ANDREW CUTLER
Publisher/Editor
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
WYATT HAUPT JR.
News Editor
JADE McDOWELL
Hermiston Editor
SATURDAy, MAy 15, 2021
A4
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
Tip of
the hat,
kick in
the pants
A
tip of the hat to the prospective of a
Pendleton Round-Up in 2021.
During a Tuesday, May 11, press
conference Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said
she “would fully expect” for the Pendleton
Round-Up to go forward as planned this
year, with guidelines from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention like mask
wearing in place.
“There may be some CDC guidelines
around masking that we will want to align
with as we’re meeting Oregon’s needs, but
I would fully expect that we will be able to
Let’er Buck, so to speak, in September,” she
said.
That should be music to everyone’s ears.
After a year without Round-Up, the first time
Round-Up had been canceled since World
War II, having an event that generates about
$65 million for the local economy will be
good for all.
Of course, in order for us to get to that
stage, 70% of Oregonians over the age of
16 need to receive at least their first dose
of the vaccine, according to Brown. Once
that happens, capacity limits on restaurants,
bars, stores, gyms and venues for athlet-
ics and entertainment, as well as limits on
people who can gather for events, such as
Round-Up, and festivals, would be lifted.
Our actions now will determine what
events, such as the Pendleton Round-Up and
Umatilla County Fair, will look like later this
year.
A tip of the hat to the everyone involved
in the completion of the East Project irriga-
tion system, which was dedicated before a
crowd of about two dozen along the Colum-
bia River on Tuesday, May 11.
The more than $50 million project aims
to provide farmers with river water in lieu
of pumping from the ground in an effort to
recharge depleted aquifers and allow farmers
to grow higher value crops.
“It wouldn’t be possible unless there was
a lot of people supporting it, and then the
benefits are going to be broad,” said Carl St.
Hilaire, president of JSH Farms in Herm-
iston. “Just as the support was broad, the
benefits will be broad in terms of economic
benefits for the entire community.”
The East Project, which is owned and
operated by the East Improvement District,
joins the $31 million West Project, completed
by the Columbia Improvement District in
May 2020. A third project, previously known
as the Central Project and now called the
Ordnance Water Supply and Aquifer Resto-
ration Project, will run through the former
Umatilla Chemical Depot. In addition to
the pumps and main lines for those projects,
farmers have also spent an additional $39
million on supply lines, distribution lines,
water rights management and administrative
costs to utilize the water being pumped from
the river.
With water becoming an all-too scarce
resource, it’s gratifying to see so many
private landowners and agencies work
together to ensure the success of this proj-
ect and help prepare future generations for
success.
EDITORIALS
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.
LETTERS
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.
SEND LETTERS TO:
editor@eastoregonian.com,
or via mail to Andrew Cutler,
211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801
Restoring faith in Legislature requires
rooting out conflicts of interest
BILL
HANSELL
OTHER VIEWS
I
recently introduced Senate Bill 865
and it has generated some controversy.
The bill is about rooting out conflicts
of interest in our government, but I wanted
to provide my constituents with what I
hope is helpful background.
One fundamental American ideal is
checks and balances. Oregon’s govern-
ment, which is elected and governed by
the people, must not only protect the rights
of Oregonians, but must also have their
trust. In regard to trust, our representative
democracy needs all the help it can get.
Polling shows that faith in our government
is at an all-time low.
Principles of checks and balances are
intended to root out conflicts of interest in
our elected officials. In the words of James
Madison, the author of the American
Constitution, “ambition must be made to
counteract ambition.”
One way the Oregon Constitution seeks
to counteract ambition is by prohibiting
elected officials from holding multiple
offices at one time. According to Arti-
cle 3, Section 1 of Oregon’s Constitution,
as a state senator, I cannot also serve as a
county commissioner at the same time,
nor can the governor serve as the attorney
general, and judges cannot be state repre-
sentatives. The goal of this is to ensure that
different people are carrying out different
parts of our government. If one person was
controlling all aspects of our government,
we would call that tyranny.
However, the Constitution is silent if
elected leaders can also lead their political
party as elected officers. While currently
legal, the same ethical and practical
concerns apply. Political parties are tasked
with fundraising to help their candidates
get elected. yet, elected statewide lead-
ers make policy that directly influences
elections, campaign finance, and even the
structure of the political parties them-
selves.
If political party leaders are also elected
to public office, they can too easily change
the rules of the game to benefit them-
selves. That’s called corruption, and one
of my goals as a Republican official is to
ensure that the Republican Party avoids all
appearances of corruption.
There has long been an understanding
that there should be a separation between
the “people’s work,” which we are sent
to Salem to do as elected officials, and
political party politics. That is why we, for
example, cannot use taxpayer dollars for
our campaigns.
As a lawmaker, one of my primary
responsibilities is to ensure that my
constituents trust their government. I want
every Oregonian, regardless of political
ideology, to have faith that conflicts of
interest do not have the final say on the
laws that govern them. Without that funda-
mental trust, we do not have a government
by, for, and of the people.
