Thank you for your interest in reading The Astorian. Here are a few stories that you might have missed this week:

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Clatsop County has been drawn into Oregon’s public defender crisis.

The abrupt departure of an Astoria defense attorney this summer left dozens of criminal defendants without an attorney.

The county does not have a public defenders’ office and instead uses a consortium contract with private defense attorneys.

A crisis plan reported that the attorney who left had over 70 active cases, including 13 defendants in custody.

The county has been able to find attorneys for all defendants in custody. As of Friday morning, though, 61 criminal defendants lacked counsel.

The state has scrambled for the past few years to address a shortage of public defenders and meet the constitutional requirement under the Sixth Amendment to provide criminal defendants with attorneys.

See the story by Jasmine Lewin by clicking here.

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Measure 110, Oregon’s landmark drug decriminalization law, is under scrutiny statewide.

The idea behind Measure 110 is to emphasize drug treatment over criminal punishment, but the application of the law has been uneven across the state.

A review by The Astorian found contrasting approaches to the law among law enforcement on the North Coast. And, so far, the grant money that has reached Clatsop County has not significantly improved access to inpatient treatment — the most pressing need in a region that has long had higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse.

“Measure 110 is complicated because in some ways everybody’s right,” said Amy Baker, the executive director of Clatsop Behavioral Healthcare, the county’s mental health and substance abuse treatment provider. “I don’t think anybody thinks jail is the right treatment place for people who have a serious addiction. But the loss of that as an option has meant that people — their continued use is happening with fewer breaks because of those arrests.”

Read the story by Nicole Bales by clicking here.

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After a long wait, Saddle Mountain has welcomed back visitors.

The trail, a strenuous route that clocks in at about 2.5 miles each way with over 1,600 feet of elevation gain, has been inaccessible for most of the past three years aside from a brief window in 2021.

The park had a targeted reopening date of early August, but further delays set park management back a month. There is still more work to be done in the coming months.

“We’re going to continue working up there,” said Ben Cox, park manager at the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department’s Nehalem Bay Management Unit, which oversees Saddle Mountain. “But we felt confident in the work that we had already completed that people could come and enjoy, get a little bit of the recreation season, salvage the last month or two.”

Take a look at the report by Rebecca Norden-Bright by clicking here.

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— Derrick DePledge