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Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Tuesday, August 16, 2016 Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN DANIEL WATTENBURGER Publisher Managing Editor JENNINE PERKINSON TIM TRAINOR Advertising Director Opinion Page Editor OUR VIEW File predator study under ‘junk science’ Straight from the Department of Wishful Thinking comes a new study that offers the theory that predators are good for people. Why? Because they eat deer, and a deer that’s been eaten can’t jump in front of a car and cause a wreck. Such tortured logic is popular these days, as some researchers desperately try to paint a “Happy Face” on real problems. Because they reside at the top of the food chain, wolves and cougars eat just about anything that moves. Mice, squirrels, deer — all are on the menu. So are sheep and cattle. In the recent “Predators Are Our Friends” study, researchers wanted to prove that having cougars and wolves around isn’t all bad. In fact, these predators do good by eating those pesky deer that station themselves along roads at night waiting for a car to jump at. There is no argument that deer are rural trafic hazards, especially during rut, when the males go looking for love in all the wrong places. Some years ago, a particularly amorous deer saw his relection in the plate glass window of a Salem- area restaurant. He crashed through the window and slid across the loor. The impact broke the jaw of a customer who had been sitting at a table drinking coffee. Others tell the story of a deer that charged the side of a minivan that had stopped on the road to avoid hitting him. In those cases, the deer would have been much better off staying in the woods. Or better yet, hunters should be allowed to thin the ranks of cougars, wolves, deer — and elk, too, for that matter. We would prefer a regulated hunting season over an unregulated population of predators preying on ranchers’ livestock. To make the case that any predator that kills a deer — unless it was getting ready to jump through a restaurant window — is a beneit to mankind is a stretch. Many humans have problems with cougars and wolves. They are called ranchers, and they have to clean up the mess after a cougar or wolf has torn a sheep or cow to shreds. They also pay for the honor by losing valuable members of their locks or herds. Predators cost Western ranchers many thousands of dollars each year. We admire the efforts of the researchers who attempted to create a happy story about predators. But the reality remains that ranchers continue to have many problems with predators, including cougars and wolves. A well- regulated hunt would go a long way toward solving those problems. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of Publisher Kathryn Brown, Managing Editor Daniel Wattenburger, and Opinion Page Editor Tim Trainor. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. OTHER VIEWS Public records law still needs more bite The Oregonian, Aug. 13 I t shouldn’t require superhuman tenacity, legal expertise or deep pockets to be able to review how school districts, state environmental regulators or other governmental agencies handle the public’s business. But in Oregon, where legislators routinely shield agencies from disclosure requirements and where agencies demand as much as $1 million to retrieve data for the public, those seeking to scrutinize government workings have needed to summon all three. That’s not likely to change much, even with the recent release of proposed public records reforms by Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum. Rosenblum’s draft amendments provide some worthwhile ideas, but the proposal avoids tackling some of the biggest problems facing those seeking public information. The draft amendments to the public disclosure law leave unlimited the fees that agencies can charge for fulilling requests. The reforms lack any built-in consequences for public bodies that take excessive amounts of time to respond. Agencies can continue citing any one of the more than 400 exemptions that shield public records from public scrutiny. In short: Oregon’s cagey relationship with the public continues. Still, the proposal offers a foundation upon which Rosenblum and her task force of public oficials, journalists, citizen advocates and others can and should build more aggressive reforms. True government accountability and transparency depend on it. First, the positives. The proposed changes give shape to a law that currently measures compliance with fuzzy standards of whether an agency responded “as soon as practicable and without unreasonable delay.” Rosenblum’s proposal calls for specifying that public bodies acknowledge a request within ive business days and fulill them within 10, except for schools that are not in session. It also calls for producing an exhaustive catalogue that lists the exemptions legislators have authorized over the years. And a new statement of purpose makes clear that the default mode for government should be to make records accessible to the public — with narrowly construed exceptions. But the ixes are largely symbolic and won’t resolve many of the conlicts that citizens and media members reported to the task force, such as the $1,042,450.20 estimate Portland Police cited to fulill a request from The Oregonian/OregonLive’s Carli Brosseau for information from the bureau’s evidence database, or the $750 that the Department of Environmental Quality wanted to charge The Oregonian/ OregonLive’s Rob Davis to search and produce emails with a few keywords. For many citizens who don’t have the resources or desire to spend such money, $750 might as well as be $1 million. This is how a government thwarts citizen scrutiny. With no consequences in the proposed legislation, it’s unclear whether the ixes would have prevented one of the most egregious public-records runarounds recently. In December 2014, Anne Marie Gurney with the Freedom Foundation requested from the Department of Human Services the names and contact information for home health care workers to alert them of their rights regarding paying fees to unions. Although the information was public, the agency stalled and put Gurney off for four months — long enough for the Legislature to pass a law exempting that information from public disclosure laws. Gov. Kate Brown signed the bill, despite knowing there was an unilled request for the information, Brown acknowledged earlier this year. Fortunately, there’s still time to strengthen the proposed reforms. Veteran Oregonian/OregonLive investigative reporter Les Zaitz, who serves on the task force for the Oregon Territory Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, plans to raise the issue of fees at an Aug. 31 meeting. And Michael Kron, the attorney general’s special counsel who is heading up the public records task force, said Rosenblum wants to continue convening the group to tackle fees and streamlining exemptions, even if those issues don’t get addressed in the 2017 session. Separately, Brown’s ofice is developing a proposal for a public records advocate to handle disputes. These are promising steps. But as Zaitz noted, there needs to be a change in mentality as well as a change in law. Public oficials need to get away from this misconception that they own public records and that citizens gain access only by their good grace, he said, adding “this is about citizens watching what their government is doing.” Rosenblum, Brown and legislators need to show with their actions that that’s an outcome they genuinely want to support. OTHER VIEWS To get to Harvard, go to Haiti? T his summer, as last, Dylan He asked her if she had a roadway or Hernandez, 17, noticed a theme country in mind. She didn’t. on the social media accounts of Richard Weissbourd, a child fellow students at his private Catholic psychologist and Harvard lecturer who high school in Flint, Michigan. has studied the admissions process in “An awfully large percentage of the interest of reforming it, recalled my friends — skewing towards the speaking with wealthy parents who had afluent — are taking ‘mission trips’ to bought an orphanage in Botswana so Central America and Africa,” he wrote their children could have a project to Frank to me in a recent email. He knows this write and talk about. He later became Bruni from pictures they post on Snapchat aware of other parents who had bought Comment and Instagram, typically showing one of an AIDS clinic in a similarly poor them “with some poor brown child aged country for the same reason. 