A4 BAKER CITY HERALD • SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 2022
BAKER CITY
Opinion
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news@bakercityherald.com
Baker City, Oregon
EDITORIAL
District takes a risk with
International School
T
he Baker School District’s Oregon International School, a char-
ter school intended to bring up to 40 foreign students to Baker
High School each year and make it more affordable for local
students to study abroad, might turn out to be a success both culturally
and financially.
Baker School Board members are confi dent that it will.
But the board and district have also taken a substantial risk, both mone-
tarily and in terms of public perception, by deciding to spend an estimated
$865,000 to buy and renovate two historic homes in Baker City that will be
used to house a dozen or so of the visiting students each school year (the
others would stay with local host families).
Although the board made those decisions in public meetings, those
meetings, including the most recent one on April 12, were done remotely,
via Zoom. Th e meeting agendas were available on the district’s website, but
the district didn’t issue any press releases to announce the proposed pur-
chases. Th e board needs to return to in-person meetings, as other public
bodies, including the Baker City Council and Baker County Board of
Commissioners, have done for many months.
As for the International School itself, the concept seems sound. Th ere is
a benefi t to Baker students to meet, learn and socialize with teenagers from
other cultures, and to have a better chance, thanks to scholarships, to visit
another country themselves.
Th e district projects that the International School will produce more
revenue, through state payments for visiting students and tuition, than it
will cost, starting with its fi rst full year of operation.
And although district offi cials told board members on April 12 that
interest among foreign students has been strong, and that the district likely
will have to turn away some applicants, what if the demand doesn’t con-
tinue over the 14 to 15 years the district projects it will take for the Inter-
national School to repay the district for the housing purchases? As we’ve
learned over the past two years, a pandemic can almost immediately curtail
exchange student programs.
Although it’s gratifying to see two historic homes being used, the
decision to buy those, rather than newer residences, is itself a risk.
Older homes, even aft er renovations, can be expensive to maintain and,
potentially, to repair.
Th e district’s recent history of starting new programs — Baker Technical
Institute, Baker Web Academy and Baker Early College — has proved suc-
cessful. Th ese have not only added educational opportunities for students
— and adults, through some BTI programs — but they have helped the
district remain on sound fi nancial footing.
Th at record likely helped convince some voters to approve the $4 million
property tax levy in May 2021, the district’s fi rst in more than 70 years. Th e
district is combining that money with a $4 million state grant and $4 mil-
lion from its capital projects fund to make signifi cant improvements to all
district schools over the next two years or so, including heating, ventilation
and cooling and security. Th e district will also construct a cafeteria/kitch-
en/multipurpose building at Baker Middle School. All of the levy dollars
are allocated to those projects; none is going to the International School.
Still and all, the board probably lost some of the goodwill represented
by the bond passage with its recent house purchases and expansion of the
International School, which, however rosy its fi nancial projections, also
necessitated signifi cant spending up front, money that has no immediately
tangible benefi ts.
Ideally, those projections will pan out and this latest program, like its
predecessors, will enrich the district and its students.
Taxpayers will be paying attention.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
YOUR VIEWS
Citizens need to speak up
about ambulance service
tently calling for cover to support
multiple ambulance and fire calls.
This is with them being staffed
Baker County citizens. What with three personnel and backup
is wrong with our people? We
per shift.
all need to wake up to this non-
We, the citizens, deserve much
sense going on at the city and
better than this. The employees
county level over ambulance
deserve much better than this.
service. Our ambulance service They deserve to know that when
area is facing not having service they are working, they have the
in the near future unless city/
backup that they can count on.
county officials start working
Their families deserve to know
hand in hand and come up with that their loved ones are going
a working plan and a solution.
to have all safety measures being
From watching the City Coun- taking care of.
cil meeting on Tuesday, April
As I well know, at any given
12, 2022, it appears that the
time one can find themselves in
city manager is willing to get
need of an ambulance with ex-
rid of our ambulance service.
tremely well qualified trained
His comments lead me to be-
personal a phone call away. I
lieve that he is willing to cut the probably wouldn’t be here to-
medic/fire personnel down in
day if it weren’t for the excellent
order to save money.
care I received from the first re-
In listening to medical service sponders.
calls on my scanner, with the cur-
Please Baker City and Baker
rent level of personnel available, County people, contact your
the fire department is consis-
elected officials and voice your
concern over this matter, your life
may depend on it.
