YOUR HOMETOWN NEWSPAPER SINCE 1937
Illinois Valley News
Wednesday, March 21, 2018, 1 Section, Volume LXXXI No. 11
$1.00
Published weekly for the residents of the Illinois Valley
Lions Club screens
schoolchildren for
vision and hearing
impairments
Spring cleaning
Mary West
IVN Contributing Writer
(Photo by Laura Mancuso, Illinois Valley News)
Nadja Middleton (left) and Margaret Maloney middle school students from Lorna Byrne helped pick
up trash near Old Stage Rd. Saturday, March 17 during the Rotary Club’s quarterly Clean Up Day.
The group added Holland Loop to their route with 11 helpers. Almost 50 participants picked up
trash in Cave Junction on St. Patrick’s Day.
Taxpayer-backed Oregon
mill seemed destined to fail
“Demand is good right now, ... Our
markets are good. Our customers are
begging for wood.”
Link Phillippii
By
HILLARY BORRUD and
GORDON R. FRIEDMAN,
The Oregonian
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — When state and federal
officials approved $8 million in taxpayer financing for
a Southern Oregon sawmill project, they did so on the
premise the investment would bring back jobs. But
officials greenlighted the project despite warning signs the
plan to retool the mothballed mill was likely doomed to
fail.
Sure enough, even with the expensive taxpayer-
provided upgrades, the reopened Rough & Ready mill
operated for less than 20 months before shutting down for
good. Its equipment has been auctioned off, the land sold
and the promised jobs only briefly delivered.
The failed project was overseen by Portland
environmental nonprofit Ecotrust.
Taxpayers ultimately poured more than $12 million
into the small-scale family-owned mill. On the day the
land was sold, only $5 million of it remained.
The other $7 million had been spent for naught.
Cave Junction residents like Matthew Davis, who worked
on the millroom floor, as did his father and three brothers,
have a hard time accepting that work is gone forever.
“It was a game changer,” Davis said of the mill’s
closing. “The mill was a really good income. One of the
best-paying jobs around.”
After the mill closed, Davis went back to school
and landed a better, higher paying job as a diesel engine
mechanic. But it requires a 115-mile daily commute to
and from Medford.
Government officials who hand out the type of
tax credits that Rough & Ready received don’t check a
project’s financial viability or budget details first. And that
is by design. Lawmakers who created the so-called “new
market” credits directed regulators to defer to private
sector investors.
Officials at Business Oregon, the state economic
development agency, approved Ecotrust’s tax credit
application for the mill project despite red flags. Among
them: a simplistic hand-written budget, ineligible costs
that could have been detected up front and a recent failure
by the mill’s operators to keep it open despite substantial
public investments.
Then-Gov. John Kitzhaber supported retooling the
mill in sleepy Cave Junction, surrounded by national
forests just north of the California border. He liked the
idea of putting laid off mill employees back to work.
The sawmill owners, Jennifer and Link Phillippi,
wanted as much taxpayer help as possible to buy up-
to-date equipment and restart the mill. The size of a tax
credit for pumping up a rural businesslike theirs depends
on the total cost of the improvements. Ecotrust decided to
include in its tax credit application a $4 million expense
to buy the decades-old mill and the land on which it sits.
What should have been obvious: The company in charge
of the sawmill already owned the mill and the land, so
buying them wasn’t a genuine arms-length cost and
shouldn’t have counted.
But officials at the state and federal agencies that
grant new market credits say digging deep into the
workings of individual proposals isn’t their role.
On the federal level, the Department of Treasury
scrutinizes the private entities that it authorizes to award
multiple tax credits to a spectrum of projects. Ecotrust is
one of those. Treasury officials check the performance of
each entity’s portfolio before granting it a new round of
credits to give out.
Under Oregon law, Business Oregon leaders
said, they were required to leave it to Ecotrust and
the Phillippis to judge if the deal would save the mill.
Ecotrust was paid $520,000 for arranging the deal.