2 to 6 on their knee,” he explained. The captions “It becomes contagious,” he said. tend to say something along the lines of, “This A more recent phenomenon is teenagers cutie made it so hard to leave.” trying to demonstrate their leadership skills in But leave they do, after as little as a week addition to their compassion by starting their of helping to repair some village’s crumbling own ledgling nonproit groups rather than school or library, to return to their comfortable contributing to ones that exist — and that might homes and quite possibly write a college- be more practiced and eficient at what they do. application essay about how transformed they “It’s a sort of variation on going on a mission are. trip and iguring out that people all over the “It rubs me the wrong way,” Hernandez world are really the same,” said Stephen told me, explaining that while many of his Farmer, who’s in charge of undergraduate friends are well intentioned, some seem not to admissions at the University of North Carolina notice poverty until an at Chapel Hill. exotic trip comes with “I don’t mean to make it. He himself has done light of it,” he added, extensive, sustained acknowledging that many volunteer work at the such trips and nonproits Flint YMCA, where, have beneits, and not he said, the children he just for the college-bound tutors and plays with students engaged in them. would love it “if these But they’re largely same peers came around reserved for students and merely talked to whose parents are them.” afluent enough to assist “No passport or the endeavors. And customs line required,” they’re often approached he added. casually and forgotten Hernandez reached out to me because he quickly. “My concern is that students feel was familiar with writing I had done about the compelled to do these things — forced — college admissions process. What he described rather than feeling that they’re answering some is something that has long bothered me and inner call,” Farmer said. other critics of that process: the persistent In many cases they are compelled. Tara vogue among secondary-school students for Dowling, director of college counseling at the so-called service that’s sometimes about little Rocky Hill School in East Greenwich, Rhode more than a faraway adventure and a few lines Island, said many secondary schools (including, or paragraphs on their applications to selective as it happens, Dylan Hernandez’s) now require colleges. a minimum number of hours of service from It turns developing-world hardship into a students, whose schedules — jammed with prose-ready opportunity for growth, empathy sports, arts, SAT prep and more — leave little into an extracurricular activity. time for it. And it relects a broader gaming of the Getting it done in one big Central American admissions process that concerns me just as swoop becomes irresistible, and if that dilutes much, because of its potential to create strange the intended meaning of the activity, who’s to habits and values in the students who go blame: the students or the adults who set it up through it, telling them that success is a matter this way? Dowling noted that without the right of supericial packaging and checking off the kinds of conversations and guidance, “Kids right boxes at the right time. That’s true only in don’t know how to connect these experiences to some cases, and hardly the recipe for a life well the rest of their lives, to the bigger picture.” lived. There are excellent mission trips, which In the case of drive-by charity work, the some students do through churches that they checked box can actually be counterproductive, belong to, and less excellent ones. There are because application readers see right through it. also plenty of other summer projects and “The running joke in admissions is the jobs that can help students develop a deeper, mission trip to Costa Rica to save the rain humbler understanding of the world. forest,” Ángel Pérez, who is in charge of Pérez told me that his favorite among admissions at Trinity College in Hartford, recent essays by Trinity applicants came from Connecticut, told me. someone “who spent the summer working at a Jennifer Delahunty, a longtime admissions coffee shop. He wrote about not realizing until oficial at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, he did this how invisible people in the service said that mission-trip application essays are industry are. He wrote about how people looked their own bloated genre. right through him at the counter.” “Often they come to the same conclusion: Helicopter parents, stand down! Pérez’s People in other parts of the world who have no assessment doesn’t mean that you should money are happier than we are!” she told me. hustle your teenagers to the nearest Starbucks. “That is eye-opening to some students. But it It means that whatever they do, they should can be a dangerous thing to write about, because be able to engage in it fully and relect on it it’s hard to rescue the truth from that cliché.” meaningfully. And if that’s service work, why Many of the students taking mission not address all the need in your own backyard? trips or doing other charity work outside the Many college-bound teenagers do, but not country have heartfelt motivations, make a nearly enough, as Hernandez can attest. He real (if leeting) contribution and are genuinely feels awfully lonely at the Flint YMCA and, enlightened by it. Pérez and Delahunty don’t in the context of that, wonders, “Why is it doubt that. Neither do I. fashionable to spend $1,000-plus, 20 hours But there’s cynicism in the mix. traveling, and 120 hours volunteering in A college admissions counselor once told me Guatemala for a week?” about a rich European client of his who called He wonders something else, too. “Aren’t him in a panic, wanting to cancel her family’s the children there sad, getting abandoned by a usual August vacation so that her son could go fresh crop of afluent American teens every few build roads in the developing world. She’d just days?” read or heard somewhere that colleges would be ■ impressed by that. Frank Bruni is a New York Times columnist. It turns develop- ing-world hardship into a prose-ready opportunity for growth, empathy into an extracurricular activity. LETTERS POLICY The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Submitted letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. Send letters to Managing Editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
