A4 BAKER CITY HERALD • SATURDAY, MAY 28, 2022
BAKER CITY
Opinion
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news@bakercityherald.com
Baker City, Oregon
EDITORIAL
City Council has
responsibility to save
ambulance service
T
here were multiple disappoint-
ing moments during the Baker
City Council meeting Tuesday,
May 24. Here’s two of the more dis-
tressing examples:
First, when Jennifer Spencer, the
city’s administrative services man-
ager, told councilors that she had been
“gladly” providing data about the city’s
ambulance service to firms that might
respond to Baker County’s request for
proposals.
And second, when City Manager
Jonathan Cannon said “I think the
best thing we can do is cheerlead the
county” — meaning supporting the
county’s effort to find an ambulance
operator to replace the city’s fire de-
partment if it ends that service on
Sept. 30, 2022, as the Council pro-
posed.
Both statements sound innocuous.
It’s reasonable for Spencer to supply
statistics about the ambulance service
to anyone who asks. Those are public
records, after all.
And certainly no one ought to root
against the county in its endeavor, as
required by state law, to ensure that
residents have a competent ambulance
service, regardless of who runs it.
But here’s the disturbing thing about
both statements — who, to belabor the
sports analogy, is the home team?
Rather than helping the county re-
place the city fire department as am-
bulance provider, city councilors and
city officials need to keep the fire de-
partment intact for at least the fiscal
year that starts July 1. That can hap-
pen, and it can happen without plun-
dering the city’s budget.
But it’s less likely to happen due
to the Council’s 4-2 vote to approve
Councilor Dean Guyer’s motion to
not submit a proposal to the county by
the June 3 deadline. This reversed the
Council’s May 10 decision to respond
to the county’s solicitation. When
the May 24 meeting started, Cannon
was preparing to hand out drafts of
the proposal, and councilors initially
scheduled both a work session and a
special meeting with the intention of
finalizing that proposal prior to June 3.
Cannon described the situation as
a “pivot point.” He said the city can’t
afford to continue to operate ambu-
lances because the gap between what
the city spends (and bills) and what it
collects will continue to widen.
The city’s projections, which take
into account rising costs for employ-
ees’ retirement, salaries and other in-
flationary factors, as well as an increas-
ing trend in the number of ambulance
calls, show that’s the case.
But there’s something far more vital
at stake here — the dual-role fire de-
partment that multiple generations of
Baker City residents have depended
on. And that pivot point, to borrow
Cannon’s metaphor, does not hinge
on what happens two years from now,
or five.
Time is very much shorter than
that.
The City Council made sure of that
when it notified the county on March
22 that the city planned to discon-
tinue ambulance service on Sept. 30.
That prompted the county — which,
again, is legally responsible — to send
out the request for proposals for am-
bulance service. And now, two weeks
after the Council decided to make an
offer to the county, it has botched that
chance on the specious premise that,
as both Guyer and Councilor Joanna
Dixon said on May 24, the city can get
back into the contest some time after
June 3.
The Council’s seeming lack of ur-
gency is perplexing.
Particularly so considering that on
May 10 the council chambers in City
Hall was packed with residents who
urged councilors to preserve the fire
department as it is.
Councilors should demand an in-
credibly high level of proof before tak-
ing such a drastic step as ending am-
bulance service and trimming nearly
six positions from the fire department,
a step unprecedented in the city’s
modern history.
The case that Cannon has assem-
bled doesn’t meet that threshold.
There’s no doubt that the financial
projections for ambulance service,
and the fire department, are troubling.
But if the situation were as dire as
Cannon suggests, there ought to be ir-
refutable evidence that the ambulance
albatross over the past several years
has forced the city to divert significant
dollars from elsewhere in the general
fund to stanch the financial bleeding.
Yet Cannon’s response is that the city,
due to the ambulance service costs,
has had to forego some projects. This
is not the same as cutting other ser-
vices, such as police, that residents
pay for and expect to be there when
needed. The examples Cannon listed
in the May 24 meeting include a roof
for the fire hall, software for the fi-
nance department, new fire trucks,
oxygen bottles for firefighters, founda-
tion repairs and a fire escape for City
Hall, and a cash register.
It’s unlikely that residents will pack
into City Hall to advocate for financial
software and a cash register.
Cannon said something else during
the May 24 meeting that was striking.
He pointed out, correctly, that there
will be an ambulance service in the
city after Sept. 30. No reasonable per-
son ever believed otherwise. But Can-
non also said this, referring to the am-
bulance service: “It may not have our
name on it, but that’s not necessarily a
bad thing.”
