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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (May 26, 2017)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Friday, May 26, 2017 Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor MARISSA WILLIAMS Regional Advertising Director MARCY ROSENBERG Circulation Manager JANNA HEIMGARTNER Business Office Manager MIKE JENSEN Production Manager OUR VIEW Tip of the hat; kick in the pants A tip of the hat to the class of 2017, and particularly the hundreds of students in our communities who will accept their diplomas in the coming weeks. For the last 13 years these students have been enrolled in our schools, learning both the academic lessons of the classroom and the life lessons that come with growing up among peers. The diploma is a tangible token of this accomplishment, and the pomp and circumstance that surround the ceremony are a fitting tribute to the students. Shaking the hand of the superintendent, tossing your square cap in the air and getting a lot of unsolicited advice from strangers is a rite of passage. So here’s a bit more. (We’ll keep it short). Expect life to get harder, more exciting and more rewarding all at once. The training wheels are off, so to speak. Your victories through formal education so far will pale in comparison to what is in store in the wider world. Don’t fear the challenges, skip out on the adventures or settle for mediocrity. Best of luck. A tip of the hat to the Pendleton Foundation Trust and the volunteers who keep the charitable group running year after year. They do critical work in the Pendleton area, pumping more than $4 million dollars into nonprofits and goodwill projects in the past decade alone. It takes some combination of money and manpower to make a community work, and the Trust frees up many hours of fundraising by local groups by wisely selecting worthy projects. There are examples all over town of the good work funded by the Trust (see the story on Page 3A for a few), but one way to remember what they do is the new bench at Pioneer Park, dedicated Wednesday to 43-year board member John McBee Sr. Next time you’re up at the park, have a seat on the bench and think about how you can pitch in to make this community a better place. A kick in the pants to Senate Democrats for standing against an impeachment resolution in Oregon. Ours is the only state that doesn’t have a mechanism for the legislature to remove a governor, which is an important failsafe in state government. At the very least voters should have choice of whether to empower lawmakers to impeach if worse comes to worse. A House resolution passed this week 51-6, earning bipartisan support, and even Gov. Kate Brown has spoken in favor of such a measure. But the Senate has shown little interest. Senate Majority Leader Ginny Burdick holds much of the power as the resolution will likely come through rules committee she chairs. The Portland Democrat has said she thinks the state’s recall procedures are strong enough. We disagree. Voters can retain the power to remove elected leaders, but the legislature should also be given the tools to be an effective check and balance to the governor’s office. 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. YOUR VIEWS Help Spray rent some portable toilets for eclipse In your article “Spray Grapples with Predicted Influx of Eclipse Tourists” (May 12) the article you presented by Aaron Scott of Oregon Public Broadcasting summarized the concerns of Spray with three specific questions. You presented the article with questions 1 and 2, however, the East Oregonian missed the most important third question. This final question regarding “port-a- potties” is most essential and is the focal point of our small town budget in Spray. Port-a-potties and garbage removal are not revenue producing services for any town. As the EO represents news and concerns of all Eastern Oregon, we would greatly appreciate you partnering with us to advance our GoFundMe page to invite others to invest in helping Spray offset the anticipated expenses associated with the Great Eclipse of 2017. Debbie Starkey Spray City Council member Wheeler County commissioner, Spray Time for a fresh look at priorities Available energy and water are the keys to economic development. Both are conspicuously absent for developers of the industrial property on the road to nowhere. Recently it’s been reported that on completion, the new Yellowhawk Clinic with an advanced heating and cooling system and a solar carport will “operate at least 40 percent more efficiently than required by Oregon efficiency code.” CTUIR should be commended for their efforts at developing alternate sources and conservation. I wonder how the energy efficiency of those new Pendleton Heights duplexes, backed by the city and lacking gas and a central heat and air conditioning system, compare to the standard. Expected high electric bills kinda kill the whole concept of affordable housing when you consider $1,000 for rent. Umatilla Electric Co-op continues to make the news leading the way in solar farms. Meanwhile, the city of Pendleton, though claiming to lead in per capita solar participation, has chosen the most inefficient means of generation by selecting individual home owner systems verses the solar farm approach. An independent business has been attempting to construct a solar farm on city property that is essentially unusable for other development. This project as well as any significant development along the road to nowhere has been stymied, I believe, by our friends at PP&L. Perhaps it’s time to follow the example set by Hermiston and consider dumping PP&L altogether. The mayor and city council have finally completed their blueprint for the city’s goals and a rating system to measure their progress. Looks like it’s up to the city manager to implement the programs despite the distractions that have currently limited any progress. Though the Pendleton Fire Department has been pleading for replacement of worn out emergency equipment, grant requests to local foundations for funding has been conspicuously absent. Evidently, grant writing skills are lacking, so an outside agency has been paid $50,000 to write those grant requests with an expected 10 to 1 return on the investment. With those expected returns, it looks like the fire station bond request could have been considerably less. I often wonder if the funds spent on outside grant writers, consultants, and PDA projects would have covered the cost of their new equipment. I guess we’ll never know. Rick Rohde Pendleton OTHER VIEWS A road trip through rusting and rising America left along with the jobs and poverty AK RIDGE, Tenn. — In his crept up among those who stayed.” dystopian Inaugural Address, Austin, Cooke explained to me, President Donald Trump got caught in the vortex of declining painted a picture of America as a blue-collar jobs, leading to a loss of nation gripped by vast “carnage” — a dignity for breadwinners, depression landscape of “rusted-out factories and family breakdown, coinciding scattered like tombstones” that cried with doctors’ and drug companies’ out for a strongman to put “America first” and stop the world from stealing Thomas