OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2017
Founded in 1873
HEIDI WRIGHT, Interim Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Governor ducks
responsibility for
health authority mess
ad news keeps rolling out from the Oregon Health
Authority. But instead of taking responsibility, Gov. Kate
Brown not only ducked it but also tried to spin it as posi-
tive news.
The issue is that OHA paid too much to regional health-care
organizations, collected too much money from the feds as a result,
and might have to repay all of it.
Brown announced the issue in a roundabout way last week,
issuing a press release headlined, “New OHA Leadership Takes
Action to Resolve Overpayments Made in Wake of Cover Oregon
Failure.” It praised new OHA director Patrick Allen “and his team
for acting quickly to bring stability and transparency to OHA’s
work on behalf of Oregonians.
The overpayments were made to coordinated care organizations
for patients who were eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare.
This occurred from 2014 through mid-2016.
Brown is the state’s CEO. She is responsible what happens on
her watch after becoming governor in February 2015.
Mistakes happen. Still, it is disappointing that OHA apparently
overpaid $74 million to 16 coordinated care organizations. It is
disconcerting that, according to the governor’s office, Brown only
learned of the problem when Allen took over as OHA director. It is
disturbing that Brown, through her press release, tried to spin the
snafu instead of accepting her share of the responsibility.
Indeed, this does sound like Cover Oregon, but not in the way
Brown suggested. The Cover Oregon fiasco stemmed from Gov.
John Kitzhaber appointing the wrong people to key jobs, not
keeping close tabs on the project and accepting dubious progress
reports. That also sounds like this new OHA fiasco.
As governor, Brown is CEO of a multi-billion-dollar organiza-
tion with tens of thousands of employees. A good CEO develops a
solid record of hiring the right people, giving them freedom to do
their jobs while also staying on top of their work. In that regard,
Brown has a decidedly mixed record, although she did eventually
oust Lynne Saxton as OHA director and bring in the well-regarded
Allen.
No one, especially a politician, likes to look bad. But a good
CEO builds confidence, trust and respect by taking responsibility
when things go awry.
B
Better sooner than later to
get junkers out of marinas
J
ust as adorable spring lambs unavoidably transmogrify into
stupid tick-infested sheep, pretty new watercraft eventually
decay into weed-festooned hulks. The Warrenton Marina
is in the midst of rounding up its ugly derelicts and getting them
out of the water, a labor-intensive but worthwhile chore.
To live in any ocean-dependent community is to become famil-
iar with the phenomenon of unloved, neglected and abandoned
watercraft. Once someone’s pride and joy — or at least a valuable
tool — recreational and commercial vessels all eventually become
worn out and obsolete. They have an air of mystery and are mag-
nets for dreamers and artists. Even seasoned mariners who know
the truth — that they are holes in the water into which you throw
money — may feel pangs of temptation to restore them to pro-
ductive life. Often, however, vessels slumbering in local mooring
basins are too far gone, too encumbered in liens and toxic paint to
be rescued.
Warrenton has joined other local marinas in going through a
formal legal process of clearing vessel titles so they can be sold or
demolished. Walking the marina’s floats, it was easy to spot once-
prized vessels that hadn’t moved out into the estuary or ocean in
years. They were taking up potentially valuable moorage space.
Like neglected houses in an otherwise gentrifying neighborhood,
they harmed the overall impression of an up-and-coming marina.
Most crucially, they threaten to sink — as the abandoned
Western Skies did at its slip this summer — leaving taxpayers to
soak up expensive cleanups.
Goaded by these costs, marinas have been getting smarter and
tougher about requiring current insurance and registration docu-
ments before allowing boats to take up a slip. Over the course of a
few years, these steps and seizures of previously abandoned ves-
sels will get them out of public facilities.
Oregon and Washington both also have large, unfunded liabil-
ities in the form of sunken watercraft, along with many others left
to decay on dry land in blackberry thickets and junkyards. Both
legislatures must step up funding for these seeping sores on the
environment. All by itself, the partially sunken Antarctic research
ship Hero at Bay Center, Washington, will cost hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars to extract from its resting place and dismantle.
Dealing with junkers before they sink is far cheaper than waiting
until after they’re in the drink.
Commendations to Warrenton Marina. The steps it is taking
will make it a more appealing and valuable public asset.
National parks for the 1 percent
AP Photo/Felicia Fonseca
Visitors gather at an outlook on the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park in northern Arizona in
2015. A National Park Service plan would impose steep increases in entrance fees at 17 of its most pop-
ular parks, including the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone and Zion.
