A8 THE BULLETIN • TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Have your say
about plans
for homeless
camps in Bend
I
f Bend wants homeless people to not be homeless, that takes
effort. It takes access to medical care, food and services to help
them find more permanent housing.
A critical step in doing that suc-
cessfully is transitional housing. And
the city doesn’t have enough. This
week the Bend City Council is sched-
uled to vote on a “safe parking” plan
to allow more. It would essentially
permit parking lots or other spaces to
function as homeless camps — with
restrictions.
The plan would allow temporary
camping for people if they cannot
find permanent shelter elsewhere. Up
to six vehicles or moveable shelters
such as tents would be allowed with
permission of the property owner
or lessee. The city could specifically
allow more than six. There are re-
quirements for sanitation facilities
and more, such as providing notice
to neighbors. The proposed code is
much more detailed (it is available on
the city’s website under the council’s
Wednesday agenda).
This is not completely new for
Bend. There are already two locations
in Bend operating in a similar manner
under COVID-19 emergency orders.
But if councilors approve the change, it
seems likely that more locations would
provide transitional housing.
Expect some bumps. At the very
least, neighbors or neighborhoods
may complain if a nearby lot is used.
The notification requirement is only
for immediate neighbors, not to
neighborhood associations. The city
prides itself on using neighborhood
associations to gather feedback and
share information. Why not require
that neighborhood associations be
notified? Or is that excessive?
The city did put some teeth in its or-
dinance in case it had problems with a
location or with individual campers. It
included enforcement power to allow
it to prohibit such transitional housing
on any property if it constitutes a nui-
sance or other threat to public welfare.
A property owner can revoke permis-
sion at any time and any person “must
leave the property immediately after
permission has been revoked.” The
proposal also includes giving the city
the power to revoke permission for an
individual if the city “has a reasonable
suspicion that the person has violated
any applicable law, ordinance, rule,
guideline or agreement, or that the ac-
tivity constitutes a nuisance or other
threat to the public welfare.” Imple-
menting any such enforcement action
could get tricky.
It seems likely this council will ap-
prove this policy or something very
close to it. If you would like to influ-
ence it, let councilors know before their
meeting Wednesday. You can reach
them at council@bendoregon.gov.
Make the bus to the
wilderness a reality
T
he Cascade Lakes High-
way out past Mount Bach-
elor doesn’t get traffic jams
so much as it has had cars jammed
along the highway — parking where
they aren’t supposed to.
This year, because of the new U.S.
Forest Service requirement to grab
one of the limited permits to ac-
cess the wilderness, it may not be as
much of a problem. But parking at
the trailheads has tended to fill up.
What if you could ride the bus?
Cascades East Transit, with some
help from Mt. Bachelor, is trying to
make that happen. CET is working
with the Deschutes National Forest
to pilot a new summer shuttle ser-
vice in June 2022 along the Cascades
Highway.
Stops, frequency of the busses and
so on have not been decided yet.
But the goal CET told us is to stop
at sno-parks and “stop at all major
trailhead destinations to transport
hikers, walkers, tourists, and moun-
tain bikers and reduce single occu-
pancy vehicles within the National
Forest.” CET got a grant to pilot the
project. There may be three or four
bus runs in the morning and three
or four bus runs in the afternoon
and evening.
Mt. Bachelor kicked in $25,000
to help make it happen. Thank you,
Mt. Bachelor. A regional transporta-
tion group, the Bend Metropolitan
Planning Organization, is scheduled
to talk about the plan Tuesday.
Want less traffic? Ride the bus. It’s
not the best advice during the pan-
demic. But life will get back to more
normal, and this program makes
riding the bus a more potent option.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
No, we are not moving fast enough on water
BY YANCY LIND
T
he Bulletin recently ran a col-
umn titled “Central Oregon
Crossroads: Are we moving fast
enough to protect our waterways?” I
always appreciate water articles and
commentary, but the column did not
address numerous local issues. Here’s
a brief, partial overview.
Irrigators use somewhere
between 85% and 90% of
local water supplies. That
water is mostly diverted out
of rivers and supplied via
canals dug into porous lava
rock with a significant per-
centage lost to seepage and
evaporation. Importantly,
Lind
only part of that seepage re-
turns to the aquifer and only
after first reducing flows in a river.
Primarily at taxpayer expense,
main canals are being piped, but this
is a process that will take decades at
an estimated cost of approximately $1
billion. There are no plans to signifi-
cantly pipe the “lateral” canals that
transmit water from the main canals
to irrigators.
While some irrigators have in-
stalled efficient irrigation systems,
many have not. For example, Central
Oregon Irrigation District, the larg-
est of the local irrigation districts, has
a System Improvement Plan, which
states that 25% of their “patrons” still
use flood irrigation. This is a highly
inefficient distribution method first
developed in Mesopotamia over 5,000
years ago. Further, significant end
spills (excess water running out the
end of canals) continue.
GUEST COLUMN
End spills and agricultural runoff
introduce pollution and raise water
temperature in local rivers, especially
the Crooked River. A water qual-
ity study released by Portland Gas
and Electric, operators of the dam
that creates Lake Billy Chi-
nook, identified pollution in
the Crooked River as a ma-
jor source of degraded water
quality in the lake and the
Lower Deschutes .
