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The office said officials ordered homeowners to pay $5,000 for tree removal, yet PP&R paid $15,000 to remove a Heritage Tree

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Portland’s ombudsman has criticized city officials for “inconsistently” determining who should cover the cost of tree removal.

In a release published on Thursday, the ombudsman’s office revealed the city ordered homeowners to pay to chop down a tree located 30 feet outside of their property line and “in an unimproved section of the public right-of-way.”

Simultaneously, the office reported that officials paid to remove an ancient elm tree primarily located on a real estate investment company’s private property.

The city watchdog first received the complaint from the Southwest Portland homeowners in April. The complainants said it cost around $5,000 to remove the tree that was within the city’s jurisdiction. They also alleged they couldn’t directly access it from their property, and they wouldn’t be able to insure against any future damage.

In an ensuing review, the ombudsman opined that the city’s provisions on property owner’s responsibilities for nearby trees were “poorly written and confusing.” The office claimed that Portland Parks and Recreation’s Urban Forestry division had a history of addressing these matters inconsistently.

Despite this, Deputy Ombudsman Andy Stevens noted the division rejected his recommendation to pay for tree removal in the Southwest Portland neighborhood in July 2024.

However, the office said Urban Forestry “readily took full financial responsibility” to rid the city of its oldest Heritage Tree — near the Portland Art Museum — the following month. Experts estimated removing this particular tree could cost about $15,000.

“The American Elm Heritage Tree had long been regarded as a private tree due to its location on private property and was maintained by the property owner, Schnitzer Properties,” the Ombudsman wrote. “Urban Forestry determined that a mere six inches of the tree’s more than 48-inch base had grown into the right-of-way and assumed full financial responsibility for its removal.”

Auditors additionally ruled that ordering the homeowners to pay for tree removal contradicts a previous decision from city leaders.

At a Portland City Council in 2017, commissioners decided against a city code amendment that would hold people accountable for maintaining trees within “unimproved or partially improved rights-of-way” near their land.

“How can the commissioners justify saddling homeowners with maintenance of large parcels of public land adjacent to their properties?” one resident wrote in testimony ahead of the meeting.

In response to Stevens’ findings, Portland Parks & Recreation said it recognizes city regulations on tree maintenance are “dense and complex.” Read the full statement below.

We know the City code about responsibility for street tree maintenance is dense and complex – and can be confusing. We appreciate the opportunity to review our process so we can ensure both equitable application of the policy and public safety.

After careful review of precedent, the history of frontage maintenance for the property, and comparison of code language for Heritage Trees versus street trees, we determined the tree removal at the SW Portland location is most appropriately the responsibility of the adjacent property owner.

We understand the right-of-way configuration is large, but the setback is not unusual for many places throughout the city. In this case, the property owner has a documented history of maintaining the frontage in question. Also, the tree in question does not threaten to injure public health or safety.

Heritage Trees are recognized for their unique significance and have special rules requiring the City to take care of them when they extend onto City property, like the American Elm Heritage Tree example used in the City Auditor’s report. However, the tree at the SW Portland location is not a Heritage Tree—it’s a street tree, and the responsibility for its care falls to the adjacent property owner, according to City code.

We know the code places a burden on property owners, and our Urban Forestry team has long supported a change that would give the City a greater role in street tree maintenance. We are excited and hopeful the recent allocation of Portland Clean Energy Fund dollars will expedite progress toward that goal.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — He’s the #1 high school prospect in the state of Oregon. And he’s got colleges and universities salivating to lure him to their school.  But the 2025 MLB Draft —13 months from now — may be his ticket to playing professionally.

Until then, the 6’8″ lefty is leading Sunset High School to a deep postseason run.  In his 2024 playoff opener, Kruz Schoolcraft struck out 15 as the Apollos defeated Liberty, 2-0.

Schoolcraft has been on baseball’s radar for the last 5-6 years. And that’s saying something. He comes from a baseball family. His dad is heavily invested in USA Baseball here in the Northwest.  And, he has a younger brother (Jett Schoolcraft) that was instrumental in helping the U.S. win the 12U World Championship in 2023.

