Editorials from around Oregon

Selected editorials from Oregon newspapers:

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The Bend Bulletin, April 23, on House Speaker Kotek not needing to be a can kicker:

Of all the things parents want to pass on to their children, debt is probably not one. House Speaker Tina Kotek has suggested doing it anyway.

One of the ideas she has been thinking about as a partial solution to the state pension program’s $27 billion unfunded liability is kicking the can down the road. Delaying payments. Stretching out the liability farther into the future.

The idea in pensionspeak is to lengthen the amortization period for the Public Employees Retirement System. In plainer language, that means stretching out the number of years used to calculate the time to raise the money to pay PERS pension benefits.

Think of it like a car loan. Paying it off over 6 years rather than 4 years lowers the monthly payment. The Legislature could do a similar thing to PERS.

PERS amortization periods actually vary depending on the class of beneficiaries. Some are 16 years. Some are 20 years. Oregon could stretch those out both out to 25 or further. Kotek pointed out state statute permits 40 years.

She said Oregon has one of the shortest amortization periods in country at 15 years. That is not correct, as The Oregonian’s Ted Sickinger pointed out.

The lower payments could, indeed, provide some temporary relief for Oregon’s public employers - school districts, state and local governments. The rates that many of them have to pay into PERS have been ratcheting up. That’s because, in part, of richer retirement benefit packages the state promised in the past.

For instance, the Hillsboro school district is paying about 28% of its payroll into PERS for the 2019-2021 biennium. That’s projected to go up to over 33% for 2021-2023, meaning the district will have less money to work with. So one way to hold down those increases is to fiddle with the calculations to lower those payments.

But we all know what happens. Delaying paying off the debt means paying more in the end. Kotek knows that. She sees it, though, as one way to limit the increases in PERS rates as state employees with the richer packages move through retirement.

As The Oregonian’s Ted Sickinger explained, though, there’s no guarantee that lengthening the amortization period would help much. What if the stock market dipped and PERS investments faltered? Oregon might be even worse off. Oregon could just make things harder for the next generation. That’s not a solution the Legislature should pursue.

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Corvallis Gazette-Times, April 22, on taxes, schools grabbing spotlight in Capitol:

With about two months remaining in the legislative session, we’ve reached the point at which the focus is narrowing onto the biggest and most contentious issues in the Capitol - and at least some Democrats are starting to sense that, despite their super-majorities in both chambers, they may not be able to win approval for all the items on their agenda.

In that light, it was interesting to note this comment from Speaker of the House Tina Kotek in a recent story in The Oregonian: “We only have so many super-majority votes in our pocket.”

So, the question at this point becomes this: Where will legislative leaders choose to use those votes? Which agenda items will rise to the top? Which ones will be set aside? And how long can Democrats maintain those super-majorities, the three-fifths edge in each chamber that will allow them to pass revenue bills without the benefit of a single Republican vote?

And there’s this as well: How will voters react if any of these bills are referred to them through the initiative process, which is likely? It’s possible that ballot measures could undo much of the Legislature’s work.

So it will be interesting to see what sort of alliances take shape over the final weeks of the session.

The top priority at this point, for both Gov. Kate Brown and legislative leaders, appears to be pushing through a proposed gross-receipts tax on Oregon businesses. The proposal, which would apply to businesses with at least $1 million a year in Oregon sales, would generate an estimated $1 billion a year for schools. But it’s not yet clear where precisely the money would be spent, and that issue could drive a wedge between the governor and legislative leaders. The subcommittee where the taxation plan has been hammered out is an offshoot of the Joint Committee on School Success, which has been focused on K-12 education. Both Kotek and Senate President Peter Courtney last week sent signals that they believe the money should almost exclusively be spent on K-12 education. With teachers around the state scheduled to descend on Salem on May 8 in an echo of similar protests by educators nationwide, you can be sure that legislators are starting to feel the pressure.

In fact, Kotek told reporters last week that if community colleges and universities want dedicated funding, “maybe that’s next year’s discussion.”

The problem with that, of course, is that Oregon’s community colleges and universities have been hearing “maybe next year” for decades now. Last year, when Brown was making her initial pitch for the tax on businesses, she broadly suggested that at least some of the money might go to Oregon higher education; her thinking then was that she’d need support from higher education officials and advocates to push through the business tax. Last week, she seemed to renew that pitch, saying that such support would be essential, especially if the tax were referred to voters. How the Democratic leaders resolve this conflict could well determine the fate of the business tax.

Adding to the complexity of all of this is the question of what to what extent reforms to Oregon’s underfunded public pension system will have to go along with the business tax proposal. Part of this is practical: Without reform, increasing pension premiums likely will eat away a huge chunk of any additional revenue. And part of it may be political: The proposed tax might not muster the required three-fifths majorities if it doesn’t go hand in hand with pension reforms.

And still lurking are big issues that the Legislature must resolve, such as how to balance a budget in which costs have again significantly outstripped spending - not to mention a carbon cap-and-trade proposal that reportedly is receiving a behind-the-scenes overhaul and a contentious gun control bill. Don’t be surprised to see some of these initiatives fall by the wayside in the final few weeks of the session.

