Business
AgLife
B
Thursday, August 11, 2022
The Observer & Baker City Herald
Season of
change comes
for OFB’s
Dave Dillon
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Press
SALEM — If changes in leadership are
comparable to shifting seasons, Dave Dillon
reckons he’s had a “very long, full season” at
the Oregon Farm Bureau.
After 20 years at the state
ag group’s helm, Dillon has
taken a job at Food Northwest,
a regional organization repre-
senting food processors.
“The hardest time to leave
can also be the best time to
Dillon
leave,” he said.
Dillon figures the organization is in solid
shape for whoever replaces him as executive
vice president — financially strong, with a
“fantastic” roster of staff members and elected
leaders, he said.
As Food Northwest’s executive director, he
expects to deal with “ag-adjacent” issues, such
as labor shortages and environmental regula-
tions, that are substantially similar but one step
downstream in the food supply chain.
“There’s a real opportunity to take some-
thing good and build it up to something better,”
Dillon said of his new job.
An overlapping challenge facing both orga-
nizations is the current political environment,
which he’s watched become increasingly bel-
ligerent and divisive over the past couple
decades.
“Politics in Oregon were a lot more centrist
in those early years,” Dillon said. “There was a
lot more collegiality among the elected leaders,
even if they were from a different party.”
When the state Legislature was more
evenly divided between conservative and lib-
eral lawmakers, compromise was typically
necessary to get anything done, he said.
Now that the House and Senate are domi-
nated by left-leaning super-majorities, though,
there’s no longer much incentive to reach
across the aisle.
For agriculture, that’s translated into a
steeply mounting regulatory burden, he said.
“It’s the toughest political climate I’ve ever
seen for farmers and ranchers.”
The Oregon Farm Bureau will surely
encounter numerous important problems in
the years to come, but Dillon advises its mem-
bers to focus on those that most endanger their
livelihoods.
“Is this something that will impact my
ability to be farming or ranching next year?”
Dillon said. “Does it affect my ability to keep
producing?”
Dillon isn’t entirely pessimistic about the
prospects for agriculture and natural resource
industries in the political arena, however.
If people realize the state’s policies aren’t
improving their lives or resolving serious prob-
lems, they’ll likely make their dissatisfaction
known at the ballot box, he said.
“I do believe there’s a potential for the pen-
dulum to move back toward the middle,”
Dillon said. “At some point, voters will make a
decision to try something different.”
In the meantime, the staff and members
of the Farm Bureau are capable of defending
against damaging laws and regulations, as
they’ve proven in the past, he said.
“Countless times, we’ve stopped bad legis-
lation or bad rules, or at least made them less
harmful,” Dillon said.
The Farm Bureau is also better equipped to
fight such battles due to the reliable coalition
it’s built with other crop, livestock and irrigator
groups, he said.
Agriculture and natural resource advocates
have set aside their differences to cooperate on
common interests, amplifying their influence
over the years, Dillon said.
“They’re more cohesive now than they have
been at other times,” he said. “I’m proud to see
that happen.”
Beyond the Farm Bureau’s state-level suc-
cesses, Dillon is encouraged by the group’s
victories at the national scale during his tenure.
For example, the organization prevailed
against the U.S. Department of Labor’s
“hot goods” tactics during the Obama
administration.
The federal agency accused farmers of
underpaying alleged “ghost workers” who
weren’t represented in employment records.
If pickers harvested more fruit per hour
than the agency believed reasonable, it
assumed they’d been helped by unauthorized
“ghost workers” receiving less than the min-
imum wage.
Crops grown by targeted farmers were
declared “hot goods” by the federal agency,
blocking the perishable fruits from sale unless
the employers paid hefty settlements.
The Oregon Farm Bureau repre-
sented farmers in federal court, ultimately
recovering those financial payments and
exposing the “ghost worker” charges as
baseless, Dillon said.
See, Dillon/Page B6
Photos by Bill Bradshaw/Wallowa County Chieftain
From left, Louis Villagomez, Kevin Kurfurst and Tia Villagomez string lights Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022, in the restaurant area of Boggans Oasis. The
Villagomezes recently purchased the business and hope to have it open by Labor Day. Kurfurst is a friend who moved there with them to help out.
Under new
ownership
Familiar Boggans Oasis restaurant getting
new look inside, but staying the same
By BILL BRADSHAW
Wallowa County Chieftain
ASOTIN COUNTY, Wash-
ington — It’s a familiar landmark to
those making the trip from Wallowa
County to Lewiston, Idaho, and
Boggans Oasis has new owners.
