Editorials from around Oregon

Selected editorials from Oregon newspapers:

The East Oregonian, July 23, on managing fish to help recover threatened populations:

The fishing rights guaranteed to Indians by treaties and court decisions are meaningless if there are few fish to catch. These “treaty tribes” are entitled to half the salmon. But 50 percent of nothing is nothing. Tribal negotiators are increasingly insisting that there be actual flesh attached to the bare bones of treaty rights.

As a practical matter, this means the team of agencies responsible for salmon must ensure that salmon prosper through a combination of strategies, such as hatcheries, habitat restoration, modifications of hydropower operations, predator management and harvest adjustments.

The current management plan, a result of a federal court ruling, expires Dec. 31, 2017. The states, tribes and feds have started deciding what comes next in terms of harvest strategies.

It is possible the next harvest plan will be essentially identical to the current one, which is based on stock abundance. This means estimating how many fish are returning in various runs, including the 13 species covered by the Endangered Species Act. Managers then determine how many can be caught before the species recover to a healthy population.

There are several suggested alternatives - even including no harvest at all. Chances are good that agencies will prefer to stick to something pretty close to the status quo. But our region’s many nongovernmental experts - including commercial and recreational fishermen on the Columbia River - may have better ideas and should promote them.

Underlying any approach, we all should bear in mind the principle of insisting on a path toward sustainable salmon recovery, and resist squabbling over a share in an ever-threatened and too often diminishing set of salmon runs. Different fishing interests, cooperating together, must advocate for actual recovery, and be unsatisfied with small percentages of small salmon runs.

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The (Medford) Mail Tribune, July 21, on funding gun violence research:

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown last week issued an executive order intended to strengthen existing state gun laws, and called on the Legislature to enact three new laws next session aimed at reducing gun violence. Gun rights groups say the measures won’t work; gun control supporters say they will. Here’s the truth: Nobody knows.

Nobody knows because badly needed research at the federal level has been suppressed for decades by Congress, which has blocked funding for gun violence research by the Centers for Disease Control. Starting in 1996, Congress prohibited any funding for CDC studies that would “advocate or promote gun control.” The public health agency, fearing the rest of its funding could be in jeopardy, ended all such research.

In 2013, after the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Conn. President Obama issued an executive order directing the CDC to draw up a plan to thoroughly study gun violence and potential remedies. The CDC, with the help of the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, convened a committee of experts that developed a potential research agenda. But Congress never approved funding for any actual research.

Now, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, along with 22 fellow Democratic senators, is asking Senate leaders to allow the CDC to conduct the research.

None of that research needs to infringe on anyone’s rights. What it just might do is settle some debates over gun statistics, so that at least we can all start the debate with the same set of facts.

For example, gun rights advocates are fond of claiming that gun owners successfully defend themselves with firearms far more often that is reported - 3 million times a year, according to one study. Another study says 500,000. Still another says 108,000. The CDC’s research agenda drily notes, “The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field.”

Clearly, more research is needed. While they’re at it, researchers could answer some other basic questions, such as:

-How many guns are there in the U.S.?

-How do criminals get guns?

-Does limiting magazine capacity work?

-Is there a relationship between gun ownership levels and crime levels?

-Do universal background checks work?

Gun rights supporters and gun control advocates alike may say they know the answers to these questions. They don’t. But they could, if the CDC were allowed to conduct the research necessary to answer these and other questions.

Unfortunately, the gun lobby and its congressional supporters has steadfastly blocked that research - as though it is afraid of what the research might reveal.

The Senate should choose science over rhetoric and fund gun-violence research.

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The (Albany) Democrat-Herald, July 21, on shortening summer vacation for Oregon students:

An interesting story last Sunday in the Democrat-Herald examined the phenomenon that educators have termed the “summer slide” - the natural tendency for students to lose academic ground during the long, warm weeks of summer vacation.

School districts around the mid-valley have started programs intended to help students keep an educational mindset during the summer months, and those are showing some signs of success.

Engaged parents and guardians also have a role to play: Something as simple as frequent trips to a public library can keep kids reading during the summer, and libraries themselves increasingly are offering innovative programs intended to keep young brains buzzing in that stretch between the end of the last school year and the start of the next.

Summer can be a good time to encourage children to follow their own passions and to explore them. If that means one of your kids spends a long afternoon taking a long, careful look at bugs, well, that’s probably for the best. And savvy parents often are on the lookout for opportunities during family vacation to sneak in some learning under the guise of fun (that is, until the parents collapse, exhausted, at the end of each vacation day).

All that is worthwhile. But it seems that we continue to dance around a question that we should be asking more directly: Is the summer vacation too long?

Jim Golden, the superintendent of the Greater Albany Public Schools district, is among the educators who’s been asking that question. (We should emphasize here that the district is nowhere near making any decision about summer vacation, and any decision along those lines will be made only after considerable opportunities for input from parents, students, teachers, administrators and school staff members.)

The idea Golden was floating last year involved shortening the 10-week summer vacation and scattering what he called “mini-breaks” throughout the year. For example, schools could schedule mini-breaks around holidays such as Memorial Day to give families five-day weekends. (The mini-breaks in the schedule also could offer stressed students a chance to catch up on their schoolwork, an opportunity students likely would embrace.)

