Editorials from around Oregon

Selected editorials from Oregon newspapers:

The (Medford) Mail-Tribune, April 23, on nonprofit refusing donation from gay men’s chorus:

The decision by an organization operating youth shelters in Jackson and Josephine counties to refuse a $3,000 donation from the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus seems impossible to justify, but officials of the organization are trying anyway.

The donation was raised in a sold-out benefit concert last month at Newman United Methodist Church. Hearts With A Mission, a faith-based nonprofit organization that operates the shelters, declined to accept the money, even as it was asking the city of Grants Pass for $26,000 to get through the fiscal year. That’s on top of the $50,000 the group gets from the city annually.

In a letter to the Grants Pass City Council, the organization said it did not refuse the donation to discriminate against the men’s choir, but out of concern for the welfare of the at-risk youths the shelter serves. Never mind the fact that those at-risk youths can and do include LGBTQ young people.

Apparently, the decision had everything to do with what the neighbors might think.

Hearts With A Mission Executive Director Kevin Lamson told the Grants Pass Daily Courier that “By branding something with our logo, what we are essentially doing is endorsing it,” adding that “It’s a shame that that factors into how somebody else perceives our organization.”

Well, yes. What’s more shameful is that Hearts With A Mission is so fearful of being perceived as endorsing - what? The existence of gay men? The performance of choral music by gay men in a church sanctuary to benefit a charitable organization?

Lamson attempted to draw a parallel with the Boys & Girls Club, which saw canceled memberships and threats of withheld funding after it allowed the anti-Trump group Indivisible to hold a rally at the club. But the two situations are not remotely comparable.

Allowing an activist group with a political agenda to use a nonprofit agency’s facility for a rally is not the same as merely accepting a donation.

Making matters worse, Grants Pass School District Superintendent Kirk Kolb, a Hearts With A Mission board member, said in the letter that the board’s decision had to do with the “challenges that come with living in a considerably conservative climate” - again, what will the neighbors think - and then didn’t have the guts to respond to the Courier’s request for further comment.

Lamson attempted to justify the refusal by saying that many youths the group has served are struggling with their own sexual identity, and if they hear their parents saying they don’t support Hearts With A Mission anymore, they might not seek help there. Nonsense.

On the contrary, youths struggling with sexual or gender identity who hear that Hearts With A Mission refused a donation from the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus are hardly likely to darken its door.

If Hearts With A Mission wants to continue operating shelters for homeless youths using taxpayers’ money, it needs to stand up for the principle of helping those who need help without judging them, and that extends to having the courage to accept help graciously offered, regardless of what some in the community might think. This unfortunate decision is likely to damage its ability to raise funds from the public far more than simply accepting the donation would have.

Before it asks for any more money from anyone, Hearts With A Mission needs to decide what its mission is.

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The Oregonian, April 24, on cleaning up Oregon’s air:

Entek International, a manufacturing firm and longtime employer in Lebanon, uses the nasty chemical trichloroethylene (TCE) in its processes. It does so carefully, however, having worked consistently over the years to reclaim and contain the chemical in all its forms and falling well below use limits established by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

But that makes little difference when Oregon regulators, bent on curbing toxic air emissions statewide, estimated the air near Entek’s facility likely contains high ambient concentrations of TCE and should be gauged definitively. Exposure to the chemical has been linked to heart abnormalities in newborns and cancer. Breathing air tainted with TCE could be a serious public health threat - a matter separate from a factory’s compliance with state environmental regulations. So the state’s environment agency decided, correctly, to set up monitoring stations along Hansard Avenue in Lebanon to collect air samples, shifting its work from computer modeling to real measurement.

Entek agreed. But things quickly went off the rails as state officials, supported by an epidemiologist and toxicologist from the Oregon Health Authority, told Entek a news release would explain the air-testing project to Entek employees and the surrounding community. Rationally, Entek leaders wanted to know how, in the event of high TCE levels downwind, it might possibly be held to a higher emissions standard in the absence of a higher emissions standard. And they wanted to know how it was fair play to withstand what would surely be panic from its employees and neighbors, especially in the event emission levels turned out to be safe. Entek took its concerns to Linn County Court and obtained an astonishing thing: a judge’s gag order against the DEQ blocking it from discussing its Entek probe, a matter of public concern by a public agency, with the public. On Friday, Rob Davis of The Oregonian/OregonLive reported that Entek enjoyed support in its action from the industry group Associated Oregon Industries.

Several things are wrong here.

The state’s stepped-up effort to control toxic emissions arrives under the banner of a program called Cleaner Air Oregon and championed by Gov. Kate Brown following the air toxics scare posed in Portland last year by glass-making facilities. If overdue, Cleaner Air Oregon is spot-on in its purposes: to make Oregon’s air safer to breathe. And nobody wishes otherwise, least of all those industries whose fortunes are tied to the goodwill of their workforce and neighbors.

