A8 The BulleTin • Wednesday, June 23, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Sustainability
fund is good idea
from Visit Bend
S
ome people will harrumph and scrunch up their faces if
you mention tourists and Bend.
They have had enough of tourists.
They have had enough of people
treating Bend like a play thing. They
have had enough of the added traf-
fic. They have had enough of people
visiting and then deciding to move
here.
And for the scrunched up har-
rumphers there is perhaps no more
despicable villain than Visit Bend.
It’s the economic development orga-
nization that adeptly tries to bring
tourists here and ensure they have a
positive impact. “We don’t need it,”
we often hear harrumphed. “The
word is out about Bend.”
Of course, they do have a point.
But Bend would be a very different
place if those tourist dollars weren’t
boosting the economy. And by law,
the money that comes in from tour-
ism taxes has to be spent on tour-
ism-related stuff.
Already, Visit Bend has had a se-
rious campaign at the forefront of
its marketing efforts urging visitors
to take The Bend Pledge. It encour-
ages people when they visit to tread
softly, take only memories and leave
only footprints. Be nice and behave.
Visit Bend even gives away prizes for
people who sign the pledge, encour-
aging more people to pay attention
to it.
Visit Bend is also launching some-
thing new, the Bend Sustainability
Fund. It’s going to take some of its
funding and invest it in the com-
munity. It is looking to create tour-
ism-related facilities that will last for
more than 10 years. Such a facility
would have to have substantial use
by visitors because of those legal re-
quirements for tourism taxes.
Anyone can apply for project
funding. They must be able to pull
the project off and the project must
create sustainable recreational re-
sources and outdoor experiences.
Projects should be shovel ready.
There must be community support
for the project. There should be a
plan for long-term maintenance and
care. It should be accessible to all.
The money is coming from the city’s
transient room tax, not other taxes.
The grant application process starts
on July 1.
What sorts of things might be
right? Trailhead parking. Bike trails.
Sports facilities. An equestrian
camp. Improvements to Deschutes
River access. Public restrooms, too.
Do you have an idea?
There is more information
here: www.visitbend.com/
bend-sustainability-fund/.
This fund could bring some great
improvements to Bend and environs
for everyone.
About that letter
from Travel Portland
D
id you see the ad for Port-
land that showed up in the
Los Angeles Times, The New
York Times, San Francisco Chroni-
cle and The Seattle Times?
Maybe. Maybe not. It’s worth
checking out. There’s a good over-
view in the Willamette Week.
The ad is an effort from Travel
Portland, the tourism promoter. It
tries hard to market Portland to vis-
itors by urging them to look past
some of the headlines and see the
city for themselves.
“You’ve heard a lot about us lately,”
the ad says in part. “It’s been a while
since you have heard from us.”
“We have some of the loudest
voices on the West Coast,” the ad
later continues. “And yes passion
pushes the volume all the way up.
We’ve always been like this. We
wouldn’t have it any other way.”
The ad has more polished word-
smithing than that.
We picked that excerpt, because
it’s a place where it’s trying to round
off the edges.
Some people object to the way the
ad portrays Portland. Yes, in fact,
they would have it some other way.
Yes they would not like their city to
be known as a place of protests. Oth-
ers would like the city to give them
less reason to protest.
The thing that intrigues us about
the ad is that it is right, in a way. You
only have a chance to truly know
a place if you go see it for yourself.
Portland is wreathed by a narrative
that is not completely fair, nor is it
completely wrong.
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.
GUEST COLUMN
Water sharing is not enough
BY YANCY LIND
T
he Bulletin recently covered the
plight of some farmers with ju-
nior water rights getting only
40% of their traditional water deliver-
ies while senior water rights holders
continue to get their full allotment.
Beginning in the late 1800s set-
tlers were lured by developers to
Central Oregon with sometimes du-
bious promises of cheap land, good
soil and weather, and plentiful water.
Dreams of fertile farms helped bring
the wagon trains. The first to arrive
and organize were given the most se-
nior water rights and every right after
that was more junior. North Unit Ir-
rigation District around Madras has
the most productive farmland but the
most junior rights. While they have
been here the longest, fish and wild-
life have the most junior water rights
of all.