Kruz Schoolcraft is planning to make his college tour this fall, before he eventually makes a decision on where he’ll attend.

That’s a big IF too.  Because at this rate, the steady lefty — who’s ranked as the 14^th best high school prospect in class of ’25 — is on pace to become a first-round MLB draft pick in June of 2025.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — The race for chair of the Clackamas County Board of Commissioners features two candidates with extensive political experience.

Incumbent Tootie Smith faces retired Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts in the May primary. Before winning the election for county chair in 2020, she served as a Clackamas County Commissioner from 2013 to 2016. 

The Position 4 seat, previously held by Smith, has been a game of musical chairs in recent years. Smith lost her reelection campaign to Ken Humberston in 2016. Humberston then lost his reelection bid in a runoff with current commissioner Mark Shull in 2020. Shull is now at risk of losing the seat after he reportedly posted racist, transphobic, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant views on social media.

Roberts served as Clackamas County Sheriff from January of 2005 to December of 2020. As a former sheriff, Roberts received an endorsement from the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association. However, Smith is backed by the Clackamas County Peace Officers Association President Ben Wiley and the local firefighters union.

The third candidate to enter the race is Clackamas County employee April Lambert, who also runs the local organization Yona’s Kids.

Clackamas County Board of Commissioners Position 1 candidates

• April Lambert: Clackamas County employee
• Craig Roberts: Former Clackamas County Sheriff
• Tootie Smith: Current Clackamas County Chair

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — The possibility of an In-N-Out coming to Washington County just got one step closer to becoming a reality.

A land use application to open an In-N-Out in the Beaverton area on Highway 10 has been approved. According to Washington County, the proposed fast food joint would include a 4,000-square-foot restaurant with a drive-thru and outdoor seating.

It would be located on Southwest 107th Avenue and Beaverton Hillsdale Highway.

The California-based chain’s application to build a drive-thru at 10565 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy — in unincorporated Washington County — was denied by an independent hearings officer in 2022, due to a land use issue.

A few afternoon showers are possible around Portland Friday afternoon and evening

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Milder temperatures return to the greater Portland-Vancouver metro area Friday after a frosty start to the day.

We’ll start the morning out dry with sun breaks that’ll continue into the afternoon. A few pop-up light rain showers are possible anytime after lunchtime today. Temperatures will warm back into the mid to upper 50s this afternoon as a warmer air mass shifts into the valley from the south.

Another cold front will swing through western Oregon and Washington Saturday morning. This latest spring front will increase the rain potential and knock temperatures back down into the low 50s Saturday. Scattered showers are expected to last through the end of the weekend.

The scattered rain showers Friday and more frequent showers Saturday will fill rain gauges to nearly a tenth to a quarter of an inch of rain by Saturday evening.

The wet weather trend will keep rain showers and cooler than average temperatures for the start of the Hillsboro Hops home games. The coolest and potentially wettest game will fall on Saturday.

The rain shower potential starts to decrease just in time for the partial solar eclipse Monday. A few clouds may make it difficult to see the eclipse at times around Portland. Drier and warmer weather continues to build by the middle of next week. Some afternoon highs are expected to return to the low to mid 70s by the end of next week.

Portland is at about the halfway point in its tri-governmental 90-day emergency declaration on fentanyl.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — People from all backgrounds are now working together as they tackle the fentanyl crisis and outreach workers say it’s going to take law enforcement, service providers, and local government working together to really fight this. For a long time, many of these groups have done separate work to fight the fentanyl crisis, but now, many of them are also working together to figure out a solution.

“Bringing us together in a room so that we can say, ‘hey, I have this, I have this capability. I’m just missing this piece and I know you actually have that piece, can we bring that together and make this work?’” PDX Saints Love executive director Kristle Delihanty said.

