The BulleTin • Friday, July 23, 2021 A5
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Time is running out:
Get vaccinated ASAP
A
s we slowly emerge from our isolation cocoons thanks
to the year of the COVID-19, people may feel a little
disoriented meeting in groups again, shaking hands
or even standing close to one another. It’s almost like the cicadas
emerging after 14 years, but we’re not chirping as much as we
would like.
That’s because there are still un-
knowns out there. The COVID-19
delta variant is spreading across the
globe and has been found in Oregon
and Deschutes County.
It affects those who are not vac-
cinated against COVID-19 the
most, but there’s the unknown as to
whether vaccinated folks can carry it
or even pass it on. And reports are it
is much more contagious.
As of Thursday, St. Charles has 14
coronavirus patients hospitalized,
three of whom are in ICU and on
ventilators. While that number is far
from the high of 40 during the worst
of the pandemic, it is concerning be-
cause numbers are trending upward.
Deschutes County had three recent
deaths from COVID-19 in the past
several days and yesterday recorded
14 new cases. Statewide there were
421 new confirmed and presump-
tive cases reported.
The death toll in Oregon from
COVID-19 stands at 2,833.
Troubling as all this is, there is a
sure-fire way to curb it: Get a vac-
cination. Most clinics, pharmacies,
the hospital — all offer a vaccine
of choice. It is even easier than was
waiting the mere 30 minutes to get
one at the county fairgrounds a few
months back — which ran like a
well-oiled machine.
Concerned about the vaccine?
Ask a health care professional. Get
the straight skinny from those in
the know. Don’t take our word for it,
and you don’t have to take the gover-
nor’s word for it. Do a bit of research,
whatever it takes to make you feel at
ease in getting vaccinated.
As of Wednesday, 2,457,522 Ore-
gonians have had at least one dose of
a COVID-19 vaccine, and 2,285,052
people have completed a COVID-19
vaccine series.
In June, there were 7,241 cases of
COVID-19; 92% of these cases were
unvaccinated people, according to
the Oregon Health Authority. Fur-
ther, minorities, people of color and
Native Americans are sorely lacking
in getting the vaccine. The OHA says
the minority groups are hovering at
the mid-40% range. It is making a
push to move that number to 80%,
or some 240,000 people, by sum-
mer’s end. That’s a big hill to climb,
but getting the word out will help.
If you’re interested in tracking
COVID-19 in Oregon or the vacci-
nation numbers, here’s a great dash-
board to view: https://govstatus.
egov.com/OR-OHA-COVID-19.
By curbing this new variant now,
we can hope for an easy transition
back to normal work schedules,
school hours and leisure time.
Small towns give
with their hearts
D
espite the traffic jams at
roundabouts under con-
struction, or the detours, or
the 15-minute “rush hour” com-
mutes, it still feels like we all live in a
small town.
Drivers are generally polite, resi-
dents are helpful to visitors and there
are still moments when we recognize
each other face-to-face, now that the
face masks have come off.
A great example of the caring and
giving spirit of Central Oregon came
out of a tragic event last week when
a horse-racing jockey accidentally
died after being thrown from a horse
at the Crooked River Roundup.
The crowd was stunned when
the accident occurred during the
first race of the event. When it was
determined that jockey, Eduardo
Gutierrez-Sosa, 29, died from his in-
jures, the rest of the racing card was
canceled.
Gutierrez-Sosa was a journeyman
jockey primarily based out of Grants
Pass. He was married and had three
children.
Last Wednesday was the start of
the three-day roundup in Prineville,
which is back after a year off due to
the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our hearts are broken,” Doug
Smith, race chairman for the
roundup, told The Bulletin in
an email. “We ask that everyone
keeps those he left behind in their
thoughts and prayers.”
The audience did more than that,
however. In about an hour, race of-
ficials had raised more than $3,500
from attendees for Gutierrez-Sosa’s
family, according to a Bulletin story.
It is one of the many, albeit small,
giving gestures that make up our
communities.
Another was the packages of wa-
ter and necessities that the Bend
community delivered en masse
to the homeless camps during the
recent heat wave. It made a dif-
ference in alleviating the extreme
temperatures.
There are lots of other exam-
ples. Suffice to say that despite the
trials and tribulations of ongoing
heat, fires and coronavirus issues,
the small-town feel remains alive in
Central Oregon: neighbor watching
out for neighbor.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright,
Editor Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe.
