VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, August 13, 2016
East Oregonian
Page 5A
Britney Mendel
Another big win for salmon
Quick takes
School construction puts
hours at risk in Pendleton
I’ve always liked the idea of year round
school. Two weeks off for Christmas, four
weeks off for the summer, maybe a week
off for Thanksgiving and the week off for
Easter. That way there can just be regular
eight hour school day with good lunches
and good recesses. I think everybody would
win.
— Kristina Ream
I don’t have children in school, however,
if it comes to it, I hope all parents will unite
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I already think a full day of kindergarten is a
lot to ask of some kids.
— Betty Little
I’m sure all my teacher friends will hate
me for asking this, but why they can’t extend
the year by a few days at the end of the year?
—Alice Gilson Hepburn
Wind farm proposed
We got these things shut down in Union
County and I suggest Umatilla County does
the same. What a farce windmills are.
— Logan Jones
Are these two wind farms going to be
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the others? Because Oregonians have
been watching our natural resources being
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ourselves.
— Steve Barclay
One of the great lessons of the Twitter age is
that much can be summed up in just a few words.
Here are some of this week’s takes. Tweet yours
@Tim_Trainor or email editor@eastoregonian.
com, and keep them to 140 characters.
By PAUL VANDEVELDER
Writers on the Range
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more than 150 years ago — continue
to haunt the federal courts and state
governments. Most were made to justify
land grabs by newly arriving settlers, and
what was guaranteed to the tribes must have
seemed inconsequential.
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Isaac Stevens, negotiated a bundle of these
treaties in the 1850s and
1860s, baldly promising
state legislators that he
would “extinguish, as
quickly as possible, the
Indians’ claims to their
traditional lands so that
settlers could be given
legal title.”
The governor’s
duplicitous treaties
eventually led to war
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Yakama tribes. Most of his other treaties
with tribes on Puget Sound sparked legal
battles that have tied up federal courts for
more than a century.
Then, this June, the 9th Circuit Court
of Appeals added yet another loss to
Washington state’s nearly perfect record of
defeats, which began in 1905, with a case
challenging the Yakama Tribe’s treaty right
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and accustomed places.”
As Matthew Love and Carly Summers
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Review, this new decision grew out of
litigation that began in the 1970s. Back
then, Washington’s attorney general
(and future U.S. senator) Slade Gorton
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hopes of extinguishing them forever.
The lawsuit also sought to clarify three
issues stemming from the original treaty
with Gov. Stevens: Did the tribes have
a guaranteed right to a percentage of the
annual commercial catch; should hatchery-
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and do treaty rights implicitly safeguard the
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in “all the usual and accustomed places” is
protected?
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now-famous 1974 Boldt Decision. Judge
George Boldt wrote
that the Stevens treaties
guaranteed tribes half of
the commercial salmon
catch. As for the second
question, that guarantee
had to include hatchery-
bred salmon.
The third question
about protected places
has been bandied back
and forth since 1985.
The court originally rejected placing the
burden of what it called “environmental
servitude” on the shoulders of the state.
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crucial caveat. It ruled that the burden for
environmental protection of salmon runs
might well fall on the state’s shoulders in
the future if environmental degradation
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By 2007, much had changed in the
rivers and streams of the region, and nearly
all species of salmon were endangered.
At the request of the tribes, the 9th Circuit
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state of Washington was responsible for the
protection of salmon streams — including
their passage through road culverts. The
court explained that the Stevens treaties
imposed “a duty upon the state to refrain
Gov. Stevens’
duplicitous
treaties eventually
led to war with
the tribes.
Grim outlook for PERS
The (Eugene) Register-Guard
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ctuaries for the Public Employees
Retirement System paint a grim picture of
the next half-dozen years: State and local
governments will have to increase their contributions
to the pension system by an amount equal to about 4
percent of total payroll costs next year, and again in
2019, and again in 2021. Those increases will absorb
most or all of the money otherwise available for pay
raises for current employees, or
for improved public services.
PERS is squeezing everything,
testing the Legislature’s ability
to act.
In the current biennium,
according to PERS, payroll costs
for all governments enrolled in
the pension system — school
districts, cities, counties and
state agencies — totaled $19
billion. An additional $2 billion
will be contributed to PERS. In
2017-19, payroll costs will rise
an estimated 7 percent, while
PERS contributions will climb 44
percent to $2.9 billion.