But Oregon faces a 10-month gap, minimally, before it will have new regulations in place that set limits to the use of some of more than 200 potentially problematic chemicals, any number of them possibly sullying the air people breathe. As a result, the DEQ, under the new directorship of Richard Whitman, must move purposely forward without scaring Oregon’s valuable businesses into retreat - or straight into the courtroom.

Meanwhile, the environment and health agencies involved should tread carefully in their zeal to conduct extensive public outreach as steps are taken that might or might not unmask an “imminent” health threat. In the event of such a threat declaration, Oregon statutes give the agencies the authority to take actions to limit chemical releases - even in the absence of regulatory limits - and that’s the right time for extensive public outreach.

But treading carefully does not mean hiding from the public data collection that’s underway. Instead, it means that an agency’s actions should be accurately explained to anyone asking but not be monumentalized to such an extent it produces the Entek outcome. Documents obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board show that no fewer than 15 specialists from both the environment and health agencies were present, with seven others on the phone, at a March 29 meeting in Salem to review the Entek situation. Separately, a seven-page “Communications Plan” on the Entek situation states the “core message” of state agencies to be this: “Health experts don’t know if levels of emissions from Entek are putting people at risk, but recent computer models show it is possible. Regulators are testing the air near Entek to find out. State agencies will take action to reduce any risk to Entek workers and neighbors.” This is hardly scare material. But with a small army behind it, and everyone aping the same talking point, it becomes scary.

The 10 months leading up to the adoption in early 2018 of new regulations will be critical to the success of Cleaner Air Oregon. It seems clear from the Entek jam, however, that Oregon officials seek to re-establish trust with the public following acrimony in the Portland glass-maker case. And that’s wise. But as Oregon rises from an historically passive approach to environmental regulation, which put it in the bottom half of all states in regulating air toxics, officials must avoid overcorrection and industries collaborate.

Everybody wants clean air. The public can be trusted to handle the truth as Oregon takes one understated step at a time to achieve it. So, too, can the Enteks of the world.

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The (Albany) Democrat-Herald, April 24, on state budget problems:

One of the more somber messages in a somber letter the state’s top budget writers delivered Friday was this one: If officials don’t take serious action now, that $1.6 billion shortfall legislators are grappling with only will get worse.

The bipartisan letter from leaders of the Legislature’s budget-writing Ways and Means Committee included a warning that “underlying the current deficit is a long-term, structural imbalance between existing revenue streams and the growing costs of providing programs and services to Oregonians. The structural imbalance is due to choices legislators and voters have made over many years. Without action to contain the growing costs of state government now, the structural imbalance will cause even greater deficits in future years.”

The letter could be an important step forward as both Democrats and Republicans come to grip with this basic fact: Creating a balanced budget will require both cost cuts and some sources of additional revenue.

But if you’re looking for some of the reasons why the state is running such a budget gap at a time when it’s expected to collect a record amount of revenue, some of the cost-containment principals in the letter offer a clue: These ideas seem like they should have been adopted a long time ago.

For example:

-Do not create new programs or funds that have no money to support them.

-Use one-time funds for one-time investments or save them for an emergency.

-Require analysis of ongoing costs rather than initial costs for all new programs.

-Review performance and need for current programs and services to determine whether new proposals are a higher priority than current programs and services.

-Prioritize preservation and maintenance of infrastructure before constructing new buildings.

If all of these strike you as common sense, they are. But, to be fair, it can be easy for legislators to lose sight of essential principals like these in their efforts to deal with all of the competing demands they face.

So, Friday’s letter from Ways and Means represents yet another cold splash of reality: Even though these are historically good times for Oregon’s economy, the time has come to deal with fundamentals. (That includes, by the way, serious work in restructuring how the state gets its revenue.)

In the short term, as the letter noted, most of the $1.6 billion shortfall is because of the cost of expanding health care accounts; rising public-pension costs account for about a fifth of it while unfunded initiatives approved by voters make up another fifth.

In the short term, the letter recommends a hiring freeze for nonessential positions and stopping automatic increases tied to inflation for service and supply costs.

But the letter also listed a variety of longer-range fixes to help control state government spending, including restricting the growth of state government to 1 percent of the state’s population.

Among the letter’s recommendations for cost reductions in the state’s Public Employees Retirement System was one to increase the share of retirement contribution required from current and future PERS members.

The letter also suggested combining the Public Employee Benefit Board and the Oregon Educators Benefit Board and requiring both of those health insurance boards to keep costs at or below a 3.4 percent annual growth rate.

Union leaders blasted the proposals, calling them “outrageous” and saying that they were an attempt to “scapegoat people who have devoted their lives to public service.”

But this doesn’t strike us in any way as an attempt to demonize public employees. Rather, the letter is an important early step to bring Oregon’s state government in line with what taxpayers can afford - and not just for the next two years, but for the coming decades. It’s overdue, to be sure, but it’s still welcome.

