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About The Bulletin. (Bend, OR) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 13, 2022)
A4 The BulleTin • Sunday, novemBer 13, 2022 EDITORIALS & OPINIONS Heidi Wright Gerry O’Brien Richard Coe AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Publisher Editor Editorial Page Editor Elected officials should be voting, not abstaining W e want our elected officials to vote on the decisions before them. Not be out of town during meetings. Not abstain. Vote yes or no. It seems so obvious. But a dis- cussion by the Deschutes Public Li- brary Board last week did make us start to wonder. The board got an opinion from its attorney, Carrie Connelly, on the matter, because the issue of absten- tions has come up in library board votes. When is it OK to abstain? Is it le- gal? Or should board members be voting? We are far from legal experts, but Connelly suggested the board members should not abstain. “Members of boards, commis- sions, or councils are obviously ap- pointed to make decisions. Absent compelling circumstances, for ex- ample, pecuniary conflict of interest problems, board members should not abstain from voting,” Oregon’s public records and meetings man- ual states. That’s backed by case law. In the 1970s, a developer in Ore- gon wanted to put a warehouse on a site after he failed to get permis- sion to put a drive-in movie the- ater on it. Then the approval for the warehouse was denied. That was, in part, because two commissioners abstained. “In judicial proceedings as in football, when a judge steps out, he can be replaced from the bench and the adjudication can be made; be- fore a municipal governing body, as in rugby, however, there can be no substitution and the administrative adjudication may go unmade. Non- participation by a commissioner is therefore a drastic step,” the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled in 1978. Abstaining can be like voting no, as the Oregon Supreme Court recognized in a 1962 case. “....(A) refusal to vote may result in defeat- ing the proposition because in such case affirmative action is required, and those who refuse to vote can- not be counted on the affirmative side….” the court ruled. There is, of course, the matter of conflicts of interest. What usually comes up, though, with limited ex- ceptions, are potential conflicts of interest rather than actual conflicts of interest under Oregon law. And in the case of potential conflicts of interest, a member of a public body can actually fully participate in the discussions and vote. So yes. In most cases, elected of- ficials should be voting yes or no. And not abstaining. That’s what we elect them to do. OSU-Cascades grows; don’t let that be stopped T he enrollment story for higher education in most of the country is: decline. Undergraduate enrollment is going backward, though it seems to have slowed to the backward of before the pandemic, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The two-year de- cline of undergraduates across the country was 4.2% since 2020. Not at Oregon State University — Cascades. Enrollment went up more than 16% for first year students over last year. The 2022 fall class was up to 204. It’s a newer campus so growth isn’t necessarily unexpected. But it does also mean this community’s university is getting things right. It’s an attractive campus. Attrac- tive offerings. Talented faculty and staff. And surely the location next to great opportunities in the great outdoors and in Bend don’t hurt. either. OSU-Cascades put out some in- teresting numbers last week. Most of the students in the new class are from Oregon, nearly 76%. Short of █ a third are students of color, 28%. And overall the school has 74 stu- dents out of a total enrollment of 1,271 who are receiving veterans benefits. Alongside the efforts to keep building up the success OSU-Cas- cades, there have been efforts to put on the brakes. In 2017 then-House Speaker Tina Kotek justified the Legisla- ture directing so little funding to OSU-Cascades because there was not enough consensus to invest in a brand new campus “out there.” Of course, much has happened since then to Kotek and the campus. But in 2021 state Rep. Paul Evans, D-Monmouth, did introduce a bill to squash OSU-Cascades — sever the relationship between OSU-Cas- cades and OSU and prohibit the school from ever offering anything above a master’s degree. Sure, the bill died. Evans was just re-elected, though. Perhaps he will try again. As much as students find OSU-Cascades attractive and as much as it is an asset to Central Or- egon, there will be those who fight it. 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. Killing cougars may result in immigration of other cougars I BY ROBERT WIEGLUS have studied large predators and their interactions with hu- mans, prey, and livestock for over 35 years and have published over 35 peer reviewed scientific papers on predator/human interactions. I captured, radio-collared, and stud- ied hundreds of cougars in Idaho, Washington, and southern British Columbia for 20 years (1998-2018) with my research partners: Wash- GUEST ington Depart- COLUMN ment of Fish and Wildlife, Idaho Department. of Fish and Game, and the British Columbia Ministry of En- vironment. Cougar sightings and cougar/ human problems were increasing in eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and southern British Colum- bia, the same as is occurring here in Bend. We were tasked to determine the causes and possible remedies for these problems. We increased cou- gar hunting and mortalities in these areas expecting to see decreased cou- gar/human conflicts. Contrary to the expected results, cougar human con- flicts increased with increased killing of cougars, leading us to believe that the cougar population was increasing despite increased hunting. We radio collared hundreds of cougars to see what was really happening. The re- sults were astounding and completely counterintuitive. Increased remedial hunting of cou- gars resulted in increased immigra- 123rF I urge us to consider killing fewer cou- gars and maintaining a natural “biolog- ical fence” or a cadre of resident older resident cougar “police” to keep young troublemakers out of the area. tion by young, mostly male cougars. For every older resident male killed, two or three young guys came to the funeral. No such immigration was observed in a lightly hunted cougar population where most older males were spared. High cougar mortal- ity was compensated by high immi- gration of teenaged cougars with no net change in cougar density but did shift the sex ratio towards younger immigrant males. These younger inexperienced cougars caused the vast majority of cougar/human con- flicts, whereas older resident cougars caused no problems and kept the young troublemakers out of the area, similar to a biological police force. Increased mortality of cougars actu- ally caused increased immigration by young males and increased cougar/ human conflicts. We recommended that cougar mortality of resident adults be cur- tailed and not exceed the natural maximum population growth rate of cougars of 12% to prevent such increased immigration and cougar/ human conflicts. