B6 The BulleTin • SaTurday, July 24, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Law enforcement
is on right track
P
ublic safety appears to be on the right track in both Redmond
and Warm Springs.
Redmond recently announced its
plan to build a new police station, while
the Confederated Tribes at Warm
Springs has received the OK to con-
struct a new jail that will be up to federal
standards.
Key to the Redmond facility is the ad-
dition of an “on-site mental health triage
center,” according to a story by The Bul-
letin’s reporter Garrett Andrews.
That will be similar to the stabilization
center that is operating adjacent to the
Deschutes County jail and sheriff’s of-
fice, which has been a large success story.
A stabilization center is a holding fa-
cility for people who may be having a
mental health crisis. In the past, those
people would be dropped at the hospital
emergency rooms and pretty much left
to fend for themselves, not to mention
the cost to the county for such services.
The Deschutes County Stabiliza-
tion Center has been open for the last
13 months, 24 hours a day, seven days a
week. Since the center has been open, An-
drews writes, 30 people have indicated to
staff they would have killed themselves
had the facility not been there.
The facility sees a daily average of
nine people ranging in age from 6 to 93
years old. Most people come in during
the day, though the center is busy
throughout the night.
It’s no secret that Redmond is a
fast-expanding city and needs to stay
ahead of the population boom. The cur-
rent station is 25 years old and used to
house 36 employees. Today, the staff is
up to 61 employees.
The addition of a crisis mental health
facility really meets that need that police
officers are often unqualified to handle.
It takes the pressure off the officers and
the hospitals.
Meanwhile, in Warm Springs, accord-
ing to a story in the Madras Pioneer, the
Bureau of Indian Affairs has agreed to
fund a new jail on the reservation. It has
been in dire need of renovation due to
neglect.
“The straw that broke the camel’s
back was COVID,” Bill Elliott, chief of
the Warm Springs Tribal Police Depart-
ment, said in the Madras Pioneer. Elliott
describes the cinder-block, 51-bed jail as
“a dungeon.”
Built in 1989, the structure has a
primitive ventilation system. The de-
partment closed the Warm Springs jail
permanently in August because indi-
viduals could not be isolated from the
coronavirus.
But the jail has been closed on and
off since 2017, according to The Pi-
oneer. The reservation experiences
frequent power outages, and the jail’s
backup generator frequently fails. The
troubled water system on the reserva-
tion made it unsafe to house inmates at
the jail, and inmates and staff suffered
through the summer of 2020 without air
conditioning.
Elliott said the intent of the new jail
is to have a facility that provides a safe
environment for both inmates and staff
and is capable of handling issues such
as areas to contain possible outbreaks
of contagious diseases. And it will be
a place for the most vulnerable of the
community’s population, providing ac-
cess to mental health and other services
to assist in options to incarcerations or
rehabilitation.
Public safety is so much more than
locking people up. These two projects
show that the strength of a community
is to demonstrate in how well it handles
its most vulnerable.
Historical editorials:
Breaking quarantine
e
The following historical editorials originally
appeared in what was then called The Bend
Bulletin on Aug. 24, 1906.
T
he action of certain parties in in-
sisting on breaking a quarantine
established by the Bend board of
health, to say the least, deserves the most
severe censure. When a board of health
imposes a quarantine, with no purpose
in mind other than to obey the law and
protect public health, and this quaran-
tine is disregarded by some, there is no
alternative left but a summary arrest of
those violating the law. The recent arrests
in Bend were amply justified and those
arrested got no more than their just des-
serts. The city officials should be com-
mended for the faithful performance of
a duty that, that the best, must have been
an unpleasant and disagreeable one.
…
Bro. Myers of the Laidlaw Chronicle
takes exception to The Bulletin’s state-
ment classing George L. Simmons ex-
cellent ranch “in the Bend country.” He
would prefer that the Simmons ranch be
credited to Laidlaw. Well! Well! We are
sure no offense was intended. Yet, Bro.
Myers, for many years, yea, long before
the thriving little town of Laidlaw was
even conceived in man’s mind, the coun-
try in this part of the Deschutes Valley
was designated as “the Bend country.”