There’s nothing particularly new about the idea of trimming back summer vacations; the notion has been kicking around ever since it became apparent that most children were no longer required on the farm during the summer.

In fact, some Oregon schools have experimented with the idea of doing away with extended summer vacations: Rosa Parks Elementary School in Portland, for example, has used what amounts to a year-round schedule. The school operates on a nine-weeks-on, three-weeks-off rotation. (Rosa Parks students do get five weeks off at the end of the school year - and the school offers extra instruction during the three-week-off periods to students who need it.)

No one is saying yet that this is the model that all Oregon schools should follow. And any plan to shorten summer vacations will require working through a long list of details. It likely will come with some increased costs. (Although Rosa Parks students have about the same number of school days as other Portland students, the extra instruction during the three-week-off periods costs about $60.000.)

But it stands to reason that a student who stays sharp in the summer will be better equipped to attack the new school year with gusto. Would a different approach to vacation time improve the quality of education we provide our students? No one knows for sure, but it seems silly not to at least ask the question.

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The (Eugene) Register-Guard, July 19, on high-speed rail service in Oregon:

The dream of high-speed passenger rail service in the Willamette Valley will never die - but it’s not likely to become a waking reality anytime soon. For the next few decades at least, Oregon should content itself with improving the rail service it has now. Even that modest aim provides ample scope for the ambitions of train travel supporters, because there’s so much room for improvement.

It shouldn’t take nearly three hours to get to Portland from Eugene by rail, but it does - unless there’s a delay, in which case it takes longer. The current two-train-a-day schedule makes day-tripping by rail impractical for many. And the railroads are pushing to degrade passenger rail service still further by pushing for a reinterpretation of a rule that gives passenger trains priority over freight. It’s little wonder that passenger volumes on the Amtrak Cascades line has fallen - mid-length trips are faster and more convenient by car, and cheap gas adds another advantage.

It doesn’t have to be that way, and trends in transportation are working in favor of rail. Congestion on Interstate 5 is often bad and will get worse, narrowing the time advantage of travel by car. Parking in downtown Portland is increasingly expensive and hard to find. Both Portland and Eugene are served by good and improving public transit systems. Predicting the future price of gas is risky, but it’s not likely to stay low forever.

Even if the balance shifts in favor of train travel, high-speed rail will remain out of reach in the near- and mid-term. The high-speed rail systems of Europe and Asia serve populations more dense than Oregon’s by an order or two of magnitude. Building a high-speed rail line along the I-5 median would cost an estimated $3.7 billion to $4.7 billion. That estimate may be optimistic - a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco is plagued by delays and cost overruns.

But Oregon doesn’t need a bullet train. What it needs is passenger rail service that is reliable, faster and more frequent. That goal can be achieved for a fraction of the cost of a high-speed rail line. It would involve adding sidings, switches and double tracks along the Union Pacific Railroad’s single-track right-of-way, so that train traffic can move at faster speeds and with fewer stops and slowdowns.

A plan for track upgrades supported by the Oregon Passenger Rail Leadership Council, co-chaired by Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy, would cost between $660 million and $775 million and could be implemented in phases, with each phase resulting in faster and better service. Passenger volumes would rise as service improves - and as mid-distance trips by car become slower, more costly and more aggravating.

An immediate priority is to resist the railroads’ efforts to gain priority for freight traffic. That would be easier if the state could make a credible promise that over time, conflicts between freight and passenger trains will be reduced by the addition of double tracks and sidings. It’s not a grand vision, but it is in proper scale to the state’s resources and needs.

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The Bend Bulletin, July 23, on tax exemptions for nonprofits:

Oregon law has a fairly broad property tax exemption for nonprofits. But there’s been a push in the Legislature and from the League of Oregon Cities to change that.

It’s worth exploring as long as the Legislature doesn’t rush in and disrupt important charitable organizations without careful analysis.

Nonprofits use services, too. They benefit from roads, police and fire protection and water and sewer services. Should they not pay any property taxes that support those services? Should they be required to meet some sort of benefit test to see if they qualify for a full or partial exemption? Everyone else arguably pays more because nonprofits don’t pay. Is that worth it?

Those are valid questions to ask. They are hard questions to answer.

There’s a good reason nonprofits got exemptions in the first place. Many of them improve lives. They have benefited the community. They have played a role where government sometimes does not. Taxing them more would mean they could do less good work. Just having nonprofit status, though, does not grant nonprofits a halo that entitles them to immunity from closer examination.

There is a significant amount of money at stake.

“Nonprofit organizations that are charitable, literary, benevolent or scientific are provided a property tax exemption that will cost more than $194 million in the 2015-17 biennium,” according to the League of Oregon Cities. “In addition, exemptions for the property of nonprofit religious organizations costs more than $113 million for the biennium.”

Oregon courts have used a test to determine if organizations qualify for a property tax exemption, according to a report from the Legislative Revenue Office. Is the organization charitable? And is the property actually and exclusively occupied or used in the charitable work carried on by the organization? There’s a deeper test for hospitals to ensure they treat people regardless of ability to pay, make a special effort to help the needy and are not operated for profit.

All states offer some level of property tax exemption. And we aren’t suggesting that Oregon get rid of all exemptions. The Legislature is right to take a look. Tax-exempt status should be earned.