Editorials from around Oregon

Selected editorials from Oregon newspapers:

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The (Eugene) Register-Guard, March 21, on the gift of life:

The March 17 Register-Guard told the story of Eldon Hickey of Eugene, who was one of the nation’s oldest and longest-surviving recipients of a transplanted heart when he died at age 82. Hickey could not have lived so full a life without the thoughtful compassion of another whose life was cut short: The transplanted heart came from a donor who died in a motorcycle accident in 1987. Hickey’s last 31 years testify to the importance of a simple, selfless act - registering as an organ donor.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 95 percent of Americans support organ donation. All major religions encourage or condone it. Yet only 54 percent of Americans are registered as organ donors. An average of 20 people die every day in the United States while waiting for a donated organ - a number that could be reduced if the percentage of registered donors could be increased.

Twenty-five nations have “opt-out” organ donation systems - that is, people are presumed to have consented to donate their organs unless they ask to have their names removed from a registry. The opt-out system boosts registration rates dramatically - in Austria’s case, to 98 percent. So far, the concept has not spread to the United States.

Advances in medical science are increasing the number of people whose lives could be saved by a donated organ. The world’s first heart transplant was performed only 20 years before Hickey received the heart that served him so well.

There have been nearly 70,000 heart transplants since then - and 10 times that many life-saving transplants of other organs such as kidneys, livers and lungs.

An opt-out system would increase those numbers, prolonging lives by years or decades. In the meantime, registering as an organ donor is easy. People can sign up to be an organ donor when they obtain or renew their driver’s license, or they can register online at https://organdonor.gov/thankyou.html. It’s not just the recipient who benefits: Hickey lived to see his grandchildren, and his grandchildren had the chance to get to know their grandfather - all because someone kind became an organ donor.

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The Oregonian/OregonLive, March 20, on not letting districts cheat high school students out of their education:

Educational leaders routinely bemoan the measly length of Oregon’s school year, one of the shortest in the country. They lament that Oregon students receive a year’s less education by the time they graduate from high school than their counterparts in Washington state.

All of which makes their stance on an instructional time requirement adopted by the Oregon Board of Education in 2015 puzzling. Instead of supporting a rule ensuring that most students, particularly those in high school, are scheduled for a full day of classes, the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators, Oregon School Boards Association and Oregon Education Association are urging the education board to relax the requirement for the 2018-19 school year.

The board, which is to discuss possible revisions at a Thursday meeting, should hold firm. The advocacy groups have provided no compelling reason to let districts across the state backslide from this commitment. It should reaffirm its requirements and issue relief only in a surgical manner for specific situations that justify it.

The rule targeted by the advocacy groups calls for districts to schedule 92 percent of their students - and 80 percent of those at each school - for a full day of classes for the 2018-19 year. That’s a tougher standard than the minimums in place last year, when the state required districts to fully schedule 90 percent of students, with no per-school minimum. But it seems basic enough. Full schedules help districts ensure that students receive the minimum number of instructional hours designated for their grade.

The advocacy groups, however, say it’s not so easy. While school districts can meet the minimums for K-8 students, the groups argue that full-day scheduling is not only more difficult for those in high school but even potentially harmful. They say scheduling students for full days could hurt low-income students who need time off to work. Complying with the rule could also mean that districts would be spending money giving full schedules to juniors and seniors who will easily meet graduation requirements, using funds that could be better spent on other students at risk for dropping out, they claim. And, they contend, fully scheduling most high school students could trigger larger class sizes and fewer electives.

None of their justifications, however, are convincing. A quality, well-rounded, taxpayer-funded K-12 education is the best gift Oregonians can give students to prepare them for life after high school. Districts should maximize that time and expand students’ educational opportunities in the limited years they have in the system - not look for excuses to deny them.

Their excuses are especially unconvincing considering that neither COSA nor OSBA was able to show how significant a problem this is for schools. Neither group could produce any data quantifying how many school districts or schools within a district would fail to meet the rule’s requirements for 2018-2019. Similarly, the Oregon Department of Education also lacked any data when asked about the scope of the problem. That’s a glaring omission, to say the least. Shouldn’t the education board have some hard data quantifying the problem before discussing whether to gut this standard?