Louis and Tia Villagomez, for-
merly of Buckley, Washington
— at the foot of Mount Rainier
— closed on the purchase of the
property in June and relocated
to the area that month. The Vil-
lagomezes bought the property
from Bill and Farrel Vail, who
had owned and operated Boggans
since 1984 and have now retired to
Clarkston, Washington.
“I’ve been coming here since
I was about 10,” Louis said,
recalling years of fishing expedi-
tions on the Grande Ronde River
that runs just across the road.
“We’re turning it from plain Jane
to more like a resort.”
Amid all the work on the inside
of the restaurant, Louis finds time
to take advantage of the river
access.
“I fish a lot and I’m getting
ready for the guiding season,” he
said, adding that he’s a licensed
fishing guide.
The restaurant
Tia said it’s the licenses and
other government red tape that are
delaying Boggans from reopening.
“I think people think we’re
choosing to not be open right now,
but … we aren’t legally allowed to
quite yet,” she said.
The Villagomez family are the new owners of Boggans Oasis on the Lewiston
Highway just north of the Oregon border. They are revamping the interior of the
restaurant and hope to be open again by Labor Day. From left are Louis, Graciella,
Gabriel and Tia.
“That’s been the longest pro-
cess since we moved here is all the
licenses and permits.”
Louis said the health depart-
ment wants to see the restaurant
just how it will be when it’s oper-
ating before conducting an inspec-
tion. Thus, they’re taking the time
to revamp the interior by painting,
redecorating and doing a bit of
remodeling.
They are keeping many of the
mounted big-game heads and fish
that adorn the walls of the restau-
rant, a testimony to outdoor activ-
ities of the restaurant since it
opened in the late 1940s. They’re
also keeping the name.
“We had to keep the name to
honor everyone’s past memories,
all of the past guests and hope-
fully, the future guests,” Tia said.
“The name’s really important. … I
was really adamant about keeping
the phone number, too. … It’s kind
of like a pit stop for people driving
through. We’re going with the idea
of making it an oasis for people.”
Louis said he wants to make it a
real oasis.
See, Oasis/Page B6
Survey: Disrespect, more than low pay, drives resignations
Quit rate for
Oregonians was at or
above 3% for seven
straight months
By ANNA DEL SAVIO
Oregon Capital Bureau
SALEM — More than a
quarter of Oregonians have
quit a job in the past two years,
a new survey from the Oregon
Values and Beliefs Center
found.
Among Oregonians who
quit their jobs, the most
common reason why was that
they felt disrespected at work.
Some Oregonians said the
pandemic pushed issues with
their employers — or with
work — under a spotlight.
“It’s a corporate entity, they
don’t really care about any of
their employees beyond their
productive ability, what they
can produce for the company.
I’m not a fool, I know that’s
just how it is,” said one survey
respondent in his 30s.
Shannon Richardson quit
her job with the state after
11 years and moved to the
nonprofit sector during the
pandemic.
“It was like this period of
upheaval was also a little bit
of a reckoning,” Richardson
said. “I think we’re all a little
bit afraid to disrupt our daily
lives, and then suddenly, our
lives are disrupted for us and
we see the possibility in that.”
Richardson lives in Linn
County with her partner and
two children.
When the pandemic hit,
Richardson felt her workplace
didn’t adequately respond to
the need for increased flexi-
bility, which “disproportion-
ately impacted working par-
ents and particularly working
mothers.”
When school closed for
Richardson’s children “that
support system of the edu-
cation system — and all of
the social benefits that are
packed into our public educa-
tion system — were suddenly
absent.”
“Recognizing a misalign-
ment of values is one thing, and
then having it become like a
very real part of your everyday
professional life is kind of next
level,” Richardson said.
“All of a sudden, these low-
level value misalignments
or dissatisfactions are very
present and very immediate.”
Though she wanted
more flexibility in logistics
and expectations from her
employer, Richardson “still
thought that it was a change
that I could help achieve
within my workplace.” But
when her current position
opened up, “I decided to just
take the leap.”
“In hindsight, it was past
time,” Richardson said.
The quit rate for Orego-
nians was at or above 3%
for seven straight months
in late 2021 and early 2022,
according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics. Pre-pan-
demic, the monthly quit rate
had only reached 3% or higher
a handful of times since at
least 2001, and never for more
than two consecutive months.
See, Survey/Page B6