Roger Coles
Baker City
Limiting abortion, but what
about the babies?
In all the states that are choos-
ing to limit abortion, the so-
called freedom states, not one
proposal to assist the mother to
be, in prenatal care and postnatal
assistance. No mention of child
care or severe penalties for the
fathers not supporting the child
until age 18.
Those against this proce-
dure seem to feel they have
done their moral and religious
duty, but never mind the con-
sequences. Shall we soon have
the welfare rolls skyrocket in the
great state of Idaho that so many
wish to join?
Tom Nash
Halfway
OTHER VIEWS
Editorial from The New York
Daily News:
Despite some extremist groups’
misguided legal efforts, it remains
extraordinarily difficult to legally
purchase firearms in New York
City. They can still be had on the
black market coming in from
the persistent Iron Pipeline, but
Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor
Eric Adams have begun cracking
down on that smuggling pathway,
and buying an illegal gun can be
both expensive and dangerous.
So what’s an enterprising do-
mestic abuser, drug dealer, or
would-be shooter to do? The
easy option is to purchase what’s
called a ghost gun, essentially a
disassembled weapon that does
not technically count as a fire-
arm, at least not until it is put to-
gether in as little as a half hour.
Not only is this as simple as
buying a TV or a toaster online,
it is perfectly legal, sidestepping
gun laws and allowing malefac-
tors to wield instruments that
carry no serial numbers and are
virtually untraceable no matter
what a background check would
have turned up for them. Once
a trigger is pulled, they fire just
like any other, no matter where
they came from.
This long-standing loophole
has made a mockery of our ef-
forts to control the spread of
these lethal tools, culminating
in atrocities like Friday’s murder
of 16-year-old Angellyh Yambo
in the Bronx. The share of ghost
guns used in crimes remains low
but is rising, driven by the smug-
gling crackdowns and the relative
ease of obtaining them.
With President Joe Biden’s
announcement of a new federal
rule clarifying that serial num-
bers must be included on com-
ponents known as frames and
receivers regardless of whether
they’re affixed to the rest of a
gun, as well as establishing the
kits as firearms themselves for
enforcement purposes, we can
work to stem this trickle before it
becomes an avalanche.
Along with promises to in-
crease federal enforcement and
the announcement of a new
nominee to run the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,
the president is signaling that
these workarounds won’t be tol-
erated. It’s too late to save An-
gellyh, but we can keep other
families from feeling that im-
mense pain.
COLUMN
Masterful book recounts fire that destroyed Paradise
I
have seen plenty of statistics about
the fire that decimated Paradise,
California, in November 2018, but
numbers mean little compared with a
passage in a book describing fire vic-
tims’ skin sloughing away at the gen-
tlest touch, exposing the naked pink
flesh beneath.
There is no scarcity of reasons
why I prefer compelling prose to a
spreadsheet.
Numbers can tell a story, to be
sure. But that story invariably lacks
the richness of detail that writers can
extract from the English language,
with its vast deposits of good and
powerful words.
Lizzie Johnson mined that ore
to great effect with her recent ac-
count of the tragedy: “Paradise: One
Town’s Struggle to Survive an Amer-
ican Wildfire.”
Johnson’s book, published in 2021,
is not an easy read.
It could hardly be otherwise.
She is, after all, writing about a
fire, sparked by a faulty electrical line
owned by Pacific Gas & Electric, that
killed 85 people and destroyed around
19,000 buildings, including most of
the homes and businesses in Paradise,
population 26,000.
More than three years later, Para-
dise hasn’t come close to recovering —
if that word is even appropriate given
the scale of the disaster.
About 1,100 new homes have been
built in the town that lies in the foot-
hills of the Sierra Nevada, east of
Chico and north of Sacramento.
