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About The independent. (Vernonia, Or.) 1986-current | View Entire Issue (April 1, 2010)
Page 2 The INDEPENDENT, April 1, 2010 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 Are good things coming? March, usually a month when very little is going on in Ver- nonia, has been a month of many new and potentially posi- tive beginnings. Earlier this year, the City of Vernonia (well, really City Ad- ministrator Bob Young) brought Paul Koch to town. Koch is a consultant who has done lots of work with councils on strategic planning, training, downtown development and the like. Koch looked at the five or so ‘visioning’ efforts that have occurred since 1996 and been shelved, and then spent three days asking questions. He talked to city staff, council and committee (and commission) members, business own- ers, organization leaders, and community members. Then the meetings started. There have been meetings on the city’s vision, mission, and strategic plan. There have been meetings with city staff, council members and downtown business owners. The results so far have been fairly amazing. After two meetings, he has vision, mission, strategic initiatives, and value statements ready for a final look-through at the April 5 council meeting. These products include lots of statements about working more closely with community, more citizen in- volvement in council decision-making, listening to citizens, customer service, etc. Once finalized, the statements are scheduled to be adopted at the April 19 council meeting. The proof will be in the pudding, as they say, when we all see if there are any changes in attitude by staff and council as a result of these efforts. Another area Koch has been working on is downtown re- vitalization. After meeting with a group of downtown busi- ness owners and walking through options and information with Koch, the downtown business owners formed a new Downtown Association to work with the Economic Develop- ment Committee and the city on downtown enhancements as part of economic development. Again, it will take a while to see if that good start gives positive results. See related ar- ticle on page 4. Another possible beginning came from discussions and presentations by Catherine Mater from the Pinchot Institute in Washington, D.C. (see article on page 1). Wouldn’t it be something if Vernonia became a living laboratory for new uses for forest products? After starting out with area pio- neers cutting trees to make farm land, then the O-A Mill op- erating while trees were cut for lumber, becoming a town- wide forest products sustainability project seems somehow like the town coming full circle, with the potential added ben- efit of a cheap fuel source: pellets made from the unwanted waste wood that is left when forests are logged off or selec- tively logged for other wood products. Well, spring and new beginnings go together. Keep watching. Ike Says… By Dale Webb, member Nehalem Valley Chapter, Izaak Walton League I started my official hunting career in 1968 at the age of 12. I had hunt- ed squirrels and a lot of tweety birds up to that point, but for big game an- imals in Oregon you had to be 12. My first deer hunt was for Mule deer in the Eastern Oregon Mur- derers Creek unit and there were a lot of deer, nobody came home empty handed that year. Times have changed since 1968. Big game populations are considerably lower across the state with just a few exceptions. Tag numbers are far more restricted, and being able to hunt your favorite unit year after year has long passed. Not being able to hunt in a favorite spot has hurt many family traditions and, in turn, has hurt the introduction of young hunters into the sport. With this in mind, both sportsmen groups and ODF&W have pushed for more youth hunts and the introduction of mentored hunts. Most of the youth hunts have been late hunts for deer or elk, after the regular hunting seasons, and provided a limited quality hunt on antlerless animals. The mentoring program opened the door to a better youth opportunity in that an adult provides their tag so a youth could hunt during the regular season and youth could start at the age of 9. Holding back these youth hunts, however, were low game populations that still made getting youth into great hunts a hard proposition. The latest addition to youth hunts is an antler- less elk hunt that is spread all across Oregon’s hunting units and provides a small number of tags in each unit. To help the success rate and provide more opportunity to youth who are active in school sports programs, the time for most of these youth hunts will run from August 1st to De- cember 31st. At first glance these hunts look like a good deal, then one begins to think. Killing cow elk starting August 1st will put cow elk with calves at risk. Many sportspeople started to question whether this is a wise thing to do. While many of us like to hunt and kill game ani- mals every year, we do not like to see unneces- sary suffering of our prey. Making a clean and ethical kill is a goal of any sportsperson, but hav- ing a cow hunt that may leave orphan calves be- hind will almost ensure the calf will die a slow death from starvation. When ODF&W was questioned about the ear- ly hunts, their defense was that there are a lot more early August cow hunts for adults and, to put it bluntly, an indifference to the low number of calves that will be orphaned. Many sportspeo- ple then started to question the necessity of any of these August elk hunts and even the question of harvesting cow elk during the early part of archery season. Simply put, the new youth hunts were a cata- Please see page 21