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OPINION
East Oregonian
Tuesday, July 11, 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
OTHER VIEWS
Lawmakers disregard
voters’ will, shortchange
education funding
The Oregonian/OregonLive, July 8
O
regon voters enthusiastically
endorsed two education measures
on the ballot last November,
directing legislators to devote millions
of dollars to expand career and technical
education for high schoolers and provide
outdoor school programs for 5th and 6th
grade students statewide. Measure 98,
the high-school initiative, and Measure
99, the outdoor school initiative,
both passed by huge margins — 32
percentage and 34 percentage points
respectively.
But what voters
approve isn’t
necessarily what
lawmakers do.
For the coming
biennium, legislators
have set aside $170
million for Measure
98 programs, a little
more than half of
the $300 million that
the initiative called
for in funding of
career and technical
education, dropout
prevention efforts
and expanded
college-prep courses
for high school
students across the
state. As for Measure 99, the Legislature
is allocating only $24 million of the
$44 million envisioned by the initiative
to pay for the multi-day outdoor
education program for middle-schoolers
that several districts have struggled
to maintain through fundraising or
reserving scarce funds.
There’s nothing wrong with
legislators’ amending what voters hand
off to them. Making funding decisions
and changing state law, whether it
originates from the initiative process or
legislative process, are routine functions
of the Legislature. Initiatives are blunt
instruments as public-policy making
goes, rarely including the detail and
nuance needed to fairly, legally and
effectively administer the programs
they create. And an initiative’s focus
on a single issue contrasts with the
broad array of concerns and needs that
legislators must balance in making
difficult budget decisions.
And many school districts aren’t
geared up yet to take advantage of the
funds for either program. Adding or
expanding curriculum in these programs
involves far more than just flipping
a switch, particularly for career and
technical education, even if the funding
is available in full.
Still, the amounts allocated for
programs identified in both Measure
98 and 99 are not sufficient for what’s
known to be needed now. Toya Fick,
executive director for Stand for Children
Oregon, a primary backer of the
Measure 98 campaign, called the $170
million “a down payment” but warned
that it is far from what will be required
to help high school students. That’s not
hyperbole, considering that some 10,000
students a year drop out of high school
in Oregon, which has the third-worst
graduation rate in the country.
Similarly, Rex Burkholder, chairman
of the Outdoor School for All committee,
told The Oregonian/OregonLive
Editorial Board that those tasked with
administering the outdoor school fund
have tallied the cost of existing outdoor
school programs at $30 million, $6
million more than the allocation from
legislators. That means the fund won’t
cover current
demand nor can
it accommodate
additional outdoor
school programs
from other districts
that want to start a
program in the next
two years.
Elected leaders
have bemoaned the
budget crisis that they
faced this legislative
session due in part to
the new initiatives.
But voters — who
cast their ballots
amid a sustained
economic boom that
continues to generate
record amounts
of tax revenue — aren’t to blame. The
culprits have been legislators who ignored
for years the question of how to pay
for Medicaid expansion and who have
refused to confront escalating pension and
health benefits costs for public employees.
Ultimately, legislators need to think
about the reasons two-thirds of voters
backed both of these measures. Could
Oregon’s chronically poor graduation
rate have been a motivator to back
these two measures? Both invest in
strategies known to engage students in
their education, open them up to new
experiences and career tracks, and keep
them connected to high school. Could it
be frustration with the paltry offerings
that some school districts offer? Or
could it be a message to legislators to do
a better job of directing Oregonians’ tax
dollars into student-focused programs
instead of employee benefits, which are
taking larger and larger shares of school
district budgets? Even an 11 percent
increase in the K-12 education budget
for the coming biennium isn’t enough
to stave off layoffs in some districts
because of those surging personnel costs.
Legislators and voters alike should
remind themselves of a simple truth.
These measures began as petitions filed
by citizens who wanted to put new laws
on the books because policymakers
weren’t addressing the need. They
gained traction, attention and, in the end,
overwhelming victories that deserve
respect, even by those who opposed the
initiatives. This is what voters’ will looks
like, and Oregonians unhappy with the
direction of the state should remember
how powerful that can be.
Legislators need
to think about the
reasons two-thirds
of voters backed
both of these
measures. Could
our chronically
poor graduation
rate have been a
motivator?
Columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not nec-
essarily that of the East Oregonian.
OTHER VIEWS
The West and what comes after
W
hile Donald Trump was
nations under the pressure of mass
giving a speech in Poland
migration may become — as to lack
last week depicting a West
religious or linguistic or historical
whose values, heritage and freedoms
common ground. And it becomes
are threatened by the weakening
harder still when your ruling elite’s
of borders and a loss of confidence
cosmopolitanism is essentially
within, I was reading about the last
superficial, more “eating ethnic
days when European empires ruled the
food and cheering for Obama” than
globe.
“celebrating negritude while reading
Ross
Those years, the years of
Douthat Goethe.”
decolonization that followed World
Thus the nationalist backlash
Comment
War II, are the subject of a book
against cosmopolitanism, embodied
by anthropologist and historian
in its starkest form by Trump, is
Gary Wilder, “Freedom Time: Negritude,
somewhat equivalent to the anti-colonial
Decolonization and the Future of the World.”
nationalism that rejected Senghor and
Wilder follows two black intellectuals and
Césaire’s unionism as hopelessly naive.
politicians, Aimé Césaire of Martinique
Yesterday’s African nationalists argued,
and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal,
reasonably, that you cannot develop an
who shared a striking combination of
African civilization if your center of political
anti-imperialist zeal and desire for continued
authority is still in Europe.
political union with the French Republic.
Today’s Western nationalists argue, also
plausibly, that many European distinctives are
Césaire’s tiny Martinique did indeed
become a French département. But in Senegal unlikely to survive if nation-states are weak,
mass immigration constant, Christianity and
and Africa and the once-colonized world writ
Judaism replaced by indifferentism and Islam,
large, their project never had a chance. Once
and young elites educated as global citizens
the age of empire ended, political separation
without knowing their own home.
became inevitable.
This nationalist argument comes in
Yet against critics who deemed both men
racist forms, but it need not be the white
sellouts and self-haters for desiring to remain
in some sense French, Wilder argues that their nationalism that Trump’s liberal critics read
vision was complex and potentially prophetic. into his speech. It can just be a species of
They were Western-educated Francophones conservatism, which prefers to conduct
cultural exchange carefully and forge new
who read deeply in the European canon, who
believed in the “miracle of Greek civilization,” societies slowly, lest stability suffer, memory
fail and important things be lost.
who drew on Plato and Virgil and Pascal and
As such, it’s a view I endorse. But in the
Goethe. At the same time, they argued for
European case I don’t necessarily believe
their own race’s civilizational genius, for a
that it will prevail. I certainly don’t believe
negritude that turned a derogatory label into a
celebration of African cultural distinctiveness. in Trump as its paladin — not when his
entire career makes a mockery of faith,
And finally they believed that part of the
family, tradition, virtue. Nor do I have
West’s tradition, the universalist ideals they
much confidence that the present burst of
associated with French republicanism and
European nationalism is more than a spasm,
Marxism, could be used to create a political
a reflex — not when religious practice is so
canopy — a transnational union — beneath
weak, patriotism so attenuated, the continent’s
which humanity could be (to quote Césaire)
birthrate so staggeringly low.
“more than ever united and diverse, multiple
What’s more, I can read the population
and harmonious.”
projections for Europe versus the Middle East
This vision was rejected by both the
and Africa, which make ideas like “managed
colonized and the colonizers. But in certain
migration” and “careful cultural exchange”
ways it was revived by global elites after
seem like pretty conceits that 21st-century
the Cold War’s end, with neoliberalism
realities will eventually explode.
substituted for Marxism, and a different set
Which brings me back to Césaire and
of transnational projects — the European
Union, the Pax Americana — taking the place Senghor, men who loved their African heritage
and yet also knew European civilization better
of the pan-ethnic, multicultural French Union
than most educated Europeans do today. Their
envisioned by Césaire and Senghor.
fantasy of a post-imperial union between north
Of late, though, this project has run into
and south, white and black, was in their times
some of the same difficulties that made
just that.
theirs an impossibility. The cultural reality
But as a striking sort of African-European
that Césaire and Senghor grasped — that
hybrid, as prophets of a world where the
civilizational difference is real and powerful
colonized and the colonizers had no choice
and lasting — has a way of undoing the
but to find a way to live together, the West’s
political unity for which they fondly hoped.
future may belong to them in some altogether
On the evidence of recent European
unexpected way.
controversies, it is hard enough for a political
■
union to reconcile the different branches of
Ross Douthat joined The New York
the West — German and Mediterranean,
Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009.