SEE FUNDS ON A-8
Rough and Ready responds to article.
Read it on A-9
Thanks to the humanitarian efforts of Lions Clubs
throughout Oregon, children in Evergreen Elementary School
receive yearly screenings for vision and hearing deficits.
According to I.V. Lions member Steve Lyons, between the
I.V. and CJ Lions clubs they screened 197 children and 30 of
them needed further exams.
In an interview with the Illinois Valley News, Tim Young,
event manager from the Oregon Lions Sight & Hearing
Foundation, describes the program and the difference it makes
in the lives of students with impairments.
“The statewide program that is supported by the 40 lions
clubs in Oregon, started 10 to 12 years ago. We use a Spot
Vision Screener (SVS), which is a camera and autorefractor that
has some computer-like functions. In the screening, we simply
have the children look into the camera, and an infrared light
passes through the lens of their eye to measures visual acuity.
The measurements take four to five seconds and are 98-percent
accurate.
“While the SVS doesn’t check for medical conditions
of the eye, it screens for vision disorders that include
nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, unequal eye
strength and eye misalignment such as lazy eye. If impairments
are noted, a doctor’s visit is advised.
“The SVS has the advantage of being able to check
children with verbal disorders or other disabilities that would
make measuring vision through traditional ways difficult or
impossible. Since children don’t need to relate the letters they
see on an eye chart to an examiner, the SVS is able to test
everyone.
“Hearing screenings are conducted with audiometers that
test for high-, middle- and low-frequency sounds. As with the
vision screening, if the examiner detects a possible impairment,
an appointment with an audiologist is recommended.
“In general, vision problems are found in 9 to 12 percent
of the school children, and hearing problems are found in 1 to 2
percent. Once the students with deficitsare identified, the school
sends letters to parents notifying them that their child needs
medical attention. They also apprise them that the local lions
club or foundation will pay for doctors’ appointments, glasses
and hearing aids for families who don’t have insurance or need
financial assistance. Any child under the age of 18 is eligible.
SEE LIONS ON A-10
Grandparents: Be aware
of scams and frauds
By Laura Mancuso
IVN Editor
On March 19 at 7 a.m.,
80-year-old grandmother Ruth
Benson of Cave Junction
woke up to the telephone
ringing. She groggily heard
a voice claiming to be her
grandson saying he ended up
in jail and needed $15,000
cash for bond money.
The voice said his lawyer
would be calling to give her
instructions. Luckily, Benson
talks to her grandson regularly
and was suspicious of the fake
voice on the phone. She called
her grandson and verified he
was OK and then realized
immediately she was being
called by a scammer!
Next, someone claiming
to be a lawyer called and
instructed her to get $15,000
in cash and put it flat in a
manila envelope wrapped in
a magazine. The caller gave
her a New York address and
told her to ship it overnight by
UPS. “The number they were
calling from was not even a
New York number; it was a
phone number from Canada…
a friend of mine looked the
number up on Google for
me,” said Benson.
Benson called the
Josephine County Sheriff’s
Office and gave them all the
names and numbers of the
people that had called her.
They told her not to answer
calls from the number again
because scammers often
become hostile and rude.
Benson wants the
community to learn from her
experience.
The following is some
information from the AARP
(formerly known as the
American Association of
Retired Persons) regarding
fraud or financial exploitation.
Fraudsters use a number
of persuasion tactics to
convince their targets to give
them money. Here are three
of the most common red flags
they have seen from callers
into the AARP Foundation
ElderWatch hotline:
1) You’re contacted
out of the blue with an offer
for free money or fast cash:
If you receive an unsolicited
offer like this, there’s a good
chance that you’ve been
targeted by a scam artist. Most
scams of this nature rely on
your response to their initial
promise of lottery winnings,
fast-cash from an easy work-
at-home job, guaranteed
returns from a hot new
investment or an inheritance
you didn’t know about, so
that they can gain access to
your personal information and
solicit money from you.
SEE SCAM ON A-10