Yachats community will gather Sunday, Nov. 20 to throw Don Dougherty a going-away 65th birthday bash

November 1, 2022

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com YACHATS – Don Dougherty is getting a birthday party and a sendoff. Dougherty, 64, who lived in and around Yachats for the last 30 years, died Friday, Oct. 28 at Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital in Newport after being found unresponsive in his car parked outside the Yachats Post Office where he had been living. Dougherty would

Agencies break ground for low-income apartment complex in Lincoln City

November 1, 2022

LINCOLN CITY – Officials from four nonprofits and government agencies broke ground last week on a 44-unit apartment complex for low-income residents. Known as Wecoma Place, the four-story building at the corner of U.S. Highway 101 and Northeast 29th Street, will be reserved entirely for low-income families. It will cost $12 million to construct and is expected to be finished

Columbia Bank is selling its branches in Waldport and Newport, but their new owner — whoever they are — will continue to operate them

November 1, 2022

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com WALDPORT – Columbia Bank is selling – but not closing — its branch offices in Waldport and Newport as a proposed merger with Umpqua Bank nears completion. As part of the merger, proposed in 2021, the U.S.Department of Justice required Columbia to sell 10 of its 150 branches in Oregon, Washington and California to try to

Yachats-area artist changes coasts, careers and now finishing up three years of grueling botanical illustration studies

November 1, 2022

By Oregon ArtsWatch YACHATS — If life had gone according to plan, Dana LaMair and her husband, Mark, would be living the life on a cruiser somewhere off the East Coast. Instead, the two now call home a spot six miles south of Yachats opposite the ocean – a decidedly wilder landscape than the calmer Eastern Seaboard. “My son