STATE
BlueMountainEagle.com
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
A9
Brown’s budget includes $247 million for rural projects
By CLAIRE
WITHYCOMBE
Oregon Capital Bureau
On the campaign trail,
Gov. Kate Brown was eager
to tell voters she would rep-
resent all regions of the state.
“I’m the only candi-
date in this race with a track
record of bringing Republi-
cans and Democrats together,
urban and rural Oregonians
together, to tackle the prob-
lems facing Oregon,” Brown
said during one debate.
A month after her reelec-
tion, she is following through
on that claim.
Brown’s proposed budget,
released last week, includes
more than $247 million for
rural infrastructure projects
and other increased spending
to benefi t rural residents.
“I also believe that the
work we are doing to con-
tinue to grow the economy
by investing in infrastruc-
ture, housing, broadband,
water and of course, career
and technical education will
benefi t communities large
and small across Oregon,”
Brown told reporters as she
released her budget proposal.
There’s enthusiasm from
observers about Brown’s
spending plans for rural Ore-
gon, from dams to housing to
high-speed internet.
But some advocates and
lawmakers worry about other
parts of her budget that cut
fi re protection on forestland,
hold steady money for com-
munity colleges and increase
taxes by $2 billion.
Rural areas of the state
face unique challenges.
Despite the state’s robust
overall economic growth,
rural Oregon has yet to fully
bounce back from the Great
Recession.
Rural
unemployment
has been declining since its
peak in 2009, and the state’s
rural econ-
omy is less
diverse, mak-
ing it more
vulnerable to
shocks. And
the populace
Gov. Kate
and
work-
Brown
force in non-
metro areas
of Oregon are aging, accord-
ing to a report last year
from the state Employment
Department.
While the income of rural
Oregonians is about equal to
other rural areas of the coun-
try, state economists say,
housing is about 30 percent
more expensive.
The governor wants to
offer a carrot to developers to
build more affordable hous-
ing across the state.
She wants to boost fund-
ing for loan programs and for
public-private partnerships to
build housing for people who
can’t fi nd affordable homes
in the communities where
they work. Brown wants the
state to borrow $130 million
through bonds to build up to
2,100 affordable homes for
communities of color and in
rural areas.
The governor has also
proposed millions in water
projects.
Brown’s budget allots $16
million to replace the Wal-
lowa Dam, which is more
than a century old and whose
operators keep less water
than it was built to hold to
avoid a failure.
Todd Nash, chair of the
Wallowa County Commis-
sion, said that replacing the
dam could help increase
water for irrigating crops
such as timothy hay and
alfalfa.
“That would mean addi-
tional water for some of
those areas that have been
underserved by water … to
continue to irrigate and that
is a big win for Wallowa
County,” Nash said.
And Brown wants to
divvy millions for rural com-
munity colleges across the
state, with a focus on career
readiness.
Brown’s wish list includes
an agricultural workforce
center at Blue Mountain
Community College in Pend-
leton and an industrial trades
center at Klamath County
Community College in
Klamath Falls.
Oregon’s 17 community
colleges had about 280,000
students in the 2016-17
school year, according to the
Higher Education Coordinat-
ing Commission. They pri-
marily serve rural areas.
But unless the Legislature
raises nearly $2 billion in
new taxes for her major edu-
cation revival plan, Brown’s
budget would reduce money
that community colleges say
they need to continue current
operations for the next two
years.
It would also cut funds
to Oregon Promise, which
covers tuition for certain
students.
Ron Paradis, head of col-
lege relations for Central
Oregon Community Col-
lege in Bend, said the college
would get less money under
the basic budget than it cur-
rently does.
“It would defi nitely mean
cuts, or tuition increases,”
Paradis wrote in an email.
The college operates cam-
puses in Bend, Redmond,
Prineville and Madras with
an enrollment this fall of
about 5,000 students.
The governor wants more
rural Oregonians to have
high-speed internet that
could “literally bridge the
urban-rural divide,” she said
in October.
Joseph Franell, CEO of
Eastern Oregon Telecom
who chairs the state Broad-
band Advisory Council, said
that he was “thrilled” about
the governor’s proposal to
create a Broadband Offi ce
and allocate $5 million to
a broadband infrastructure
fund.
