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About Hermiston herald. (Hermiston, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (May 15, 2019)
NEWS Wednesday, May 15, 2019 HeRMIsTOnHeRaLd.COM • A7 Detective encourages parents to monitor teens’ smartphone use By JADE MCDOWELL NEWS EDITOR A staff photo by Kathy aney A car drives on East Airport Road on Friday near EOTEC. Umatilla County seeks to reduce road project snags By PHIL WRIGHT STAFF WRITER A fter Airport Road neighbors voiced concerns about improvements to the road planned by Umatilla County, the county aims to hold private, individ- ual meetings with approxi- mately 20 property owners to find ways to mitigate the effects of improvements along the Hermiston road. The property own- ers, however, will have to request those meetings. Owners along the road leading to the front entrance of the Eastern Oregon Event and Trade Center have been building in the public right-of-way for decades. The county surveyed the area last year for the upcoming project to widen Airport Road and build other improvements and found owners and res- idents have built as much as 13 feet onto county property. Commissioner George Murdock, chair of the county board, said the sit- uation is common through- out the county, with some folks even farming on pub- lic right-of-ways. Most people understand the risks that come with building on property they don’t own, he said, and property owners along Airport Road likely will have to deal with some effects of the road project. The county board of commissioners in this case will vote Wednesday morn- ing in Pendleton to approve a plan for a commissioner, a representative of the county road department, an engi- neer and “others deemed necessary” to meet with individual property owners adjacent to Airport Road to discuss those effects and possible solutions. Chris Waine is one of the Airport Road residents. He also is founder and frontman for the Hermis- ton Airport Road Neighbor- hood Association, which is pushing the county to hold a public hearing on the road improvement project. Waine questioned why the county would want to con- duct individual meetings. “They know there is a boundary issue, they know there is a dispute,” he said. “Just hold the hearing and hear what the community has to say.” While that might be eas- ier, Murdock said, it may not be better. “Everyone in the room jumping up and down” during a hearing would not allow the county to tailor possible resolu- tions to meet individual needs, which could range from relocating fences to granting easements for items encroaching on the right-of-way. “There isn’t a great solution,” Murdock said, “We have to look at each individual property, and I think when this is all said and done, these individu- als won’t be as impacted as some people are projecting.” The private meetings also could allow for more candid discussions, and Murdock said as a property owner he would feel more comfortable standing on his own land talking with a few officials than stand- ing in a room full of people and addressing the county board. If the board approves the plan, the individuals have to ask for the meetings, and the sessions will not produce meeting minutes. Murdock said any deal that comes out of the meetings, however, would be public. The county has no legal requirement to hold a pub- lic hearing for the road project. Waine said he has talked with the office of Republican state Rep. Greg Smith, Heppner, to change that. When there are contro- versies over development and the lay of the land, he said, Oregon law should require public hearings. Waine contended the county’s proposal looks like a formality. He said he plans to attend the Wednes- day meeting on behalf of his neighbors and suggest the board table the topic. He said the solution is sim- ple enough: the county commissioner could vote to vacate 13 feet of the south- ern boundary right-of-way. Stanfield city manager Blair Larsen announced he is leaving for a position in another city. The Stanfield city coun- cil was planning a spe- cial meeting Tuesday night after deadline to approve a plan for recruitment of a new administrator and an advertisement for the posi- tion. The proposed sched- ule would see finalists interviewed on July 19. A draft advertisement for the position included in the agenda packet lists the salary at $65,000 to $80,000 plus benefits to manage a staff of 21 employees and an annual budget of about $3.7 mil- lion. Stanfield has a popu- lation of 2,185. Larsen has served as Stanfield’s city manager since May 2013. He has overseen growth in hous- ing and new business, but also controversy over alleged misconduct in the police department and the odor coming from the 3D IdaPro dehydration plant. He said Friday that he “If a girl sends a sexually explicit photo to a boy, she just manufactured child pornography” Det. Kasey Ward, Umatilla County Sheriff’s Office He said any minor with a smartphone or other inter- net-connected device should password protect it in case it gets lost or stolen, but parents should “absolutely” have the password and make it a prac- tice of asking their child to hand over their phone for random searches. It’s important to open every app, Ward said, as photos can be hidden under icons that look like a calcula- tor or other unassuming app. And the child should know that if they’re caught delet- ing messages or their brows- ing history their phone will be confiscated. If parents have a suspi- cion that something illegal is going on, they can sign a release for the sheriff’s office to search the phone using a device that pulls everything — including deleted pho- tos and messages — into a format where detectives can easily search for keywords or snapshots of every recent website visit. Ward said sometimes parents are very surprised to find out what type of pornography their young son or daughter was looking at before clearing their browsing history. There are parental-control options on the market that can notify parents of their child’s web activity or block certain sites. Ward said those can be helpful, but they’re not fool-proof. Teens today are incredibly tech-savvy and they all have friends with web-connected devices at school. “Kids get curious about sex and the opposite sex and now they have a device in their hand where they can look things up privately,” he said. “When I was a kid you had to have a friend with a dad who had a Playboy magazine.” That’s why it’s import- ant that parents have con- versations with their chil- dren, Ward said, about what they might find online and how someone might take advantage of them there. Ward also encourages par- ents to have conversations with their children about topics such as consent and the dangers of drinking to the point of blacking out at a party. Teens tend to think of rape as something that hap- pens “with a stranger grab- bing you in the parking lot,” but the vast majority of sex- ual assaults are perpetrated by someone known to the victim. Ward has seen many local cases where the perpetra- tor (and often their parents) don’t think what they did was rape or assault, because the victim was not actively fighting back. A boy might have had sex with a half-un- conscious, intoxicated girl at a party or offered a girl a ride home, only to take her some- where deserted and refuse to take her back until she agreed to have sex with him. “Teens often have no idea how the laws work and what applies to them,” he said. ZTrak™ Residential Zero-Turn Mowers MEETING The Umatilla County Board of Commission- ers during its meeting Wednesday will consid- er a plan to hold private meetings with airport Road property owners to discuss upcoming road improvements. The meeting starts at 9 a.m. and is room 130 of the county courthouse, 216 s.e. Fourth st., Pendle- ton. The board also will consider an agreement to outsource fleet management and to purchase reader boards for the public works department. Stanfield city manager leaving for new city after six years BY HERMISTON HERALD smartphone in every pocket has made it harder than ever to keep teens out of trouble. Umatilla County Sheriff’s Office Det. Kasey Ward said a combination of monitor- ing and education by parents is crucial to preventing the kind of cases he sees, rang- ing from date rape to child pornography charges related to sexting. He described teenagers sending nude photos and sexually explicit messages as an “epidemic.” “It’s become common,” he said. “They have the mindset of ‘everybody does it now.’” The consequences can be grave, however. The “cute boy” on the other end of the social media app could actu- ally be a “50-year-old per- vert,” Ward said, who could use the photos to blackmail the teen into worse things, or post the pictures on a child pornography site. He said when he checks a national database to find the victims of images pulled from locals’ phones, sometimes he finds the photos are up to a decade old and still circulating. “Once you put it out there, once you hit send, there’s no taking it back, and God only knows where it will end up,” he said. Even if teens are trad- ing sexually explicit pho- tos with someone who is known to them, Ward said there are plenty of teenage boys who delight in showing private nude photos of their girlfriend to their friends. He said teens often think they’re safe sending photos over apps such as Snapchat, which ostensibly deletes the photo after a few seconds, but it doesn’t prevent people from taking a screenshot. At best, Ward said, such an incident can result in a loss of reputation. At worst, the photos could be used as blackmail after a breakup or could cause multiple teens to end up as registered sex offenders for life. “If a girl sends a sexually explicit photo to a boy, she just manufactured child por- nography, he just received it and if he sends it to his friends he distributed it,” Ward said. $ Select Series™ Lawn Tractors AS LOW AS 62.50 per month AS LOW AS *2 $ month 69 per *1 Finding the equipment that’s just right for you: RDO does that. The perfect match for your lawn is waiting. 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