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East Oregonian
Thursday, April 18, 2019
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
CHRISTOPHER RUSH
Publisher
WYATT HAUPT JR.
News Editor
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
Pain in the 21st century
to fix problems of the 20th
T
he good news is Gov. Kate
Brown finally has a plan for
putting PERS on solid finan-
cial footing. The bad news is that it
includes pushing SAIF off that solid
ground, as well as taking most of Ore-
gonians’ tax “kicker” refund next
year.
Brown says her proposal has some-
thing for anyone to like and to dislike.
She is correct. The Oregon Education
Association immediately screamed
that she was trying to cut teachers’
salaries. That is false. Brown wants
public employees to accept a slight
reduction in their future pensions so
as to help pay the unfunded actuarial
liability of the Oregon Public Employ-
ees Retirement System.
The governor calls her proposal
“shared responsibility.” Shared pain is
more like it.
PERS’ inadequate funding is not
the fault of everyday Oregonians or
of current public employees. No, the
blame lies with the 20th century leg-
islators and union leaders who disre-
garded how bloated PERS retirement
obligations possessed the potential to
undermine state, school and local gov-
ernment budgets.
Brown’s suggestion to take all
THE GOVERNOR CALLS HER PROPOSAL
“SHARED RESPONSIBILITY.”
SHARED PAIN IS MORE LIKE IT.
but $100 of each Oregonian’s kicker
refund will draw howls from taxpay-
ers. It certainly is one way to spread
the PERS solution — and pain —
among all Oregonians. But it smacks
of class warfare, just like many other
ideas in the Democrat-dominated Ore-
gon Capitol. Any person, any business
and any organization that makes much
money seems to be under attack.
The governor’s suggested raid on
the State Accident Insurance Fund is
a perfect and unfortunate example.
Legislators in 1982 illegally raided the
semi-public workers’ compensation
carrier, taking $81 million to prop up
the state budget.
After being forced to repay that
money with interest, the Legislature
learned from its mistake by subse-
quently making it legal in the future
to raid SAIF surplus reserves. Brown
and legislators considering her plan
apparently didn’t learn much else.
They are seduced by lawyers’ advice
that the new raid would be legal, just
as then-Rep. Peter Courtney, D-Salem
— now the Senate president — and
other legislators were assured in 1982
that their bipartisan raid on SAIF was
legal.
As now, state officials at the time
said SAIF had far more reserves than
necessary for future claims and thus
could easily weather the Legislature’s
intrusion. Maybe. But SAIF’s sales
plummeted, sending it into a years-
long tailspin. It turns out that com-
panies don’t like to do business with
an insurer whose money can be taken
on a whim by the Legislature. Mean-
while, SAIF’s top officials were so
angry — for good reason — that they
quit and formed a competing, pri-
vate workers’ compensation carrier
that took a significant share of SAIF’s
business.
As justification for a new raid on
SAIF, the governor and her cohorts
point out that Oregon has some of the
lowest workers’ compensation rates in
the nation and the highest rate of divi-
dends being paid back to employers.
Isn’t that what we want — acci-
dent prevention being more effective,
YOUR VIEWS
We cause street
damage, we should
pay for repairs
By now just about every-
body agrees the streets of
Pendleton are worn out and
breaking apart. The cause of
such wear and tear is obviously
due to the vehicles we all drive
on these streets day after day.
Over the past 30 years the
size and weight of our cars and
trucks have increased substan-
tially, which has hastened the
street damage. The most direct
way to pay for street repair is
to tax the vehicles that create
the problem. A gasoline tax is
equitable, as the heaviest vehi-
cles that do the most street
damage also use the most gas-
oline, so they will pay a lit-
tle more at the pump. But a
fuel tax on all vehicles means
everybody chips in.
No one likes taxes, but let’s
face it, folks, we created the
problem, so it’s up to us to pay
for its solution.
Terry Templeman
Pendleton
Show the taxpayers
you’re serious
According to the city offi-
cials, that 13 cent gas tax won’t
solve our street problems in
itself. The public works direc-
tor, Bob Patterson, who pre-
viously suggested streets be
reclassified as a utility and res-
idents billed accordingly, has
proposed a street light fee.
The city, rather than paying its
electric bill, currently $16,000
monthly, from the $1.1 million
annual PP&L franchise fee, is
actually using the street main-
tenance fund. When queried,
the city manager explained
that all franchise fees go into
the General Fund, and paying
that power bill from that fund
would require cuts in other pro-
grams. The room went silent
and the subject quietly died.
OTHER VIEWS
Mayor Turner presented a
list of possible taxes and fees
and promised to lobby all
major civic organizations to get
some consensus of their views.
It’s a pretty smart move consid-
ering these groups tend to have
a higher percentage of people
that vote than the general pub-
lic. Remember, only 22% of the
voters turned out for that vote
on the new fire station, so don’t
look for any town hall meetings
that include the general public.
There are a lot of angry peo-
ple out there. They’re tired of
hearing that our only path to
success is new taxes and fees,
tired of hearing our manag-
ers have again received glow-
ing performance reports and
deserve a raise, especially
when there is not a single sug-
gestion or recommendation on
any budget cuts. A reasonable
gas tax is probably the fairest
of any proposal, but 13 cents?
The parameters used by the
city manager to arrive at that
13 cents, 24.5 mpg from your
automobile (in pickup coun-
try?), and 40% provided by
tourists are simply not realistic,
making it difficult to take his
proposal seriously. Remember,
a percentage of that tax goes to
the retailer for collecting that
tax, but I doubt it will make up
for revenue lost when custom-
ers go elsewhere.
