Editorials from around Oregon

Selected editorials from Oregon newspapers:

The Corvallis Gazette-Times, May 19, on state employment numbers:

Oregon’s unemployment rate dipped to 3.7 percent in April: It was the lowest mark since the state started keeping comparable records in 1976.

The April 2017 rate showed significant improvement over the 5.0 percent rate in Oregon a year ago. And the state joblessness rate continues to be better than the U.S. rate, which was 4.4 percent in April 2017. (The numbers in this editorial all have been seasonally adjusted.)

This is all undeniably good news, as the state continues to add jobs as the economic recovery continues. And a peek deeper into the numbers shows more good news: Since April 2016, Oregon’s construction sector posted the fastest growth of any of the state’s major industries, adding 6,400 jobs, a 7.2 percent growth rate. This is particularly welcome, because the construction sector was among the hardest-hit during the recession.

Other winners among the state’s leading economic sectors were transportation, warehousing and utilities (up 3,600 jobs, or 6 percent), professional and business services (up 8,700 jobs, or 3.7 percent) and health care, a sector which has demonstrated consistent growth, up 6,800 jobs, or 3.0 percent.

Economic sectors that suffered relatively minor job losses over the past 12 months in Oregon included government (down 700 jobs), wholesale trade (down 500 jobs) and information (with a loss of 300 jobs).

So the picture painted by the employment number is a cheery one - but it doesn’t tell the entire story, especially if you’re tracking the economic health of Oregon’s rural counties.

In this regard, a new report from the Oregon Employment Department, “The Employment Landscape of Rural Oregon,” is essential reading. And it’s worth keeping that report in mind as you scan the latest sunny statewide employment numbers.

The big takeaway from the report is that Oregon’s employment recovery has been uneven: Of the 23 counties that the report identified as rural (Benton County is considered urban), 17 of them have not recovered the jobs lost in the recession - and many of the jobs that have returned pay lower wages than the jobs that were lost.

Part of the issue here, of course, is that our economic attention tends to be focused on the state’s populated areas: The report found that those 23 rural counties accounted for just 13 percent of Oregon’s job total in 2016, “a small enough share to be lost in broader analyses of the state economy.”

In other words, when you read reports celebrating another dip in Oregon’s unemployment rate, it means that the job picture is bright in the state’s urban areas - but that doesn’t necessarily translate to good times outside the cities.

This isn’t a new problem, although it tends to be hidden. The report found that unemployment rates typically are higher in Oregon’s rural areas, dating back to 1990, which is as far back as the data goes. Since 1990, the long-run average of unemployment rates is 2 percentage points higher in rural areas (8.4 percent, as opposed to 6.4 percent).

The report concluded that rural areas likely always will have higher unemployment rates than urban areas, for a number of reasons: Rural areas depend on seasonal agricultural and resource industries, which tend to be seasonal. And rural workers who lose their jobs likely spend more time searching for work, simply because there aren’t as many jobs available in those areas.

But that shouldn’t mean that everyone in Oregon needs to move to a city to find work. A prosperous Oregon is one that has vibrant, creative economies in both its urban and rural areas.

It can be easy to overlook the economic trends at work in rural Oregon, overshadowed as they are by the urban numbers. But that doesn’t mean the needs of rural Oregon should be ignored.

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The Register-Guard, May 12, on rural homelessness:

Homelessness is not just an urban issue, a point that’s easy to overlook if you live in Eugene or Springfield.

About 13 to 14 percent of the county’s homeless population last year - or about one out of seven people who were homeless - were living in rural areas, Lane County’s Human Services Division calculates.

People in rural areas become homeless for pretty much the same reasons as people in urban ones: a job loss or a job that doesn’t pay enough to live on, a shortage of affordable housing, mental health or substance abuse issues, flight from domestic abuse, a health crisis or unexpected expense. Some constantly teeter on the brink of homelessness, or move back and forth through the thin membrane between the housed and the unhoused.

While the problems may be the same, the resources are significantly reduced in rural areas, where there are far fewer housing units, far more low-wage and seasonal or part-time jobs, and far fewer places to go for help.

Local governments, volunteers and donors have stepped up in rural communities across Lane County to do what they can to fill the needs, such as St. Vincent de Paul’s purchase and rehabilitation of mobile home parks. But the mesh in the rural safety net has even larger holes than in urban areas .

Cottage Grove is often cited as an example of a rural community that has come together to support people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless.

It has a 21-unit affordable housing project, built by St. Vincent de Paul in 2004. A healthy cadre of volunteers steps up whenever there is a need - a factor in why Cottage Grove has twice received the All-America City Award from the National Civic League.

Cottage Grove officials are supportive of efforts to reduce homelessness and are willing to try new approaches, such as a tiny house project now in the works. Community Sharing, a non-profit agency founded in 1982, provides help with basics such as food, energy and housing. “We’ve done well providing food,” Executive Director Mike Fleck says, “and pretty darn well with energy.” Housing, he says, is another story.

