Editorials from around Oregon

Selected editorials from Oregon newspapers:

The (Medford) Mail-Tribune, April 30, on benefit costs for public employees:

Lawmakers in Salem are getting serious about tackling the looming shortfall in the state budget, which must be balanced this session. To that end, legislative leaders and Gov. Kate Brown are talking about stemming the increase in benefit costs for public employees along with changes to the Public Employee Retirement System, which faces a $22 billion unfunded liability. Lawmakers must resist pressure from state employee unions, who will fight any limits on compensation.

On Wednesday, legislative leaders announced the creation of a bipartisan tax reform committee to propose changes in taxing corporate income. The goal is a business tax plan that could go to voters as early as this fall.

That’s not a promising development, because of the resounding defeat of Ballot Measure 97 last fall, which would have increased taxes on the largest corporations doing business in Oregon. Some business interests already are gearing up to fight any future tax proposal, and others have made it clear they will consider changes to corporate taxes only if the state first addresses the constant increase in spending.

Public employee unions, which backed Measure 97 and want corporations to pay more taxes, also support the majority Democrats in the Legislature. But halting the constant increase in employee compensation costs is key to solving the budget problem.

The Oregon Business Plan coalition, a group of businesses and organizations working on public policy issues, points out that Oregon spends more than most other states on public employee benefits, especially health insurance.

Teachers and classified school employees, for instance, receive salaries that rank 22nd nationwide - a little above the middle of the pack - but their benefits are the fifth highest in the country.

State agency employees have the sixth highest total health insurance premiums among all states - and the state pays far more of it on their behalf. Oregon state employees’ contribution to their own health insurance ranks 45th lowest. The state’s contribution to those premiums is 50 percent greater than the national average.

These costs continue to rise as premiums climb.

Limiting the state’s contribution to public employees’ health insurance to the national average would go a long way toward controlling the rise in state spending.

That won’t sit well with public employees or their unions, but private sector employees have faced that situation for years. When costs go up for everyone, it’s only fair that everyone shares the burden.

No one is suggesting that public employees’ salaries should be cut. But continuing to provide some of the richest benefit packages in the country is simply not sustainable.

Oregon voters might be persuaded to support higher taxes on corporations, but not if the Legislature fails to get a handle on spending. The same goes for business leaders.

The Democrats who control the Legislature must stand up to their union supporters and face the reality that the state must rein in benefit costs before it asks for more revenue.

___

The East Oregonian, April 26, on new tariffs on imported lumber:

Many Americans in extractive industries, and in the regions dependent on them, voted for Donald Trump. These regions - whether in Appalachia or Southern Oregon - are among the poorest in the country, and have the worst government services. Call the county sheriff’s office in Douglas County, for instance, and you’re likely to get an answering machine.

These regions and people have been left behind by the American political class. They’ve also been actively targeted by a more environmentally conscious world, automation and new technology, and cheaper, less-regulated competition from abroad.

So they elected Trump. And last week, the new president said he would impose a 20 percent tariff on imported Canadian softwood lumber. Surprisingly, it makes our northern neighbor - not Mexico or China - the expected first target of Trump’s protectionist policies.

The U.S. purchases about 80 percent of such lumber produced in Canada at a cost of about $6 billion a year, according to Canadian government data. For those of us in timber-rich Oregon, there is a real opportunity to take advantage of the new tariffs on imported products. For American consumers and homebuilders, prepare to see higher prices at your local lumber store.

But this is the perfect opportunity for Trump to try out his overall policies. A federal investigation found that Canada was unfairly subsidizing its timber business, allowing its companies to undercut U.S. competitors. Trump has long argued that the U.S. has been on the wrong end of bad deals, allowing other countries to get one over on us. Trump’s predecessor agreed that in this case that Canada was being unfair, but the two countries had been unable to reach an agreement on the matter.

If timber bounces back in the U.S., you can imagine Trump and his administration promoting similar protectionist policies on an array of imported goods. For a Republican Party that has long been cemented behind free trade, that is a quick about-face. But with Trump in control, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is already dead. Perhaps NAFTA is next in his sights.