This week, government leaders, law enforcement, and service providers came together to see how they can help each other. Providers like PDX Saints Love say that while they work daily with those in the throes of addiction, more can be done, especially between the state, City of Portland, and Multnomah County – like creating an open referral process.

“The referral process for most of the services across the city are extremely siloed and so the referrals belong to contracted providers with the city. Not all of us who are doing this work are contracted with the city to do this work,” Delihanty said. “Having those, those housing systems, outreach systems and the health, that community health and the public health sector come together and all of us have access to those same referral systems and those same shelter beds, those same detox beds, is going to be one of the number one things that are going to help us.”

Delihanty says another part of the gap is communicating what areas are solely in need of outreach beyond Downtown Portland, like East County. 

On Thursday, KOIN 6 News got a look at the Rapid Needs Assessment Task Force, matching law enforcement with those doing outreach.

“We call the hotline that we have or someone from a nonprofit is dispatched out here and a team hopefully to talk to that person,” Portland Police Ofc. David Baer told KOIN 6 News.

Delihanty says, ultimately, it’ll take combined efforts like these to get a hold on this crisis.

“We are going to need collaboration. We’re never going to get out of this unless we take every piece to the puzzle and bring it together,” Delihanty said.

The 90-day unified fentanyl emergency declaration between the state, city, and county is about halfway through, but officials say much of the work being done during this timeframe will continue long after.

The moves comes in the wake of sexual harassment allegations leveled against DaBella’s CEO

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — A rainy Portland afternoon at Providence Park didn’t stop some fans from still making a trip to the official team store, especially as staff removed all the new merchandise and jerseys with the DaBella logo. 

“I felt so bad because he had just finished stocking everything the day before so I wanted to come in and see how he was doing because I knew he had a long day ahead of him,” Timbers fan Rocky Serna said.

As news spread of the Portland Timbers cutting ties with their newest sponsor DaBella, following sexual harassment allegations against the CEO, fans were quick to react. Some say while they’re glad the Timbers took swift action to end the sponsorship, they still feel some disappointment about the whole situation.

“It is unfortunate that the Timbers’ front office finds itself in this position, especially given the recent history with violence against women, workplace conduct, and their use of an agency to source sponsor in DaBella,” Sam Prince, a Timbers 107IST board member, said.

They also hope this won’t happen again.

“Anything like this makes you feel a bit more cautious that vetting didn’t capture this,” Prince said.

While jerseys and banners with the DaBella logo were taken down around Providence Park, inside, the name could still be seen throughout the stadium. With a match against DC United just days away, the race is on to take down the name and get team member jerseys ready in time, replacing the ones used just once in the season opener against Colorado over the weekend.

As fans wonder what to expect on Saturday, they do have some ideas as to who should be the next sponsor.

“For Saturday, we don’t even know if there can be a sponsor on the jerseys, so are we going to wear a blank jersey with just the names and numbers, not a sponsor? Do you wear a Dutch Bros warm up jersey? Printing the names and numbers isn’t an overnight thing. It takes a lot of time to iron on all those numbers and names,” Serna said, adding his hopes for the next sponsor. “Somebody local, obviously, doesn’t even have to be that massive, Tillamook or Dutch Bros even stepping up.”

One fan says that the team store is able to do jersey exchanges, but so far, the team has not announced any official plans for fans who recently ordered the new jerseys with the DaBella sponsorship logo.

The Oregon Medical Examiner’s Office said more cold cases could be re-examined with additional funding for genetic genealogy.

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — A break in a decades-long Oregon cold case has finally helped solve the identity of a young woman whose remains were found 54 years ago today. Investigators worked for decades to solve the mystery of the skeleton found in a shallow grave on Sauvie Island on Feb. 23, 1970. 

Forensic anthropologist Nici Vance started looking into the case back in 2004 when the State Medical Examiner’s Office took on many long-shelved cases. As DNA technology advanced, they started analyzing the remains.

“That DNA profile was loaded into this database, it was searching for many years since 2011, and just didn’t hit to any missing persons profile, any family reference profiles,” Vance said.