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife fol- lowed those recommendations and reduced cougar mortality statewide to 12% in each game management area. Cougar conflicts rapidly de- creased and became unproblematic in areas where cougar mortalities were reduced. Our research was rep- licated and confirmed in other areas of the U.S. and Canada, for exam- ple cougar human conflicts are low- est in California where cougars are protected and much higher in states where cougars are heavily hunted. I suspect that the same things might be happening here in Bend. We may be on a treadmill, where killing resident cougars results in in- creased immigration by young immi- grant cougars and increased sightings and problems, followed by increased killing of cougars, followed by in- creased immigration, etc. I urge us to consider killing fewer cougars in the area and maintaining a natural “bi- ological fence” or a cadre of resident older resident cougar “police” to keep young troublemakers out of the area. The chances of being injured by an automobile in Bend is at least a mil- lion times greater than being injured by a cougar. █ Robert Wieglus lives in Bend. He is the former director of the Large Carnivore Conservation Lab at Washington State University. Letters policy Guest columns How to submit 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 verifica- tion. We edit letters for brevity, grammar, taste and legal reasons. 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Box 6020 Bend, or 97708 Fax: 541-385-5804 The dubious tradeoffs that economists love to cite T BY TYLER COWEN Bloomberg o learn how an economist really thinks, ask them which mainstream economic idea bugs them most. You’ll get a wide range of responses, from “too much belief in laissez-faire” to “not enough use of ma- chine learning.” Here is my answer: the way the equity-efficiency trade-off is in- voked in policy discussions. To win this competition for worst idea, the idea has to be in widespread use, it has to be embraced by many of the professional elite, and it ought to be flat-out wrong or misleading. You can’t just pick a bad idea that hasn’t caught on, such as modern monetary theory. The equity-efficiency trade-off, in its simplest form, argues that econ- omists should consider both equity (how a policy affects various inter- ested parties) and efficiency (how well a policy targets the party it is intended to affect) in making policy judgments. So far so good. I start getting ner- vous, however, when I see equity given special status. After all, it most often is called “the equity-efficiency trade-off,” not “an equity-efficiency tradeoff,” and it is prominent in mainstream economics textbooks. By simply reiterating a concept, econ- omists are trying to elevate their preferred value over a number of al- ternatives. They are trying to make economics more pluralistic with re- spect to values, but in reality they are making it more provincial. If you poll the American people on their most important values, you will get a diverse set of answers, de- pending on whom you ask and how the question is worded. Americans will cite values such as individualism, liberty, community, godliness, merit and, yes equity (as they should). An- other answer — taking care of their elders, especially if they contributed to the nation in their earlier years — does not always show up in polls, but seems to have a grip on many na- tional policies and people’s minds. I hear frequently about the equi- ty-efficiency trade-off, but much less about the trade-offs between effi- ciency and these other values. Main- stream economists seldom debate the value trade-offs between efficiency and individualism, for instance, though such conflicts were of central concern to many Americans during the pandemic. To cite another example, many economists have argued that the U.S. should cut Medicare expendi- tures and instead spend that money on Medicaid, and more generally on health care and aid for younger people. (An early version of the Af- fordable Care Act tried to do exactly that.) I agree with this argument, but still I see an obvious trade-off: The U.S. would be boosting efficiency — there is a higher return from spend- ing on the young — but arguably taking something away from deserv- ing old people. Yet I hardly ever hear economists discuss the “efficiency vs. desert for the elderly trade-off.” Of course voters talk about it a lot, albeit using simpler terminology. There is a large branch of econom- ics, stemming from the research of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, focus- ing on normative trade-offs involving liberty. Yet Sen’s concept of liberty is so foreign to the American mindset it is hard to explain. For Sen, you have liberty only if you cannot make a re- ciprocal deal with another person — involving a corresponding commit- ment from the other person. Patrick Henry would roll over in his grave. For many American cit- izens, liberty means a right to free speech, or perhaps freedom from onerous regulation or excess taxes. Not for Sen and the extensive branch of social choice theory he birthed. Yet an entire branch of economics supposedly concerned with “liberty” went off in this direction with many hundreds of journal articles, all miss- ing the point. Surveys have shown that a strong majority of academic economists prefer Democrats. Yet most econo- mists, including Democrats, should pay more attention to the values of ordinary Americans and less atten- tion to the values of their own seg- ment of the intelligentsia. That also would bring them closer to most Democratic Party voters, not to men- tion swing voters and many Republi- cans. Equity is just one value of many, and it is not self-evidently the value economists ought to be most con- cerned with elevating. Many economists consider it a sign of their humanity that they are willing to moderate efficiency for the sake of equity. They are not wrong. It would be more humane yet to de- throne the equity-efficiency trade-off from its central position in economic discourse. █ Tyler Cowen is columnist for Bloomberg.
