non-
wood materials. He also said
the new playground would
have fewer places where
people could hide from view
and would have an improved
security camera system.
“I’m very interested in
replacing it with materials
that are non-combustible,”
he said. “It’s just too heart-
breaking to go through it
again.”
He said the city would
be getting some insurance
money but it wasn’t clear
yet how much that would be.
It was also yet to be deter-
mined how much could be
salvaged from the park, but
Fetter said more than half
the playground was obvi-
ously a total loss and much
of the section that was not
blackened had still been
damaged by heat.
The original Funland was
Cleaver grew 400 acres
of hemp last year to be
processed elsewhere and
planted more than 1,500
acres this year. Currently,
he said, most operations
can process between
1,000 and 2,000 pounds
per day. Columbia Basin
Extraction will be able to
handle about 40,000 with
room to grow.
While hemp plants in
the field have a marijua-
na-like odor, they will be
dried out and processed
into pellets out on the farm
before being brought to the
extraction plant. Cleaver
said there shouldn’t be a
noticeable odor around the
facility.
Hermiston Foods was
one of Hermiston’s 10
largest employers from
1990 to 2017, when its
WEDNESDAy, MAy 15, 2019
Staff photo by Jade McDowell
More than half of the Funland play structure at Butte Park was
damaged in a fire early Friday morning.
a community project built
in 1996, built by volun-
teers and predating the city’s
parks and recreation depart-
ment. After the fire in July
2001, insurance paid out
$345,000, the city donated
$10,000 and the commu-
nity raised thousands more
before coming together to
build the park in six days
during March 2002.
Many people who helped
build that version are still
living in Hermiston. During
parent company NORPAC
announced it was clos-
ing the vegetable-process-
ing plant and laying off its
more than 200 employees.
The building has been on
the market for the last year
and a half.
Despite its lack of
high-inducing
THC,
research on CBD oil was
restricted by all cannabis
species’ classification as
a Schedule 1 illegal drug
until last year, when Con-
gress included a provision
in the farm bill allowing
farmers to grow industrial
hemp.
“There hasn’t been a lot
of work done with it yet,”
Cleaver said.
The FDA has so far
only approved CBD oil for
treatment of epilepsy, and
has cracked down on com-
Monday’s city council
meeting, Charlie and Carol
Clupny, who were instru-
mental in building the first
two playgrounds, urged the
council to include commu-
nity members — particu-
larly children — from start
to finish.
Carol, who was on the
executive committee for
the past playgrounds, said
it was amazing how much
the projects had united the
community.
panies selling CBD prod-
ucts under promises that it
will cure other ailments.
However, Cleaver said
now that the federal gov-
ernment has opened the
door for pharmaceuti-
cal companies to perform
legal research on hemp
products he hopes that
more FDA-approved uses
are coming soon. He said
much of his hemp crop
last year was purchased by
universities for research
purposes.
Cleaver
presented
information about the
planned plant to the Herm-
iston city council on Mon-
day. Councilors asked
him multiple times about
whether the project would
create odor problems for
the city, but Cleaver said
the operations he had vis-
“We had superintendents
working alongside dropout
kids,” she said. “I think the
volunteer aspect is really
important to bring people
together.”
Charlie was a captain
over several crews of vol-
unteers during the 1996 and
2001 builds. He said his
crews involved everyone
from mothers and children
to National Guard members
and inmates.
He got choked up when
talking about Friday’s fire.
“I haven’t been over to
Funland yet because what
burnt is what I was in charge
of building,” he said. “... I
never thought in my lifetime
we were going to be build-
ing another one of those
again.”
On Saturday from 9 a.m.
to noon hundreds of volun-
teers from local churches
will be cleaning up litter,
restoring
flood-damaged
sections of Riverfront Park
and doing other beautifica-
tion around town as part of
the annual I Love My City
event.
While it is too soon to
put those volunteers to use
demolishing the burned
ited had not had a notice-
able smell outside the
building.
He did acknowledge he
had received complaints
from neighbors about
the smell of the plants
while they were grow-
ing out on his farm, away
from Hermiston. He also
said the plants — which
look and smell like mari-
juana — had drawn some
would-be thieves who
mistakenly thought they
would be able to use them
to get high.
“We had a great sting
going on with the Morrow
County Sheriff’s Office
last year,” he said.
Councilors
thanked
Cleaver for being trans-
parent and willing to
answer questions about the
project.
playground, Pastor Terry
Haight said that he would
be asking participants of a
follow-up worship service
on Sunday to give a “love
offering” toward rebuild-
ing Funland. Last year’s ser-
vice drew about 1,200 wor-
shippers. This year’s is at
10 a.m. at the Eastern Ore-
gon Trade and Event Center.
The city is also accepting
donations at city hall. On
Monday the council agreed
that they should put together
a steering committee of city
councilors and community
members as quickly as pos-
sible and then use that com-
mittee to research options
and gather community input.
Fetter said his goal was to
have plans for the new park
done by October and ground
broken next February.
Mayor David Drotz-
mann thanked everyone
for their generosity, not-
ing he had hoped to see his
future grandchildren play at
Funland.
“This community rises to
the occasion when it comes
to children,” he said. “I think
we will have no problem
reaching whatever target we
need to reach to rebuild.”
Staff photo by Kathy Aney
Alan Cleaver, owner of Cleaver
Farms, holds out some pelletized
hemp biomass. The business is
purchasing the former Hermiston
Foods plant to extract CBD oil from
industrial hemp for pharmaceutical
purposes.
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