New Year’s Update from Union County Commissioner Donna Beverage
By Garrett Christensen on Thursday, January 5th, 2023 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
UNION COUNTY – Elkhorn Media Group’s Garret Christensen recently met with Union County Commissioner Donna Beverage to discuss the various projects and goals of the Union County Commissioners and what progress was made during 2022. The following transcript includes the major updates discussed during the meeting.
(GC): “Generally, what kind of projects and plans have the commissioners been working on as of late?”
(DB): “Every year I go over my goals for the year. Because this is the beginning of the new year, I thought I would talk about our goals for last year and how far we came along on those.”
“The first one is the Baum Industrial Park which is located on the way to Imbler. Six years ago, when I started out, we had sixty acres of industrial land. We’ve had several existing businesses in Union County come and want to expand out there. We are now down to about nine acres, which is a good thing, it means businesses are expanding, but we are also now looking for more industrial or commercial land where if a business comes to me, I can steer them that direction. So, we have nine acres left of that and I’m hoping a couple of business in Union County will either expand or come on out and finish up the industrial park.”
“Working on place-based water planning, which I started when I first became a commissioner six years ago. The state of Oregon OWRD had four pilot projects to do place-based water planning, which means local planning for your needs. We’ve been working on that for six years with a diverse group of people; state agencies, federal agencies, local farmers and ranchers, people that care about fish. We have about twenty-five people that have been coming to those meetings and we’ve finished the planning and now we’re working on implementation. So, we’re pretty excited to be moving forward with some ideas on how we can implement and help water. What we’ve found out is, in Union County we have in the spring maybe too much water when it comes off really fast and we have some flooding and that kind of thing, but when we get to August and September, we don’t have enough water. We don’t have enough water for fish, agriculture, that kind of thing. We’ve got some goals for that and we’re working on that now.
“Buffalo Peak Golf Course. When I first became a commissioner six years ago, we were really struggling. The background on that is, the City of Union started it and we’re unable to make the payments. So over twenty years ago, the county stepped in and took over those loans, so we’re having to pay that back to the state. In the last six years we have revamped how our staff is out there, revamped the loan we have with the state, make sure we’ve had a fixed rate. So, one of my goals this year was to have more revenue and that has happened, it’s probably triple what it was two years ago so we’re thankful for that.”
(GC): “I Didn’t realize Buffalo Peak was County run”
(DB): “So the city of Union started it. They do put their wastewater on the golf course. That was the reason that the city of Union bought it and started was they had a need to put their waste somewhere and they still put their wastewater there. We do partner with Union still in order for them to get rid of their wastewater onto the golf course. It’s actually cleaned and put into a pond before we put it on the golf course. So, it’s good for the city of Union and for us also. But, yeah, we’ve been able to really get a lot more people using it. So, we have no plans that I’m working on this year which are basically upgrading the irrigation and that kind of thing. We’re on our way to maybe making that place pay for itself.”
“Another goal I had for this year was to do a business summit. I’ve been doing that every other year. This year I was excited to work with Timothy from the city of La Grande and OTEC and EOAlive and we worked together and what we do is we bring together all the entities that can help with business to do presentations. We were able to videotape that and if a business comes in and says, ‘I have a need for this’ we can give them a master list of all the different entities that can help them and we can also show them that video of the presentations that could help with, for example, maybe you need energy assistance, or maybe you need more employees, or maybe you need help with taxes or funding. So, we put together a list of all the people that would be able to help you. In most cases, your tax money is already paying for that so most of those entities can help you for free. Well, not necessarily free but you’ve already paid for it with your tax money. It’s a good thing and we had it up at the Blue Mountain Conference Center. I figure every other year we need to renew that because they’ll be different people working or updating.
“And part of that water planning is, what we found out was a need is there’s so many stage agencies that have information that have information about our water and data, but they don’t know what the other one has because we’re not communicating. So, what’s come out of that is we’re hopefully going to be putting together a state water data portal, which means every state agency, federal agency, whatever data they have it’ll be in this one spot and it’ll be available to each other and the public to see what data we have and what kind of data we need.”
“Another thing we learned from that water planning is we don’t know what our groundwater situation is in Union County so we’re hoping to start some groundwater studies, so we know what we’re dealing with as far as whether we need more water, whether we’re losing water, that kind of thing. So that’s been a data gap.”
(GC): “Alrighty, I think that covers all the main areas. Are there any other projects or updates you’d like to share.”
(DB): “A goal of the commissioners has always been to make sure that we’re communicating with our constituents and also with all the cities in Union County. A couple of things that we do is we have a mayor meeting. We switch out which commissioner is there, where we meet all the new mayors, and we’re able to visit about different issues like, ‘hey, we’re having a water problem, this is what we did. Did that work for you?’ where they can kind of share information and also get to know each other. So, in case they do have an emergency instead of buying a piece of equipment they could maybe find out, ‘oh, well that city has that piece of equipment, and I could borrow it from them. So that’s important.”
“And each commissioner is a liaison to a different city, so I’m liaison to Cove, Union and North Powder and commissioner Anders’ Imbler and Elgin and then commissioner Scarfo Summerville and La Grande and Island City. That doesn’t mean that we can’t go to other meetings, but we try to stay in touch with the cities that we are a liaison to see if there’s anything we might be able to partner with on them or help them with. To us it’s really important because we don’t want to be an island on ourselves. We want to work together for the whole county. Communication is very key; we don’t just want to sit in our office and not ever talk to anybody else in the county…we enjoy working with the county and I can just say that we really care about our county and would like to see it thriving.”