Right now, Oregon’s many trees have become more marketable.

____

The Daily Astorian, April 27, on funding state education initiatives:

Oregon legislators are in quandary - their table is filled with a projected $1.6 billion deficit despite record revenues, and they face the stiff challenge of crafting a balanced budget that also meets demands from voter-approved measures from last November’s general election.

Three statewide measures approved by voters with overwhelming margins carry a collectively hefty sticker price of about $363 million through the two-year budget cycle. Two of those have a direct impact on education funding.

Measure 96 is a constitutional amendment which passed with a whopping 83 percent voter approval and mandates 1.5 percent of net lottery proceeds, or about $9.5 million a year, be dedicated for veterans services. The Legislature cannot change that mandate and is required to fully fund it.

Measures 98 and 99, though, were statutory education initiatives rather than constitutional amendments. Even though each passed by a 2-to-1 margin, the laws enacted through the two measures are subject to legislative change, and mostly likely will be because without new tax revenue they would siphon already limited funds available for pre-existing educational needs.

Measure 98 was aimed at dropout prevention and increasing graduation rates with more vocational and technical education and college prep for students. It has a $150 million annual cost, or roughly $800 per high school student, if fully funded. Measure 99 directed the Legislature to use up to $22 million a year from lottery proceeds to provide stable funding for Outdoor School.

Lottery proceeds already partially fund education and also earmark money for statewide economic development. It’s probable the veterans services mandate and any Outdoor School funding will tap into the money set aside for economic development rather than cut into the limited lottery pie used for education.

Legislators say funding for Measure 98’s implementation is far more troublesome. As state Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, told The Associated Press, “The voters indeed have spoken on this issue. But they spoke without writing a check.”

In Gov. Kate Brown’s suggested budget, she proposed cutting the $300 million for Measure 98 in half, while the legislative budget co-chairs have proposed trimming it by a third. While the money for veterans services is mandatory, the other two measures remain alive and whole, too. Last week, amid legislative maneuvers as a deadline for action passed, an effort in the House kept Measure 98 funding intact while a move in the Senate backed by the teachers’ union to turn it into an optional grant failed - a least for now.

The final decision on funding won’t be determined for some time, and no doubt there will be plenty of maneuvering still to come. We’d like to see that funding be directed as voters demanded, but we also realize the harsh budget reality legislators are facing. We’ve also advocated strongly for controls on spending.

While legislators begin the process of cutting costs they should be looking hard at the largest expenses of health care and the bloated Public Employees Retirement System. As we advocated Tuesday, those costs must be controlled for Oregon’s long-term financial health.

Importantly, though, state leaders - and most certainly Gov. Brown - need to show leadership by reaching out to Oregon businesses, corporations and organizations which pledged to be supportive of more equitable business taxes when the corporate tax proposed in Measure 97 was defeated and when state expenses are brought under control. Legislators, together with the public employee unions, need to rein in the PERS costs.

It’s time to initiate those talks now rather than later. Oregonians have too much at stake to lose - now and in the future - for the status quo to remain intact.

Getting business and the unions involved in revenue generation and cost cutting is a solution sitting on the table with the potential of solving the perplexing problems all Oregonians will face when legislators start making the tough decisions of whittling state services and programs, including the educational initiatives the voters overwhelmingly said are needed.

It’s time for our political leaders to invite everyone to take their seats.

___

The Oregonian, April 26, on protecting Oregon’s elderly residents:

Few choices can be as wrenching as shopping for a care facility for an aging parent. The homes are expensive - but, if resources are available, who balks when it’s a mom or a dad with increasing needs? Worse, the emotional challenge of the elder in moving to an institutional setting can be exhausting, even traumatic. What families typically count on throughout, however, is that the facility being considered reliably delivers the kind of care and attention that makes life worth living: safe, prompt, courteous, complete and at times fun.

