Editorials from around Oregon

Selected editorials from Oregon newspapers:

The (Salem) Statesman Journal, March 9, on the cost to vote:

Oregon has required its electorate to vote by mail since an initiative was passed by voters in 1998. But Oregonians, who have the option to “cast” their ballots at an official drop site on Election Day, have had to pony up the postage the past 19 years to participate in democracy.

Two lawmakers last week decided it was time to end that inequity, and we agree enthusiastically.

Oregon has reduced the cost of its elections for nearly two decades and increased the time available for workers to tally votes and get results dispatched in a timely fashion.

Despite the program’s success, (Washington state and Colorado followed Oregon’s lead and others are considering it), the state is still “charging” Oregon residents to vote.

Today’s “forever” stamps cost 49 cents each.

This might not seem like a financial barrier to many of us, but it could be a reason why those living on fixed or low incomes, especially in households with multiple members, forget to vote.

The Statesman Journal’s story about the bill online attracted numerous commenters who wrote that if 49 cents is too much to pay, folks should just get off their hindquarters (a polite interpretation) and “take their ballots down to a drop-off site.”

But this option isn’t always possible for those living with disabilities, or in skilled-care homes or for whom transportation is an issue. There are far fewer drop-off sites in the Mid-Valley today than former polling places.

Senators Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, and Richard Devlin, D-Tualatin, introduced Senate Bill 683 to shift the limited financial responsibility for voting to the state. The bill would require business-class postage to be affixed to ballot return envelopes to ensure that if the envelope isn’t used, the state won’t be charged.

Earmarked for elections held after Jan. 1, 2019, the cost to the state to provide free postage would be about $300,000 for the 2017-2019 budget cycle and about $1.3 million for each 2-year budget after that.

Devlin said the purpose of the bill is to increase voter participation. “If this legislation were to lead to a 5 or even 10-percent increase in voter turnout, then I believe this expenditure of public dollars will be very well spent.”

Some call this a waste of taxpayer money at a time when the state is looking to fill a gaping budget deficit of $1.6 billion.

But getting a disenfranchised voter to cast his or her vote is not nonsense.

In Oregon, we vote by mail, not pay to vote.

___

The (Medford) Mail Tribune, March 10, on Oregon’s secretary of state:

As a state legislator, Dennis Richardson never pretended to be anything other than a conservative Republican. Now, as the first Republican secretary of state in three decades, he’s still conservative in many ways, and still a Republican, but he’s approaching the state’s Number 2 job the way he said he would: As a nonpartisan advocate of efficient, effective government that serves all Oregonians.

As the keynote speaker at the annual Dorchester Conference last week, Richardson told his fellow Republicans the party needs to reach out to all Oregonians, regardless of party affiliation, and to stand for good government. “With victory comes responsibility,” he said.

Richardson said he will strive to “serve all Oregonians, regardless of party, regardless of who you pray to, regardless of who you love.”

That may come as a surprise to those who remember his socially conservative stands as a lawmaker, but Richardson’s actions since taking office have been decidedly non-political. In fact, he wants to make the office he holds nonpartisan. And he wants to remove the secretary of state’s ability to initiate investigations of election law violations, making it a complaint-driven process instead, to avoid the appearance of partisanship.

Richardson also is backing two proposals put forth by his predecessor, Democrat Jeanne Atkins. One would create a searchable, online database of state administrative rules, replacing the existing law that requires the rules to be printed. He argues that’s unnecessary, and he’s right.

The other would allow non-affiliated voters to electronically request a ballot for any party that holds an open primary. Both major parties tend to resist encouraging more participation from non-affiliated voters in primaries, but Richardson supports it.

He also defends Oregon’s pioneering vote-by-mail system, saying it can’t be hacked, and sent a letter to President Trump declaring that no voter fraud happened here in the November election.

The Dorchester Conference, the oldest annual political conference in the country, was founded in 1965 by Bob Packwood, then a Republican state legislator, who was alarmed by the arch-conservative shift in the Republican Party and its nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Dorchester began as a gathering of what today would be considered liberal Republicans.

Over the years, Dorchester has leaned more conservative as the state party moved to the right. But conservative though Richardson may be on social issues, his approach to his new job bears more than a little resemblance to those Dorchester Republicans of yore.

____

The East Oregonian, March 10, on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation:

In a way, Oregon finally gets to turn the page on the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, little more than a year after a 41-day standoff came to a close.

Feds re-seized the public property in February 2016, an event that gained international attention. To some who watched, it was a clear story of government overreach. To others, it was no doubt domestic terrorism.

To a Portland jury, it was somewhere in between.

That jury on Friday returned guilty verdicts on two defendants and not guilty verdicts to two others who had been charged with conspiracy. Duane Ehmer, who lived in Irrigon when the occupation began, was one of the men who was set free.

Remember that back in October, Ammon Bundy and six others were acquitted on the same conspiracy and weapons charges after a five week trial - results that shocked legal experts but confirmed the feelings of many Bundy supporters.

Whether legal or illegal, it was clear Ammon and his brother Ryan were ringleaders in the occupation.

It’s disappointing that some minor players were found or pleaded guilty for their crimes, while those in control and who devised the plan have not been convicted. That may not last long, however, as Ammon, Ryan and their father, Cliven, face even more serious charges in a Nevada court of law.

Perhaps it is truly the occupation that will never end.

Yet, for Eastern Oregonians, we should consider the book of justice closed for all intents and purposes. We should take a new book off the shelf and start a new chapter, one where ranchers and residents can speak without fear about the land they love and listen to others. The rabble-rousing outsiders didn’t start that conversation, and they sure aren’t going to have the last word.

