WATERFRONT ORGANIZATIONS OF OREGON
P.O. Box 83296
Portland, OR 97283-0926
woooinc.org
SUBJECT: Annual Meeting - April 29, 2006
The meeting was called to order by President, Bob Wilson, at 7:00 p.m. He thanked everyone for coming and the following business was accomplished:
ATTENDEES:
The meeting was attended by 50 people, as well as representatives from the Multnomah County River Patrol.
MINUTES:
The minutes of the meeting of April, 23, 2005 were dispensed with since no one probably remembers them anyway.
TREASURER'S REPORT:
The Treasurer's Report was dispensed with. You can read it in the Meeting Minutes or on the web site at woooinc.org (which is up and running now).
BALLOT - 2007 BOARD OF DRECTORS:
Ballots were distributed at the door. Twenty four ballots were returned, which constituted a quorum. The Board of Directors for 2006-07 are as follows:
Bill Barrett Barrett Automotive & Marine
Bill Mackey The Islands Moorage
Missy Gerber Macadam Bay Club
David Grant Dikeside Moorage
Sue Gress Buoy 1 & Blue Frog Moorage
Dan Gulbrandson A-1 Moorage
Jan Hamer Rivers Bend Moorage
Jeff Ingebrigtsen Paradise Moorage
Peg Johnson Jantzen Beach Moorage
Mary Schutten Oregon Yacht Club
Carl Von Dreele Class Harbor Moorage
Bob Wilson Tyee Yacht Club
Alternate: Clark Caffall Combined Forestry and Marine Services
ADJOURNMENT:
Since there was no other business the formal meeting was adjourned at 7:30 p.m.
GUEST SPEAKER: (Lt. Monte Rieser, Multnomah County Sheriff River Patrol)
Bob introduced our guest speaker of the evening, Lt. Monte Reiser and noted that we are fortunate to have such a good rapport with our River Patrol. If there is anything anyone can do to help them, please do so.
MONTE RIESER:
"I do want to thank Waterfront Organizations of Oregon for having me back here for the annual dinner. It's always a pleasure to be a small part of your organization and, a couple of years ago when I first got promoted to Lieutenant, Carl Von Dreele….I hate to bring this up again. It was kind of an eye opener to get in the mail one afternoon, a letter from Carl and he basically, point blank, told me in a polite way in this letter that our River Patrol was not really reaching that level of exemplary service that we have in our mission statement. He had questions about our productivity, some issues about wake complaints and a few other things that really grabbed my attention, and with that he invited me to a meeting where I discussed some of the reasons why we had kind of a deficiency in our performance and I shared a few things with the State Marine Board who was also present at that meeting and from there really brought back a focus to the River Patrol Unit to change our direction and the mind set of the way we wanted to go.
I am happy to say that we did make a lot of improvements and in the Fall of 2004 we received the Most Improved Marine Program in the State award. That was really gratifying and we have also received some quite prestigious awards both at the Marine Academy and locally, so…..
APPLAUSE!
Thank you. I appreciate that and I think it shows how community groups can have an affect on public agencies. It made me feel like we hold some accountability. We have to be accountable to everybody on the water. So tonight I would like to present a little overview of the River Patrol, where we are now, where we have been over the past 45 years that we have been around
and a little bit about our future.
The deputies were kind enough to bring about a dozen or so children's life jackets that we would like to give away if there is an interest so please contact them after the presentation and we might have time for a short ride on Liberty also and please take a look at the pilot house if you get a chance.
Our mission is basically to protect and serve the citizens. We care a lot about livability issues. We kind of take a problem-oriented policing approach to problems in the community. As part of that, something that I am very proud of is, we really engage in the community policing aspect of the community, for example, we had an incident down in the local marinas where we had a significant methamphetamine, stolen vessel, and all kinds of crime happening and with the joint
MONTE REISER (Continued)
effort of the Portland Fire Bureau we were able to develop a response plan that has been quite effective this past season.
Basically our beginning in 1958 with the passing of the Boating Act, or the Bonner Act was the legislation that gave monies to the states to enact laws to create timely registration fees. That brought money into the state and shortly thereafter in 1959 the State Marine Board was formed. We were able to dig up some old documents that show a lot of our history at the River Patrol.
We have Deputy LeRoy Graeme here. Some of you may know him. He was on the river for about 32 years I think it was and he retired about five or six years ago.
We are getting ready to decommission the boat that he had built in Bellingham in 1979. We are going to be decommissioning that on May 6, at the opening day of yachting season as part of their agenda.
There is the boat ramp at 42nd street. A couple of the older boats from 1964. Deputy Fred Perce, you may know that name. He was the sheriff back in the late 70's, early 80's and just some more shots of our 42nd street ramp.