Here’s another way to put it:
Over the next two years, state
and local governments will
spend an additional $1.3 billion
on everything that counts as payroll: teachers in the
classroom, cops on the beat, nurses in the clinic,
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people receive. In that same period, those same
governments will pay an additional $885 million
to cover pension obligations. Of all the additional
resources available to government during the next
biennium, 41 percent will go to PERS.
It gets worse: By 2021-23, governments’
aggregate PERS contributions will be $4.5 billion,
more than double the $2 billion for the current
two-year budget period.
Even contributions at that level won’t be enough
to cover the pension system’s unfunded liability of
$21.8 billion. PERS currently has enough assets to
cover only 71 percent of its future obligations. The
shortfall must be made up by the system’s only two
sources of funds — income from investments or the
taxpayers.
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who is chairman of the PERS board, told The
(Portland) Oregonian that no one should expect
a Wall Street miracle. “This is not a situational
problem that is going to go away if returns spike a
bit,” he said. “It’s a systemic problem. ... Everything
is predicated on a linear 7.5 percent investment
return, and that has not been sustainable.”
The annualized rate of return on PERS’s invested
funds over the past 10 years has been 5.9 percent,
and was only 2.1 percent last year.
The pension system’s insatiable appetite is often
cast as a contest between the interests of public
employees and everyone else, but that is less the
case each year. PERS’s heaviest obligations are
owed to public employees hired before 1996, when
the Legislature began reducing pension entitlements.
Currently, nearly 1,200 PERS retirees receive
pensions of more than $100,000 a year, and more
than 23,000 receive more in retirement than they
were paid in salary while working — almost all
of these are pre-1996 hires. Increasingly, public
employees who are on the job today are seeing their
wage growth slowed and working
conditions worsened to maintain
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came before.
Current public employees also
pay the political price of PERS
costs. Any proposal for a tax
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as raising money that will be
swallowed by PERS, which makes
it harder for governments at all
levels to persuade voters to provide
funds for anything from reduced
class sizes to sheriff’s patrols.
Retired teachers and deputies aren’t
affected — those in the classroom
or on patrol today are.
The Legislature has repeatedly
attempted to rein in the cost of
PERS, but its scope of action is
limited. In a series of decisions,
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changed retroactively without violating contract
rights. Republicans in the Legislature criticize the
state’s Democratic leaders for failing to lighten the
PERS burden — but in fact members of both parties
have tried, sometimes at political expense, to change
the system, only to encounter a legal brick wall.
But legislative Republicans offer a list of ideas
they say have not been tried, such as capping the
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of pension plan, and ending the practice of including
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Some of the Republicans’ proposals seem
vulnerable to the same legal challenges that have
scuttled earlier attempts to lighten the burden of
pension costs. But both economic and political gains
could come from pursuing another round of reforms.
Any changes that stand up in court would reduce
PERS’s unfunded liability, and therefore its cost to
the taxpayers. And Oregonians’ resentment could
be cooled from a boil to a simmer if they see that
lawmakers have exhausted all possible cost savings.
State and local governments’ purpose is to
provide vital services to all Oregonians — but rising
pension costs feed the cynical belief that their real
purpose is to provide well-upholstered retirement
to a privileged class. Lawmakers need to do all they
can to weaken the basis for that belief, which is
well-established already but will grow stronger in
the years to come.
Current public
employees pay
the political price
of PERS costs.
Retired teachers
and deputies
aren’t affected
— those in the
classroom or on
patrol today are.
from building and operating culverts under
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passage and thereby diminish the number
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tribal harvest.”
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those culverts could run into hundreds of
millions of dollars, the state challenged
that decision. But in June the 9th Circuit
told Washington, in effect: Tough luck. It
said that after the Boldt Decision, the state
should have taken appropriate measures
to remedy treaty violations before salmon
became endangered.
Moreover, the court said that the tribes’
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their “usual and accustomed places” was
long-settled law protected by Article VI,
clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution, making
the Stevens treaties “the supreme law of the
land.” That, combined with the Endangered
Species Act passed by Congress in 1973,
obligates the state to replace or repair any
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for salmon to move freely to their spawning
grounds.
Gov. Steven’s zeal to extinguish Indian
title to lands they had owned since time
immemorial has resulted in a bonanza for
lawyers, decades of legal headaches for the
state, and no end of frustration for the tribes.
But in 2016, all of this legal logrolling begs
an even more daunting question: How will
future courts tell the difference between
culverts that stop endangered species from
reaching their breeding grounds, and dams
that do the very same thing?
Ŷ
Paul VanDevelder is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, the opinion service of
High Country News. He lives in Portland,
and is the author of “Savages and Scoun-
drels: America’s Road to Empire through
Indian Territory.”