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The Oregonian/OregonLive, April 21, on child-welfare lawsuit possibly forcing the accountability Oregon needs:

Time and again, the leaders of Oregon’s Department of Human Services vow to do better to protect children in foster care. After news articles or lawsuits reveal abuse, deplorable living conditions or deaths of foster children, DHS’ top managers appear before legislators assuring them they’ll adjust practices to ensure that such lapses don’t occur again.

But inevitably, they do. DHS and child-welfare leaders are replaced, new appointees take the helm and the dysfunctional cycle starts again. The agency’s broken system persists, cemented in place by an immutable culture, as even the most well-intentioned caseworkers, agency heads - and governors - come and go.

And here we are again. As The Oregonian/OregonLive and Oregon Public Broadcasting have reported in recent months, the agency has been shipping abused and neglected children to converted juvenile jails and out-of-state institutions with controversial practices. The kids aren’t receiving adequate counseling, education or services and have little, if any, contact with Oregon caseworkers. And the agency has continued its long-standing pattern of obscuring, misstating and withholding information from the public about how well, or poorly, it is doing its job.

Accountability isn’t going to come from the system we have in place - and likely not under a new advisory board that Gov. Kate Brown announced on Thursday. And that’s why Oregon’s leaders should swallow their pride and welcome the federal lawsuit filed against them that seeks to represent Oregon’s 8,000 foster kids. Instead of fight the suit, the state should work with the plaintiffs on a settlement that maps out specific, measurable and enforceable reforms that can finally, effectively repair Oregon’s foster-care system.

The complaint, filed by foster-care nonprofit A Better Childhood and Disability Rights Oregon, doesn’t seek monetary damages. Rather, they want a judge to require the state to fulfill its obligations to foster children under federal law. Among other things, they want the state to conduct individualized assessments of foster children, provide them with counseling and other needed services, and develop a plan for a permanent home. They seek a court order requiring the state to hire an adequate number of caseworkers to keep workloads at a manageable level so they can provide the attention, care and follow-up that foster children need. And they want the state to develop a plan for recruiting, training and retaining a sufficient network of foster and adoptive families who can provide safe homes for children entering the system.

These are not outlandish goals. They are what many Oregonians would expect that DHS’ Child Welfare division would already be doing and match the agency’s own objectives. But DHS, now under its fourth interim or permanent director in four years, struggles to hire and train enough caseworkers, remains woefully short of suitable foster families and has been overwhelmed for so long that it can’t even recognize how broken it is.

But anyone who sees the lawsuit does. There’s the 7-year-old girl who has been in five different foster homes in less than two months, separated from her brother and dropped off at a home with lice so bad, her head was shaved. Or the boy whose reports of being sexually abused by a relative went uninvestigated by DHS for years, even as he defecated on himself repeatedly as a defense mechanism. Or the 9-year-old girl who was shipped out of Oregon to a Montana facility, effectively abandoned by Oregon caseworkers and regularly injected with a “chemical restraint” to calm her down.

“We’re traumatizing these children more,” said Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, whose stalwart advocacy for children has helped close some of the gaps in foster-care policies and who has pressed DHS relentlessly on its practice of institutionalizing foster kids. She decried a general lack of urgency, noting that agency leaders are focused more on long-term goals than addressing that a 9-year-old is spending her childhood alone and in misery. “These are kids in our system right now,” she said, noting her frustration that Oregon officials waited 24 days from the time the agency was told of the injections before telling the Montana facility to stop administering them.

That lack of urgency has extended on up to the governor’s office until recently. Just a year ago, after the Secretary of State’s office released a scathing audit about the foster-care system, her spokesman, Chris Pair, dismissed it as “just about politics.” It was only after her Republican opponent, Knute Buehler, called for a $50 million investment and a “rapid improvement team” to carry out reforms in DHS, that she sought less than a third of that from the Legislature with no plan for a team.

And while news stories about the state shipping kids out of Oregon have been coming out for months and legislators have been grilling DHS officials for weeks, it was not until Thursday, two days after the lawsuit was filed, that Brown announced a new child-welfare board and a crisis management team to advise her in overseeing the agency and implementing reforms.

A court judgment or settlement requiring the state to hire an adequate number of case workers instantly elevates child welfare as a funding priority for the governor and the Legislature. A court-ordered monitor overseeing whether DHS is providing individualized assessments of foster care children within 60 days brings a level of accountability that can’t easily be brushed aside. And Oregon could follow the lead of Tennessee, which had also been sued by A Better Childhood and is now lauded for the improvements it has made in its system. There is an opportunity that comes when you finally admit the need for help.

As the lawsuit notes, “the problems in the Oregon foster care system have been exhaustively documented for well over a decade. It is time that Oregon is held accountable.”

These kids - the ones who are covering themselves in feces to prevent sexual abuse, the ones who are kept in locked detention centers despite having committed no crime, the ones who were separated from their families and for whom DHS has no plan of a permanent home - have been waiting and waiting for someone to hold the state accountable. Oregon leaders should not pass up this opportunity to do so.