Leadership from federal officials is likely to be nil in the next few years, but perhaps that offers an opportunity to rebuild from the community up. We should reject outside agitators and instead focus on the local economy and the local environment. When thinking about public lands, we should not be hyperbolic about problems, pessimistic about solutions, nostalgic about the past or nihilistic about the future.

Let’s put the occupation behind us and step forward as a region.

___

The (Albany) Democrat Herald, March 12, on Sunshine Week:

This year’s Sunshine Week - the annual celebration of the idea that government functions best when it operates in the sunlight - couldn’t come at a timelier moment.

President Obama famously promised that his administration would be the most transparent in history, and then fell far short of that promise. At least President Trump has made no such promise, and no one expects his administration to even pretend it’s interested in transparency - although the number of leaks coming from his administration in its first two months has been remarkable. (It will be interesting to see how Trump deals with leaks, which appear to be part of the landscape for any administration.)

In Oregon, efforts have been launched to reclaim some of the state’s reputation as a leader in open government. It was just a couple of generations ago that Oregon was known nationally for the simple sweep of its laws regarding open meetings and public documents, and it all started from a relatively simple belief: The people of the state deserved to have access to their government.

That meant members of the public needed to be able to attend meetings of their governmental bodies, with relatively narrow exceptions. That meant citizens needed to be able to access documents that showed what their governments were up to, with a minimum of fuss and without officials deciding to charge outrageous fees.

But that was a couple of generations ago. Since then, especially on the public documents front, legislators have approved literally hundreds of new exceptions to the state’s open government laws. Every new exception dims the sunshine that serves as the best disinfectant for government. The spread of email and other electronic forms of communication have created new challenges for those interested in making sure that government actions take place in the open.

Fortunately, there have been some promising recent developments in Salem. Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum has convened a task force to examine the state of open records in Oregon. The work of that task force has resulted in a promising proposal before the Legislature to create a public records advocate in state government to help cut through records disputes between citizens and government officials. The legislative proposal seeks also to clarify other issues surrounding open records.

The task force also found that some areas of its work were particularly challenging, in particular work to re-examine all those exemptions to the public record laws. Some of those exceptions are doubtless legitimate, but our hunch is that the majority are not. Nevertheless, it will take more time than was first expected to sort through those.

And, of course, every time the Legislature meets, some group is interested in adding to that list of exceptions. Our advice to legislators on this issue continues to be the same: Requests to remove yet another set of documents from public view need to clear a very high bar indeed. Inconvenience to the parties involved is not sufficient.

Meanwhile, other legislative actions may make it more difficult for the public to access governmental information of importance: For example, Senate Bill 210 would allow state and local governments to stop publishing public notices in local newspapers and to post them instead on websites operated by the Association of Oregon Counties, the League of Oregon Cities and the Special Districts Association of Oregon.

Obviously, newspapers have a financial interest in opposing this proposal. But there also is a public interest at play: Relegating these important notices to little-viewed websites that are under the control of these local governments would be a step toward dimming the sunshine that allows citizens to keep tabs on their government.

___

The Oregonian, March 12, on helping those who have lost homes to wildfire:

Wildfires burned across Oregon for much of the spring, summer and fall of 2015, devouring hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land, tapping millions of dollars’ worth of state and federal firefighting resources and leveling more than 40 homes.

The blazes also laid bare a major flaw in one of the few state programs aimed at helping Oregonians who have lost homes to wildfire. During Oregon’s worst fire season in 80 years, not a single dollar was paid from a new $50,000 fund to help low-income homeowners because the income cap was so low that no one could qualify.

Two families who lost their homes to the massive Canyon Creek fire near John Day applied hoping they were close enough to the $18,000 cap. Both were denied, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive’s 2016 investigation of the fire, Burned.

In fact, two years later the Wildfire Damage Housing Relief Program remains intact at its original $50,000 funding level.

That’s not exactly what lawmakers had in mind when they worked to create the fund, especially House Minority Leader Mike McLane, a Republican whose district is in the heart of wildfire country.

McLane and others, including Senate President Peter Courtney, recognized that low-income families can be particularly hard hit after a wildfire. Unless a community’s losses are massive in cost and scope, it’s nearly impossible for individuals to qualify for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Wildfires are equal opportunity destroyers, as news reports regularly show high-priced homes in well-off mountain towns torched across California. Yet here, lightning-ignited summer wildfires often sweep through economically hard-hit communities in Eastern and Central Oregon surrounded by state and federal forests.

The original bill aimed to provide those families with $5,000 grants to victims displaced from fully destroyed or substantially damaged homes. The money was intended to help a family replace basic supplies, cover deductibles and secure rental housing until insurance payments came through.

State employees tasked with getting the word out about the program soon became frustrated as they realized the ridiculous gap between reality and the number marked out on the forms. And it was too bad, as a number of the Canyon Creek victims who ended up living in tents or RVs with limited water and electricity near the burned out shells of their homes likely could have made that $5,000 go far.

Another wildfire season will soon be upon us. And while the coming spring and summer aren’t predicted to be anywhere near as hot or conditions as combustible as they were in 2015, it’s time for lawmakers to prepare for the tragic potential and approve a proposed fix to the fund.

Lawmakers face so many tangled messes this session. Oregon’s massively unfunded pension system. The gaping $1.6 billion hole in the state budget. A long-overdue package to fix highways, roads and other infrastructure.

But this one’s fairly easy. McLane has proposed adjusting the annual income cap to $49,200 for a family of four, an amount based on federal poverty guidelines. For individuals, it would be $24,120. He also calls increasing the payments up to $7,000.

The money’s already there. Now, lawmakers should finish the work to be sure the help gets where it’s needed most.