It is a bad thing.
Worse, it’s a bad thing that needn’t
happen.
Whether the city can afford to con-
tinue operating ambulances, and
maintaining the level of firefighter
staffing that ambulance revenue
makes possible, far into the future is
very much uncertain.
The city needs a new revenue
source. Most everyone seems to agree
that the most plausible solution is to
ask voters within the Baker Ambu-
lance Service Area — the city and
most of the rest of the county — in the
May 2023 election to boost their prop-
erty taxes.
But such a measure would be in ef-
fect a moot point if the city parks its
ambulances at the end of September
and lays off firefighters.
If the current dual-role fire de-
partment is to continue well into the
future, it must first be saved now.
That should be the City Council’s top
priority. But after the May 24 meet-
ing, the city seems more inclined to
help whoever steps in to replace the
fire department.
— Jayson Jacoby,
Baker City Herald editor
OTHER VIEWS
After Uvalde, will Americans
finally take action on guns?
Editorial from The Dallas Morning
News:
The feeling is too familiar now. It
hits like a shock and then twists into
emotions of horror, anger, sadness
and fear until it settles in the mind
as a sickening numbness that we
don’t know what to do with.
The place this time is Texas.
Uvalde. The deaths for now include
19 children and two adults.
Schoolchildren. Teachers. Exe-
cuted on their own campus. Mur-
dered in the place where they
should be safe, where they should
be growing and becoming.
As a nation, we lack the capacity
— morally, intellectually, politically
— to seriously grapple with the evil
sickness that has set in, manifested
in the incomprehensible nihil-
ism of a murderer who would de-
stroy the lives of the most innocent
among us. But the rage spreads
through all of us as we spin in the
powerless frustration that nothing
is done, that nothing will be done
and that we will simply await the
next slaughter.
Politically and legally, this coun-
try refuses to accept or act upon
the obvious connection between
the easy availability of powerful
weapons designed to kill humans
and the way they get into the hands
of young men, even boys, with his-
tories of disturbing behavior.
Our political conscience as a
nation is so stunted now that we
cannot even enforce laws that are
on the books to stop these shoot-
ings. We cannot seriously discuss,
much less legislate, common-sense
laws that could get broad agree-
ment that might stop the next
shooter. We cannot even agree
that we should use the resources
of the federal government to study
gun violence.
We believe in the right to bear
arms. But every human right is bal-
anced with human responsibility.
No right is unlimited. Every lead-
ing Republican in this state has
made more permissive gun access a
political cause while doing precious
little or actively undermining ef-
forts to enforce existing regulation.
We do not know, at this writing,
the details of how the Uvalde mur-
derer got his hands on the weapon
or weapons he used. We do not
know his motive. We do not know
much beyond the fact that he was
18, he wanted to kill children and
he had the means to do it.
It is time to re-enact the restric-
tions in the Federal Assault Weap-
ons Ban that were so foolishly per-
mitted to expire. It is time to limit
high-capacity magazines. It is time
to ensure that background checks
and red flag laws have the most se-
rious and uniform enforcement.
And it is time to open broad de-
bate about other measures.
Saying this law or that law would
not have prevented what happened
is Uvalde is not enough. We must
demand from our elected officials
that they study, propose and enact
legislation that has an effect. If you
are in elected office, this is your job.
It is urgent — a moral imperative.
There will be calls for address-
ing mental illness. Those are valid.
But if one thing is clear from mass
shooting after mass shooting, it
is that killers generally acted with
careful planning and clear intent.
They understood the depravity and
evil of their actions. They did these
things because they knew they
were terrible and because they had
the ready means to do them.
After so much blood of so many
children has been spent, after so
many mothers and fathers and sis-
ters and brothers have been left
with lives of agony and mourning
and loss, after all of this horror and
pain, are we still unable to act?
All exit doors on hallways should
be locked from the outside. I spoke
with Mark Witty at the District 5J
In view of the tragic school mas- office and learned that only the
sacre in Texas I ask everyone to
Baker Early Learning Center has
call members of the school board
such protection. He told me two
and School District 5J Superinten- other elementary schools will have
dent Mark Witty and demand that these doors installed this summer
every Baker school be fitted with
and one next summer. He said it
double locking doors at the front
would require “millions of dollars
of the school requiring people to
to retrofit the junior high and high
identify themselves prior to gain-
school due to the architectural lay-
ing access to our precious children. outs of those schools.” This should
be the highest priority for our
school board. Don’t kid yourselves
into thinking it won’t happen in
Baker. It has happened everywhere.