‘Infrastructure’ fix is simple: Pipe
clean water to Native Americans
BY BIDTAH BECKER AND ANNE CASTLE
M
uch of the infrastructure
talk in Washington these
days focuses on large, com-
plicated projects involving tunnels,
bridges and highways. But there is a
much more basic matter involving
infrastructure that also merits atten-
tion: the need to provide clean water
to the more than half a million Native
Americans who lack the sort of wa-
ter and sanitation services that other
Americans take for granted.
These households may have no toi-
let, no sink or any piped connection
that delivers clean water, as a report
by the Democratic staff for the House
Committee on Natural Resources laid
out in 2016. Others may be connected
to a contaminated water supply that is
not suitable for drinking and, in some
cases, even poisonous. Still others may
rely on systems that are deteriorating,
unreliable and possibly polluted.
That so many citizens lack access to
basic plumbing should be unaccept-
able in a modern country. Yet Native
American households are 19 times
more likely than those of white peo-
ple to lack indoor plumbing. (Black
and Latinx households are twice as
likely as white ones to lack the same
services.)
The public health impacts of not
having clean water are obvious. At
the beginning stages of the corona-
virus pandemic, Native Americans
were 3.5 times more likely than their
white neighbors to be stricken with
the illness. Unsurprisingly, the dis-
proportionate incidence of covid-19
in Indian Country has been strongly
correlated with the lack of indoor
plumbing and access to clean water.
When you lack running water to
wash your hands, or you share an out-
door latrine with other households,
or you can’t isolate because you’re
forced to drive to a water collection
point used by the whole community
Letters policy
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 attacks, form
letters, letters submitted elsewhere and
to fill your plastic water buckets for
the week, limiting exposure to a po-
tentially lethal virus becomes nearly
impossible.
Concerted efforts by tribal govern-
ments, urban Indian organizations
and the Indian Health Service to pro-
vide vaccines to tribal members have
slowed the incidence of covid among
tribal members. But Alaska Natives
and American Indians still have the
highest hospitalization and death rates
of any ethnic group. Tribal elders were
hit particularly hard by COVID-19, a
devastating loss of Indigenous culture.
Native communities have chron-
ically lacked access to clean and safe
water for decades; the consequences
of federal government inaction were
simply laid bare by the pandemic.
The lack of clean, piped water is not
just a Native American predicament.
In other rural areas outside of reser-
vations, some households don’t have
clean piped water. But nowhere else is
the problem as concentrated as in In-
dian Country.
Moreover, the United States owes
a special obligation to its Indigenous
citizens. The federal government ap-
propriated their lands in exchange
for the promise that the tribes would
have permanent, livable homelands
where they could prosper and thrive.
That promise has gone unfulfilled
in countless ways, and it is meaning-
less if Native American homes do not
have clean water.
This problem is not intractable. It
simply requires properly funding and
constructing the necessary systems.
At least one solution has been autho-
rized since 1959, when Congress cre-
ated the Indian Health Service’s sani-
tation facilities construction program.
Several other federal programs are in-
tended to address the problem, but all
have fallen short.
There have been encouraging signs
that the Biden administration and
those appropriate for other sections of
The Bulletin. Writers are limited to one let-
ter or guest column every 30 days.
Guest columns
Your submissions should be between
550 and 650 words and must include
the writer’s phone number and address
members of Congress recognize the
injustice. This year, the White House’s
Domestic Policy Council has held two
listening sessions on Native Ameri-
cans’ access to clean drinking water.
Resolutions have been introduced
in both the House and the Senate
acknowledging the federal govern-
ment’s responsibility to provide clean
water to tribes. Sens. Michael F. Ben-
net, D-Colo., and Martin Heinrich,
D-N.M., have introduced the Tribal
Access to Clean Water Act of 2021,
which would fund the unmet need in
four federal agencies that administer
programs addressing clean water in-
frastructure in Indian Country, for a
total of $6.8 billion.
Each of the infrastructure packages
now under consideration by Congress
would dedicate significant resources
for clean drinking water systems na-
tionwide; but a specific, targeted ap-
propriation such as the Tribal Access
bill is what is desperately needed.
Investing in clean water infrastruc-
ture has far-ranging benefits: It cre-
ates good-paying jobs, nurtures future
generations and offers the chance to
address long-standing and persistent
racial injustice. The Indian Health
Service has noted that every dollar it
spends on sanitation facilities to serve
Native American homes has at least a
20-fold return in health benefits.