The Broadband Offi ce
would develop partnerships
between government and pri-
vate companies to expand
high-speed internet to rural
Oregon, pursue federal fund-
ing and support local efforts
to develop faster internet.
There’s a technical advan-
tage in having a dedicated
broadband offi ce. It could
help the state qualify for
more federal funding, Franell
said.
As the economy and
daily life depends more on
the internet, reliable and fast
internet service can connect
rural Oregonians to services
like health care and educa-
tion, Franell said.
“If the Colt .45 revolver
was the great equalizer of the
1800s, broadband is the great
equalizer of our era,” Franell
said, “And when I say that,
there’s no one thing other
than broadband that has such
potential for positive impact
on people’s lives.”
For example, instead of
traveling for hours to see a
specialist, more rural res-
idents could use medical
video conferencing, often
called telehealth.
“If you have good, reli-
able, fast access to broad-
band, regardless of location,
you can get educated, literally
all the way up to a Ph.D.,”
Franell said. “Regardless of
where you live, you can get
health, you can connect with
government in ways you
couldn’t before.”
Rural communities have
had problems enticing pri-
vate companies to build high-
speed internet infrastructure.
John Day City Manager
Nick Green said that there is
not much incentive for com-
panies to invest in high-speed
internet in rural or frontier
communities. There’s a lot
of space and not many peo-
ple per square mile to pay for
the service.
And getting federal
money is tough. Green
found out last week that the
city hadn’t been awarded a
federal grant to help bring
broadband to the area. It had
spent about $100,000 to pre-
pare the grant application.
Internet is so sluggish at
John Day City Hall that he
couldn’t directly upload that
application.
He hopes that more sup-
port from the state would
help communities like his
get federal dollars to close
the broadband service gap,
which impacts schools,
libraries and other govern-
ment functions.
A smattering of other pro-
posals could improve life in
rural communities. The gov-
ernor wants to phase in hun-
dreds of new state troopers
over the next 10 years, which
would improve emergency
response times in rural areas
of the state.
And she wants to put $10
million toward cleaning up
contaminated rural Oregon
lands.
A front-and-center envi-
ronmental concern in many
rural areas, though, is smoke.
Come summer, gray skies
and ash affl ict rural parts of
the state where wildland fi res
are more common, and local
residents and lawmakers
have clamored for a change
to forest management poli-
cies to address smoke issues.
Brown wants to establish,
through the executive order, a
council on wildfi re response
to evaluate Oregon’s system
for responding to large fi res.
The council’s job would
be to fi gure out whether Ore-
gon’s current mode of fi ght-
ing fi res is “sustainable” and
recommend changes.
Senate Republican Leader
Jackie Winters of Salem said
that while the governor’s
efforts to address fi re issues
were “long overdue,” she
didn’t think decreases in the
fi re protection budget would
help.
The governor’s budget
attributed the dip to one-time
costs for recent large fi res.
Jonathan Sandau, gov-
ernment affairs specialist at
the Oregon Farm Bureau,
pointed to a number of
proposals in the gover-
nor’s proposed budget that
could be a boon for rural
communities.
He was encouraged by
her support of economic
development projects in rural
Oregon through the Regional
Solutions program and
efforts to expand broadband
service. She also wants to
extend tax credits for farmers
who house agricultural work-
ers and donate crops to food
banks or other charities.
Those credits are set to
expire in the next budget.
But Sandau worried that
the governor’s push for edu-
cation funding — if new
taxes don’t pass — could
sideline funding for natu-
ral resource agencies like
the state Agriculture Depart-
ment, the Fish and Wildlife
Department and the state’s
watershed
enhancement
board.
Those agencies do every-
thing from regulating the
pesticides that farmers use to
managing wolves that prey
on livestock.
“Oregon is a natural
resources economy, and a lot
of lives and jobs and com-
munities depend on that,”
Sandau said.
State public records advocate fi nds litany of fl aws in Oregon’s public records laws
By AUBREY WIEBER
Oregon Capital Bureau
Governments in Oregon unrea-
sonably delay handing over pub-
lic documents or charge too much
for that access, and put records of
elected offi cials sometimes nearly
beyond reach of citizens, accord-
ing to a new state report.
Those are the fi ndings of Gin-
ger McCall, Oregon’s public
records advocate and included in
a formal report issued last week
by the state Public Records Advi-
sory Council. Her observations
are her own, though, based on
her experiences in recent months
with government offi cials, report-
ers and editors and citizens who
want public documents.
