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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After years of public feedback and debate and last-minute protests in Salem, the Oregon Board of Forestry voted 4 to 3 on Thursday to advance the state’s habitat conservation plan.

The draft was developed to help the state stay in compliance with the federal Endangered Species Act, designating protected habitat areas across roughly 640,000 acres of state forests, primarily in Clatsop and Tillamook counties. Modeling estimates indicate that Clatsop County could lose up to 35% of its timber revenue as a result of the plan and stands to be the most financially impacted of any county in Oregon.

Thursday’s decision comes on the heels of a recommendation from State Forester Cal Mukumoto to take actions necessary to finalize the plan as drafted and to model management outcomes the board can use to discuss trade-offs and inform the setting of performance measure targets. As part of the process, the plan must be reviewed by federal agencies.

See the story by Olivia Palmer by clicking here.

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Law enforcement leaders on the North Coast are hopeful that potential changes to state law on drug possession and new money for treatment will provide tools that could make a difference in discouraging drug abuse.

Gov. Tina Kotek is preparing to sign House Bill 4002, which would make the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs a misdemeanor, undoing a key provision of Measure 110, which was passed by voters in 2020.

Clatsop County is among the counties that have agreed to pursue deflection programs that would give people who could be cited or arrested for drug possession the opportunity to seek treatment and divert them away from jail and the courts.

A companion bill would provide $211 million statewide toward treatment, deflection programs and other steps to confront drug abuse.

“We want people to get treatment,” Astoria Police Chief Stacy Kelly said. “If there’s somebody out there that wants treatment, they don’t need to be in jail, they need treatment. And I think this is going to give us a way to motivate people to go that way.”

Read the story by Jasmine Lewin by clicking here.

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On the first day of commercial Dungeness crab season, Kelsey Cutting began his morning the way most crab fishermen do: checking the weather.

At 5 a.m., the air in Ilwaco, Washington, was still — without so much as a breath of wind, Cutting recalls — but just offshore, a nearby buoy warned of towering swells. The fourth-generation crab fisherman decided to play it safe, keeping his crew onshore.

Around noon, they gathered at the boat again, still feeling no wind. This time, having already missed the first few hours of the season, they decided it was time to set out.

It didn’t take long before a bout of gusty weather set in.

“It was totally different once we got out there, and we were pretty much stuck there at that point,” Cutting said. “We missed the tide and we didn’t come in, so we just had to stay out there and deal with it.”

Like many commercial fishermen, Cutting relies on data from weather buoys at the mouth of the Columbia River to guide his decisions. But as he’s learned, not all weather buoys are created equal — and when one goes out, there can be serious consequences.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates two buoys at the mouth of the river that track real-time data on barometric pressure, wind direction, speed and gust, air and sea temperature, humidity and waves, which help inform National Weather Service forecasts.

The buoys have been out of operation since late last year. Although the Scripps Institution of Oceanography still has a working buoy at the mouth of the river, its data reporting is more limited, leaving commercial fishermen in a challenging and sometimes perilous guessing game about the weather.

Take a look at the report by Olivia Palmer by clicking here.

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— Derrick DePledge