By DANA TIMS/YachatsNews.com
Sam Hillman, by all accounts, has been a whirlwind in his first months as an intern helping the city of Yachats complete ambitious, long-term plans for identifying future sources of drinking water.
Now, with the aid of a $243,500 grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, a long-time Northwest charitable foundation, he’s about to get some help.
Eugene-based McKenzie River Trust will use the grant to hire someone for a three-year position that will help Yachats, other communities on the central Oregon coast and environmental groups with water planning and other tasks.
The new hire will be involved in everything from working with landowners who want to establish permanent environmental easements across their properties to identifying new drinking water sources and recreational opportunities, said Joe Moll, McKenzie River Trust’s executive director.
“The coast is a unique geography with unique challenges and opportunities,” Moll said. “We’re very excited to announce this new position, which will help enhance many of those.”
The new hire also represents a significant realization of the trust’s long-held plans to extend its reach beyond the McKenzie River valley east of Eugene to the central Oregon coast.
That extension was made all the more necessary, Moll said, after another environmental group – the Central Coast Land Conservancy – lost its funding several years ago. That left parts of the central coast without critical environmental advocacy, even though four existing permanent easements in the area still needed tending.
The group, which is still technically in existence, is working to transfer monitoring of the easements, which are in the Yaquina River watershed, to the McKenzie River Trust.
Having a new staff member living on the coast will make tasks such as that far easier, Moll said.
“We’ve always had Eugene as our base, but that’s proved really limiting,” he said. “It meant that every time we had to attending a meeting with a group or city on the coast, someone had to drive all the way there and back.”
The trust is also contributing to Hillman’s work in Yachats, where he is serving an 11-month-long position as a Resource Assistance for Rural Environments volunteer.
RARE, an AmeriCorps program administered by the University of Oregon, aims to increase the capacity of rural communities to improve their economic, social and environmental conditions. In doing that, it places trained, graduate-level members in areas needing assistance in a variety of areas.
Hillman’s placement came about after members of View the Future, a Yachats conservation nonprofit, began talking with the McKenzie River Trust. After learning more about the university’s RARE program, the two groups approached the city of Yachats to see if all three were interested in sponsoring a RARE intern for a year-long stay to help with water planning.
Now, taken together with the prospects of the trust’s new three-year coastal hire, those groups say environmental planning on the central coast is taking on important new momentum.
“Having that presence and strength of the McKenzie River Trust and its board will be huge for us,” said John Purcell, View the Future’s co-chair. “And it’s not stretching anything to say that part of the reason they will be playing a larger role on the central coast is partly due to Sam’s efforts out here.”
The Murdock grant will pay for program start-up costs, staff salary, benefits, travel and related expenses, Moll said.
Timing of the grant couldn’t be better, he added, given that the city of Yachats currently is updating its water protection plan.
“Our goal right now is to do anything we can to help with management and stewardship of projects like that,” Moll said. “That’s the core of what we do.”
- Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to YachatsNews.com. He can be reached at DanaTims24@gmail.com