NATION/WORLD
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
East Oregonian
Irma’s roar gives
way to grinding
chorus of saws,
generators
SWEETWATER, Fla. (AP)
— A grinding chorus of chain
saws and generators kicked in
quickly after Hurricane Irma’s
roar left Sweetwater, a small,
mostly Spanish-speaking town
west of Miami where streets
were swamped, fences and
trees fell, cars got stuck in
fl oodwater and shed roofs bent
like tin foil.
Adrian Ortiz, 28, was
philosophical as he sat in his
BMW on Monday, waiting
rather ambitiously for a
tow truck. He had tried to
make a run home from his
girlfriend’s house during
the storm, but his sports car
stalled after a few blocks as
6th street turned into a wind-
whipped canal. He touched
the carpet — still soggy.
“I decided to come to
Sweetwater, and my car got
full of sweet water,” he said
with a shrug.
Electricity was out across
the city, but the people were
powered by coffee and little
sandwiches, handed through
“cafecito” windows that
opened early. Residents with
weary eyes struggled to clear
tree branches and debris. City
trucks with giant metal claws
were handling the big stuff.
This community was
spared from the storm surge,
but the ground will likely
remain saturated for a while.
Ahead of the hurricane,
the South Florida Water
Management District fully
opened fl ood gates to drain
water from recent rainstorms
into the oceans. Now the
trillions of gallons of ocean
water Irma dumped on its
northward march is also
fl owing south.
Now it’s the heart of
Miami-Dade County’s
Nicaraguan community, and
over 90 percent of the Miami
suburb is Hispanic.
Jesus Castillo, 50, and his
family who have lived in the
neighborhood for about nine
years. They were cleaning up
fl ood muck and plant debris.
“My entire patio was
underwater, and in the street
it was two-to-three feet high,”
Castillo said in Spanish.
Charles Trainor Jr/Miami Herald via AP
In this Sunday photo, boats block the Overseas Highway in the Florida Keys as Hurricane Irma passes.
Pendleton native rides out fi rst hurricane safely — though classes canceled
East Oregonian
For a day or two, it looked like Ryan
Lacey had gone from the frying pan the
fi re.
Hurricane Irma forced the Pend-
leton High School and Embry-Riddle
Aeronautical University sophomore
to leave Daytona Beach, Florida for
Cuba’s decrepit
buildings no match
for Irma
HAVANA (AP) — The
historic but often decrepit
buildings of Havana and
other colonial Cuban
cities couldn’t stand up to
Hurricane Irma’s winds
and rainfall, collapsing and
killing seven people in one
of the highest death tolls
from the storm’s passage
through the Caribbean.
Authorities said Monday
that three more people were
killed by falling objects or
drowning, pushing the death
toll to 10 in Cuba and at least
24 others in the Caribbean. It
was Cuba’s worst hurricane
death toll since 16 died in
Hurricane Dennis in 2005.
Most of Cuba’s grand old
Tallahassee, where he hunkered down
to wait out the storm at a friend’s house.
But projections had shifted since the
evacuation, and for a while, Lacey said
it looked like the worst of the hurricane
would pass right over the Florida state
capital.
Luckily for Lacey, the eye of the
hurricane bypassed Tallahassee and
buildings were confi scated
from the wealthy and
distributed to the poor and
middle classes after a 1959
revolution that promised
housing, health care and
education as universal rights.
But with state salaries of
about $25 a month and
government agencies
strapped for cash, most
buildings have seen little
maintenance in decades.
Tropical rain and sea
spray have chewed into
unpainted facades and
seeped through unpatched
roofs. Trees have sprouted
from balconies. Iron rebar
has rusted, sloughing off
chunks of powdery concrete.
Damage wasn’t limited
to Havana. More than 100
houses in a small town
on Cuba’s coastline were
destroyed in Matanzas
the worst he dealt with on Sunday and
Monday was a half-day without power,
40 mile-per-hour gusts and fallen tree
branches.
Embry-Riddle canceled classes for
a week to accommodate the evacuation
and Lacey and his friends plan to
return to campus Wednesday to resume
classes.
Province when Irma
swept through the area,
leaving hundreds of people
homeless.
UN approves
watered-down new
sanctions against
North Korea
UNITED NATIONS
(AP) — The U.N. Security
Council on Monday
unanimously approved new
sanctions on North Korea
but not the toughest-ever
measures sought by the
Trump administration to ban
all oil imports and freeze
international assets of the
government and its leader,
Kim Jong Un.
The resolution,
responding to Pyongyang’s
sixth and strongest nuclear
test explosion on Sept. 3,
does ban North Korea from
importing all natural gas
liquids and condensates. It
also bans all textile exports
and prohibits any country
from authorizing new work
permits for North Korean
workers — two key sources
of hard currency for the
northeast Asian nation.
As for energy, it caps
Pyongyang’s imports of
crude oil at the level of
the last 12 months, and it
limits the import of refi ned
petroleum products to 2
million barrels a year.
The watered-down
resolution does not include
sanctions that the U.S.
wanted on North Korea’s
national airline and the army.
Nonetheless, U.S.
Ambassador Nikki Haley
told the council after the
Page 9A
vote that “these are by far
the strongest measures ever
imposed on North Korea.”
But she stressed that “these
steps only work if all nations
implement them completely
and aggressively.”
Haley noted that the
council was meeting on the
16th anniversary of the 9/11
terrorist attack.
In a clear message to
North Korean threats to
attack the U.S., she said:
“We will never forget the
lesson that those who have
evil intentions must be
confronted.”
