A4 BAKER CITY HERALD • SATURDAY, MAY 21, 2022
BAKER CITY
EDITORIAL
Opinion
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news@bakercityherald.com
Baker City, Oregon
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Hoping
City hasn’t justified fire dept. cuts
this candy G
tastes sour
T
he notion that anything
could make the expe-
rience of eating a Twix
candy bar anything but blissful
might seem farfetched.
But here’s to hoping this is so
in one instance.
Whoever pilfered four box-
es of candy — including the
aforementioned scrumptious
combination of chocolate and
caramel with a cookie crunch
— from the concession stand at
Wade Williams baseball fi eld in
south Baker City doesn’t deserve
to enjoy the fruits of the larce-
nous labor.
Th e Baker Little League,
which manages Wade Wil-
liams (owned by the Baker Elks
Lodge), lost about $300 in the
incident that happened between
Sunday evening, May 15, and
the next aft ernoon.
Jason McClaughry, Little
League president, said the thief
or thieves used boltcutters to
snap two padlocks and gain
entry to the concession stand.
Baker City Police investigated
but there’s little evidence to link
someone to the theft s.
McClaughry said this isn’t
an isolated incident. Th ere have
been similar theft s at Wade Wil-
liams each year for the past three
or four years, he said.
Stealing from an organization
that helps kids play baseball is
abhorrent in any case, of course.
But targeting Wade Williams
seems especially obnoxious
given the amount of work vol-
unteers, led by Kenny Keister,
have put in over the past several
months to restore the fi elds,
parking lot and other parts of
the facility.
Anyone with information
about the theft s should call Bak-
er City Police at 541-523-3644.
— Jayson Jacoby,
Baker City Herald editor
reetings! I’m Casey the firefighter/para-
medic and I am here to help you under-
stand the conflict going on regarding the
ambulance and Baker County.
The first thing that myself and the other fire-
fighters would like you to understand is that
there is no budget crisis. Baker City is not losing
vast amounts of money on the ambulance nor is
it in any other department that we are aware of.
There is no crisis except that which was cre-
ated by city manager Jonathan Cannon’s manip-
ulation of our elected officials, and the trust of
the citizens of this great community.
To help illustrate this point I am going to
highlight some large-scale numbers for the city
and the fire department, and then we will get
into the nuance of the fire department budget
and how he was able to craft the illusion that we
are losing money.
The IAFF, International Association of Fire-
fighters, conducted a routine assessment of the
city of Baker City’s budget and found that the
city is in excellent financial health.
City Reserve Funds (essentially our savings
account) are up 34%, or 2.44 times greater than
our liabilities.
City revenue is 12% greater than our ex-
penses, meaning that we’re putting 12% of “ex-
tra” income to the general fund.
Next, we will look at fire department budget
reports and previous years accounting to assess
the overall financial health of the fire depart-
ment. All of this information is available online
to the general public. If there is anything that is
not available, one simply has to submit a request
to the city using their form and you can obtain
the same financial information that we have.
Excluding this year, when financial reports
have grossly overshot previous years due to ma-
nipulation by the city manager, we see a trend.
Starting in 2015 and going until 2020 we note
that every single year the fire department was
under budget except for two years, 2018 and
2019. In the former, we were 3.5% over our allo-
cated budget, and in the latter, a scant 1%. If the
fire department has been under budget for five
of the last seven years, I assume we are still do-
ing fairly well. We are certainly not hemorrhag-
ing money as I have heard some say.
Now we get to the nuanced assessment of the
fire department budget. To understand how this
complex assessment works, we need to think
about our budget being broken down into two
separate components, ambulance and fire. To
be clear, there is no physical or other boundary
between the fire department and the ambu-
lance service. I am a fireman and a paramedic.
Depending on your needs as a victim calling
911 I can either put on bunker gear and go put
the fire out in your home or I can come to your
house when you’re having a heart attack and
provide lifesaving interventions.
Now back to the accounting. It helps to
think of our budget as being divided into two
parts of unknown size. The fire department
part is paid for by the taxpayers and there is
no expectation from the city to reimburse the
general fund for fire department expenses. The
second component, the ambulance service, is
essentially given a loan out of the general fund
and then is expected to reimburse the city for
that money using ambulance billing and other
sources of income.
Now, if we play the game of “what would
a nine-year-old say?” we would say that each
part needs to pay for half of the fire department
budget. 50-50 split. If our budget is $1 million,
we expect the fire department to cost approx-
imately $500,000 and the ambulance service
would also then cost approximately $500,000.
