SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
4A
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news@bakercityherald.com
EDITORIAL
Perils of
police work
We understand, even though most of us have the
luxury of not having to often think about it, that police
officers put themselves in dangerous situations we prob-
ably will never have to face.
But just recently in Baker County, a couple of episodes
have starkly illustrated the hazards that officers from
each local agency — Baker City Police, Oregon State
Police and the Baker County Sheriff’s Office — are oc-
casionally exposed to.
On March 12, Oregon State Police Sr. Trooper Andrew
McClay responded to reports of a driver speeding the
wrong way on Interstate 84 near Durkee. When McClay
saw the 2011 Toyota Camry, driven by a Washington
man, approaching him “at a very high rate of speed,”
as McClay wrote in a report, he didn’t merely try to
persuade the driver to stop by way of flashing lights and
a siren.
McClay, as he wrote in his report, “rammed the ve-
hicle to get it off the roadway.”
By risking his own life, McClay might well have saved
somebody else’s. The wrong-way driver had already
barely missed hitting at least one vehicle after driving
west for about 15 miles in the freeway’s eastbound lanes.
More recently, early on Tuesday morning, April 6,
Baker City Police officer Mark Powell, along with Dal-
ton Baker, a security officer at Saint Alphonsus Medical
Center-Baker City, were confronted with a violent man
from Boise who refused to leave the hospital after being
evaluated following an incident in which he allegedly
backed his car into a gas pump. The man punched both
Powell and Baker, and he continued to fight even after
Powell deployed his Taser.
Both episodes ended without any serious injuries.
This is a testament to both the skill and the bravery
of the officers, acting on our behalf and with a goal of
protecting us from the dangers they confront.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
Your views
Appreciated Steve Culley’s
letter about immigration
I want to congratulate Steve Culley
on his letter to the editor on immigra-
tion. Well said, Steve.
Julie Miller
Baker City
Another chance to express
opposition to power line
On the 15th, our Public Utility
(OPUC) commissioners will hold their
fi nal hearing on Idaho Power’s 2019
energy plan, which includes the B2H
transmission line. I’ve urged OPUC to
acknowledge issues of environmental
justice when considering approval for
the B2H transmission line. I believe
Idaho Power is not shouldering the
true environmental cost of the proposed
B2H line, that Idaho Power is instead
passing the cost of impacts to economi-
cally disadvantaged rural communities.
For instance, Idaho Power claims “no
signifi cant impact” for 150-foot trans-
mission towers that would be built a
few blocks from a beautiful mountain
Letters to the editor
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lake, the key feature of the cherished
and historic City of La Grande Morgan
Lake Park. If the B2H line impacted
such a park in Portland I do not believe
it would be going forward. Fire risks
are another cost/hardship passed on to
our fi re vulnerable rural communities.
Rural citizens demand to be treated
fairly and to have our environment
considered and protected!
There are other options to building
the B2H line, even if a transmission
line is determined to be necessary.
Concerned citizens with STOP B2H
have outlined many such alternatives,
see: www.stopb2h.org. I’ve asked the
commission to pursue these options,
taking into account environmental
justice issues and the true cost of the
B2H transmission lines to economi-
cally disadvantaged rural communities.
Please consider doing the same before
the 15th. Write: puc.publiccomments@
state.or.us
Kathryn Andrew
La Grande
Thank you, Haines Fire
Department, neighbors
We would like to thank the Haines
Fire Department as well as friends and
neighbors for helping put out the fi eld
fi re on Sunday, March 28.
The Brazofsky family
Seeking to pierce the veil of COVID-19 secrecy
You might scoff at the notion
that you haven’t heard enough
about COVID-19.
Perhaps you would even utter a
piquant epithet.
More than a year into the biggest
viral pandemic in more than a cen-
tury, you might indeed struggle to
think of another topic that you’d be
happier to banish to history, there
to gradually accumulate the rusty
and musty patina of an unloved
artifact.
I sympathize with the mental
fatigue.
For more than a dozen months
now we’ve been inundated daily
with data on tests and cases and
— more recently but also happily
— vaccinations.
I would be grateful to pass a full
day without seeing or hearing the
word “virus.”
This would give me more time
to ponder such vital topics as the
newest fl avor of Oreo, and to patrol
my yard for spring weeds.
And yet, as tiresome as these
incessant repetitions of the same
statistics are, I don’t think we know
nearly as much as we ought to
know about this pandemic.
Which is to say, we don’t know
many of the things we need to
know to assess, in a cogent way,
what this virus has done, and con-
tinues to do, to our communities.
The reason we don’t know these
things is because state offi cials, and
in some cases their counterparts at
the county level, have denied them
to us.
Their justifi cation for this se-
crecy is about as convincing as the
banana fl avor in Laffy Taffy.
(And with a similarly unpleasant
aftertaste.)
One excuse is that state and
federal health privacy laws prevent
government offi cials from divulging
JAYSON
JACOBY
details about the pandemic.
This would be sensible if people
were asking to poke around in
somebody’s medical fi les, the paper-
work version of a colonoscopy, but
without the need to insert tubes
into orifi ces that generally fare well
with minimal interference.