McCall found that Oregon’s
public records laws are confus-
ing to government and request-
ers. It allows government offi cials
to delay or withhold records that
should be public, and there is lit-
tle punishment for agencies who
violate the law. If citizens or oth-
ers want to challenge a govern-
ment’s decision to withhold pub-
lic records, the recourse can be a
costly court battle.
Since April, McCall has trained
1,300 government employees on
Oregon’s public records laws.
She has also been called on in 90
instances by reporters and edi-
tors for help getting government
records.
The council’s report is meant
to inform Gov. Kate Brown and
the Legislature and promote
reforms in the law.
McCall and the public records
council received reports of gov-
ernment offi cials overusing their
authority to keep records secret
relating to criminal investigations,
personnel matters, trade secrets
and internal communications.
Decisions to withhold records
are based on employees’ reading
of the law, and they are some-
times poorly trained to do so, the
report said.
One example is waiving the
cost of providing a record. Pub-
lic agencies can provide records
at free or reduced cost if the infor-
mation serves the public inter-
est. Some agencies often waive
fees, while others have a policy
against it, even if the information
serves the public. McCall’s report
fl agged the city of Molalla’s pol-
icy not to waive fees.
Kelly
Richardson,
city
recorder for Molalla, said the
city charges the cost of gather-
ing and copying records because
it wouldn’t be fair for the commu-
nity to have city employees doing
the work for free.
“I have found if there is no
monetary value attached to the
request often times people will
make a frivolous request and
waste my time and I never hear
from them again,” Richardson
said via email.
McCall called the issues “sys-
temic” and said they are caused by
a range of challenges, from gov-
ernments that can’t search data-
bases to citizens making sweep-
ing requests that can involve
thousands of pages of material.
McCall said the law is ambig-
uous in many ways. According to
her report, there are at least 550
exemptions in Oregon’s public
records law.
The report noted that govern-
ment agencies use exemptions to
withhold information when there
is no reason to do so. Government
agencies are supposed to weigh
benefi ts of keeping the informa-
tion private against the interest of
the public.
McCall also found some juris-
dictions, such as the cities of
Portland and Salem and Mar-
ion County, charge a fl at fee to
provide specifi c records. The
law allows them to charge only
the actual cost of providing the
documents.
Those agencies say they have
assessed the average actual
cost of each type of record and
charge that amount.
“Charging all requesters based
on an ‘average’ cost of processing
public records requests removes
incentives for requesters to sub-
mit narrowed requests and is
unfair to a requester who submits
a properly narrowed request,”
McCall said in her report.
McCall also found delays to be
prevalent. Public agencies gener-
ally have 15 business days to dis-
close public records. Agencies
can take longer if it’s not practi-
cal to disclose the records within
that time frame.
That provision, “is unneces-
sary and entirely undercuts the
requirements” McCall found.
The result, McCall found, “can
make it diffi cult for victims to
obtain insurance payments, limit
the damage of identity theft, pur-
sue civil litigation, take precau-
tions to protect their personal
safety, or vindicate their rights in
a variety of other venues.”
Another provision in Oregon’s
record law provides the only way
to legally challenge an elected
offi cial’s decision to keep doc-
uments confi dential is to sue in
state court.
Appeals, however, can involve
an arduous process.
“The avenues for appeal —
including appeals to the attor-
ney general or district attorney or
appeals to the courts — are often
expensive or time consuming,
and requesters are forced to bear
the burden of enforcing the law,”
McCall said in the report.
But not all of the blame is
on government. McCall found
requesters often send broad
requests, such as records of all
communication between a gov-
ernment employee and another
party. McCall found such
requests appear to result from
a growing distrust of agencies
repeatedly showing a lack of
cooperation with public records
requests.
The council is already pro-
posing two pieces of legisla-
tion. The fi rst is to make the
council permanent; it’s sched-
uled to sunset at the end of
2020. The other would require
state agencies to report annually
how they handle public records
requests.
But McCall wants further
action. Her report is based on
anecdotal information, but she
wants data. To that end, the Pub-
lic Records Advisory Council
is surveying the state’s 10 larg-
est cities, all state agencies and a
random mix of other government
bodies.
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