Darcy Jones, who is running for position number two on the Tillamook County Board of Commissioners, recently sat down with the Headlight Herald to discuss his campaign.
Jones’s top priority as commissioner would be overhauling the county’s building department, which he says is a hindrance to development. Jones also mentioned pressuring state and federal agencies on natural resource issues, increasing county revenues and decreasing services for the county’s homeless population in the interview.
“My biggest motivation is really the building department,” Jones said, “I want to make it more efficient. It’s stalling the whole county in a lot of ways, the planning, zoning and the building department. We’re just at a total stall here in Tillamook County.”
Jones is a lifelong resident of south Tillamook County and recently celebrated his 66th birthday in early April.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Jones began to work as an excavation contractor part-time at the age of 14 and eventually opened his own business in 1992. Since that time, Jones has been involved in a wide swath of projects including development work on South Beach Road in Neskowin and in several subdivisions in Pacific City.
“To me it’s rewarding because you can always see what you’ve created,” Jones said of his work as an excavator.
Jones also served for 16 years on the school boards of the Hebo School District then the Nestucca Valley School District following those districts’ merger. He has also served on the county’s roads advisory committee.
In recent years, Jones said that he noticed delays in the Tillamook building department’s processing of applications as compared to other nearby jurisdictions, which eventually led to his decision to run for the board of commissioners. Jones said that a process that would take days in other counties in Oregon was taking multiple months in Tillamook.
Jones believes that the issues in the department are being caused by staffers being inefficient with their time and that he would direct the department’s head to process applications in less than a week.
“I can give the head of that department a plan of assistance and a timeline that those will be done in,” Jones said.
Removing the impediments to development presented by the building department’s slow pace is key to helping support the county’s tourist economy by paving the way for additional housing for employees, according to Jones.
“To me the biggest thing we can do is we need to promote more tourism-oriented small business and we need to get some lower-income housing built,” Jones said. “Right now, with the way the building department is, it’s just not a doable thing, we need to change that. To me that’s a big focus we can actually do.”
Jones also bemoaned the decrease in local fish populations, saying that he believed the decrease had been caused by the discontinuation of a fish-box program that was previously administered by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) across the county. Jones said that he would favor seeing the return of the program and that if elected, he would try to pressure ODFW to bring it back.
“I really don’t know what influence we have and I think all we can really do is put pressure on fish and wildlife,” Jones said.
On the subject of timber and the recently approved habitat conservation plan (HCP), Jones said that he felt the county needed to continue fighting to derail the plan’s progress. He mentioned joining a lawsuit that was recently filed against the department of forestry by the Jewell School District seeking to block the HCP and the possibility of hiring a publicist to increase awareness outside the county.
Jones said that the impacts of revenue decreases under the HCP were also a major concern as the county looks forward. He said that it would be difficult for the county to support its budget with current revenue but did not offer a solution.
“I really don’t have an answer for that but as commissioners I think we have the power to change our tax structure, we should have a way to change it,” Jones said, without offering more details.
Jones mentioned that he thought the model of funding the county’s public works department with transient lodging tax revenues wasn’t working and that he would favor funding them through property taxes.
Jones also criticized the current county leadership’s approach to the homeless population, saying that programs offered by Community Action Resource Enterprises was enabling homeless residents’ lifestyle. “All you’re doing is giving them supplies so that they can spend their money on drugs while you’re giving them supplies,” Jones said, “it just enables them to keep going.”
Jones said that he would favor more arrests for property crimes and the return to higher levels of bail for those crimes, believing that spending time in jail would lead to more participation in rehabilitation programs.
Promoting more affordable housing and non-dairy agricultural activities in the county were also platform planks mentioned by Jones. “We need to start creating more usable ground here in Tillamook County,” he said, mentioning small farms and woodlot areas that he believed could support affordable housing.
Jones also said that the county needed to reduce barriers to starting businesses and that he would like to see local contractors given preference for jobs in the county.
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