There have been 117 school shoot-
ings in the last year. Please protect our
children and join me in letting the
Baker School Board and Mr. Witty
know that we need to find the money
NOW to add this extra layer of pro-
tection to our children’s schools!
Harvey Haskell
Baker City
YOUR VIEWS
Security at schools should be
highest priority
COLUMN
Sight of a thunderhead serves as summer preview
T
he juvenile thunderhead
seemed to rest on the shoulder
of Black Mountain, a temporary
appendage that at a cursory glance
might have been mistaken for stone
rather than ephemeral water vapor.
For me, though, the vantage point
from Bowen Valley, just south of
Baker City, is a familiar one.
I was not fooled by the illusion.
I’m no geologist but I know, from
perusing various books and maps,
that Black Mountain is not a volcano.
This makes the peak, which rises
above the southeast corner of Phillips
Reservoir, an unlikely candidate to
suddenly sprout topographic features.
The sight of that cloud, slate gray
in the center with fringes of white
around its fluffy top, thrust me sud-
denly from spring into the summer
storm season.
Thunderstorms are perfectly plausi-
ble in May, to be sure.
But for me the classic thunder-
head is the sort that forms on hot
afternoons in July or August, when
broiling air becomes buoyant and as-
cends until it can no longer hold all
its latent moisture.
The physical processes that con-
spire to transform an innocuous cu-
mulus cloud into a malevolent cumu-
lonimbus, with its potential to spawn
crop-smashing hail and tree-cracking
gusts and lightning bolts that set fire
to vulnerable forests, are far beyond
my ability to comprehend.
I was fortunate to get through high
school chemistry without burning
down the laboratory after mishan-
dling a Bunsen burner.
But I needn’t grasp the scientific
principles to relish the return of this
atmospheric concoction, as reliable as
the January blizzard that graces every
streetlight with a halo, or the October
dawn when the frosty air seems so
bright and sharp that it ought to ping,
like fine crystal, when you snap it with
a finger.
The distinctness of the seasons is
one of Baker County’s most fetching
attributes, it seems to me.
I don’t mean only that we can ex-
pect the snow squall to give way to
more palpable to me when I see
clouds amassing in the southwest,
and feel the heat intensify as it so of-
ten does in those strange still mo-
ments before a storm breaks and the
the lilac blossom, or know that the
willow boughs begin to thrash about.
harsh yellow of the rabbitbrush will
It is, appropriately enough, an elec-
yield, come autumn, to the softer
tric feeling, one that can make the fill-
shade of the tamarack.
ings in my teeth seem to vibrate, and
I anticipate with at least as much
the fine hairs on my arms to quiver.
affinity the less tangible sensations as
I have in recent years sadly sup-
the seasons wane and wax.
plemented skywatching, a trait I un-
The July thunderstorm and its May doubtedly share with my ancestors
counterpart might be closer to sib-
dating back dozens of millennia, with
lings than to cousins, in a meteoro-
the ersatz, if effective, digital ver-
logical sense. But they feel quite dif-
sion. Which is to say that in addition
ferent to me.
to glancing up at the sky I also look
I rather expect rain, or hail, during down at my cellphone and its cun-
May. It is, after all, on average the wet- ning displays of Doppler radar. This
test month hereabouts.
is interesting, as technology can be.
A midsummer storm, by contrast, But the yellow and red digital blobs
often marks the only deviation amid that denote a storm — which remind
a long spell of the hot, dry weather
me of nothing so much as the rudi-
that is the default in our arid cli-
mentary graphics from an Atari 2600
mate, sheltered as we are by the twin game — can’t convey the acrid smell
rain shadows of the Cascades and
of ozone from lightning, can’t make
the Elkhorns.
your organs feel as though they’ve
The sense of anticipation is much
been jumbled the way a cannonade of
Jayson
Jacoby
thunder, seeming to explode directly
overhead, can do.
The sheer power of nature can’t be
captured in pixels.
And although I recognize the wis-
dom of seeking shelter when a storm
approaches and would never suggest
otherwise, I also look forward, among
the many experiences that summer
promises and usually delivers, to those
moments when I stand in my yard,
awaiting the coming of the tempest.
No other season can replicate those
interludes between the predictable
heat of the afternoon and the brief
downpour, when the sweat on my
neck seems to turn to ice.
No air conditioner can produce a
draft of air so refreshing.
And then the steaming aftermath
as the sun rapidly regains its strength,
leaving only the puddles as evidence
that the storm, on its way to dampen
places far beyond the horizon, was
ever here.
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the
Baker City Herald.