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