Rental housing in general is scarce in rural Lane County; add “affordable” to the description and scarce doesn’t begin to describe the situation. Rental assistance can help bridge the gap for people who are poor and homeless, or at risk of homelessness. But funding lags far behind need: “We turn away three-fourths of the people who apply for rental assistance,” Fleck says.

Obtaining a Section 8 housing voucher is a long and difficult process; trying to actually use it is, in many cases, impossible. There’s a rental cap on what qualifies for Section 8, and that limit is far below the actual price of a rental home in Cottage Grove these days.

Continued funding for many state and federal programs - including one aimed at keeping people at high risk of homelessness housed - is uncertain.

A handful of states have recognized the special challenges of homelessness in rural areas and begun to craft their own, coordinated programs to combat homelessness. Colorado’s Rural Initiatives Program, for example, offers a range of resources, from rapid rehousing programs to transitional housing and permanent, supportive housing. It also helps rural organizations or agencies compete for federal grants.

But overall, rural homelessness continues to receive little attention, with limited understanding of how it differs from urban homelessness - for example, there’s a far higher percentage of homeless families with children in rural areas, and a higher percentage of people living in inadequate shelter - such as cars, sheds or substandard housing - rather than on the streets.

Any plan to attack rural homelessness needs to account for these differences, as well as the scarcity of resources. In Florence, for example, the non-profit Siuslaw Outreach Services helped more than 800 people who were homeless last year. But Florence has no emergency shelter, no treatment facilities for people who are homeless, no Egan Warming Centers.

Dealing with rural homelessness requires, first, a recognition that this is not a temporary emergency. It is the result of some long-term changes that include the hollowing out of the middle class and the loss of family-wage jobs. As the largest timber county in Oregon, Lane County has been particularly hard hit by both the loss of wood products jobs, including to automation, and a sharp decrease in the federal timber funds.

Rural areas need more help to both attract new, full-time, family-wage jobs and train or re-train workers for them. They also need help in securing the most basic of needs for poor people.

The time and specific skills it takes to search, and apply, for grants or government aid puts badly needed assistance out of reach for many small rural communities. (One federal grant program targeting rural homelessness was cancelled due to a lack of applicants.) A program to help rural communities find, and win, grants could potentially reap big rewards.

More support in general for rural communities is needed, along with more avenues for them to work together and share information and resources. The Lane County Poverty and Homelessness Board is a start in this direction; currently, however, only one of the 21 board positions is filled by someone from a rural area.

Any agency or organization dealing with homelessness needs to understand that the resources and needs of rural communities differ from the urban centers, and incorporate it in to their planning and proposals.

Rural communities need more and better information on what programs are working elsewhere; finding programs that can be copied or adapted to meet local needs is more efficient than re-inventing the wheel multiple times.

Most of all, there needs to be a recognition that homelessness in rural areas is a long-term, systemic issue, part of the widening gap nationwide between rich and poor, and needs to be treated as such. A Band-Aid approach isn’t going to heal the equivalent of a broken bone.

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The Statesman Journal, May 18, on wage gap bill:

Congratulations Oregon middle-school girls! The news from the Legislature this month bodes well for your futures.

By the time you graduate from high school in seven years, the state is expected to close its wage gap and require employers to pay women the same rate they pay men for the same work.

Republicans and Democrats in the Senate came together in May and unanimously passed a bill called the Oregon Equal Pay Act of 2017 or House Bill 2005. The bill will now be returned to the House to ensure it concurs with the amendments the Senate introduced.

It’s expected that the bill will be approved by the House and forwarded to Gov. Kate Brown for her signature.

In order to get the bill passed in the Senate accommodations were made. And women will remain the poorer for them. Literally.

The effective date was pushed to Jan. 1, 2024, ostensibly to accommodate some exemptions.

But more than likely it was because businesses squawked and lawmakers listened.

Despite existing federal protections, women in Oregon still earn 82 cents for every dollar men are paid. This constitutes an annual wage gap of about $8,393, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families.

Oregon women of color face an even larger pay gap, the center reported. African-American women are paid 70 cents, Latinas earn 51 cents and Asian women get 75 cents compared to every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men.

The new legislation offers women some strong protections. Differences in compensation among employees will have to be based on job-related reasons such as merit, seniority, workplace locations, education, training and experience.

Screening job applicants based on salary histories will be banned, and penalties for wage discrimination violations will be increased. It also adds remedies for workers facing pay disparity.

But while members of both parties are clapping themselves on the back for working together and passing legislation that benefits women, women themselves won’t see more in their paychecks until 2024.

For those who have lived with this inequity all their working lives, the bill is a triumph and a tragedy.

We understand that crafting legislation is tedious work requiring long hours of negotiation, compromise and give and take.

But women already have waited too long for equal pay. They should not have to wait seven more years to finally achieve parity.

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The News-Register, May 19, on the budget shortfall:

The Oregon Legislature is facing a general fund shortfall of $1.4 billion, a Public Employees Retirement System shortfall of $21 billion and a transportation system deficit, harder to estimate with any great degree of precision, of at least $10 billion.

