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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.