So The Bulletin was not so far amiss af-
ter all. Be that as it may, we are glad to
hear so many good crop reports from
this whole “upper Deschutes valley” (as
Bro. Myers would have it called), glad to
hear of “the Laidlaw country’s” prosper-
ity, of Redmond’s fine crops, and sim-
ilar good reports from all parts of the
compass. Laidlaw is to be congratulated
upon having so valiant a defender of her
rights as in Bro. Myers.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor Gerry
O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe.
Bureau of Land Management has
gone rogue in managing wild horses
tourism instead of wiping out every
animal deemed a threat to ranch-
ing. It makes economic sense, too.
According to the Department of
the Interior Fiscal Year 2019 Eco-
nomic Report, forage and grazing
supported an estimated $2.2 bil-
lion in economic output and about
40,000 jobs. In contrast, Interior’s
lands hosted an estimated 501 mil-
lion visits. Recreation accounts for
469,000 jobs and contributes $60.6
billion to the economy.
And we don’t mean creating more
paved roads, just create maps and
put up some signs to point people in
the direction of wild horses as their
feet touch the Earth while hiking.
BLM’s belief that wild horses only
have value if they can be adopted
out, domesticated and trained is a
national disgrace. It was recently
publicized in the media that the
“Wild Spayed Filly Futurity” event
2019 winner was from the South
Steens HMA in Oregon, and our
hearts sank because we visited there
in 2016. Witnessing the wild horse
herd dynamics was magical.
One staff member will never
forget that a BLM employee at the
Burns District office told her the
best place to see wild horses in Ore-
gon is the Wild Horse Corral hold-
ing prison. That statement alone
says volumes about what the BLM
is all about.
GUEST COLUMN
BY PRISCILLA FERAL
Y
ou’d think that the Bureau
of Land Management would
have learned from its recent
assault on Utah’s beloved Onaqui
wild horse herd that Americans
want the agency to keep its hands
off wild horses and halt the rest of
the 2021 roundups.
The Onaqui roundup, which
ripped 435 wild horses from the
range after drugging them with
fertility control for years, drew the
ire of the public, celebrities, leg-
islators and advocates. Everyone
made it clear they want wild horses
to be free, not privatized through
an adoption program that does not
protect wild horses from slaughter.
Still, it’s business as usual for the
meat-industry-loving BLM. Now,
Oregon’s wild horses are targeted.
The BLM is slated to round up 750
from the Beatys Butte, Stinking-
water and Pokegama Herd Manage-
ment Areas.
However, since the Onaqui wild
horses are so frequently visited and
famous, all eyes are now on the BLM
— and public backlash matters.
There is hope to derail BLM’s
wild horse extinction plan through
Friends of Animals’ ongoing legal
efforts, but also if the public keeps
pressure on new leadership — Deb
Haaland and Nada Culver, a new
BLM director — to demand re-
forms to rein in this rogue agency,
which has obliterated the Wild
Horse and Burro Act of 1971.
The BLM can legally establish
appropriate management levels, or
AML; however, it doesn’t use sci-
ence to do so. Then it perpetuates
the lie that there are too many wild
horses, convincing Congress that
roundups and fer-
tility control are
necessary.
BLM has
shirked responsi-
bility to maintain
thriving natural
Feral
ecological balance,
letting doomed
livestock dominate the range. Case
in point — the AML within the
Beatys Butte HMA, which spans
437,120 acres, is a scant 100 to 250
wild horses. However, a staggering
4,469 cattle can graze in the Beatys
Butte Common allotment.
It is the 50th anniversary of the
WHBA, the perfect time to begin
phasing out livestock grazing allot-
ments in wild horse HMAs and to
start using scientific models to de-
termine AMLs and to survey the
range. Doing so would also give our
planet a better chance to combat the
climate crisis.
Speaking of, wild horses have
a positive impact on the habi-
tat where they evolved. A recent
study reveals they are ecosystem
engineers, using their hooves to
dig more than 6 feet deep to reach
groundwater, which helps other
wildlife. Other studies show wild
horses do not decompose the veg-
etation they ingest, which allows
them to spread seeds of many plant
species and sequester carbon in
their droppings. And they help to
build more moisture-retaining soils
and prevent catastrophic fires.