The current emphasis in Washing-
ton on infrastructure improvement
and addressing racial justice provides
a once-in-a-generation opportunity
to correct a shameful state of affairs
that has been allowed to persist for far
too long.
e
Bidtah Becker is an associate attorney for the
Navajo Tribal Utility Authority and former
director of the Navajo Nation Division of Natural
Resources. Anne Castle is a senior fellow at the
Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources,
Energy and the Environment at the University of
Colorado and former assistant secretary for water
and science at the U.S. Interior Department.
for verification. We edit submissions for
brevity, grammar, taste and legal reasons.
We reject those submitted elsewhere. Lo-
cally submitted columns alternate with
national columnists and commentaries.
Writers are limited to one letter or guest
column every 30 days.
Email: letters@bendbulletin.com
Klamath Dams are driving salmon to extinction and not helping people either
BY MARK ROGERS
T
he Oregon Council of Trout Un-
limited represents 3,800 conser-
vation-minded anglers across
Oregon. We are known for our stream
habitat restoration work and our re-
liance on solid science to inform our
programs and views.
One of the most important water-
sheds in which we are invested is the
Klamath River. The Klamath was once
the third-most productive salmon river
on the West Coast, but its salmon and
other native fish populations have de-
clined precipitously and the multi-spe-
cies fisheries this river supported his-
torically are now in deep trouble.
Coho salmon are now listed as
threatened under federal and Califor-
nia law. Spring chinook salmon, once
the Klamath Basin’s dominant run,
have decreased by nearly 98% and now
approach extinction. Fall chinook pop-
ulations — even heavily supplemented
by hatchery production—have been so
poor the past few years that the Yurok
Tribe had to suspend fishing for the
first time in the Tribe’s recorded his-
tory.
Klamath River salmon are both sa-
cred to local Tribal cultures and a key-
stone species essential to the resilience
of the entire river ecosystem. The cur-
rent desperate shortage of water in the
Klamath Basin is exacting a heavy toll
on them, and on everyone else.
While we can’t do much to make it
rain or snow more, we can take other
actions that would help all the basin’s
residents. In particular, we can follow
through on a multi-party agreement,
twenty years in the making, to remove
four old hydroelectric dams.
The Iron Gate, Copco I & II, and
GUEST COLUMN
J.C. Boyle dams are outdated for their
original purpose (energy produc-
tion). Three of the four produce so
little energy they are money-losers.
These dams also provide zero water
supply benefit, for agriculture or any-
one else. Moreover, these dams com-
pletely block fish access to more than
400 miles of historic habitat and create
some of the worst water quality in the
nation.
Twenty-three parties, including
PacifiCorp (the utility company that
now owns the dams, and doesn’t want
them anymore), the States of Oregon
and California, Tribes, commercial
fishing groups, federal agencies, and
TU and other conservation organi-
zations have signed an historic settle-
ment agreement that is centered on the
removal of these obsolete, polluting,
fish-killing dams.
Some have argued that the cost of
removing the dams and restoring the
project footprint will be far more than
is estimated, due to the spike in cost of
construction materials over the past
year. But the dam removal project is a
deconstruction project, and involves
tearing down and hauling away old
concrete, not pouring it.
The Public Utility Commissions
of Oregon and California — whose
charge is to protect ratepayers — have
already determined that removing the
four Klamath dams is in the best inter-
est of ratepayers in both states. While
the removal project may see some cost
escalation due to the drawn-out federal
permitting process, the existing $450
million budget has built-in contin-
gency funds to cover cost overruns.
In addition, the States of Oregon and
California and PacifiCorp have agreed
to chip in an additional $45 million,
if needed. Lastly, the cost of upgrad-
ing the dams so they could continue
to operate for hydropower production
(while enabling fish passage) would be
far greater than the cost of taking them
out, under any scenario.
The plan for removing the old
Klamath dams — and the budget for
doing so — has been vetted thoroughly
by independent experts and approved
by federal and state regulators. Restor-
ing the free flow of the Klamath River
is one thing we can and should do
as soon as possible to help all Klam-
ath Basin’s residents, human and wild
alike.
e
Mark W. Rogers is chair of the Oregon Council of
Trout Unlimited from Sandy.