pushing painkillers, and with too many our jobs. It was a shocking speech in Friedman people in the community failing to many ways and reportedly prompted realize that to be in the middle class Comment former President George W. Bush to now required lifelong learning — not say to those around him on the dais, just to get a job but to hold one. “That was some really weird (stuff).” “Thirty percent of students were not It was weird, but was it all wrong? even graduating from high school,” said I just took a four-day car trip through the Cooke. “Then you take high unemployment, heart of that landscape — driving from Austin, generational poverty, homelessness, childhood Indiana, down through Louisville, Kentucky, abuse and neglect, and cloak that within a winding through Appalachia and ending up closed-off culture inherited from Appalachia, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in and you begin to have the ingredients that Tennessee to try to answer that question. contributed to the HIV outbreak.” Trump is half right in his diagnosis, but Austin’s insularity proved deadly for both his prescription is 100 jobs and families. “The close- percent wrong. We do knit, insular nature of the have an epidemic of failing community worked against it, communities. But we also with the CDC later finding up have a bounty of thriving to six people shared needles ones — not because of a at one sitting, and two or three strongman in Washington but generations — young adults, because of strong leaders at parents and grandparents — the local level. sometimes shot up together,” Indeed, this notion that The Courier-Journal reported. Lately, though, Cooke told America is a nation divided me, the town’s prospects have between two coasts that started to improve, precisely are supposedly thriving, because the community has pluralizing and globalizing come together, not to shoot and a vast flyover interior, up but to start up and learn up where jobs have disappeared, and give a hand up. drug addiction is rife and “The local high school has everyone is hoping Trump can bring back the 1950s, is highly inaccurate. introduced college-credit classes and trade programs so people are graduating with a The big divide in America is not between the coasts and the interior. It’s between strong head start,” said Cooke. Faith-based and civic communities and weak communities. You can groups have mobilized, celebrating social and find weak ones along the coast and thriving economic recovery, providing community ones in Appalachia, and vice versa. It’s dinners called “Food 4R Soul” and even community, stupid — not geography. installing community showers for people The communities that are making it share a without running water. key attribute: They’ve created diverse adaptive Addiction is often a byproduct of social coalitions, where local businesses get deeply breakdown leading to a sense of isolation. involved in the school system, translating in Cooke feels hopeful because he sees the tide real time the skills being demanded by the slowly shifting as “social isolation gives way global economy. to community.” “Only a healthy individual can contribute They also tap local colleges for talent and innovations that can diversify their economies to a healthy family, and only a healthy family and nurture unique local assets that won’t go can contribute to a healthy community — and away. Local foundations and civic groups step all of that requires a foundation of trust,” said in to fund supplemental learning opportunities Cooke. “That kind of change can’t come from and internships, and local governments help to the outside, it has to be homegrown.” catalyze it all. Just 40 minutes down the highway from The success stories are all bottom-up; the Austin, I interviewed Greg Fischer, the mayor failures are all where the bottom has fallen out. of Louisville, a city bustling with energy and I started in one of the bottomless places: new buildings. “That ‘Intifada’ you wrote Austin, Indiana, a tiny town of 4,000 off about in the Middle East is happening in Interstate 65, which was described in a parts of rural and urban America — people brilliant series in The Louisville Courier- saying, ‘I feel disconnected and hopeless Journal “as the epicenter of a medical about participating in a rapidly changing disaster,” where citizens of all ages are getting global economy.’ Drug-related violence and hooked on liquefied painkillers and shooting addiction is one result — including in a few up with dirty needles. neighborhoods of Louisville.” The federal Centers for Disease Control But Louisville also has another story to and Prevention confirmed that Austin tell: “We have 30,000 job openings,” said “contains the largest drug-fueled HIV Fischer, and for the best of reasons: Louisville outbreak to hit rural America in recent has “a vision for how a city can be a platform history.” Its 5 percent infection rate “is for human potential to flourish.” It combines comparable to some African nations.” “strategies of the heart,” like asking everyone Austin, the newspaper noted, doesn’t just to regularly give a day of service to the city; sit at the intersection between Indianapolis strategies of science, like “citizen scientists” and Louisville but at the “intersection of bearing GPS-enabled inhalers that the city uses to track air pollution, mitigate it and warn hopelessness and economic ruin.” asthma suffers; and strategies for job creation I chose to go there to meet the town’s that leverage Louisville’s unique assets. only doctor, Will Cooke, whose heroic work One job-creation strategy led to creation of a I learned of from the Courier-Journal series. Cooke’s clinic, Foundations Family Medicine, slew of businesses that make “end of runway” products for rapid delivery by leveraging the sits at 25 West Main St. — opposite Marko’s fact that Louisville is UPS’ worldwide air Pizza & Sub, a liquor store and a drugstore. hub; “bourbon tourism” that leverages the fact Down the street was a business combination that Kentucky is the Napa Valley of bourbon; I’d never seen before: Eagle’s Nest Tanning and a partnership with Lexington, home of and Storage. It’s the Kissed by the Sun the University of Kentucky, has created an Tanning Salon and a warehouse — both of advanced manufacturing corridor. which seemed to be shuttered, with the space Show me a community that understands available for rent. today’s world and is working together to thrive For generations Austin’s economy was within it, and I’ll show you a community on anchored by the Morgan Foods canning plant, the rise — coastal or interior, urban or rural. but, as The Courier-Journal noted, “then ■ came a series of economic blows familiar to Thomas Friedman, a New York Times many manufacturing-based communities. The American Can plant next to Morgan Foods shut columnist, was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting in Beirut and Israel its doors in 1986 after more than 50 years in business. A local supermarket closed. Workers and one for commentary. O The big divide in America is not between the coasts and the interior. It’s between strong communities and weak commiunites. 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.
