>Baker City Herald | Baker County Oregon's News Leader

Bob Butler has had mixed success renting his Main Street building

Bob Butler has had mixed success with renting space in his building on Main Street. (Baker City Herald/Kathy Orr)

Butler, who’s now 39, remembers Baker City as a magical place where log trucks shared the wide streets with cars and bicycles.

He was in awe of downtown’s tall buildings made of brick and of stone quarried at Pleasant Valley.

Butler recalls how the ranch hands wearing cowboy hats and boots, and loggers in their steel-toed boots and hacked off pants held up with suspenders seemed larger than life as they climbed in and out of the pickup trucks, shopped in downtown stores, ate in downtown restaurants and exchanged stories of their day felling logs, breaking horses and mending fences.

Alice Trindle, holding antler, shares facts about elk with the Davis family from Utah — from left, Dalton, Miranda, Brooklyn, Lisa and Ethan. (Baker City Herald/KathyOrr)

“Oh, wow,” she says.

As she watches, the bulls emerge from the forest to join a herd of 150 Rocky Mountain elk already gathered at the Anthony Creek feed site west of North Powder.

These five look like they just awakened after a night of indulgence — they walk slowly, and one has frayed orange baling twine wrapped around his antlers like a wild party favor.

“He got into somebody’s haystack,” says Susan Triplett.

Triplett and Trindle, who own T&T Wildlife Tours, have for the past 18 winters offered horse-drawn rides at this feed site run by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

ODFW runs 10 feed sites along the base of the Elkhorn Mountains, a program, started in 1971, designed to keep hungry elk away from ranchers’ haystacks.

The Anthony Creek site is the only place where the public can see the elk up close and personal.

With natural gas prices having risen by 5.4 percent in Baker City on Nov. 1, weather-proofing a house to keep the cold out and the heat in can save on energy bills, but there are potential hazards when a house is made “too tight.”

Electric rates dropped by 0.68 percent for residential customers of Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative, and are up slightly for Idaho Power residential customers.

However, Todd VandenBos, manager of the new residential division at Oregon Power Solutions in Baker City, said higher electric rates based on peak demand have been adopted in some metro areas and are likely to hit Baker County at some point.

“We would like to help residents of Baker County and Eastern Oregon identify energy consumption problems and take care of them before this stuff kicks in,” VandenBos said.

 He said Oregon Power Solutions is the only company in Northeastern Oregon certified by the state to provide energy audits of homes and  businesses.

“We go into your home and test every system in your house,” VandenBos said. “Our report is about 80 pages long. It will tell you where your energy is going, what your biggest problems are and what your options are to fix it.”

Cattle groups are worried about potential regulations that could affect their industry in the coming year.(Baker City Herald/Kathy Orr)

“Some people are proposing a per-head tax on cattle for their perceived contributions to greenhouse gas,” said Bill Moore, president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association.

Moore, who raises between 1,000 and 1,100 head of Angus crossbred cattle near Unity in Baker County, said the cattle industry opposes a move afoot at the state and national level to tax digestive gases emitted by cattle.

“There’s quite a bit of activity on clean air and clean water,” Moore said. “The fear is that we might be facing some burdensome regulations.”

“We expect water law to be a big issue in the Legislature. There are some legislators who would like to rewrite Oregon law governing water rights from the headwaters to the ocean,” Moore said.

rice for generic cattle dropped by 40 cents a pound since summer, before rebounding slightly.(Baker City herald/Kathy Orr)

“The cattle industry is not immune to the economy. People are still eating a lot of meat, but they’re dining out less often, and at home they’re eating more ground beef and less rib steak,” said Bill Moore, who ranches in Baker County near Unity and is president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association.

This month, Baker City is losing one of its newer restaurants, the Fillin Station, due in part to a decline in people dining out.

Nationally, the Ruby Tuesday’s chain of steak houses announced it is closing 40 restaurants, and the Morton’s Steak House chain has shut down, said Ron Rowan, marketing manager for Beef Northwest feedlots headquartered in North Powder.  