Deschutes County tax pol-
icy can also be a source of wa-
ter waste. Land categorized
as exclusive farm use can get
dramatic tax breaks even if
the land has essentially no agricultural
use or value. This leads some land-
owners to “water rocks,” as the saying
goes, simply to use their water, main-
tain their water right and receive a tax
break.
In the county, “exempt” wells can be
drilled with no metering or monitor-
ing. I have such a well, and while the
rules say I can only water half of an
acre, there is no measurement of how
much water I pump and there are no
usage costs. Exempt wells are a small
part of the problem, but essentially all
new development in the basin uses
groundwater.
In a 2013 report, the U.S. Geolog-
ical Survey stated that local ground-
water has been dropping more than
one foot a year since at least the mid-
1990s, primarily due to a drying cli-
mate. This rate has certainly increased
as drought conditions become the
norm, glaciers disappear, the snow-
pack shrinks and population growth
increases demands on a diminishing
resource.
It may not be obvious yet, but we
are already in a water crisis that will
undoubtedly get worse. While the
catastrophic ecological damage in the
Upper Deschutes above Bend may
be partially ameliorated due to recent
changes by irrigators required by the
Endangered Species Act, the Middle
Deschutes below Bend, the Crooked
River and Whychus Creek remain on
life support due to low water levels
and elevated temperatures.
As readers of The Bulletin already
know, farmers in North Unit Irri-
gation District around Madras have
some of the most productive farm-
land in Central Oregon but have ju-
nior water rights, and this year they
will again have to leave some of their
lands out of production due to lack
of water. What you may not know is
that many domestic wells are also go-
ing dry and local cities have limits on
their ability to pump for municipal
use. A shrinking aquifer also impacts
local springs, which nourish wildlife
and recharge rivers.
Water availability, quality, alloca-
tion, usage and monitoring are im-
portant issues in Central Oregon to-
day — and will likely be critical in the
foreseeable future. Without public de-
mand for reform and strong political
leadership, however, solutions will not
be implemented.
— Yancy Lind lives in Tumalo and blogs at
coinformedangler.org.
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What information should the government collect about race?
BY RONALD M. SMITH
I
would like to expand on and rein-
force Valarie Anderson’s heartfelt
perspective in her March 11 guest
column. It is true, as Anderson notes,
that all humans on Earth
share around 99.9% of the
same DNA, meaning that
their genomes have nearly all
the same genetic codes in the
same locations. But the vari-
ation in the remaining one
tenth of a percent, equaling
Smith
around 300 million genetic
codes, is very consequential.
It accounts for all of the observable
and internal differences among peo-
ple. Eye color, hair color and texture,
skin color, height, allergies, body
shape and intelligence are all common
examples of these variable genetic
traits.
Where does variability come from?
It is inherited. For every individual,
traits came from a mother and fa-
ther blended into a new genome. The
parents passed along genetic ma-
terial they inherited from previous
generations stretching back thou-
sands of years. Today we can
glimpse our own patterns of
inheritance by submitting a
DNA sample to commercial
companies like Ancestry,
23andMe, or CRI Genetics,
to name a few. Through this
kind of analysis we can learn
where our ancestors came
from geographically and
about some of the traits that we in-
herited from them.
Thousands of human genomes
from all over the world have been se-
quenced and analyzed and one finding
is clear: Some human variations are
not homogenously distributed. They
arose through evolution in isolated
populations during the great disper-
GUEST COLUMN
sion of humans out of Africa begin-
ning some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.
Humans alive today have traces of
these ancestral populations, including
for some of us, even traces from Ne-
anderthal forbearers. To varying de-
grees we still carry genetic variations
contributed by these distant relatives. I
can enjoy the milk in my latte because
a milk tolerance genetic mutation oc-
curred and spread in one of my ances-
tral lineages about 8,000 years ago.
Now let’s tie this information back
to the concept of race as used in com-
mon parlance. I agree with Ms. An-
derson that the concept is poorly
defined, lacks a sound biological foun-
dation and has been politicized into
total uselessness. But its demise does
not imply that there are no meaningful
differences in ancestral populations.
I prefer the French model where
no such self-report information
is collected by government
institutions at all. If this
“universalist” approach was
applied here, every citizen would
simply be considered an American
— emphasizing unity.
Though the historical study of human
population genetics is still in its in-
fancy, the increasingly wide-scale use
of genome sequencing is sure to re-
veal many important details about our
family trees. But one thing is already
certain from a genetics perspective:
Skin color is irrelevant (except insofar
as a high level of melanin is protective
for direct sun exposure).
As for the collection of informa-
tion about race, I prefer the French
model where no such self-report in-
formation is collected by government
institutions at all. If this “universalist”
approach was applied here, every cit-
izen would simply be considered an
American — emphasizing unity. Such
a change would go a long way toward
reducing the negative effects of iden-
tity politics.
For a deeper dive into ancestral
populations and genomic research, I
recommend Charles Murray’s book,
“Human Diversity: The Biology of
Gender, Race and Class” (2020) and
my own textbook, “A Field Guide
to Humans: The Natural History of
a Singular Species, Second Edition”
(2020).
— Ronald M. Smith lives in Bend. He has a B.A. in
the earth sciences and an M.A. in experimental
psychology. He spent more than 30 years working
in education.