This is why I introduced Senate Bill
865. The law would prohibit an elected
official to state office from simultane-
ously being an elected officer on a political
party’s state central committee. This bill
would codify neutral standards of trans-
parency and accountability.
I have been contacted by several of
my constituents who are concerned about
potential conflicts of interest among the
current Oregon Republican Party lead-
ership. Let me be clear — this bill is not
about individuals. It’s about establishing
clear ethical boundaries to which all politi-
cal parties can agree.
I can only imagine the rightful outrage
from my Republican constituents if Gov.
Kate Brown controlled both the state
government and the flow of millions of
campaign dollars as chair of the Democrat
Party’s central committee. That would be a
clear problem. While we are nowhere near
that point yet, we needn’t wait for such
obvious abuse of power.
As your senator, I feel a deep responsi-
bility to make our government as transpar-
ent and accountable to “We The People”
as possible. That sometimes means doing
things that some in my own party won’t
like, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t the
right thing to do.
———
Sen. Bill Hansell represents Wallowa,
Union, Umatilla, Morrow, Gilliam, Sher-
man, and parts of Wasco counties.
In any community, the living world is essential
BETTE
HUSTED
FROM HERE TO ANY WHERE
R
eaders in Eastern Oregon have
loved the books of Molly Gloss
since we read “The Jump-Off
Creek,” set in the Blue Mountains, in
1989. So we were happy to learn that
she was recently named the recipient
of Literary Arts Charles Erskine Scott
Wood Distinguished Writer Award “in
recognition of an enduring, substantial
literary career.”
Stories connect us. In a deep sense,
they are all that does. And Molly Gloss’
work explores the connections that lead
to community. While traditional West-
erns emphasized a lone male hero who
rides into town, shoots, and then rides
away — a story fueled by violence and,
ultimately, racism — the arc in Molly’s
works, from the story of a woman home-
steader to a disillusioned Hollywood
stunt rider, takes us away from that
damaging mythology into the reality of
the American West.
Her people — women as well as
men — lose husbands and brothers and
ranches and, heartbreakingly, children;
they die of cancer and botulism. But they
stay. They do the hard work that family
and community require of us.
How best to build community? Indig-
enous people remind us that commu-
nity includes the living world: humans,
animals, plants, water, rock. From her
earliest novel, the young adult fantasy
“Outside the Gates,” Gloss has recog-
nized animals as essential to commu-
nity. The young protagonist in that story
is rejected — put outside the gates —
because animals commune with him.
And in “Wild Life,” Charlotte learns
about her own connections to (and
through) the lives of Sasquatch-like crea-
tures.
Horses seem to appear when Gloss’
characters need them. In one of my
favorite stories from “Unforeseen,” her
collection of speculative short fiction,
a woman knows when an earthquake is
going to happen, but she doesn’t know
where.
“It’s science,” she says. “They’ve
made recordings. There’s this dron-
ing, or purring, or swishing, it might
be the oceans banging against the sea
floor, always moving, or something else,
maybe it’s just the sound of the globe
turning on its axis, they aren’t sure, but
it’s a sound that’s always going on under
our feet, only nobody can hear it.”
What if, Gloss asks us, someone
could feel this “everlasting humming”
intensifying but be unable to warn
people of coming disaster? What if pain-
ful experience has taught her not to even
try?
A moment of relief comes when the
woman leans her face against an old, wet
horse and feels the slight tremble in his
body, “not his heartbeat but his essential
being, his aliveness” and for a moment
his “calm, steady hum against her scalp
overrode the humming of the earth.”
Just as the circle of story requires
both teller and listener, the relationship
with horses (or any animal) is recipro-
cal: We need them, they need us. In “The
Hearts of Horses,” a team of frightened
Belgians leans into Martha Lessen, and
“she told them steadily how brave they
were. She could feel her own heart thud-
ding against the hearts of the horses.”
When things go badly wrong a few
moments later, she hangs her weight
around each horse’s neck, “the kind of
reassurance you give a child when you
hold him tight, ‘I’ve got you, I’ll hold
you, it’s all right,’” and the horses are
able to calm enough to save both her life
and their own.
So it seems particularly appropriate
that the Distinguished Writer Award is
named for CES Wood, because there’s
a horse story involved. Wood, who
recorded Chief Joseph’s words of surren-
der, would later sent his son Erskine to
live with Joseph for two summers. He
told the boy to ask Joseph what gift he
would like in return, but when Erskine
was embarrassed at the modesty of the
request — a stallion to increase Joseph’s
herd — he failed to pass on the message.
When Erskine died, his descendants,
knowing his adult regret, presented a
3-year-old black and white Appaloosa
stallion to Chief Joseph’s descendants in
a ceremony at Wallowa Lake.
The horse was not a gift, but a prom-
ise kept, Joseph’s great-great-grandson
Keith Soy Redthunder said. And “if
there is a promise that can be fulfilled
after 104 years, surely you have to have
hope.”
It’s a story about our need for each
other, a story about connections. About
community.
———
Bette Husted is a writer and a student
of T’ai Chi and the natural world. She
lives in Pendleton.