By TIMOTHY EGAN
New York Times News Service
A
merica’s Best Idea is now
just another commodity. A
president who knows the
price of everything
and the value of
nothing, as Oscar
Wilde had it, wants
to make it prohib-
itively expensive
for many to enter
the most popular
national parks.
You may have missed this,
between the indictments, the terror-
ist attack, the Civil War revisionism.
But the Trump administration has
proposed nearly tripling the entrance
fees to select national parks, to $70.
The man who loves nothing so
much as his gold-plated bathroom
fixtures wants to gouge people who
want to experience something that
all of Donald Trump’s minions
could never create. It’s a teardrop in
the federal budget, but is emblem-
atic of the ocean of wrong coming
from this president.
First, we already own these
parks — Glacier, Olympic, Mount
Rainier, Zion, Yellowstone, the
names themselves music to lovers of
magic in the natural world. They are
a birthright of citizenship.
Second, the Trump administra-
tion wants to jack up the price of
admission to our most spectacular
public lands while moving to cut the
Park Service budget by almost $300
million. The new fees would add
$70 million. Go figure. His attacks
on the parks would be the biggest
cut to the agency since World War
II.
Third, he not only wants to make
it more costly to get into beloved
public places, he also plans to take
away land already protected in
ways similar to national parks. He
told Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, he’s
going to shrink two extraordinary
national monuments — “for you,
Orrin.” It’s a corrupt-sounding gift
to a senator, and a giveaway of a
public trust. No drain of this swamp.
But this is the Trump ethos.
There’s always a velvet rope —
coming soon, at the rim of the
Grand Canyon — a place for VIPs,
deal-makers and insiders, and too
bad for everyone else.
It may sound like no big deal
— raising admission fees in the 17
parks targeted for price gouging
— when Trump’s government is
running a $660 billion deficit. You’d
pay $107 to get into Disney World.
But national parks are not theme
parks, market-driven to match the
latest entertainment blockbusters.
All national parks should be
free, like the great museums of
Washington. We should care for
these special places with a budget
commensurate to their value,
treating them like the huge income
generators they are, producing $34
billion to local businesses. Instead,
we starve them nearly to death.
In the bizarro world of this
administration, taxpayers are being
asked to subsidize a dying industry,
coal mining, while their government
is slashing the budget for a growing
one that is responsible for four times
as many jobs.
We saw again this week how
confused so many people are about
basic elements of our history. When
a general, Trump Chief of Staff
John Kelly, doesn’t even have a
grade-school understanding of the
Civil War, you know we need more
park-uniformed historians.
Kelly should visit the national
battlefield at Antietam, site of the
bloodiest single day in our history.
Or walk up the slope of the national
military park at Fredericksburg,
Virginia. There, the Union Army’s
Irish Brigade was slaughtered by the
slaveholding forces of Gen. Robert
E. Lee.
The park service keeps that vital
history alive. Trump’s budget would
drastically cut money for historic
preservation, and eliminate more
than 1,200 full-time employees.
It’s too bad that the statue of
Teddy Roosevelt in front of the
American Museum of Natural
History was recently defaced, which
a handful of extremists took respon-
sibility for. Roosevelt was a found-
ing progressive voice who saw parks
and public land as a basic right.
National parks are “as uniquely
American as the Declaration of
Independence and just as radical,”
wrote Dayton Duncan, a parks histo-
rian and a co-writer of many a Ken
Burns documentary.
Ryan Zinke, the thin-skinned and
very strange secretary of the inte-
rior, says the price hikes for select
parks are necessary to ensure their
preservation. Yes, the parks have a
huge backlog of things that need to
be fixed. Broken toilets, pockmarked
roads, untended trails. And yet, there
were 331 million visits to these
much-loved and abused places last
year — a record.
The solution is not to make it
more difficult for those who are
financially struggling to see their
parks. Yes, again, their parks.
We could, for instance, not build
Trump’s nonsensical border wall,
which looks like it will cost upward
of $20 billion, more than eight
times the entire proposed budget for
the Park Service. (Wait — wasn’t
Mexico supposed to pay for that?)
Or we could keep the estate tax,
which affects only about 1 out of
every 500 people who die every
year, and raises $20 billion as well.
The bigger question, after all, is
about inheritance: What would we
rather pass on to our children?
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