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The (Yamhill Valley) News Register, April 21, on on-farm pot production:

Historically, growing and processing consumables were separate functions performed by separate means, in separate locations, by separate parties. And never the twain did meet.

The farmer grew corn, beans, beets, carrots or what have you on rural farm fields far from town. After harvest, he hauled his bounty to the nearest city for processing.

The processing was done in factories, typically automated and mechanized for maximum efficiency. These factories were sited in industrial zones, thus keeping fumes, odors, pollution, noise and waste from disturbing residents of nearby housing tracts.

In Oregon, that began to change when the state’s nascent wine industry started to reach critical mass. Increasingly, vintners insisted not only on processing their wine in the field, but also in making on-site tasting an integral part of their marketing plan and staging festive food, drink and music events as an added attraction.

Soon, rural residents, a goodly portion of whom were engaged in some level of farming themselves, began to use Oregon’s notoriously picky land use process to fight back.

They said bucolic vineyards were one thing, but processing plants doubling as food, wine and music venues were quite another. They said they were fine with the former, but the latter belonged in urban settings better equipped to handle the noise, traffic and waste generated.

However, there was no slowing the tidal wave of wine-oriented agri-tourism. These days, grapes are, in large measure, processed and marketed on the same rural hillsides on which they are grown.

Then along came the craft beer brewers, olive pressers, mead makers, liquor distillers and jam producers. Could the craft pot producer be far behind? Not in Oregon, not once legalization and regulation were ushered in.

Recently, the county commissioners presided over a battle erupting when a deeply rooted family farmer decided to begin brewing and marketing beer on site, amid fields of hops and grains.

Taking a leaf from the wine industry, he proposed staging food, beer and music events to draw customers. And he prevailed.

Commissioners are now presiding over another battle royale, this one involving an entrepreneurially minded transplant bent on growing and processing marijuana on Dusty Drive.

His tract lies just up from a Muddy Valley vineyard and winery operated by the Momtazi family on a strict biodynamic basis. The Momtazis don’t like the proposed grow much better than the proposed processing plant, but there’s nothing they can do to stop a farmer from growing a legal crop in a farm use zone.

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission is requiring applicant Richard Wagner to maintain an elaborate security system, suggesting theft risks. The Sheridan Fire District is requiring him to install a 32,000-gallon fire suppression tank, suggesting a fire risk as well - particularly if he uses highly flammable butane, as he reserves the right to do in his application.

It gives one pause, but it’s hard to draw a new line after a veritable parade of vintners, brewers and distillers have trekked past the old one.

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The (Eugene) Register-Guard, April 19, on Oregon gun laws:

Three bills aimed at reducing gun deaths and injuries are on the state Legislature’s docket right now. Any proposal relating to, or labeled as, “gun control” is likely to produce a backlash, but the bills that received a first hearing this week are neither unprecedented nor extreme.

Senate Bill 797 would mandate that the background check required for a gun purchase under existing state law actually be completed before a sale takes place. Currently, if Oregon State Police aren’t able to complete the background check within three days, a gun dealer can go ahead with the sale anyway. In addition to setting the stage for unequal enforcement of the law, this doesn’t make sense.

If background checks are important - and 85 percent to 95 percent of Americans think they are, according to recent studies by organizations such as the Pew Research Center and Gallup - they’re important for all gun sales, not just some.

Another proposal, SB 868/SB 719, would allow family or household members, or police, to seek an “extreme risk protection order” in court for someone who is a suicide risk or a threat to others. The onus of proving this would be on the person seeking the order. If the order is granted, its subject would have to surrender his or her guns and ammunition for a year, unless the order is lifted before then in response to a request from either the person who asked for the order or the subject of the order.

Several states - including Washington, Indiana, Connecticut and California - have adopted similar laws, generally after a horrifying shooting incident. Proponents of this measure cite legal precedent for such restrictions, including the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the District of Columbia v. Heller, which included a finding that the Second Amendment is “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose” and that it does not prohibit laws such as those barring possession of firearms by felons and people who are mentally ill.

SB 764 would, among other things, require that anyone seeking a concealed handgun permit receive live classroom training, not just an online class. Engaging in a live fire exercise would also be required. .

These bills are part of a national trend of viewing gun-related deaths as a health crisis, similar to disease and drug-related epidemics, and treat them as such. The best way to do this would be to develop a cohesive national strategy to research causes and prevention, but this has been blocked by Congress. So it’s up to states and municipalities to deal with the issue on a piecemeal basis.

The old excuse that any attempts to reduce gun-related violence are an attempt to confiscate all guns has grown threadbare. After eight years of false reports that the Obama administration was working on such a program, surely this is becoming clear to more Americans.

In the absence of national action, it’s been left to the states to try to protect their people. The Oregon Legislature deserves support for making its best effort to do so.