French and Anglo-Saxon. It becomes harder
Previously, he was a senior editor at The
when that same union is trying to manage
Atlantic.
a society so multicultural — as European
YOUR VIEWS
Too many junk laws
out of legislature
In reading the laws recently
passed by the legislature, I was
dismayed at the ludicrous ones
passed by elected persons who are
supposed to be doing something
responsible for the people.
An example of this is when they
passed a law that lets 16-year-old
persons register to vote, even
though the law says they can’t
vote until 18 years old. Excuse me,
but when you register to vote the
state will send you a mail ballot
allowing that person to vote. I for
one do not feel that persons in high
school should have access to vote
for various taxes that I would have
to pay — and, of course, they do
not.
Why can’t we get legislators to
do a proper job instead of passing
junk laws like this?
James Tiede
Hermiston
Barreto’s ‘no’ vote no
help for district
So, Mr. Barretto, let me get
this straight: You voted “no” on
the transportation bill because
they didn’t need your vote. So
I take it that you knew the bill
was going to pass. Where does
that leave those of us who live in
District 58? Oh yeah, we get to pay
higher gas taxes, higher income
taxes, a bicycle fee, higher vehicle
registration fees, and higher costs
on car purchases.
What do we get with your
“no” vote? Absolutely nothing in
earmarks for needed transportation
projects in our communities.
Just who are you representing in
Salem? Certainly not the people
who live in District 58.
When you were elected in 2014
it was a concern that you would
vote in accordance with your
ideology and not in the best interest
of those who live in the district.
That concern was just confirmed.
Thanks for your support!
Ed Taber
Pendleton
Leave Renewable Fuels
Standard alone
As an elected official, I
understand the challenges
(and the pressures) of complex
policymaking, where we must
represent diverse interests and
balance all perspectives. But that’s
exactly why Oregonians have
asked us to do this job. Sometimes,
we must examine the larger picture
to make the right decision, whether
it’s here at home or in Washington,
D.C.
One such topic is the Renewable
Fuels Standard, a bipartisan policy
that promotes competition at
the gas pump from homegrown
biofuels, including those produced
right here in the Beaver State. It
has and will continue to deliver
significant benefits to our economy
and environment in Oregon and
across the United States.
While there’s no shortage of
opinions about the RFS, there’s no
debate that clean fuels are helping
to deliver savings at the at the
pump for consumers. And because
they compete against foreign oil,
biofuels increase American energy
security.
I encourage Congressman
Greg Walden and his colleagues
to recognize that any legislative
or regulatory changes to the RFS
would be disruptive to a program
that is currently working. When
so many other policies are in
flux, consumers and American
businesses need to have a stable
energy sector. Please reject
pressures to undermine the RFS
and protect current renewable
energy goals.
Craig Pope,
Polk County commissioner,
Monmouth
Goats or fish, you can’t
have both
The main stressor on fish in the
Umatilla River is lack of oxygen,
caused by water that gets too warm
(warm water holds less oxygen)
and nitrogen-rich pollution that
promotes algae growth (that uses
up the oxygen).
Goats eat the reeds, shrubs,
and small native trees that would
normally thrive along the river, and
grow into larger trees. Goats eat the
bark from saplings, killing them,
too. These would normally produce
the shade that helps keep the river
cooler — and more oxygen rich.
Goats produce nitrogen. Each
goat produces 5-7 pounds of
nitrogen rich poop each day. If
there are 50-100 goats for 10-14
days, they will produce one to five
tons of poop! That poop, besides
being something you do not want
your children to play in, also sends
a flood of nitrogen into the river
each time it rains, feeding those
slimy algae blooms that clog
the river, use up the oxygen and
suffocate the fish.
Want fish? No goats. No
livestock of any sort near the river,
period.
Jill Johnson
Pendleton
LETTERS POLICY
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managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton,
OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.