OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
OUR VIEW
It’s past time
to ix crumbling
infrastructure
W
arrenton’s efforts to upgrade aged water and
sewer lines are part of a nationwide problem that
demands creative solutions. There are growing
warnings around the country that consumers face steeply
higher utility bills.
As we reported, in Warrenton as in many other towns in
our region, obsolete and compromised pipes allow much
drinking water to leak before it reaches paying customers,
while storm and ground water iniltrates sewer lines, balloon-
ing the cost of sewage puriication. During wet weather, up
to half the water that enters the wastewater treatment plant
doesn’t need to be there.
The intensity of winter rainfall here in our area is out of
the ordinary, but the overall problem of failing water and
sewer infrastructure is all too common. All around the U.S.,
pipes and treatment plants installed in the mid-20th century
have reached the end of their functional lives. In some places,
including Warrenton, previous choices to use pipes containing
asbestos are no longer considered acceptable.
A comprehensive 2014 report by the Johnson Foundation
(tinyurl.com/Johnson-Water-Report) and a story about it by
the Circle of Blue website (tinyurl.com/jost6lc) show the
scale of these issues and provide some useful guidance for
policymakers.
“Water-cleaning and water-moving systems that were
designed and installed to contend with different conditions
generations ago are nearing the end of their design lives.
American infrastructure needs to be updated, expanded, rede-
signed, and, in many cases, reinvented for 21st-century chal-
lenges,” Circle of Blue observes.
This won’t be cheap. Up until 1990, the federal govern-
ment provided up to 90 percent of funding for sewage plants
in the form of grants, in effect spreading the cost of sanita-
tion among U.S. taxpayers. Nowadays, the vast majority of
the bill for water infrastructure is footed at the state and local
level. Reluctance to take on these expensive and ungratify-
ing projects now adds up to a nationwide backlog estimated
at $400 to $600 billion. Catching up with this work will
mean higher water and sewer bills for everyone — a situation
already all too familiar to many local residents. In Warrenton
this iscal year, water rates are going up 7 percent and sewer
rates 6 percent to compensate for years of postponing rate
hikes.
The Johnson Foundation report makes clear that much
thought is going into these issues; there’s good advice out
there, if local oficials choose to seek it. In Warrenton’s case,
its success at economic development provides the city with
some good private partners that can be called upon to assist
in designing a modern and equitable water/sewer system and
rate structure.
It’s time for all U.S. communities to deal with this long-de-
ferred work. We need to use new technologies and strategies
so we don’t fall behind again.
Our new dumbed
down democracy
By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times News Service
A
re you smarter than an immi-
grant? Can you name, say,
all three branches of govern-
ment or a single Supreme Court jus-
tice? Most Americans, those born
here, those about to make the most
momentous decision in civic life this
November, cannot. And most cannot
pass the simple test aced by 90 per-
cent of new citizens.
Well, then: Who controlled the
Senate during the 2014 election,
when control of the upper cham-
ber was at stake?
If you answered
Dunno at the time,
you were with a
majority of Ameri-
cans in the clueless
category.
But surely now, when election
news saturation is thicker than the
humidity around Lady Liberty’s
lip, we’ve become a bit more clue-
full. I give you Texas. A recent sur-
vey of Donald Trump supporters
there found that 40 percent of them
believe that ACORN will steal the
upcoming election.
ACORN? News lash: That
community-organizing group has
been out of existence for six years.
ACORN is gone, disbanded, dead.
It can no more steal an election than
Donald Trump can pole vault over
his Mexican wall.
Politically illiterate
We know that at least 30 million
U.S. adults cannot read. But the cur-
rent presidential election may yet
prove that an even bigger part of
the citizenry is politically illiterate
— and functional. Which is to say,
they will vote despite being unable
to accept basic facts needed to pro-
cess this American life.
“There’s got to be a reckoning
on all this,” said Charlie Sykes, the
inluential conservative radio host,
in a soul-searching interview with
Business Insider. “We’ve created
this monster.”
Trump, who says he doesn’t read
much at all, is both a product of the
epidemic of ignorance and a main
producer of it. He can litter the cam-
paign trail with hundreds of easily
debunked falsehoods because con-
servative media has spent more than
two decades tearing down the idea of
objective fact.
If Trump supporters knew that
illegal immigration peaked in 2007,
or that violent crime has been on a
steady downward spiral nationwide
for more than 20 years, they would
scoff when Trump says Mexican
rapists are surging across the border
and crime is out of control.
If more than 16 percent of Amer-
icans could locate Ukraine on a map,
it would have been a Really Big Deal
when Trump said that Russia was not
going to invade it — two years after
they had, in fact, invaded it.
If basic civics was still taught,
and required, for high school grad-
uation, Trump could not claim that
judges “sign bills.”
Potty talk
The dumbing down of this
democracy has been gradual, and
then — this year — all at once. The
Princeton Review found that the Lin-
coln-Douglas debates of 1858 were
engaged at roughly a high school
senior level. A century later, the pres-
idential debate of 1960 was at a 10th
grade level. By the year 2000, the
two contenders were speaking like
sixth-graders. And in the upcom-
ing debates — “Crooked Hillary”
against “Don the Con” — we’ll be
lucky to get beyond preschool potty
talk.
How did this happen, when the
populace was so less educated in the
days when most families didn’t even
have an indoor potty to talk about?
You can look at one calculated loop
of misinformation over the last two
weeks to ind some of the answer.