In that example, the city would give the fire
department $1 million at the beginning of the
year and expect the ambulance to reimburse the
taxpayer (general fund) $500,000 in ambulance
revenue. This brings the effective cost of the fire
department down to $500,000 a year.
Unfortunately, that’s not the game that Mr.
Cannon and his cronies are playing. Taking
the broadest brush imaginable, they stated that
since roughly 85% of our calls are EMS (ambu-
lance)-related, then 85% of the fire department’s
budget can be attributed to the ambulance. If
85% of our budget goes to supporting the am-
bulance alone, then the ambulance alone needs
to reimburse the city for 85% of the fire depart-
ment budget.
Using our $1 million budget from the exam-
ple above, the expectation is that the ambulance
then needs to make $850,000 to justify its exis-
tence (85% of $1 million). The other assump-
tion this makes is that running the fire depart-
ment will only cost $150,000.
If the ambulance only makes $300,000 this
year, Mr. Cannon frantically proclaims “the am-
bulance is costing us $550,000 a year!” When
we apply real budget numbers, we find that this
85% assumption is where the claims of the fire
department losing $700,000/year come from.
Do you see what he has done there? I call this
bad math. You can call it what you would like.
If one wants to check the validity of the “85%
rule” we only need to look at the new budget
that was passed earlier this month for the fire
department only. Even though this budget in-
corporates three months of ambulance service
and associated costs, it also accounts for nine
months of the year with no ambulance. This is
a good approximation for what it would cost to
run the fire department without the ambulance.
I can tell you right now that it will not be 15% of
our current combined service budget. The ac-
tual budget passed for the fire department alone
was $1.67 million. That’s 72% of our current
budget for fire only, the exact opposite of the
85% rule.
The reality of this unfortunate and highly
political situation is that we don’t know what
it costs to run the ambulance alone. We don’t
know how much of the fire department bud-
get actually goes to ambulance operations ver-
sus that which goes to fire operations. We have
never had a professional company come in to
evaluate the structure and cost effectiveness of
this department. City staff can’t even tell us why
we bill the amounts we do when we take you to
the hospital.
If we can’t answer these simple questions
and find ourselves using ridiculous math that
doesn’t pass the “asking nine-year-old” test, does
it really justify putting 16,000 citizens at risk and
terminating half of our fire department?
I believe the answer is no. They have not
brought enough proof to validate the risk they
are exposing this community to.
Hundreds of you showed up on May 10 to tell
city council that very thing. They listened and
voted to put in a bid for the ASA. While that is
a great start, I’m here to tell you that it will not
be enough.
Under Mr. Cannon‘s leadership, council will
likely put in a bid of $1 million or more. In pri-
vate conversations with this department, he has
said as much.
I am not here to pass judgments on whose
duty it is to pay for the fire department or the
ambulance. My purpose today is to tell you
that if you want to keep fire-based ambulances
showing up to your emergencies, we need a rea-
sonable bid to the county. A $1 million dollar
bid will shut down negotiations between com-
missioners and the city, and the fire department
along with it. We will lose six firefighters and
the safety our current structure has brought you
for the past hundred years.
Furthermore, when the fire department has
been gutted and you only get two firemen to
show up to your emergency in the name of “sav-
ing money,” you will not get a tax break. The city
has no plans to reduce taxes when they reduce
fire department services.
Reach out to your councilors and demand
that they work with the county to make this
problem go away. Reach out and tell them to
handle Mr. Cannon so that the city goes the di-
rection that the population wants it to go in, not
the direction he wants to go in.
█
Casey Husk is a firefighter/paramedic with the Baker City
Fire Department.
COLUMN
Don’t diminish the guilt of mass murderers
L
one lunatics who murder a
bunch of strangers don’t deserve
to have their culpability curbed.
Not even by a minuscule amount.
Yet the latest member of this most
dubious of clubs already has what
amounts to a publicity campaign that
perversely diminishes his culpability.
Payton Gendron, 18, is accused of
shooting 13 people at a supermarket
in Buffalo, New York, on May 14. Ten
people died.
Eleven of the 13 victims, and all 10
of those who died, are Black. Gendron
apparently has described himself in
writing as a white supremacist and
anti-Semite, railing about “replacers”
who “invade our lands, live on our
soil, live on government support and
attack and replace our people.”
So he’s a deluded bigot as well as a
mass murderer.
This is hardly shocking.
Yet in the wake of the Buffalo mas-
sacre, some pundits weren’t content
to try to place the tragedy into some
broader societal context, a tactic with
limited validity but one that needn’t
diminish the criminal’s responsibility.
Instead, some commentators ex-
plicitly blamed people with particular
political beliefs for, in effect, encour-
aging Gendron.