They were able to eventually analyze the DNA enough to see what she might’ve looked like, but still, there were not enough leads to get an answer as to who she was. When the Oregon State Police Medical Examiner’s Office received a national grant to start looking into these technologies, they were able to look at forensic genealogy data after seeing it used to catch the Golden State Killer. 

“We knew that this was a technology that could be utilized, not necessarily to find a suspect, but to identify these unidentified individuals that we had had in our facility some for decades,” Vance said. 

Years later, a match came in 2023 after a family member submitted their DNA to GEDmatch and detectives and scientists began to work with the potential family. Finally, this past year, they identified the girl as their teenage sister Sandra Young, a Grant High School student who went missing in the late 1960s.

“It was a good feeling. It’s bittersweet to find this first and last name of this young girl who had her whole life ahead of her,” Vance said.

Just like Young’s case for years, many remain unidentified – about 1% of medical examiner cases each year.

“They’re either recognizable or they’re skeletonized. We’ve performed certain analyses on them, but we can’t necessarily move the cases forward,” Vance said.

She adds that with continued advances in technology, they will continue to re-analyze cases and ultimately hope to get them back to their loved ones.

“I think our community needs to know that we’ll never give up on these cases,” Vance said.

There are still many cases here in the state yet to be solved and Vance says a lot of that will also come down to funding. Genetic genealogy casework and testing can cost around $6,000-$10,000 for each case.

Washington is among the hardest hit states when it comes to the fentanyl crisis

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — As leaders work to tackle the fentanyl crisis in Southwest Washington, officials met Friday to address the impact of fentanyl and overdose deaths in Cowlitz County. According to the CDC, Washington had the single-highest increase of reported drug overdose deaths among the states from August 2022-August 2023.

“I just turned 39. I’ve been an addict since I was 9 years old. I started with marijuana and it went to meth when I was 13. By the time I was 15, I was doing heroin,” John Nash, a recovering addict, said. “Six years ago, it went from heroin to fentanyl because of the availability and the thing with fentanyl is it does exactly what it was made to do.”

Nash’s story is just one of many highlighting the devastation of the drug crisis, especially as fentanyl sweeps the country.

“You were either heroin or meth, not both. And now we’re just seeing that everyone is doing fentanyl. There’s no distinction anymore,” Cowlitz Co. Corrections Director Marin Fox said. “We’re just literally trying to keep people alive and it’s harder than it’s ever been.”

On Friday, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, who serves Washington state, heard from officials and community members who deal directly with the fentanyl crisis.

“As one of the most impacted states, we need to do everything we can,” Sen. Cantwell said. 

Cantwell is currently working on efforts in Washington D.C. through the U.S. Senate, like the FEND Off Fentanyl Act.

“This is a really important piece of legislation because it helps us fight the actual drug cartels that are moving so much product into our country,” Cantwell said. “We have to disrupt the illicit flow of fentanyl in our country. We have to.”

But as some shared in Friday’s roundtable, fentanyl is also deeply rooted in communities across Washington state, much of it seen by first responders.

“Just under 3% of all overdoses in the state happened in the City of Longview in 2023, despite the fact that the City of Longview represents less than a half of 1% of the population,” Longview Fire Dept. Battalion Chief Eric Koreis said. “It’s very disproportionate here.”

It’s also felt by those working directly in the treatment field, as they urge elected officials like the senator to help fund and streamline solutions. Frank Morrison, CEO of CORE Health, lost his daughter to an overdose in August. Now, he’s working to help others who are struggling, like operating treatment shelters for everyone from kids to entire families.

“The average age they started was 11 years old. 80% of their family members used and their first substance was cannabis,” Morrison said while discussing some of the teens currently in treatment. “It’s been a long-standing generational thing where families and use is connected.”

As for Nash, these kinds of solutions have made a difference. He says he hadn’t had 30 days of sobriety at any point in his life since the age of 9, which makes this Saturday extra special.

“I celebrate a year clean tomorrow,” Nash told the room.

