OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 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
OUR VIEW
Brown’s budget
fails the state’s
struggling youth
losing the North Coast Youth Correctional Facility is a
bad idea in every way, but one that may prove hard to
avoid in light of a coming $1.7 billion state budget short-
fall for the next two-year funding cycle.
Although its residents aren’t there by choice — having been
sentenced for breaking the law — it probably isn’t quite right
to call it a youth prison. It is a form of energetic intervention by
society to try to save youths whose lives are slipping off course.
Young men between the ages of 14 and 25 get a chance to earn
high school diplomas — 30 last year and 15 so far this year
— while learning how to resist addiction behaviors and gang
involvement.
The facility was whipsawed by a previous state budget crisis,
closing in 2003 at a cost of much disruption to troubled young
people and a loss of 100 local jobs with a payroll of $3.5 mil-
lion a year. The threatened closure this time is related to fail-
ure of controversial corporate tax hike Measure 97. Reopened
on a smaller scale with a mission of serving young wrongdoers
with substance-abuse problems, it currently houses 45 and pro-
duces a local payroll of about $2.5 million. The equivalent of 45
good-paying professional positions will be lost.
State budget woes are largely blamed on reductions in federal
funds for the Affordable Care Act and the unfunded liability of
the Public Employees Retirement System. The Affordable Care
Act is certain to remain in turmoil as congressional Republicans
and the new GOP president begin following through on plans to
scrap and replace it, while PERS is a state-made problem that
defeats every effort at a long-term solution. But Oregon clearly
must find ways to stand on its own and live up to its obligations
to all citizens.
It is interesting, and deplorable, that Gov. Kate Brown’s plans
to address this immediate funding crisis chose to close just
two outlying state facilities — the state psychiatric hospital in
Junction City and the North Coast Youth Correctional Facility. It
is difficult to imagine two more vulnerable populations than the
mentally ill and disadvantaged youth with behavioral and sub-
stance issues.
At the same time, in her proposed budget, Brown failed to
address the PERS crisis, an omission that is a bit like offering a
battle strategy and leaving out ammunition costs.
Fortunately, there are legislators who — unlike the gover-
nor — see the need to address the problem and have the courage
to do so. The proposals they are most actively discussing would
invite three constituencies to participate in a solution: public sec-
tor employers, PERS members and Oregon taxpayers. It is a
realistic coalition of shared sacrifice.
The greatest political advances in history have occurred
when a leader goes against his or her native values to break
new ground. President Richard Nixon, the arch anti-Commu-
nist, opened diplomacy with what was then called Red China.
President Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner, passed landmark Civil
Rights legislation.
For there to be a breakthrough and a remedy on PERS, it will
require an act of courage from Oregon’s Democratic leaders,
because they are most beholden to the public employees unions.
Meanwhile, in the case of the Youth Authority and its bud-
get, this on-again, off-again semi-commitment to the good works
performed in Warrenton penalizes personnel and facility resi-
dents alike, with a demoralized staff left feeling like their work
doesn’t matter. It does; it matters very much.
Oregon’s residents and leaders must find better ways to make
sustainable commitments to our neighbors at greatest risk.
C
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GUEST COLUMN
Chance to push for salmon recovery
By GLEN SPAIN
and JOEL KAWAHARA
For The Daily Astorian
A
fter decades of watching
failed attempts to fix a bro-
ken system, West Coast fish-
ermen now have a golden opportu-
nity to push for a
serious Columbia
River salmon recov-
ery plan. Federal
agencies and dam
operators will hold
a public meeting in
Glen Spain
Astoria on Thurs-
day to seek public input on a new
approach — and it’s crucial that they
hear from the fishing community!
Wild salmon runs from the
Columbia Basin, once 10 to 16 mil-
lion strong, now stand at less than 3
percent of those numbers (less than
400,000 wild fish). Nearly half of
this historical production was in the
Snake River, but most of what’s left
of this habitat is behind four federal
dams on the lower Snake River.
Those dams — Ice Harbor,
Lower Monumental, Little Goose
and Lower Granite — were built
on the Snake (the Columbia Riv-
er’s largest tributary) in the 1960s
and 70s. When the project was up
for approval in 1949, Washington’s
Department of Fisheries warned
that it would harm fisheries, writ-
ing: “Salmon must be protected from
the type of unilateral thinking that
would harm one industry to benefit
another.”
This warning went unheeded.
Although they created a subsidized
barge route for agriculture, the dams
exacted an enormous economic
and social toll through lost fishing
economies.
More than two decades
The history of litigation seek-
ing to secure adequate protection
for salmon stretches back 24 years.
Most recently, in May 2016, a fed-
eral judge in Oregon invalidated the
federal government’s fifth try at a
legal Columbia River salmon plan.
The latest version — just like the
four that came before it — doesn’t
do enough to safeguard endangered
wild salmon, the judge ruled, and the
entire system “cries out for a major
overhaul.”
This sent federal agencies back
to the drawing board, prompting
the Astoria meeting and others like
it. The removal of the four lower
Snake River dams is now firmly on
the table, but it won’t happen unless
agencies are compelled to finally
confront that it’s the only viable
path forward for salmon. Many sci-
entists, including the Western Divi-
sion of the American Fisheries Soci-
ety, have already found Snake River
dam removal to be the single most
effective step that could be taken to
rescue the Columbia Basin’s endan-
gered and threatened salmon runs.
But the federal agencies have, to
date, done their very best to ignore
the dam removal option.
The four lower Snake River
dams generate relatively little power,
amounting to only 4 percent of the
Columbia’s federal power system’s
base production, most of it during
April-June runoff periods when it is
least needed. The only major bene-
fit any of these four dams ever pro-
vided is heavily subsidized river
barge transportation — but these
marginal benefits are now swamped
by the ever-rising costs of maintain-
ing this aging system and could be
cost-effectively replaced by invest-
ments in the more flexible existing
rail system.