Contrary to popular belief, a water
right is not water ownership. We, the
public, own the water. A right allows
an irrigator water provided its use is
“beneficial.” Beneficial use is not well
defined, but it was commonly under-
stood to mean economically produc-
tive; something that would help the
region grow. It is also important to
know that the water is free. Irrigators
commonly do not understand this,
but they are charged by their irriga-
tion district for the delivery of the wa-
ter, not the water itself. We, the public
owners of the water, get nothing.
Today, 88% of all water rights in the
Upper Deschutes
Basin are held by ir-
rigators, 2% by mu-
nicipalities, and the
rest is in streams and
rivers. While there
are many econom-
ically viable farms,
Lind
according to the U.S.
Department of Ag-
riculture, most Deschutes County wa-
ter right holders are small with higher
costs than income, aka “hobby farm-
ers.” If you look around Deschutes
County, you will see many acres of
well-watered fields, perhaps with a
few horses or cows.
Water rights are protected by law,
and everyone should be able to pursue
their hobby of choice. But what if an
irrigator wanted to give up some wa-
ter? Until this extreme drought year
this was limited by the districts, and
additional water is not being allowed
to go instream.
A partial solution would be to es-
tablish a well-functioning water mar-
ket, where water can be freely bought
and sold while protecting water rights,
land use designations and tax breaks.
Water markets have been shown to
work in other states and would work
here as well. In fact, the Deschutes
River Conservancy runs a limited wa-
ter leasing program, which provides a
small, but important, amount of flow
into local rivers at some times of the
year. (55 CFS this year spread over the
entire basin.) There also used to be a
water bank that facilitated permanent
transfers to rivers and cities. This pro-
gram was shut down by the districts.
A water market would be a step in the
right direction, but it is not enough.
The solution to our water problems
would be to also charge irrigators for
their water.
Junior water rights holders in North
Unit Irrigation District have become
highly efficient in their use of water
out of necessity. Similar incentives do
not exist elsewhere. For example, 25%
of Central Oregon Irrigation District
still uses flood irrigation, the most in-
efficient form of irrigation. Charging
for water would quickly fix this.
Charging for water would also help
direct water to economically viable
uses, the original intent of grant-
ing rights. Additionally, raised funds
could be used to buy water to per-
manently put back into rivers and
streams, along with other ecological
restoration activities, helping to re-
verse 100+ years of damage from of-
ten wasteful irrigation practices.
This is a radical idea, one that would
require changes in our laws. In the
face of a heating planet and a boom-
ing population, however, we need to
think of radical solutions or the plight
of North Unit farmers will be visited
on the rest of us. Neither planned ca-
nal piping, nor water conservation by
homeowners, is enough to solve our
worsening water problem.
e
Yancy Lind lives in Tumalo and blogs at www.
coinformedangler.org.
Letters policy
Guest columns
We welcome your letters. Letters should be limited to one issue,
contain no more than 250 words and include the writer’s phone
number and address for verification. We edit letters for brevity,
grammar, taste and legal reasons. We reject poetry, personal at-
tacks, form letters, letters submitted elsewhere and those appro-
priate for other sections of The Bulletin. Writers are limited to one
letter or guest column every 30 days.
Your submissions should be between 550 and 650 words and
must include the writer’s phone number and address for verifi-
cation. We edit submissions for brevity, grammar, taste and legal
reasons. We reject those submitted elsewhere. Locally submitted
columns alternate with national columnists and commentaries.
Email submissions are preferred. Email: letters@bendbulletin.com
American society is not nearly as woke as it sometimes appears
BY TYLER COWEN
Bloomberg
I
t is sometimes called “Conquest’s
Second Law of Politics”: “Any or-
ganization not explicitly and con-
stitutionally right-wing will sooner or
later become left-wing.” I am hearing
this more and more lately, leading me
to wonder if it is actually true. And if
so, why?