Rowan said prices for generic cattle dropped from about $1.20 per pound in July to a low of 80 cents per pound a couple weeks ago, before edging back up to around 92 cents per pound on Monday.

Project could lead to five timber sales

A project up for public comment in the Snow Basin north of Richland calls for cutting Douglas-fir and other trees to reduce the threat of wildfire and improve growing conditions for native ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine and western larch.

The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest project is in the Little Eagle Creek and Eagle Creek Paddy subwatersheds.

The project area includes 27,680 acres of national forest lands, 281 acres owned by Baker County and 2,107 acres of private property, according to Steve Ellis, forest supervisor.

The Wallowa-Whitman plans to cut trees and do other work on 13,000 to 14,000 acres.

Snow Basin would be one of the larger logging projects on the Wallowa-Whitman in the past decade. The project could result in five separate timber sales, one per year starting in 2010, according to the notice the forest published in the Federal Register.

Those sales could produce an estimated 60 million to 70 million board-feet of timber, according to the notice.

Owners will close the store by March 31 if it’s not sold

Baker City Herald/Kathy Orr

In fact, they met in the late 1970s while attending a Marriage Encounter weekend with their spouses, Jay and Wade — an apt metaphor for forging a successful and lasting business partnership.

“A business partnership is like a marriage,” Ackerman said. “You stay in it during good times and bad, through thick and thin.”

But it’s all coming to a close by March 31 at the latest, when the business partners will either close their downtown store or have sold it to someone.

That’s when the lease expires on their building, at 1829 Main St. The women have had their business for sale for more than two years, but so far haven’t had any takers at the asking price of around $100,000, which includes all the store’s merchandise and fixtures, but not the building.

Reorganization efforts that helped double gift shop sales and restore the Visitor’s Center management contact were featured at Wednesday’s open house at the Baker County Chamber of Commerce.

 Executive Director Debi Bainter said the Chamber is wrapping up a successful autumn of changes highlighted at the open house, when visitors and chamber members toured the relocated gift shop and a new business conference center, and saw other changes.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., also stopped by to visit.

Planning is also under way for the Jan. 17 Chamber awards banquet, which honors Oregon’s Sesquicentennial (150th birthday) with a Western pioneering heritage theme of “Happy Trails.”

Bainter said the Chamber is looking for businesses wishing to a table for the banquet. Table decorating takes place Friday Jan. 16 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., or Saturday Jan. 17 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The Baker School Board’s Tuesday night work session took on a holiday air accented by the red sweaters, blouses and shirts of about 20 members of the district’s classified staff.

Bus drivers, cooks and maintenance workers and paraprofessionals turned out for a presentation by Victor Musial, the Oregon School Employees Association’s director of field operations. Musial traveled to Baker City to give the association’s perspective of contracting services currently provided by district employees.

“We were there in support of what Victor was presenting to the board,” said Ruth Woodworth, a Baker Middle School librarian and president of the Baker Chapter of the Oregon School Employees Association. “We wanted to show the faces of the people affected by contracting out.”

Musial told the board that the association had developed a PowerPoint presentation to address the issue after losing hundreds of jobs across the state to contracting.

“InSource Oregon was designed to educate people up front,” he said. “Everybody’s a stakeholder.”

The Northeast Oregon Economic Development District is seeking nominations for the second-annual Entrepreneur of the Year awards.

The awards give Baker, Union and Wallowa county residents the chance to recognize entrepreneurs or business owners who have contributed to the vibrancy of the community, said Lisa Dawson, NOEDD executive director.

 “Entrepreneurs add value and vitality to our communities with no guarantee of emotional or monetary payoff,” Dawson said. “We are devoted to offering citizens the opportunity to show their appreciation to entrepreneurs.”

Julie Mullen, project coordinator, said a winner will be chosen from each of the three counties.

Debi Bainter, executive director for the Baker County Chamber of Commerce, said the 2008 Entrepreneur of the Year award for Baker County will be presented at the chamber’s Jan. 17 awards banquet, along with legacy awards, Business of the Year and other awards.