The Oregon State Marine Board was established in 1959, with a governing board of five governor appointed and senate confirmed members and they have the authority to enact rules for boating operations and are funded by boat registration fees which they increased here a few years ago significantly, bringing in some more revenue for them. They promote safe boating through informational brochures, boating safety courses and our rule is that we are very closely connected with our friends at the Oregon State Marine Board in a number of different avenues, but basically our function is boating law enforcement, emergency medical boat assistance, boating and water safety education, boating inspections and search and rescue on more than one hundred miles of waterways in Multnomah County. Most of our vessels have fire suppression pumps on them.
This is the McGuire Island boat fire that happened here a couple of weeks ago, you may have heard about. Fire Boat 860 from the Portland Fire Dept. was assisting on that.
Hope I don't offend anybody but that is an actual deceased person on the bottom of the Willamette River and that was about a year and a half ago, just an image from a side scan sonar device and that was about a $30,000 purchase through Homeland Security. It is a terrific tool and allows our deputies to take a look at underwater specimens and prevents us at time from diving when we really don't need to. We find fish on occasion.
LAUGHTER!
Here is a multi-agency response with our dive team. We work closely with the Portland Fire Rescue Team on a number of dives and occasionally we try to assist boaters that are stranded out in the channels and get them to a safe moorage.
MONTE REISER (Continued)
Here's Deputy Erickson on the Sandy River in our Boat #6 which is a 19 foot jet sled that was purchased for us by the Oregon State Marine Board.
And some more photographs. This was taken this past year. That is not a 50 caliber rifle
on the back of the boat. It is a replica that was added for purposes of this photograph. We actually have that boat on loan right now to Columbia County.
We are the largest marine program in the State of Oregon consisting of eight deputies year-round. I am the Lieutenant and I have one Sergeant. We used to have another Sergeant, but we lost that position in 2002. That's just a photograph of our barge, Boat #12. We use that for dive operations and for placing the buoys.
And our season on a good budget year, which hasn't happened in a while. We try to have eight deputies. I am not sure what is happening this year; potentially some budget cuts and I am hoping to get at least five additional deputies.
Some more photographs of our resources, that Boat #22, a 22 ft. Seasport. We have three Seasports that were purchased in the mid-90's by the Oregon State Marine Board: and Boat #9, which is the Osprey. We operate under approximately a $1.5 million dollar budget, about a third of that comes from the Oregon State Marine Board. Here are a couple of jet skis that were donated to us as a result of….if you remember the accident on the Morrison Street Bridge, the gal that went over into the water…a man in Beaverton gave us the jet skis that we painted, and they are a great tool for us.
Some of the key locations where we cite people on the Columbia for no-wake violations are North Portland Harbor, that's probably the number one location this past year, 42nd boat ramp of course and then the Multnomah Channel.
We did a little project a couple years ago in 2004 where we took a look at those Boat Examination Reports and looked at the zip codes on those to get a better feel for where the boating public comes from and about 60% come from Multnomah County and we were a little bit surprised by nearly 16% in Clackamas and it is always kind a question that I have for the Sate Marine Board is how the monies are disbursed in the State and if there is any consideration for either Washington County boaters that use the Columbia which is a majority of our boat traffic and any other areas. I am working with them trying to get some additional revenue from that.
9/11 changed the way we do things of course and if anything good came out of that awful event it was the fact that we are communicating a lot better as agencies with the big events should they happen. We do a lot of tabletop exercises and water exercises and really have a good partnership, generally speaking, with most all of the agencies on the waterways. Our communication is a lot better than it was six or seven years ago.
In 2005 we had about ten drownings. We average about 10 to 15 drownings per year in Multnomah County. I would say 60% or 70% of those are suicides off bridges. We usually get one or two fatal boating accidents per year.
MONTE REISER (Continued)
Some of the events that we participate in are the Portland Boat Show, the Sportsman Show, the Sturgeon Derbys and we always try to market the agency and market boating safety for children mainly and give people a general idea of what we do. Something we focused on last year was getting some volunteers from the Oregon State Marine Board and placing them at highly populated boat ramps and getting the education message out to folks, doing a loaner life jacket program and trying to get some participation from some of the local businesses to supply life jackets. We are very involved in the 4th of July with the local marine agencies; Cinco Di Mayo, we have Dragon Boat Races, Christmas Ships (we have a very good partnership with them) with Jess Heitman over the years, and of course fleet week is coming up here on June 8th, and if you didn't know, we bring in about ten to twelve different agencies throughout the state. Marine agencies with their boats and set up a security zone in front of the ships which is basically like a highway work zone. We keep people from entering and then we escort them through. We used to do a lot of searches on those boats but that has tapered down since a couple of years after 9/11.
Our activities last year: 16 classes, 22,000 students might seem a little tainted. We take credit for using the local cable access television. We did a half hour show on that and they gave us an estimate.
There's our one and only hero, Rocky Graziano. He's a terrific guy. He just won our Deputy of the Year Award for his hard work on the River Patrol Unit. He went to a bunch of schools this past year and dressed up in this super-hero uniform.