The BLM should be fostering an
appreciation for wild horses and
other native species through eco-
e
Priscilla Feral is president of Friends of
Animals, an international animal advocacy
organization founded in 1957, and advocates
for the rights of animals, free-living and
domestic, around the world. It is currently
involved in a lawsuit against the BLM’s
multiple 10-year wild horse management
plans, which conflict with the Wild Horse and
Burro Act of 1971.
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Apartment boomtowns may be next bubble as demand moves
BY CONOR SEN
Bloomberg opinion
I
t was hard enough to build apart-
ments in high-cost cities like San
Francisco before the pandemic
triggered an exodus from urban
neighborhoods, and now the eco-
nomics are even tougher. But that’s
giving smaller cities a chance to catch
up to the rental boom that previously
lifted other noncoastal metros like
Austin and Denver. For builders, it’s a
riskier calculation.
The divergence in the rise and fall
of rents between high-cost and low-
cost metro areas means it makes bet-
ter sense to build apartments in places
like Spokane, Washington, than San
Francisco — at least in the short-term.
To best understand this, look at
rental prices in different metro areas
now compared with the onset of the
pandemic last spring. The June data
from Apartment List shows that in the
highest-cost metro area, San Francisco,
rents are still down almost 15% from
where they were in March 2020. On the
other end of the spectrum, the metro
areas with the fastest rent growth have
been those that came into the pan-
demic with some of the lowest prices in
the country, including Fresno, Califor-
nia, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Rising construction costs are another
big factor for anyone looking to build
anything right now. Rick Palacios Jr.
of John Burns Real Estate Consulting
showed earlier this month that the cost
of building a home has risen by 22%
year-over-year. And while apartment
buildings aren’t the same as single-fam-
ily houses, a broad-based increase in
the cost of construction is going to
pinch multifamily developers as well.
So those builders in San Francisco
are dealing with rents that are down
15% and construction costs that are
up 20%.
Meanwhile, rent prices are boom-
ing in interior-West metro areas like
Spokane and Boise, Idaho, rising
more than 30% since March 2020.
That makes those places more at-
tractive to builders than they were
18 months ago, even with the higher
construction costs. To the extent those
cities missed out on last decade’s mil-
lennial stampede to downtown apart-
ments in places like Denver, Nashville,
and Austin, Texas, there’s an addi-
tional incentive to build in places that
need to catch up.
As economic conditions return
to normal, we don’t know how long
these higher rents are sustainable
in metro areas that benefited from
changed priorities during the pan-
demic. We had a decade to acclimate
to the idea of technology companies
and young college-educated workers
moving to the urban centers of large
metro areas all over the country, and
apartment developers built housing to
meet that demand.
Right now, the theme makes sense
of homebuyers moving to Boise
where they can afford a bigger house
than they could on the West Coast.
But are there really going to be
growing numbers of people wanting
to rent luxury apartments in metro
areas of 250,000 to 500,000 people
that aren’t set to land the next technol-
ogy-company campus? That’s perhaps
a riskier proposition for apartment
developers.
Another, more sobering thought is
what all this might suggest for rents
down the road in San Francisco. If the
increase in construction costs is per-
manent, to get back to pre-pandemic
economics for apartment developers
we might need to see market rents
that are far higher than they were in
early 2020.
Maybe it’ll take one-bedroom
apartments going for $4,000 a month
to get the dirt moving on multifam-
ily housing. And until that happens,
fewer housing units will be delivered
in the city over the next couple years.
It’s possible the current lower-rent
period is just a passing reprieve for
Bay Area renters, similar to how
things were for a few years after the
dot-com bubble burst in the early
2000s — before rents soared to previ-
ously unthinkable heights.
So we should expect the apartment
construction pipeline in high-cost
cities to slow down until rents rise
enough — or costs drop enough — to
give developers the economics they
need again. But that doesn’t mean
apartment construction will dry up
everywhere. It’ll just shift to where the
rents have risen enough to make it
profitable.
e
Conor Sen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and
the founder of Peachtree Creek Investments.