It is easy enough to find anecdotal
evidence in support of it. Numerous
foundations that arose from the for-
tunes of right-leaning founders, such
as Pew or Ford or Hewlett, have mor-
phed into left-wing institutions. I can’t
think of a major foundation that came
from a left-wing founder and then
moved to the right. In the broader
sweep of American history, universi-
ties have not been explicitly left-wing
— but they are today.
And the law is not necessarily con-
fined to nonprofit institutions, which
are vulnerable to capture by left-lean-
ing educated elites. This doesn’t ex-
plain the advent of “Woke Capital”
— corporations pushing for explicitly
Democratic or left-leaning policies,
such as voting reform in Georgia.
America’s professional sports leagues
have to varying degrees endorsed
conceptions of racial politics closer to
that of the Democratic Party.
Therein lies a clue as to the nature
of the ideological shift. Those same
sports leagues are not in every way
woke. Football, for instance, remains
a violent sport, imposing injuries on
many relatively disadvantaged young
men, while the NBA allows itself to be
bullied by China on issues of human
rights.
One possibility is that institutions
respond to whichever groups make
the biggest stink about a given issue.
On many political issues, the left cares
more than the right, and so those left-
wing preferences end up imprinted
not only on public opinion-sensitive
nonprofits but also on profit-max-
imizing corporations. Yet when it
comes to statements about Hong
Kong, China cares a great deal and
most Americans do not, and so the
NBA responds to that pressure.
Additional forces strengthen Con-
quest’s Second Law. Educational po-
larization increasingly characterizes
U.S. politics, with more educated
Americans more likely to vote Dem-
ocratic. Those same Americans are
also likely to run nonprofits or major
corporations, which would partially
explain the ideological migration of
those institutions.
There are, of course, numerous U.S.
institutions that have maintained or
even extended a largely right-wing
slant, including many police forces,
significant parts of the military, and
many Protestant Evangelical churches.
Those institutions tend to have lower
educational requirements, and so they
are not always so influential in the
media, compared to many left-wing
institutions.
Furthermore, the military and po-
lice are supposed to keep out of pol-
itics, and so their slant to the right is
less noticeable, although no less real.
The left is simply more prominent in
mass media, so Conquest’s Second
Law appears to be truer than it really
is. (Note that by definition the law ex-
cludes explicitly right-wing media.)
Left-wing views, at least on some
issues, might have more of a “least
common denominator” element than
do many right-wing views. On aver-
age, the intellectual right is more likely
to insist on biological differences be-
tween men and women, whereas the
intellectual left is more likely to insist
on equality of capabilities.
No matter your view, the left ap-
proach is easier to incorporate into
mission statements, company slogans,
and corporate human-resource pol-
icies.
Egalitarian slogans require less ex-
planation, are less likely to get an in-
stitution into trouble with the law, and
are more compatible with a desire to
attract a broad range of workers and
customers.
So as nonprofit institutions have
become larger and big business has
risen in relative importance, those
trends also will instantiate Conquest’s
Law. As large organizations adopt a
more egalitarian tone in their rheto-
ric, explicit right-wing views will tend
to become less prominent in those or-
ganizations.
The common thread to these expla-
nations is that left-wing views find it
easier to win in spheres of reporting,
talk and rhetoric — and that those
tendencies strengthen over time.
It follows that, if Conquest’s Second
Law is true, societies are more right-
wing than they appear. Furthermore,
it is the intelligentsia itself that is most
likely to be deluded about this, living
as it does in the world of statements
and proclamations. It is destined to be
repeatedly surprised at how “barbar-
ian” American society is.
There is also a significant strand of
right-wing thought, most notably in
opposition to Marxism, that stresses
the immutable realities of human
nature, and that people change only
so much in response to their envi-
ronments. So all that left-wing talk
doesn’t have to result in an entirely
left-wing society.
Conservatives thus should be able
to take some comfort in Conquest’s
Second Law. They may find the dis-
course suffocating at times. But there
is more to life than just talk — and
that, for liberals as well as conserva-
tives, should be counted as one of life’s
saving graces.
e
Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg columnist. He is
a professor of economics at George Mason
University and writes for the blog Marginal
Revolution.