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The INDEPENDENT, February 5, 2009
The
INDEPENDENT
Published on the first and third Thursdays of each month by
The Independent, LLC, 725 Bridge St., Vernonia, OR 97064.
Phone/Fax: 503-429-9410.
Publisher Clark McGaugh, clark@the-independent.net
Editor Rebecca McGaugh, rebecca@the-independent.net
Mentor Noni Andersen
Printed on recycled paper with vegetable based dyes
Opinion
What is fiscal responsibility?
The Vernonia City Council continues to add or alter
resolutions to collect more money from citizens without
accountability – or maybe they’ve lost the ability to
count – again blindly raising rates and levying fees on
the recommendation (according to city staff) of the
Public Works Committee, although no documentation
justifying changes was provided from the committee.
In fact, no minutes from that committee have been pre-
sented to Council in the last five months (or longer;
that’s as far back as we looked).
On the other hand, when asked to change utility
rates to a usage-based structure, Council says they
can’t do that without a rate study. It seems they need
to have the city’s contract engineers do this study be-
fore they can determine how much it costs to provide
water and sewer services to citizens. They should be
able to pencil out an estimate of costs by looking at
historical data to see how much they have been
spending to get water to us. Yes, it would be a rough
estimate because some repair and replacement costs
need to be included and they probably don’t have the
expertise to calculate that part. But it would be at least
something to work from besides what appears, to most
citizens who have spoken to us, to be knee-jerk cost
raising.
Also, since the Council is worrying about how much
citizens should have to pay when they aren’t even us-
ing water and sewer ($10 per month plus turn on/off
fees, as of this week), isn’t it time they addressed the
“honor system” being used by people who fill up their
water tanks at the public works department? The ma-
jority of those who utilize this available water aren’t on
a city meter because they don’t live in the city.
Speaking of fiscal responsibility, we would like to
commend Interim Police Chief Mike Kay for finding a
less expensive (in fact, free) alternative to the high
tech ICOP in-car camera system that council had bud-
geted $8,700 to purchase. Unfortunately, instead of
putting the unused money back into the budget (still in
“dire financial shape”, right?), Kay asked to keep that
money for unspecified needs. Cindy Ball jumped to
make the motion for Kay to keep the money and Kevin
Hudson seconded, then council unanimously ap-
proved. We’re sure that quick approval is not because
Ball and Hudson are personal friends of Kay. After all,
later at the same meeting they learned all about ethics.
Ike Says…
By Dale Webb, member
Nehalem Valley Chapter, Izaak Walton League
Well, now we know
what it is like to dodge bul-
lets! After last winter I had
decided that wild weather
is not fun, now I’m sure of
it. This winter will go
down in the record books;
I have heard but not con-
firmed that the snowfall
this winter was the longest
on-ground event since the winter of ‘68-‘69 (I
counted 27 days locally). We had two rainfall
events that threatened to melt all that snow and
dump it through our town. Luckily the forecasts
were off enough to save our bacon.
The snowfall this year has been exceptional,
for the folks up in Timber it was unbelievable. I
have been told that the snow depth at the height
of the event was close to five feet. The elevation
at Timber is only 1,000 feet, so higher elevations
may have had more. I took some snow meas-
urements during the snow event, this is what I
observed: here at the house the highest depth I
measured was 18 inches; at 1300 feet elevation
on Clatskanie Mountain, I measured 25 inches,
when I got up to Timber late in the event, I meas-
ured a very condensed 18 inches. What is more
important than snow depth, though, is the water
content; this is what I found: Clatskanie Moun-
tain on Dec. 27 had 4.1 inches of water; Timber
on Jan. 6 had 5.4 inches; Vernonia on Jan. 6 had
2.25 inches, and Rock Creek at Longview Fi-
bre’s mainline had 3.6 inches of water content on
Jan. 6. It is the water content of the snow that
we need to worry about and, after the rain event
on Jan. 1-2, the snow was loaded with water.
The first rain-on-snow event, on Jan. 1-2,
failed to produce a flood due to several factors.
First, we did not get the wind that was predicted,
which could have scoured out the cold air and al-
lowed warmer air to melt the snow at a higher
rate. Second, the temperature in the Valley
stayed cold and the snow simply did not melt.
Thirdly, there was less rain than forecast and
there was a gap during the rainfall event, so we
did not get the anticipated rise in the river height
from the rain and definitely did not get a lot of
contribution from the snow water content. Were
we at a threat of flooding, most certainly, if all the
conditions had lined up we could very easily
have had a flood falling somewhere short of the
‘96 event.
The second rain-on-snow event on Jan. 7-8
had a larger bull’s-eye on us. We had high snow
water content thanks to the first rain event, the
forecast was for higher rainfall, wind, higher tem-
peratures, and the real killer – the river – was still
running high from the first event. We need to un-
derstand that the base of any flood event is the
beginning river height and, this time, it was two
feet higher than before any other recent flood
event. Fortunately, the rainfall simply did not live
up to the forecast. We finally got into the heavy
rain on the evening of Jan. 7 but, while it was
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