The editorial board of the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, to cite an ex-
ample I read this week, opined that
“once again, the truism that hate
speech fosters violence has been
tragically reconfirmed, this time in
Buffalo, New York.”
That accusation, in addition to
stretching beyond a reasonable level
the definition of truism, is a curious
mixture of the specific and the gen-
eral.
Which hate speech, exactly, is the
editorial board referring to?
If the speech in question is Gen-
dron’s writings, then the claim is rea-
sonable, albeit obvious — he’s a bigot
whose personal hatred, exemplified by
his writings, prompted him to shoot
people, most of whom are Black.
But the editorial board then makes
it clear that it’s not confining blame to
the man who pulled the trigger.
The editorial goes on to contend
that Gendron was “fueled by so-
called replacement theory, the far-
right fantasy that white Americans
are being intentionally ‘replaced’ by
invaders of color to steer politics left-
ward. As Fox News’ Tucker Carlson
and top Republicans continue to toot
this anti-immigration dog whistle,
the bloodshed in Buffalo shows how
easily it can translate into attacks on
anyone who isn’t white.”
The audacity of that claim is breath-
taking.
Although the editorial writers ap-
parently aren’t quite confident enough
to actually brand as conspirators Carl-
son and the other “top Republicans”
— readers are left to decide for them-
selves which GOP members are the
Jayson
Jacoby
“top” ones — the implication is as bla-
tant as the logic is flaccid.
Which is that if Carlson and his
soulless cronies would quit whining
about federal immigration policies,
people like Gendron would stop mur-
dering people.
This sort of simple-minded insin-
uation is always inappropriate, but it’s
especially egregious when deployed in
a matter as serious as mass murder.
The Post-Dispatch editorial board
seeks to strengthen its case by com-
paring something Carlson said in
2018 — apparently his influence takes
quite a while to percolate, at least
when the person being influenced is
14, as Gendron would have been — to
something Gendron himself wrote.
Carlson: “How, precisely, is diver-
sity our strength?”
Gendron: “Why is diversity said to
be our greatest strength?”
So by virtue of similarly worded
questions about the value of diver-
sity we are to conclude that Tucker
Carlson inspired a mass murder
in Buffalo.
Speaking of comparisons, The Se-
attle Times editorial board picked
the same verb as the Post-Dispatch
to further this specious cause-and-
effect indictment. The Seattle Times
described the Buffalo murders as “yet
another massacre fueled by a for-
merly fringe belief that has found a
mainstream foothold thanks to irre-
sponsible pundits and political op-
portunists on the right.”
The Seattle paper’s editorial board
was slightly more specific in its accu-
sation, with Ann Coulter and another
Fox News’ host, Laura Ingraham,
joining Carlson among those impli-
cated in the acts of a madman.
That trio, the editorial board wrote,
has “helped legitimize this paranoid
delusion, while some GOP leaders
have made the bet that stoking racial
animosity will keep them in power.”
The difference between cynical pol-
iticians and talk show hosts trying to
capitalize on immigration policy de-
bates, and blaming at any level those
same people for “fueling” a mass
shooting, is to me a great chasm.
Yet these two editorial boards seem
to believe that the connection is more
comparable to a coach relaying signals
to his players.
This offends me not because the
flimsy association between killers and
TV personalities and politicians —
neither of the latter group having a
history of shooting up supermarkets
— is unfair, although of course it is.
I’ve listened to a fair amount of
Tucker Carlson’s thoughts on immi-
gration, and I think he greatly ex-
aggerates the threat that our porous
southern border poses.
What bothers me is that pundits
seem to believe killers such as Gen-
dron are mindless pawns who only
respond, to borrow the clumsy anal-
ogy from the Post-Dispatch, to a “dog
whistle” blown by TV personalities.
Besides the absence of any com-
pelling evidence that these killers are
driven by anything other than their
own malfunctioning minds, this rhe-
torical approach siphons some of the
guilt from Gendron and sprinkles it
where it does not belong.
The logical conclusion to this il-
logical conceit is that a talk show
host such as Carlson, whose audi-
ence is measured in the millions,
ought not criticize the federal gov-
ernment’s immigration policy both
because such criticism is inherently
racist, and because there lurk among
us people like Gendron who would
allegedly draw inspiration from a le-
gitimate political debate.
This of course is antithetical to
America’s commitment to free expres-
sion.
I don’t know that we can trust that
commitment, with anything like the
confidence we once had, if people be-
gin to censor themselves for fear their
opinions, no matter how reasonably
formed and calmly stated, might share
a phrase or two with the scribblings of
a demented killer.
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the
Baker City Herald.