Editorials from around Oregon

Selected editorials from Oregon newspapers:

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Albany Democrat-Herald, Sept. 20, on fire season lingering in Congress

The healthy dose of rain we’ve received over the last few days finally has given firefighters the chance to gain the upper hand on the blazes still burning in the region.

That’s good news.

But we’re not entirely out of the woods yet, so to speak.

Even though rain continues to be in the forecast through Thursday, partly sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s are expected by the weekend. Thankfully, we won’t be returning to the blazing hot conditions we’ve been sweltering through this summer, but it will take more than a few good days of rain, welcome as they are, to finally put an end to our fire season.

In fact, a Democrat-Herald reporter driving to Lebanon on Tuesday watched as a farmer working in the fields managed to produce a good-sized cloud of dust: Soil conditions still are dry, and you can be sure that’s the case in our forests as well.

Which is why fire managers, although grateful for the change in the weather, are not yet ready to declare victory. After all, it will take until October for the state’s biggest fires to be contained. Backyard burning remains closed and regulated use for people going into the forests also remains in place, officials said. (Those same officials are keeping a watchful eye out for possible thunderstorms this week.)

So the same cautions that have been in place for much of the summer remain: If you’re headed out to the forests for some relaxation and (finally) a dose of cleaner air, you need to be careful that you don’t extend the fire season through a careless action.

In the meantime, let’s hope that the change in the weather doesn’t prompt members of Congress to put their deliberations regarding national firefighting policy (and how to pay for those firefighting bills) on hold for another year.

Last week, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke directed land managers and park superintendents to be more aggressive in cutting down small trees and underbrush to help stop fires from becoming the high-intensity unpredictable fires that we’ve frequently seen this season.

A memo from Zinke didn’t call for any new spending, but he urged federal officials to be “innovative” and use all tools available to prevent and fight fires. It’s not clear what exactly Zinke has in mind, but he probably isn’t calling for a return to the days when federal agencies did their best to put out every forest fire as soon as it was spotted. (That helped to create the conditions we see now in forests across the West, choked with underbrush that fuels fires.)

And, in fact, Congress can still, in this session, make one simple fix that would help to protect money that has been budgeted for forest management work along the lines that Zinke has suggested: Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has joined the chorus of officials urging an end to the practice of “fire borrowing.” That’s what occurs when federal officials, desperately searching for money to fight wildfires, repeatedly are forced to use money that initially was meant for prevention programs.

“Fires will always be with us,” Perdue said in a recent speech. “But if you don’t have the resources and the means of dependable funding, that’s an issue.”

And it’s particularly an issue when the backlog of maintenance work on our forests grows longer and longer, just waiting for a spark to burn.

For many years now, Congress has had the chance to end the practice of fire borrowing through a variety of proposals that share the goal of preserving money for maintenance work. It has yet to approve any of these proposals.

This should be the year when that long-running failure finally ends. How many more seasons like this will it take to finally light a fire under Congress?

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The Bend Bulletin, Sept. 20, on state lawmakers shouldn’t lose ability to hire relatives

Oregon allows state lawmakers to hire their relatives, a practice called nepotism. The word itself has come to imply something shady is afoot, although that’s clearly not always the case.

About a quarter of Oregon lawmakers, men and women in both chambers and from both parties, hire parents, children or spouses as office workers when they’re in Salem, according to The Oregonian. The relatives are paid out of the lawmakers’ budgets, as are unrelated staff members. No one, not the lawmakers or their family members, will get rich on what they earn serving the state of Oregon. Some also hire relatives for their campaigns.

Nor is the practice particularly rare. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, more than half of the states have the same restrictions that Oregon does: While lawmakers may hire relatives to work for them, there are general ethical guidelines that must be followed when doing so.

Oregon prides itself on its citizen Legislature. Sending the men and women who write our laws back to the communities where those laws will be enforced puts lawmakers in touch with their constituents in a way that would be difficult to duplicate with a full-time Legislature.

The Oregon reliance on part-time lawmakers does have its problems.

The vast majority of legislators come from someplace other than Salem, and because they’re in the capital only part of the time, they tend not to have houses or fancy apartments at their disposal. Theirs can be a lonely existence, which can be improved by the presence of a spouse or child in the office. Moreover, as more than one lawmaker told The Oregonian, no one understands a legislator’s constituents and issues as well as a close relative can.