That’s why it’s sickening to read that Sue Crawford’s 93-year-old mother, Marian Ewins, was twice found by Crawford to be sitting in her own feces while a resident at a memory care facility in Tigard and in need of hospitalization. Or that a caregiver at a McMinnville assisted living and retirement center beat a resident’s head against the bathroom wall. Or that a resident of a Eugene elder care facility apparently had a stroke yet waited for more than four hours before an ambulance was called.

None of the above events is disputed. Each was verified upon investigation. Yet none was reported publicly on a state-managed website designed to help Oregonians search for care facilities or monitor any from among the state’s more than 600 facilities in which loved ones rise every day for a life worth living.

In an extensive report published last week, Fedor Zarkhin and Lynne Terry of The Oregonian/OregonLive show that more than 60 percent of substantiated complaints against care centers in Oregon since 2005 - nearly 8,000 of them - go unseen and unknown to Oregonians searching the Oregon Department of Human Services website. This is a cruel failure, perhaps cruelest for its irony: The website was launched in 2008 in an effort to make transparent the complaint histories and performance record of elder care facilities. It followed a drive by Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley as a member of the Oregon House of Representatives to publish such records online.

Zarkhin and Terry quote Ashley Carson Cottingham, since 2015 the director of the state’s Aging and People with Disabilities program, as saying of the website: “It’s a mess.” That’s true. The gaps in information owe to decisions made early on about certain classes of information to be withheld from the website, and also to mistakes in the way state workers classified complaints, Zarkhin and Terry wrote.

But elder abuse, whether from mixed up medications or neglect or outright physical violence, is equal opportunity when it comes to the historical record. The unpublished records of substantiated complaints, now available at OregonLive, should be promptly posted where they always belonged: on the state’s website. And a good first step, until all records are available and current, would be to immediately post an explicit notice on the website saying the information provided by the website is incomplete.

In response to the work of the Oregonian/OregonLive reporters, state officials say the website will be replaced and fulfill the mission of making complete information readily available to Oregonians. Good. But that could take years owing to competing, expensive software projects within the agency.

Few priorities rise as this one does. Certainly there are corollary issues suggested by the reporters’ findings, among them staffing and management practices within care facilities that leave such dark trails of abuse.

But for now the records, like an old person’s life even in twilight, need fresh light. They should be made public by the state, with retooled practices to ensure they are current and useful to families trying to make what are often once-in-a-lifetime decisions.

___

The Bend Bulletin, April 29, on drawing lines for Oregon’s political districts:

There’s almost nothing more partisan than deciding the boundaries for Oregon’s political districts. The boundaries of 30 state Senate seats, 60 state House seats and Oregon’s congressional districts are at stake. And how does Oregon do it?

In a highly partisan way. Oregon’s process essentially leaves it up to state legislators.

The Oregon Constitution directs that elected legislators draw the lines. If legislators fail, the secretary of state takes over. The Oregon Supreme Court performs the legal review.

Is there a better way? Oregon politicians are talking about it. The lines are set to be redrawn in 2021.

Secretary of State Dennis Richardson, a Republican, proposed last week to use a redistricting commission to set the boundaries based on a computer algorithm. Voters would have to amend the Constitution to make that happen.

One major issue is picking members of the commission. Richardson proposed a randomized process that guaranteed representation for the state’s two largest political parties.

A second big question is what factors the algorithm and the commission use to draw the lines. Some attention is usually paid to making a district geographically compact. But almost always the key factor is drawing boundaries based on what are called “communities of interest.” The definition of that, though, is a headache. A community of interest could be a city like Bend. It could be previously set districts. It could be economic, ethnic, geographic, cultural, rural/urban or you name it.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a commission or a group of legislators deciding what the communities of interest should be - there’s plenty of potential for mischief. Almost everyone will be able to see something gerrymandered.

Oregon’s Democratic Party has come out against Richardson’s proposal. Jeanne Atkins, the former secretary of state who is now chair of the Democratic Party, suggests an evaluation be done of the history of Oregon’s process to better understand what works or doesn’t.

It is worth having the discussion about the right system. At least according to some political scientists who have looked at the issue, states with independent commissions do produce results that are more fair - less partisan and more competitive - than other systems. Richardson’s concepts deserve a closer look.