Try throwing the peo-
ple a bone or two. An offer
to use all the marijuana tax
for streets would be a good
start. Quit funding the Down-
town Business Association.
Agree to remove those ridicu-
lous speed bumps when Main
Street is repaved. Sell that 40
acres along the road to nowhere
that has no utilities. Get rid of
the old Eighth Street Bridge
once and for all, and for heav-
en’s sake, quit dumping our tax
money into money pits like the
Rivoli Theater. Voters might
then be a little more sympa-
thetic to a tax proposal.
Rick Rohde
Pendleton
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of
the East Oregonian editorial board. Other
columns, letters and cartoons on this page
express the opinions of the authors and not
necessarily that of the East Oregonian.
employers paying less for coverage
and SAIF customers getting rebates
on some of their premiums, plus inter-
est earned. That sounds like a well-
run program, unlike PERS.
A legitimate argument can be made
for SAIF to work with school districts
on lowering their workers’ compensa-
tion premiums. However, school dis-
tricts are not the only governments
facing soaring PERS rates. Rural pub-
lic employers, especially fire districts,
are especially hard hit.
Meanwhile, Brown is dead-set
against offering current and future
public employees a defined contribu-
tion plan, like a 401(k), as a complete
alternative to PERS’ defined benefit.
She is wrong. So, too, are the legisla-
tors whose solution is to merely extend
PERS’ debt over more years, holding
down the yearly cost to employers but
increasing the overall cost.
There is more to Brown’s plan,
including her idea of diverting estate
and capital gains taxes to pay for
PERS. Such taxes are absurdly high
in Oregon, but at least this way they
would go for a good purpose.
Still, the best that can be said about
Brown’s proposal is that it is … a pro-
posal, not necessarily a wise or inno-
vative proposal.
Five arguments the Mueller report won’t settle
A
ttorney General Bill Barr
will release a redacted ver-
sion of the Mueller report
this week. It will consume the
political conversation for days, but
even now it is clear that as much as
the report might be talked about,
it will not settle the main argu-
ments that have raged about the
Trump-Russia affair for more than
two years. Here are five debates
that won’t be resolved, no mat-
ter how much of the report Barr
makes public:
1. Collusion. On the face of it,
Barr’s summary of Mueller’s con-
clusion could not be clearer: The
evidence gathered by the special
prosecutor does not show that the
Trump campaign conspired or
coordinated with Russia to fix the
2016 election. So on the question
“Will Mueller
show that collu-
sion occurred?”
the answer
seems a pretty
straightforward
no.
But that is
not the end of
B yron
it. Immediately
y ork
upon the release
COMMENT
of the summary,
some of the
president’s accusers began mov-
ing the goalposts. Perhaps Mueller
said the evidence did not establish
beyond a reasonable doubt that
there was no conspiracy or coor-
dination. So maybe there is some
evidence that shows some sort of
collusion by some sort of standard
that Trump’s critics might adopt.
2. Obstruction. This is a guar-
antee: Some readers of the Muel-
ler report will swear that it proves
the president obstructed justice,
while others will swear it proves
he did not obstruct justice. Muel-
ler himself has made sure that will
happen by not making what Barr
called a “traditional prosecutorial
judgment” on the obstruction ques-
tion. Why Mueller did that is not
clear; perhaps it will be revealed
when the report is released. Barr
included this from Mueller on
obstruction: “While this report
does not conclude that the pres-
ident committed a crime, it also
does not exonerate him.”
That alone will be enough for
Trump’s adversaries to conclude
that he obstructed justice: Look!
Mueller specifically declined to
exonerate Trump!
3. Impeachment. Some Demo-
crats had hoped that the Mueller
report would give them cover for
impeaching the president. Some of
those Democrats also hoped that
the Mueller report would serve as
a road map to impeachment, in
effect doing for Congress the work
of discovering and organizing evi-
dence against the president.
But it appears Mueller won’t
make it easy for Democrats and
it seems unlikely the Mueller
report will make impeachment an
unavoidable conclusion. It’s more
likely the Democrats who want
to impeach Trump will want to
impeach Trump after Mueller’s
report, and the Democrats who
oppose impeachment will continue
to oppose it.
4. Investigating the investi-
gation. Many Republicans have
sought to uncover the events sur-
rounding the decision by U.S. law
enforcement and intelligence agen-
cies to investigate the Trump cam-
paign in 2016. It’s been hard find-
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. 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.
ing out what happened.
Rep. Devin Nunes, when he was
chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, shook loose a lot of
information, but much remains
unknown to the public. Now those
Republicans are counting on an
investigation by the Justice Depart-
ment to reveal more. And they are
hoping that President Trump will
declassify documents that could
shed new light on the matter. One
place they are not looking for
answers is in the Mueller report.
5. Why a special counsel?
Some question whether there was
really a need for a special coun-
sel to investigate Trump-Russia.
First, they cite the fact that there
was no underlying crime. Second,
they point to the circumstances of
Mueller’s appointment, when fired
FBI director James Comey leaked
confidential documents in order
to set off an uproar that he hoped
would result in the appointment of
a special counsel.
As it turned out, things went
according to Comey’s plan. But
was a special counsel really neces-
sary to investigate the crime that
did not occur? Like so many oth-
ers, don’t look for that argument to
be resolved by the Mueller report.
———
Byron York is chief political
correspondent for The Washington
Examiner.
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