Then there’s this: Scandal as a result of nepotism has been something of a rarity.

Oregon’s is not a broken system looking for a cure. Rather, it’s a system that has worked well for years, and as such, there’s no need to change it.

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The Eugene Register-Guard, Sept. 20, on national monuments being in danger

News that the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Southern Oregon is one of four being targeted for reduction by the Trump administration is bad news not just for Oregonians, but for Americans beyond the state’s borders.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wants to shrink the monument, which protects about 177 square miles (457 square kilometers), in order to “reduce impacts on private lands” and allow for more logging, according to a memo (bit.ly/2f7kiW8) from Zinke to the White House that was leaked to the media.

National monuments are national monuments for a reason: They protect lands known for their natural beauty; biodiversity, including rare and/or threatened animal and plant species; and historical artifacts such as rock art.

Cascade-Siskiyou was the first area in the country to be designated a national monument in order to protect biodiversity. It encompassed 102 square miles (264 square kilometers) when designated as a national monument in 2000, but has been expanded over time.

By proposing major reductions in national monuments across the country, Zinke is prioritizing the few over the many. National monument status is intended to protect and preserve special places that have value for all Americans. Removing existing protections for these lands for the financial profit of the few, such as miners and logging companies, is shortsighted.

Zinke conceded in his memo to the president that public comments the Interior Department has received on its proposals “were overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining existing monuments.”

He then dismissed this input, saying it was the result of a “well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations.”

Zinke needs to re-read his previous statement about overwhelming support before discarding this so lightly.

Those in favor of reducing the protected area are generally in industries such as grazing, timber, mining, hunting and fishing, and motorized recreation, Zinke said. In other words, mostly industries that would have serious, in some cases potentially irreversible, impact on the lands currently being protected.

The monument grew to its current size by acquisition of privately held land within its borders, Zinke notes. Does he now propose removing protections from land that was acquired with taxpayer dollars for the express purpose of protecting it?

Similarly, grazing in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was previously reduced after a study found it incompatible with the monument’s goal of protecting biodiversity. Grazing, the study found, threatened riparian areas. Yet Zinke is now proposing increased grazing within the monument’s boundaries.

Reducing areas protected as national monuments, including Cascade-Siskiyou, would offer financial benefits for a few companies and individuals. But this would come at a heavy price for the many, in lost protections for areas that receive protection now for their cultural, visual, geological, recreational, historical, paleontological and ecological value.

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The Oregonian/OregonLive, Sept. 19, on justice requiring tougher standard than ’guilty enough’

In federal courts and in almost every state in the nation, juries find defendants guilty of felony charges only if the entire jury votes to convict. That longstanding tradition of unanimity, incorporated in the 6th Amendment, makes sense in a justice system that demands the government prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

But jury unanimity isn’t the law in Oregon and Louisiana. The two outlier states require that only 10 of 12 jurors agree to a guilty verdict for defendants facing most state felony charges, including manslaughter, arson and rape. That watered-down standard, which enables the majority to disregard the concerns of holdout jurors, reflects the racist and xenophobic mentality that thrived at the time of their passage decades ago.

In Oregon and Louisiana, “guilty enough” is apparently good enough.

Critics of the law hope that may soon change. The U.S. Supreme Court is to decide next week whether to consider a case challenging Louisiana’s non-unanimous jury law and, by extension, Oregon’s. While Oregonians should support the critics’ cause, they also should start the difficult work themselves of rescinding the state’s non-unanimous jury law and encouraging prosecutors to voluntarily seek unanimous verdicts. It’s long past time for Oregon to abandon a practice that can silence minorities, racial and otherwise, and embrace a higher standard of diligence.

Oregon wasn’t always this way. Voters approved Measure 302-03 in 1934 that amended the state constitution to allow verdicts based on 10 of 12 jurors for felonies short of murder. The vote came amid a tide of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant emotion, as The Oregonian/OregonLive’s Shane Dixon Kavanaugh reports. A recent opinion by Multnomah County Circuit Judge Bronson James also concludes the 10-2 system is inherently discriminatory and based in the racist attitudes of the time. Editorials from The Morning Oregonian in that era blame “mixed-bloods,” ’’natives” and immigrants for failing their roles and responsibility as jurors. Such attitudes in 1934 aren’t shocking for a state that by constitution had forbidden African Americans from living in Oregon.

