A4 The BulleTin • Sunday, novemBer 13, 2022
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
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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.
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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.