So some of the agencies that we work with, and we are closest to, are the United State Coast Guard, the Portland Fire Bureau and Portland Police as well as Gresham Fire Bureau. We are very involved in the media and this past year, as a result of the River Patrol Advisory Board we decided to do kind of a season-end review and let everybody know the good works of all agencies around Multnomah County and we held that at the Portland Yacht Club.
This was on the news not too long ago, the Empress of the North kind of taking a little bit wide turn there by Camas. We responded to that with the Coast Guard and the Portland Fire Bureau.
There is the Columbia River Office and I say project on there, because it is a project for us. We are in a 1963 building that is really too small for us and really too small for the mechanic who now works on the boats like the Liberty instead of those 1963 run-about boats. We are working right now with Metro trying to organize a project to hopefully either have a new building built for us or trying to partner with another agency in getting something done.
You are wondering why we have a picture of a Canadian Goose there, but if you look behind it you can see our Willamette Office down at 2200 NW Front near the Fremont Bridge, and the christening of the Freedom which happened a year ago July, my wife sang the National Anthem for that and we had Senator's Smith and Wyden attend that one and it was just a terrific experience for me helping to organize that as well as Liberty. The christenings were a lot of work. We had the Rear Admiral of the U.S. Coast Guard, Jeffery Garret give a speech and his wife christen the boat for us and there is the young man who named the boat. We tried to
MONTE REISER (Continued)
involve the Police Activities League, the Community Transitional School in Portland and the Portland Public Schools in doing a drawing and naming contest using patriotic themes and it was really neat. For the holiday season we brought in the B. Cleary. We had the boat named by the Community Transitional School with a boat naming contest and Beverly Cleary, the children's author, who grew up in Yamhill County, she's just a great lady. I talked to her on the phone and she was the Sheriff's favorite author growing up so that entry won the award and that is just a terrific boat for us, a 28 ft. Donzie purchased by the Oregon State Marine Board.
I would like to have Brad Howton come up and talk just for a few minutes about our River Planning Committee. Brad has been doing a terrific job facilitating this meeting and he would like to share a few things."
APPLAUSE
BRAD HOWTON (Columbia Crossings)
"Thank you! Both Monte and I are participating in a task force that was put together about a month ago that's operating on a very short schedule. We literally had two months to review all of the public safety services that are provided on the Columbia and Willamette Rivers and inventory their assets and services that they provide to put together a proposal that will be presented to both the Portland City Council and the Multnomah County Council for strategies to make the delivery of those services more efficient. Monte referred to a budget problem that the County is involved with and that budget problem of course stretches over almost all the public safety services that are provided in Portland and Multnomah County right now.
This program has support from the Sheriff, from the Portland Council and also from the Multnomah County Council and the expectation is that when we are done we will have a strategy put together that will help to improve the response efficiency, the availability of services and at the same time reduce overall costs. In the long run the City and County would like to get to the point where they provide a single plan and a single budget for services provided on the rivers and allocate that out to the individual agencies based on their responsibility. It's really quite a big shift, especially for a community where there is a strong dividing line between County and City governments. Some of the other metropolitan areas that we have looked at the dividing line is not quite so clear and it has been a little easier to get some cooperation.
I'm pretty enthusiastic and optimistic about the outcome that we are going to see here. When we started all this about six weeks or so ago it seemed like an overwhelming task and something that we weren't going to get any good out of but my guess is that there will be something good out of this.
It's going to require some effort from the backside as well. We don't want this to just sit in a box somewhere, never to be seen again, so we may actually ask this organization to kind of kick hind ends for us once we get moving. Any questions about it? Has anyone heard about it so far? Alright, that's it, short and sweet!"
APPLAUSE:
MONTE REISER:
So again I want to thank you for inviting me back to your annual dinner. We did bring the boat here and if you have any questions for me or any of the deputies, please feel free. Make sure you grab a life jacket if you need one. I'll just say that part of our mission statement of the Sheriff's Office is to provide that exemplary service and we take that serious in defining going beyond the expectations of the customer, You, and we look forward to doing that in 2006, this summer and into the future. So thank you very much. Take care!"
APPLAUSE-APPLAUSE
BOB WILSON:
We would like you to look at their boat and see what's going on. We'll take a little bit of time to do that and then we will have the raffle and get that out of your life. You know how you wait somewhere and the last thing they do is the raffle. Well, we are going to do the raffle before we do the dancing. So it's not a threat, it's a warning.
But I do want to thank all the members of the River Patrol because it's always informative and interesting when they come to our meetings and I want to thank you for coming here and enjoying the food with us and we hope that if you have interests or questions about anything you will come to one of our Board meetings and express those interests and we will try to help you to the best of our meager ability. We have our fingers in a lot of different pots right now and there is a lot of stuff going on with River Plans and River Renaissance and you know, is there any water in the river and all those things and we are trying to deal with all of them and we can always use help from other people to serve on the Board with us.
Thank you very much, enjoy the rest of the evening!
Respectfully submitted:
Jean McNulty, Secretary
Waterfront Organizations of Oregon
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