A surging economy is producing much more revenue than projected, but Oregon’s peculiar and pernicious kicker law, now enshrined in the constitution, figures to return $480 million to taxpayer pockets. Easy come, easy go - much too easy, truth be told.

Given all the constituencies that have to be mollified, plugging any one of these gaps poses a daunting challenge. Plugging all three simultaneously poses a truly tall order.

Revenue measures require 60 percent support. What’s more, when the stakes are high, they must be capable of passing electoral and judicial approval as well as legislative muster.

That being the case, the roster of necessary constituencies includes the Democratic and Republican caucuses in both chambers, our strangely distant and detached governor, a decidedly less distant and detached electorate, the big business and big labor interests capable of funding an electoral referendum, and the Oregon Supreme Court, ultimate stop for judicial challenges. That’s quite a gauntlet to run.

The Legislature is treating these as three separate problems, so has three different sets of inside players trying to fashion workable solutions. But they are, in fact, intricately intertwined. If any one falls, it’s likely to bring the others down with it.

The keys are striking the right balance between competing interests and holding the ultimate tab to a manageable level - both easier said than done.

The Legislature created this hydra-headed monster by shirking year after year on meaningful tax reform, PERS adjustment and transportation investment. For much too long, it appears to have been following the mantra, “Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.”

Unfortunately, the challenges we share have grown all the greater with the passage of time. We’re at a point now where they demand immediate, aggressive and bi-partisan action.

The GOP is committed to countering general fund tax increases with spending cuts, new PERS infusions with long-term cost-cutting, and urban infrastructure investment with rural. While Democrats may feel that strategy is an impediment, we see it as an incentive - an incentive to come up with something palatable to a broad cross-section of interests, not just those favored by the party currently holding power in Salem.

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The Daily Astorian, May 22, on salmon run:

Count backward three years and we come to 2014 - precursor to this spring’s extremely poor salmon returns.

Fewer than 45,000 adult spring Chinook and about 5,300 immature jacks have been counted at Bonneville Dam, compared to 10-year averages of about 135,000 and 21,000. Shad, another species that should begin surging toward inland spawning grounds about now, reached a count of 38 at Bonneville this week, compared to the 10-year average of more than 33,000.

In the case of Chinook, actual returns may not be quite so bleak as the dam count indicates. Heavy mountain runoff has made the Columbia’s water cloudy and cold. Test fisheries found quite a few Chinook loitering here in the estuary, delaying their swim upstream. But with the start of summer only a month away, there isn’t much time left for the spring run to come through. If they don’t make it to spawning grounds, the run three years from now also will be weak.

This three-year cycle of migration and return is one of the Pacific Northwest’s great natural phenomena, one that has sustained humans, wildlife and forests since time immemorial. But today’s fast pace and many distractions mean most of us aren’t closely attuned to this rhythm. We need to go back and look at the news three years ago to understand what’s happening today.

The big news was “The Blob,” a peculiar concentration of warm ocean water off Oregon, Washington state and Vancouver Island. Born in late-2013, it was gathering strength in 2014 and lasted until 2015. In September 2016, meteorologists said it was returning, though there has been little indication of it since then - this past winter was notoriously cool and wet, conditions opposite to those delivered by the Blob.

Warmth and lack of normal precipitation during the Blob years created lots of pleasant picnic weather but began worrying salmon observers. Some local hatcheries struggled to have enough in-stream flow for adult fish to be able to return. River water temperatures approached and sometimes exceeded safe levels for salmon. Meanwhile, out in the ocean where it remains difficult to monitor exactly how well salmon are doing, the warm water meant that young salmon weren’t finding the nutritious cold-water prey they rely on. Ultimately, the best test of ocean conditions is waiting three years to see how many salmon survived to adulthood in order to return to spawning beds. Clearly, the news is not good.

Nick Bond, Washington state’s climatologist, said at a Long Beach conference a year ago that more blobs and overall climate warming are inevitable. Our region is heading toward a “really sobering” time when many interior rivers will be too hot for today’s native fish. “It’ll be a totally different place, and it won’t be a good place for salmon. It’ll be a place for more southern species, at least in the ocean, to be able to handle that,” he said.

It’s worth remembering that there sometimes were bad salmon returns long before modern industrialization and white settlement on this coast, according to native accounts. However, there’s no discounting the fact we face a time of epic change. This argues for several responses:

. We must continue supporting hatcheries; without them, this year’s returns would be truly abysmal, to the detriment of all sorts of fishermen, and other species that depend on salmon.

. We must continue managing the factors over which we can exert some control, such as habitat conditions inside the estuary, water temperatures and flows within the hydroelectric system, and unusually high levels of predation by marine mammals and birds.

. We must invest in high-quality monitoring and research to understand what’s happening in the ocean in real time. Waiting until salmon fail to show up before amending fishing seasons is becoming increasingly unacceptable.

. We must make both local and national plans to mitigate economic and environmental damage from rapidly changing fisheries. As southern species take up residence here, we should prepare for both negative and, potentially, positive impacts.