But it strikes me as illogical, and
not a little infuriating, for govern-
ment offi cials to refuse to reveal
such anonymous statistics as the
number of people, in a particular
age range in Baker County, who
have tested positive.
This would no more pierce
anybody’s individual veil of privacy
than if this newspaper reported the
number of county residents who
own Ford F-150 pickup trucks as
compared with Dodge Rams.
Some statewide demographic
statistics about COVID-19 are
available on the Oregon Health
Authority (OHA) website. And
although I understand the notion
that the vastly larger numbers
involved at the state level offer a
theoretical cloak of privacy, com-
pared with Baker County’s rela-
tively puny population, for practical
purposes the difference seems to
me negligible.
For instance, statewide, there are
about 26,000 cases among Orego-
nians ages 40 to 49, roughly 15% of
the state’s total cases. This hardly
makes it possible to identify any
individual in that age range. The
comparable number for that age
range in Baker County, assum-
ing a similar percentage of the
total, would be around 118 people.
But I can only guess, because the
county-level data aren’t available.
I don’t know if 15% of the county’s
cases are people in their 40s, or if
it’s 5%, or 35%. But whatever the
actual number is, it seems to me
nonsensical to contend that if the
public were privy to those numbers,
we would then be able to easily
identify every one of the people
who tested positive.
According to recent reporting in
The Oregonian, the tool of conceal-
ment favored by the OHA is not
the federal health privacy law but
rather a homegrown Oregon stat-
ute, 433.008.
(As an aside, I fi nd it eternally
disappointing to learn that our laws
require three decimal places to keep
things straight. This suggests a vol-
ume of legal strictures which hardly
is necessary to govern a society
comprising, in the main, responsible
and law-abiding citizens.)
The gist of that state statute is
that agencies needn’t comply with
Oregon’s Public Records Law when
the information in question was
gathered as part of investigating
a public health matter such as the
COVID-19 pandemic.
The OHA has cited that statute
many times in rejecting public re-
cords requests from journalists and
others, according to The Oregonian.
(A second aside — the public
records law, although frequently
employed by journalists, is, as its
name implies, designed to make
government records available
to “the public,” which is all of us,
whether we occasionally use a
byline or not. Journalists might
have a keener interest in obtain-
ing certain records, but we have no
greater legal right to them. Which
is as it should be.)
The Society of Professional
Journalists, not surprisingly, has
challenged the state’s reliance
on 433.008 to prevent the media
from reporting more thoroughly,
and thus informatively, about the
pandemic.
So have non-journalists, in some
cases.
Their efforts have yielded some
successes. The OHA’s online COV-
ID-19 dashboards are richer sources
of information now than they were
early in the pandemic.
Yet the agency remains obsti-
nate with regard to matters whose
importance, and relevance, is so
obvious that to deny the information
to the public is an act of supreme
bureaucratic arrogance.
Just recently OHA rejected The
Oregonian’s request, under the Pub-
lic Records Law, for the number of
Oregonians who have been infected
with COVID-19 despite being fully
vaccinated. The agency’s excuse is
that the cases are still under inves-
tigation. OHA did release general
information about the 168 “break-
through” cases on Thursday, April 8.
Annoyance among journalists
and the public has the potential
to at least weaken the fi gurative
mortar in this baffl ing barrier the
state has erected.
But more promisingly, some state
lawmakers are also aggrieved by
the inexplicable secrecy.
State Sen. Michael Dembrow,
D-Portland, introduced Senate Bill
719. The legislation, as drafted,
would require both the OHA and
county health agencies to hand
over public records, including those
related to COVID-19, unless, accord-
ing to The Oregonian, “there is a
legitimate risk that an individual’s
identity could be compromised.”
“We’re talking about legitimate
need to know for the public,” Dem-
brow said at a legislative hearing for
the bill March 24.
“Legitimate,” of course, is a slip-
pery sort of adjective.
I’m skeptical that bureaucrats
will defi ne the word as liberally as
you or I is likely to do.
But even a slightly neutered ver-
sion of Dembrow’s bill ought to give
the public a more comprehensive
idea of how the virus has affected
our cities, counties and the state as
a whole.
Baker County Commissioner
Mark Bennett, who has served as
the county’s incident commander
throughout the pandemic, has
told me at least half a dozen times
during phone conversations that
although he understands the legal
limits on releasing data about
COVID-19, he’s also immensely
frustrated about what he consid-
ers overly broad interpretations of
privacy laws. Bennett has told me
that as an elected offi cial, one who’s
supposed to represent his constitu-
ents during a diffi cult period, he
feels hamstrung because he doesn’t
know much more, and in some
ways nothing more, than any other
resident about the virus’ spread in
the county.
I’m not suggesting that Bennett
ought to be privy to reams of data
that are concealed from journalists
and the public.
But he, unlike me, actually has to
make decisions that have wide-
spread effects, decisions based, at
least in part, on the pandemic.
That state offi cials, and in some
cases those at the county level, are
not sharing some of that informa-
tion with Bennett and other deci-
sionmakers, strikes me as the sort
of dogged insistence on obfuscation
that George Orwell described so
pointedly.
Jayson Jacoby is editor
of the Baker City Herald.