Paradise’s mayor, Steve Crowder,
said in a November 2021 interview
that he expects the city’s population
will reach the 10,000 mark by the
fourth anniversary of the tragedy.
But it’s not only the scale of the dev-
astation that prompted me at times to
put down Johnson’s book, to rest my
mind as I might rest my legs by taking
a break during a difficult hike.
“Paradise” has a slightly hallucino-
genic quality, though Johnson’s prose
is precise and straightforward, befit-
ting her previous work as a newspa-
per reporter.
This quality stems from the large
roster of people she interviewed, and
whose experiences comprise the bulk
of the book.
Johnson shifts so often from one
person to another, from one small
group, brought together by circum-
stances beyond my ability to under-
stand, to the next, that I sometimes
felt as though I needed the equivalent
of the cast of characters on a playbill.
The litany of terror is fatiguing as
only a tautly crafted nonfiction tale
can be.
The depth of Johnson’s reporting is
palpable on almost every page — she
must have spent a considerable time
Occasionally Johnson inserts a time
reference.
In each instance I was shocked by
how much had happened in so lit-
tle time. Johnson’s storytelling is so
with the survivors she interviewed, so engrossing, the situations that her
encompassing is the detail.
subjects endured so terrible, that it
It is the most cloying of clichés to
seemed to me, as the pages and the
say that a writer “makes you feel as if chapters accumulated, that the better
you were there,” but the saying is ubiq- part of a day must have elapsed.
uitous because it’s also apt. Johnson’s
But for many of the Paradise resi-
book absolutely deserves this acco-
dents Johnson wrote about, the tran-
lade, overused though it is.
sition from a routine November day
As I followed the many awful jour- to a life-threatening predicament was
neys that Johnson catalogs I felt that I nearly instantaneous.
had a sense, secondhand though it of
Stories of wildfires have intrigued
course was, of how acrid and choking me since I first swung a pulaski in
the smoke was, how horrific the heat, the summer of 1989, just after fin-
how desperate the circumstances.
ishing my freshman year at the Uni-
I suspect Johnson had an ample
versity of Oregon. I worked for the
list of details to enrich her narra-
Wallowa-Whitman National Forest
tive, and she chose wisely. Besides
in each of the three subsequent sum-
the expected detritus of a wildfire
mers, and although I wasn’t a fire-
— charred trees and windblown em- fighter I ended up on the lines at least
bers and the like — Johnson wrote
a few times each summer, though in
about pools of melted aluminum
every case the blaze was no more than
that scorched vehicles wept like sil- a handful of acres.
ver tears. I can’t think of a better way
In the three decades since, the fire
to explain the intensity of the heat,
risk across the West has escalated a
both poignant and terrible.
great deal. In that summer of 1989,
Yet for all the book’s hellishly ex-
which seems impossibly distant to me
quisite descriptions, the reality that
now, the lightning-sparked Dooley
struck me with the greatest force was Mountain fire, at 20,000 acres, was a
how rapidly this city, with a popula-
milestone blaze.
tion nearly three times bigger than
That’s still a considerable size, to be
Baker City’s, was all but leveled.
sure. But the Dooley fire, having been
Jayson
Jacoby
eclipsed by well more than a dozen
blazes in Oregon since then, and a
great deal more across the region, in-
cluding the Paradise fire, no longer
seems especially noteworthy.
Johnson’s book was even more
compelling given what happened in
Western Oregon during the Labor
Day weekend in 2020. The most dam-
aging wildfires in decades, driven by
a windstorm quite like the one that
propelled the Camp fire through Par-
adise, ravaged multiple canyons on
the west side of the Cascades. One of
those burned through parts of Mill
City, the town east of Salem where
my parents, one of my sisters and a
nephew live.
Mill City fared far better than some
nearby towns, such as Gates and
Detroit, where the post-fire scenes
weren’t so different from those in Par-
adise. Both my parents’ and my sis-
ter’s homes survived — although the
house just across the street from my
sister did not.
Having heard from my parents and
my sister about their experiences on
the morning when the flames arrived,
I could hardly avoid pondering, as I
read Johnson’s book, how close they
might have come to experiencing
something similar.
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the
Baker City Herald.