A big political lie often starts on
the Drudge Report, home of Obama-
as-Muslim stories. He jump-started
a recent smear with pictures of Hil-
lary Clinton losing her balance
— proof that something was very
wrong with her. Fox News then went
big with it, using the Trump adviser
and free-media enabler Sean Hann-
ity as the village gossip. Then Rudy
Giuliani, the internet diagnostician,
urged people to Google “Hillary
Clinton illness” for evidence of her
malady. This forced Clinton to prove
her stamina, in an appearance on
“Jimmy Kimmel,” by opening a jar
of pickles.
The only good thing to come out
of this is that now, when you Google
“Hillary Clinton illness” what pops
up are scathing stories about a skele-
tal-faced rumormonger named Rudy
Giuliani, and a terriic Stephen Col-
bert takedown of this awful man.
Liars
But what you don’t know really
can hurt you. Last year was the hot-
test on record. And the July just
passed was earth’s warmest month in
the modern era. Still, Gallup found
that 45 percent of Republicans don’t
believe the temperature. We’re not
talking about doubt over whether the
latest spike was human-caused —
they don’t accept the numbers, from
all those lying meteorologists.
Of late, almost half of Florid-
ians have done something to pro-
tect themselves from the Zika virus,
heeding government warnings. But
the other half cannot wish it away,
as the anti-vaccine crowd on the far
left does for serious and preventable
illnesses.
I’m sorry that my once-surging
Seattle Mariners dropped two out of
three games to the New York Yan-
kees this week. I just prefer not to
believe it. And look — now my guys
are in irst place, no matter what the
skewed “standings” show. In my
own universe, surrounded by junk
fact and junk conclusions, I feel bet-
ter already.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Agricultural decisions
should be based on facts
n a sincere and well-justiied concern about collapse of hon-
eybee colonies, it appears there may have been an unwar-
ranted rush to judgment about a widely used agricultural
chemical.
A team of researchers from Washington State University
reported this month that neonicotinoid pesticides — sometimes
called neonics and chemically similar to nicotine — pose lit-
tle risk to bees in real-world settings. Imidacloprid, one type of
neonic, is the most popular insecticide in the world. It clearly
can kill bees. But WSU scientists found bees aren’t exposed to
enough of the pesticide to cause any harmful effects in rural and
urban landscapes. Even in active farm settings, bees face very
low risks so long as users follow label instructions. For exam-
ple, insecticides should not be used during plant lowering stages
when bees are likely to be foraging.
In our area, political posturing over neonics has stymied
efforts by oyster growers to use them to control burrowing
shrimp. Though it’s obviously desirable to minimize pesti-
cide use, imidacloprid is a huge improvement over the previous
shrimp-control method.
Decisions about agricultural and aquaculture must be based
on facts, not folklore. While we strive to minimize negative
impacts on the environment, we must bear in mind that terres-
trial and aquatic farmers are the best stewards among us.
I
Thanks, Mr. Smith
ometimes you come across some-
one who really makes a differ-
ence, and it requires sharing. We
recently saw a sale in a local market
— Main Street Market in Warrenton,
to be exact — of a product that one of
the food banks very much needed. I
contacted the owner, Tommy Smith,
to see if we could make a large pur-
chase of the item, even though the
sale had ended.
Mr. Smith was willing to extend
the sale price, and work with me on
packaging and pick up. He kept tell-
ing me how much he appreciated
what I was doing, but the reality is
that he was the one who deserves the
appreciation.
Mr. Smith: Thank you!
Shopping locally does make a
difference.
DAN DECKER
Warrenton
S
Affordable housing?
read that the City of Warren-
ton is going to tackle “afford-
able housing” (“Warrenton aims
to tackle affordable housing scar-
city,” The Daily Astorian, Aug. 24).
The shortage we have is not neces-
sarily affordable housing; rather the
shortage everywhere is low-income
housing.
What many people do not realize
I
is that there is a sector of our popula-
tion who are very low income, some
as low at $731 a month on Supple-
mental Security Income. Shocked,
are you? Well, you should be even
more shocked at some of the low end
— dare I say, at times even deplor-
able — dwellings that get a new
paint job and carpet then the rent
jacked up. Some I know of, sec-
ondhand, to $900 a month, or more.
Some of those are even requiring
tenants to have rental insurance. Try
doing irst, last and a deposit on that
income.
In our capitalist society, and I’m
not decrying that, most things are
proit-driven. Some should not be,
and some should be. Health care cov-
erage and health care should not be
proit-driven. Housing is an area that
should be proit-driven, but to offset
that, and address the low income sec-
tor of our population, there must be
a means to ensure that low-income
apartments and such are increased
and maintained.
Some try and get the “Yes, we
need low-income housing, just not
in our backyard” brick wall. People
have to acquiesce sometimes. Apart-
ment complexes or rehabbed homes
need to be located where they can, if
this serious, life-impacting problem
is ever to be adequately addressed.
Investors buy old apartments,
rehab them, and then double the
rent, causing the low-income renters
to have to move, thereby increasing
our homeless population. Have you
even given thought to the emotional
impact to those affected by these
incidents? How would you feel?
I mean let’s get real. Affordable
housing means homes built as close
to the bare building code standards
as possible, then sold for as much
money as can be gotten for them.
These homes are intended for the
young couple who have inally been
able to scratch their way out of min-
imum-wage jobs.
Affordable housing isn’t meant
for those with a low income. Try
buying an affordable house on
$731, which is impossible, and hon-
estly not the normal goal of folks on
low income. Heck, you cannot rent
anything for $731 a month without
rental assistance, which is two-plus
years on a waiting list.
So the issue, to me, is to real-
ize the difference between afford-
able housing and low income hous-
ing. If our elected oficials want to
tackle housing problems, and they
should, tackle low income housing
because everyone deserves a clean,
warm, accessible and dry place to
live.
STEVE HAWKS
Warrenton