This law is indefensible for other reasons. Consider that the state requires unanimous juries for murder verdicts and death sentence recommendations. It also requires unanimity in misdemeanor verdicts, (though those lesser offenses are decided by smaller juries). That raises the logical question of why non-murder felonies - many of which carry mandatory prison terms - should be treated any differently. The answer, of course, is that they shouldn’t.

Oregon and Louisiana have both kept their non-unanimous juries due to a bizarre three-way split in opinion among Supreme Court justices in 1972 that determined states did not have to adhere to the federal standard of unanimous jury verdicts.

Some defenders of the system argue that the 10-2 system allows for more efficiency and fewer hung juries. They also contend that defendants have an easier path to acquittal by securing 10 not-guilty votes instead of all 12. None of these reasons are compelling.

A justice system’s “efficiency” should come from streamlining processes and adequately funding public defenders and prosecutors alike so that cases can move more quickly. It shouldn’t come from short-circuiting defendants’ rights to make it easier for the government to secure a conviction.

Similarly, hung juries aren’t a sign that the justice system has failed or that unanimity is unreasonable. Rather, the inability to reach a verdict is a sign that the prosecutor’s case fell short of meeting its burden of proof. That happens sometimes, and we expect juries to be independent enough to say so.

The potential for acquittal on fewer votes also is not persuasive. Not only are acquittals rare, but such arguments distract attention from where it should be - demanding that the government prove guilt, not that the defense prove innocence.

Even prosecutors are showing discomfort. Deschutes County District Attorney John Hummel told The Bend Bulletin that letting jurors ignore the voices of one or two people in the jury box compromises the integrity of the verdict. And Multnomah County District Attorney Rod Underhill wrote in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board that he believes it’s “time for a thoughtful review of this law,” noting that the criminal justice system “is and should continue to be a reflection of our shared values.”

Our justice system is built on noble principles and high standards. In reality, it falls short. National and local data show racial disparities in those who are arrested, prosecuted and convicted. Racial, religious and ethnic minorities comprise a small percentage of juries - a percentage that Oregon’s non-unanimous jury protocol allows to be ignored.

We should take pride in what our justice system strives for, and we should act with humility in how our justice system underperforms. A unanimous jury doesn’t guarantee justice but it is a step toward that goal. Guilty enough should no longer be good enough.

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Baker City Herald, Sept. 18, on money going up in smoke

The idea is so simple, and so obvious, that it’s hardly surprising Congress hasn’t acted on it.

The wildfires that have burned across hundreds of thousands of acres in Oregon this summer have revived one of U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden’s priorities over the past several years.

The Oregon Democrat, with backing from the state’s other senator, Democrat Jeff Merkley, and U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Hood River, has repeatedly tried to change the way the federal government pays to fight fires on public land.

Specifically, the lawmakers want the government to treat big blazes as it does other natural disasters such as hurricanes - by putting money into a separate account for that specific purpose.

The current budgeting system for firefighting is, to borrow Wyden’s apt adjective, “awful.”

Federal agencies, principally the U.S. Forest Service and BLM, frequently have to “borrow” money from their budgets to cover firefighting costs.

In a perversely ironic twist, this means the agencies often have less money to do work, such as thinning overcrowded forests, that can help reduce the size and severity of wildfires.

This creates a recurring cycle in which the government deals with the symptoms of the problem - the fires - but not one of its key sources - unhealthy forests. It’s roughly analogous to the government dealing with a river that frequently floods by buying a bunch of pumps rather than building a better system of levies.

We endorse the proposal to end what Wyden calls “fire borrowing.”

The Trump administration has been striving to reduce government spending, but when it comes to managing the nation’s hundreds of millions of acres of public land, one of America’s greatest resources, spending more to protect those vast expanses seems to us a worthwhile investment.

Moreover, it’s conceivable that over years and decades, a more concerted effort to reduce the fire danger will actually result in fewer blazes on public land, and a net savings to the government treasury.

Restoring forest health is not cheap, to be sure, in part because some of the necessary work, such as cutting small trees and lighting prescribed fires, doesn’t produce commercial products.

But the current situation hardly qualifies as a bargain, either.

The federal government has regularly spent more than $1 billion annually to fight fires over the past decade. And despite that expense, we continue to lose tens of millions of dollars in potential timber value, as well as the degradation of recreation areas.