“Today we are saying the
world will never accept a
nuclear armed North Korea,”
she said. “We are done
trying to prod the regime
to do the right thing” and
instead are taking steps to
prevent it “from doing the
wrong thing.”
Haley said the U.S.
doesn’t take pleasure in
strengthening sanctions and
reiterated that the U.S. does
not want war.
Catholic leaders
decry Dems’
questioning of
judicial pick
WASHINGTON (AP)
— Roman Catholic leaders
are objecting to Democratic
senators’ line of questioning
for one of President Donald
Trump’s judicial nominees,
arguing the focus on her
faith is misplaced and runs
counter to the Constitution’s
prohibition on religious tests
for political offi ce.
The outcry stems from
the questioning last week of
Amy Coney Barrett, a Notre
Dame law professor tapped
to serve on the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the Seventh
Circuit. Democrats focused
on whether her personal
views would override her
legal judgment, especially
with respect to the landmark
1973 Supreme Court
decision legalizing abortion.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein,
D-Calif., told Barrett that
dogma and law are two
different things and she
was concerned “that the
dogma lives loudly within
you.”
MARIJUANA: Sales prices have fallen about 20 percent annually since legalization
Continued from 1A
in May, the fi rst where a
marijuana-specifi c forecast
was included. “While Oregon
has now collected just over a
year’s worth of taxes, there
have been substantial changes
during this time that compli-
cate any analysis.”
For one thing, there have
been policy and regulatory
changes on the state level. Back
in July 2015, when those 21
and older could fi rst purchase
marijuana legally in Oregon
without a medical marijuana
card, marijuana was initially
taxed at a 25 percent rate.
There are also signifi cant
“upside and downside risks”
when it comes to recreational
marijuana, state economists
say — meaning that the
predictions economists make
could greatly exceed or fall
below expectations.
Among the downside
risks: regulatory “changes”
or “bottlenecks” that could
prevent companies from being
able to get licensed or get their
products tested quickly.
Sales prices could also fall
sharply. Prices have fallen
about 20 percent annually since
legalization in Colorado and
Washington, state economists
say. And since recreational
marijuana taxes are based on
sales price, that could affect
state revenues as well.
One risk that can be hard
to assess: the chance that
the federal government may
change its policy toward recre-
ational marijuana and either halt
or curtail the business in states
that have legalized the drug.
On the other hand, sales
could increase if marijuana use
becomes more conventional or
“gains broader social accep-
tance,” and the state’s “seed-
to-sale” tracking system could
reduce black market sales.
And then there are the little
things.
For example, the North
American Industry Classi-
fi cation System, which the
U.S., Canada and Mexico use
to classify businesses so they
can track economic data, has
yet to catch up with the legal
cannabis industry.
Under the system, a series
of digits correspond to a
specifi c sector, but there’s no
code for marijuana businesses.
“If you’re a place that
makes edibles, you show up in
bakeries and confectioneries,
or whatever, so you’re in there
with the cupcake shops,” state
economist Mark McMullen
told lawmakers Aug. 23. “And
so it’s hard sometimes to pull
these things out, but we’re
starting to get numbers. Those
numbers are growing rapidly,
but they’re still relatively
small.”
Beau Whitney, an Oregon-
based economist and business
consultant who has studied
the recreational marijuana
industry, says that he has peti-
tioned Canada and Mexico —
which have legalized medical
marijuana on the federal level
— to create a NAICS code
that corresponds to marijuana.
State economist Josh
Lehner says that his offi ce
— the Oregon Offi ce of
Economic
Analysis
—
consults with state agencies,
such as the liquor control
commission and the revenue
department, as well as private
businesses, to get a sense of
I ntroducIng
P honak d Irect
where things may be headed.
Whitney said that’s a smart
move.
“There’s just not a whole
lot of historic data to draw
upon, so they really need
people in the industry to help
them out, to let them know
where the movement in the
market is, what the consump-
tion patterns are and all that,”
Whitney said.
There’s not a profusion of
data two years into legaliza-
tion, but Oregon economists
also have two other states,
Colorado and Washington, to
look to for a glimpse of things
to come, says Lehner.
“We’re using them as a guide
for what Oregon’s next two
years look like,” Lehner said.
There are distinctions
between states, though. For
example, Oregon’s tax rate
on marijuana is signifi cantly
lower than Washington’s. Our
neighbors to the north have a
37 percent excise tax on recre-
ational marijuana, according
to the Washington Department
of Revenue.
If the legal marijuana
industry keeps growing,
some hope that peripheral
companies could spring up to
support companies that grow
pot or produce pot products,
in the way that craft brewing
made Oregon a hotspot for
brewing equipment and other
products tangential to beer as
the microbrew craze spread
in other parts of the country,
Lehner said.
Meanwhile, the state’s
employment department is
still trying to get a better sense
of just how many people
work in legal cannabis outfi ts,
whether that’s tending to
plants or making extracts.
Brian Rooney, a regional
economist with the Oregon
Employment
Department,
says that in order to estimate
cannabis employment, one
can start with a broad range.
For the lower bound of the
range, state employment econ-
omists can use information that
businesses are required to report,
per unemployment insurance
law, to the government.
Using that data and
industry classifi cation recom-
mendations from the U.S.
Department of Labor, state
employment
economists
believe that in Oregon, the
lower bound for legal mari-
juana employment is about
3,500 people, as of late May.
On the higher bound of
the range, the employment
department uses the number of
people with active permits from
the Oregon Liquor Control
Commission to work with
marijuana, which as of late May
numbered about 12,000.
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