Five area residents have been given the assignment to help make Hermiston more beautiful and livable.
Those five people, confirmed to the Community Enhancement Committee by the Hermiston City Council Monday night, are Phillip Scheurers, Phillip Spicer Kuhn, Billie Jean Morris, Debbie Pedro and Karen Zacharias.
The selections, said Hermiston Mayor Dave Drotzmann, were not easy. Drotzmann said there were 13 applicants for the five-seat committee.
“We interviewed multiple candidates over multiple nights,” he said. “We had a lot of willing people who wanted to serve on this committee.”
Councilor George Anderson, who is on the Vacancy Review Committee along with Drotzmann and Councilor Jackie Myers, said he was particularly pleased that several younger people applied for a seat on the committee.
“We had a lot of wonderful candidates – including some much younger people in the community and two of them were appointed,” he said. “We’re seeing younger people express an interest in serving the community, and that’s a healthy thing.”
Also on Monday, the council voted to approve a grant application to use $300,000 in Federal Aviation Administration funding to pay for engineering work for the Hermiston Airport’s taxiway re-alignment project. The city’s matching portion of the project would be $33,333. The city, however, would not have to pay anything if it is awarded a $300,000 Connect Oregon grant that was applied for back in December. The city won’t know if it gets the grant money until July. The engineering portion of the taxiway project will take place this year, with construction in 2015.
The council also voted to vacate a 100-foot section of Northwest Eighth Street. The street, located in the Butte Crest subdivision, was originally intended to connect West Alder Avenue to future development. The city will remove the existing asphalt and reconstruct the gutter and sidewalk along West Alder Avenue. Twenty-five feet of street right-of-way will be added to each adjacent lot to the east and west of the vacated street.
City Planner Clint Hurdle said the street, which does not provide any connections to the neighborhood’s street network, poses difficulties for the street department’s street sweepers to maneuver around because it does not have a cul-de-sac bulb.
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