The West Coast salmon fleet
once freely ranged the coasts from
March until at least the end of Octo-
ber. Unfortunately, those kinds of
seasons are no more. Conservation
measures necessary to protect weak-
ened Snake River fall-Chinook and
other stocks increasingly constrain
salmon fishing from Alaska to Cen-
tral California.
$500 million
In 2000, the government esti-
mated the personal income value
of the original historic Columbia
runs at approximately $500 million/
year, enough to support 25,000 fami-
ly-wage jobs in coastal communities
like Astoria, stretching all the way
up to southeast Alaska and south to
central California.
But during the 1990s, the annual
economic value of all Colum-
bia-based ocean salmon fisheries
dropped to under $20 million, and
has only slightly improved since.
The difference between those two
numbers is what the industrialization
of the Columbia River has ultimately
cost our industry and our fishing
communities.
In spite of massive historic losses,
the West Coast salmon industry con-
tinues to depend upon Columbia
and Snake River salmon. Recently,
between 30 percent to 50 per-
cent of ocean harvests from South-
east Alaska to Oregon are from the
Columbia River, and it also provides
for treaty and nontreaty in-river fish-
eries. Columbia River salmon still
mean fishing jobs that supply needed
income and a sense of pride and
place for communities throughout
the region. But hydroelectric devel-
opment has cost our communities
dearly.
We need federal agencies to fol-
low the law, apply the best science,
take input from the people of the
region, and come up with a well-
thought-out plan that offers a real
solution. To get it right, they must
legitimately analyze every option on
the table — including an honest look
at lower Snake River dam removal.
Federal agencies will hold a pub-
lic meeting 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thurs-
day at The Loft at the Red Building,
20 Basin St. . All are welcome to
attend and provide input.
Joel Kawahara (joelkaw@earth-
link.net) is a long-time salmon troller
working offshore Washington and
Alaska, and a board member of both
theWashington-based Coastal Troll-
ers Association and Alaska Trollers.
Glen Spain is the northwest
regional director of the Pacific Coast
Federation of Fishermen’s Associa-
tions (www.pcffa.org).
Donald Trump’s art of the scam
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times News Service
emember Donald Trump’s
tax returns? It was
unheard-of for a presiden-
tial candidate to refuse to release
returns, since doing so strongly sug-
gests that he has something to hide.
And at first the Trump campaign
offered excuses, claiming that the
returns would eventually be made
available once an IRS audit was
done, or something. But at this point
it’s apparent that Trump believed,
correctly, that he could violate all
the norms, stonewall on even the
most basic disclosure, and pay no
political price.
Indeed, it’s clear that Hillary
Clinton was in effect punished for
her financial transparency, while
Trump was rewarded for his practice
of revealing nothing about how he
makes money.
And as a result, we can expect
radical lack of transparency to be
standard operating procedure in the
new administration. In fact, it has
already started.
Take, for example, the bud-
get process. Normally, an incom-
ing administration issues a fiscal
plan conveying its priorities soon
after taking office. But as the budget
expert Stan Collender notes, there
are strong indications that the Trump
administration will ignore this prec-
edent (and, possibly, the law) and
simply refuse to offer any explana-
tion of how its proposals are sup-
posed to add up. All we’ll get, prob-
R
ably, are assurances that it’s going to
be great, believe me.
True, we don’t yet know for sure
that there will be no budget. But it’s
already clear that bait-and-switch —
big but empty promises, completely
lacking in detail — will be central
to Republican strategy on one key
issue: the future of health coverage
for millions of Americans.
Obamacare
The background: Back in 2010
President Barack Obama and the
short-lived Democratic major-
ity in Congress passed the Afford-
able Care Act with zero GOP sup-
port. Ever since, Republicans have
promised to repeal the law as soon
as they had a chance, replacing it
with something much better. Strange
to say, however, they have never
described what their replacement
would look like.
Almost seven years after
Obamacare was enacted, Republi-
cans haven’t offered even the broad
outline of a health reform plan. Why
not?
Actually, there’s no mystery here.
While many Americans say they dis-
approve of Obamacare, large majori-
ties approve of the things the Afford-
able Care Act does, notably ensuring
that people with pre-existing med-
ical conditions can still buy insur-
ance. And there’s no way to achieve
these things without either a major
expansion of government health pro-
grams — hardly a Republican prior-
ity — or something very much like
the law Democrats passed.
Worse yet, from the Repub-
lican point of view, Obamacare
has worked. It’s not perfect, by a
long shot, but the number of unin-
sured Americans has plummeted
to its lowest level in history. And
Americans newly insured thanks to
Obamacare are highly satisfied with
their coverage.
So what can the GOP offer as an
alternative? We know what Repub-
licans want: a free-for-all in which
insurance companies can discrimi-
nate as they like, with minimal reg-
ulation and drastic cuts in gov-
ernment aid. Going there would,
however, cause millions of Ameri-
cans — many of them people who
voted for Trump, believing that
their recent gains were safe — to
lose coverage. The political blow-
back would be terrible. Yet failing to
repeal Obamacare would also bring
heavy political costs.
There will, of course, be no
replacement. And there’s likely to
be chaos in health care markets well
before Obamacare’s official expi-
ration date, as insurance companies
exit markets they know will soon
collapse. But the political thinking
seems to be that they can find a way
to blame Democrats for the debacle.
It’s all very Trumpian, if you
think about it. An honest mem-
oir of the president-elect’s business
career would be titled “The art of
the scam.” After all, his hallmark
has been turning a profit on failed
business projects, because he finds
a way to leave other people holding
the bag.