The FEND Off Fentanyl Act passed the U.S. Senate earlier this week. It’s now expected to head to the U.S. House for a vote.

ODOT advises anyone who must travel to check conditions first

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Oregon Dept. of Transportation officials are keeping a close eye as a winter storm system moves through the Columbia River Gorge, preparing to close I-84 if conditions worsen.

“The gorge really gets all kinds of different weather systems out there and gets a lot of different microclimates,” ODOT’s Don Hamilton said.

In advance of the latest winter storm making its way through the gorge, the Oregon Dept. of Transportation already started treating major roads like I-84 with de-icer in the days leading up.

“That’s the one thing we can do in advance of a storm coming down. We can’t really do anything like plow or sand or put salt on anything until something’s actually falling from the sky,” Hamilton said.

On Wednesday evening, much of the I-84 corridor past Troutdale mostly saw heavy rain or a slushy wintery mix, but in Hood River, snow started to fall. The Hood River Fire Department tells KOIN 6 they’re also prepared for conditions that may come through, calling the town “resilient.”

As for the road to Hood River and beyond, ODOT says if conditions worsen, they’re prepared to close I-84 at Troutdale if need-be.

“If we start to see trucks spinning out along in there, if we see dangerous conditions out there, we’re going to close that road,” Hamilton said. “We’re going to make sure that we can keep the roads safe.”

If you do have travel plans through the Cascades or the gorge during this winter weather system, ODOT advises checking TripCheck online for the latest road conditions and closures.

Detractors of the bill say parents and school boards should have a say in what material is deemed appropriate

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Many Oregonians are now divided over who has the say when it comes to what books are allowed in school libraries and classrooms. New legislation introduced this session aims to prevent so-called “book bans,” but not all are in support of it.

Just some of the arguments made during Tuesday’s committee hearing included: “stop messing with our kids,” “this is an important First Amendment and democracy issue,” “you’re chipping away at school board rights,” and “every student sees themselves in the curriculum.”

The education-focused bill is getting plenty of attention from both sides this legislative session.

“I’m basically trying to help Oregon avoid some of the nonsense that’s taking place in other parts of the country,” Sen. Lew Frederick, who represents north and northeast Portland, said.

Senate Bill 1583, introduced by the Oregon state senator, is aimed at preventing school boards or district officials from banning textbooks, instructional materials, or library books in moves that may be seen as discriminatory toward protected groups like people of color, LGBTQ+, religions, and others.

Sen. Frederick tells KOIN 6 he wanted to push protections forward after seeing efforts to remove or limit books in Oregon communities like Canby and Dayton.

“We have some folks in Oregon that are basically wanting to tell everyone else what everyone else’s kids can read and that’s not okay,” Frederick said.

Hundreds signed up for public testimony during Tuesday’s hearing. Some say they’re fully behind the bill and what it stands for.

“It’s essential that children see themselves in the stories that they read, but they should also read about people who are not like them,” Darin Stewart, president of Parents Defending Schools and Libraries, said. “People who live differently, who look differently, people who think differently.”

However, some spoke against the bill, urging the state to keep decisions surrounding materials in the hands of elected school boards — which Frederick says is a power that remains — this is just aimed at preventing discriminatory removals.

“Why would Oregon legislators want to further render school boards obsolete and strip them of important decisions,” Oregon City resident Angela Pederson said. “This bill conveys distrust and disrespect for parental and community involvement.”

Others say their issues are with what content may be allowed in books.

“What I have a problem with is putting sexually inappropriate materials in front of my children,” Albany resident Jeff Shaw said.

Others questioned why the bill is declared as an “emergency” with other pressing issues in the state and with schools like building conditions. KOIN 6 News asked Sen. Frederick why that is. He says they often put emergency clauses on bills and they’re currently working on other school-related issues this session, in addition to this bill. He added that he does believe this issue is an emergency, not wanting further “battles” over books with other more serious issues at hand.

Multiple amendments to SB 1583 were proposed on Tuesday. Lawmakers are next set to review it on Thursday.