OUR 114th Year
September 3, 2021
SEASIDESIGNAL.COM
$1.00
Residents
challenge
Gearhart
fi rehouse bond
Complaint fi led in Circuit Court
By R.J. MARX
Seaside Signal
SUNSHINE AT THE FINISH LINE
Blue skies welcome Hood to Coast runners, walkers
Roskelley said. “And when we arrived
at the ocean this morning, you couldn’t
see the ocean.”
By mid-morning the weather
changed for the better and even with
a wrong turn, the team of 12 made up
the time and were in Seaside by early
Saturday.
The team Buff alo Shampoo left
from OMSI in Portland in the PDX
to Coast Walk Relay. The team of 11
walked 130 miles strumming gui-
tars and rattling tambourines, spread-
ing good vibes and winning the relay’s
congeniality award in the process.
Last year’s event was canceled
because of the pandemic, and with
a surge of COVID cases in Oregon,
health and safety protocols remained at
top of mind, Floyd said.
Runners celebrate
achievement
By R.J. MARX
Seaside Signal
C
louds started the morning in Sea-
side, but lifted as runners crossed
the fi nish line.
“Things are going really well
this morning,” Hood to Coast
Chief Operating Offi cer Dan Floyd
said last Saturday morning. “The
weather’s beautiful. And it seems like
people are really happy to rediscover
being in Seaside and the North Coast.”
The Hood to Coast Relay from
Mount Hood brings teams of eight to
12 runners 198 miles to the fi nish at
the beach in Seaside. The Portland to
Coast Walk Relay brings teams 130
miles to Seaside.
The fi rst team arrived at 4:48 a.m.
Photos by R.J. Marx
TOP: Run With the Winners consists of
team members from Cleveland, Ohio.
ABOVE: One of the many team vans in
Seaside during Hood to Coast.
Saturday morning, and the last was set
to pull in at about 9 p.m., Floyd said.
It was pouring rain when runners
from Girls Run Wild from Salt Lake
City left Mount Hood 3 a.m. Friday
morning.
“We left Mount Hood without see-
ing Mount Hood,” team member Amy
See Hood to Coast, Page A6
Almost six years ago, Seaside School
District voters approved a $99.7 million
bond to bring a new campus out of the
tsunami inundation zone.
Plans were delivered in March 2018
and since that time hundreds of contrac-
tors, staff and consultants have endured
COVID-19, labor shortages, material
delays. Their work is coming to an end
this fall, project manager Brian Harde-
beck told the district’s board of directors.
In July, crews fi nished exterior paint-
R.J. Marx
Construction at Seaside High School is
expected to be complete in September.
ing at Pacifi c Ridge Elementary School.
They added Americans with Disabilities
Act-accessible ramps, landslide mitiga-
See Firehouse, Page A3
Park district to
require employees
to get vaccinated
against virus
Several virus cases have
been reported
By R.J. MARX
Seaside Signal
tion buttressing and a four-way intersec-
tion at the school.
At the high school and middle school,
the west parking entrance and athletic
fi eld were completed. Landscaping and
maintenance projects are complete.
“Items moving forward for the remain-
ing part of the summer will include the
added gym vestibules,” Hardebeck said.
“They’re in fi nal design now.” Drain-
age piping at the track, delayed by labor
shortages, will be completed by Sept. 15.
BRIC Architecture is designing new
vestibules at the south facing gym doors
The Sunset Empire Park and Recre-
ation District will require employees to
receive vaccinations against the corona-
virus, with the exception of those who
have religious or medical exemptions.
“I understand that there’s controversy
around it, but it is part of our role to role-
model health and well-being in our com-
munity,” Celeste Bodner, the park district
board’s vice president, said at last Tues-
day’s board meeting. “All the science tells
us that vaccination is the way to do that.”
Implementing a vaccine requirement
for staff would likely limit the spread of
the virus, Skyler Archibald, the execu-
tive director of the park district, said at
the meeting.
Since the start of the pandemic, about
10 park district employees have tested
positive for the virus.
See Construction, Page A6
See Park district, Page A6
School district zeroes in on September construction end date
By R.J. MARX
Seaside Signal
Two residents who oppose the city’s
plans for a new fi rehouse have fi led a
complaint in Clatsop County Circuit
Court asking that a bond measure on
the November ballot be suspended or
rewritten.
The bond measure would deliver up to
$13 million for a new fi rehouse off High-
lands Lane. The project would replace the
aging facility on Pacifi c Way that is vul-
nerable to a tsunami.
Jack Zimmerman and Harold Gable
claim the ballot title and text are insuffi -
cient and vague. “To leave the proposed
ballot as (is) puts all Gearhart voters at
a profound disadvantage and renders
(Gearhart) voters uninformed to material
facts that may shape the votes and future
of Gearhart,” they wrote.
In the complaint fi led last week, Zim-
merman and Gable asked the court to
suspend the bond measure until the fi nal
costs of the project are determined or
order the measure be rewritten to refl ect
that the costs are preliminary.
A hearing is scheduled for Sept. 9.
Zimmerman ran unsuccessfully for
City Council in 2020 and 2018 and
opposed the new fi rehouse as part of his
campaigns.
Furnish remembered, and with asteroid joins the heavens
Young, an astronomer,
discovered the object in
May 2004. Young has dis-
Jim Furnish died earlier covered 256 of the objects
this year, but will forever and named 40. The name
be remembered not only for has been approved by the
his life in Gearhart,
Committee on Small
but thanks to friend
Body Nomenclature
James Young, in the
of the International
celestial skies with
Astronomical Union
an asteroid named in
of the Minor Planet
his honor.
Center.
“This is a perma-
Furnish, a com-
nent honor,” Young
mercial fi sherman,
Jim Furnish
said. “This is not
died at 70 in January.
something to last for
He was described
50 years. This is going to at a memorial last week at
last forever.”
the Sons of Norway as the
The asteroid is No. owner of the Hylah Ruth in
313892.
Astoria. He fi shed from Cal-
ifornia to Alaska, and the
Columbia River for salmon,
tuna, crab and halibut. He
Seaside Signal
James Young, who discovered the asteroid in 2004 and named
it after Jim Furnish at a ceremony in Gearhart.
Asteroid 313892 is now known as “Furnish.”
was also a digger of razor
clams.
He graduated from Sea-
side High School in 1968
and went on to work as a
commercial fi sherman and
clammer extraordinaire; he
herded cattle and sheep on
Buoy in Seaside.
A social media infl u-
encer, he founded the social
media pages Million Friends
of Gearhart and the Pacifi c
Way Group on Facebook.
The memorial was a great
opportunity to see friends of
the family ranch outside of
Pilot Rock and worked as a
drug and alcohol counselor
in Astoria, something he was
proud of.
His favorite job, after
fi shing, was the years he
spent as a fi xture at Bell
his father, both old and new,
son James Furnish said. “He
would think having an aster-
oid named after him would
be an extremely high honor,
and would probably joke
that it would destroy Earth
one day,” he said.