This rule didn’t come out of nowhere, after all. The education board adopted these requirements after Portland Public Schools was found to be routinely assigning students to light schedules that fell far short of providing state instructional-time mandates. A group of Portland parents filed a complaint in 2014 with the state education department, pointing out that only 17 percent of high school students were getting a full day of school. The others were forced to accept late starts, early dismissals or non-academic study halls, according to the complaint.

The state backed the group, called the Portland Parents Coalition, (three of whose members now sit on the Portland School Board.) The education board soon adopted the rule for fully scheduling at least 92 percent of students and 80 percent per school, phasing it in over four years. Tellingly, most PPS schools are showing significant improvements since the rule was adopted.

To be fair, the advocacy groups’ objection to the rules seem rooted in the same fear that underlies most educational issues: How to stretch inadequate funding to cover a bottomless bucket of needs. School districts have been left in the lurch by the unwillingness of the governor and legislative leaders to bring forward the funding solutions and spending reforms that schools desperately need. And so education policy comes in second to the funding tug-of-war that determines which students - and it’s always students - get shortchanged this time.

But those are not reasons to pull back on such reasonable demands as the revised rules adopted by the board. Particularly when there’s no data showing the scope and nature of the problem.

The education board may well need to develop a targeted fix that exempts certain students from the percentage calculation, such as those with disabilities whose educational plans may require more flexibility than a full schedule allows. But relaxing the requirement for everyone leaves too much to districts’ discretion. We know how badly that can turn out.

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East Oregonian, March 20, on National Ag Day:

Each American farmer feeds more than 144 people - a dramatic increase from 25 people in the 1960s. Quite simply, American agriculture is doing more and doing it better. As the world population soars, there is an even greater demand for the food and fiber produced in this country.

For 45 years, National Ag Day has recognized and celebrated the abundance provided by American agriculture. Each spring, producers, agricultural associations, corporation, universities, government agencies and others across the country join together in recognition - and appreciation - of agriculture in our country. This year it was officially celebrated Tuesday.

But we’re preaching to the choir here in farm country about the work farmers do to keep us well fed at an affordable price. We also know how they support their communities, purchasing equipment and donating to a wide variety of good causes. But on National Ag Day, we learned plenty of information we didn’t know, and we decided to share some from the National Agriculture Council with you:

Did you know?

. Hamburger meat from a single steer will make about 720 quarter pound hamburger patties. That’s enough for a family of four to enjoy hamburgers each day for nearly six months.

. Straight from the cow, the temperature of cow’s milk is about 97 degrees Fahrenheit.

. Farmers and ranchers provide food and habitat for 75 percent of the nation’s wildlife.

. An acre of trees can remove about 13 tons of dust and gases every year from the surrounding environment.

. Americans eat about 125 pounds of potatoes a year, about half from fresh potatoes and half in processed foods.

. Onions contain a mild antibiotic that fights infections, soothes burns, tames bee stings and relieves the itch of athletes foot.

. One bushel of corn will sweeten more than 400 cans of pop.

. A family of four could live for 10 years off the bread produced by one acre of wheat.

. Each American consumes, on average, 53 pounds of bread per year.

. Heart valves from hogs are used to replace damaged or diseased human heart valves.

. One acre of soybeans can produce 82,368 crayons.

. One bale of cotton can produce 1,217 men’s T-shirts or 313,600 $100 bills.

. Honeybees must tap 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey. Each worker honey bee makes 1/12th teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.

. Cotton is a food crop. Almost 200 million gallons of cottonseed oil are used in food products such as margarine and salad dressing. Cottonseed and cottonseed meal are used in feed for livestock and poultry. And even products such as toothpaste, ice cream, and the paper money used to buy them contain by-products of the cotton seed.

. It takes just 40 days for most Americans to earn enough money to pay for their food supply for the entire year. In comparison with the 129 days it takes the average American to earn enough money to pay federal, state and local taxes for the year.

. More than 96 billion pounds of edible “surplus” food is thrown away in the U.S. Each year. It is estimated that almost 27 percent of our food supply is wasted.

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Albany Democrat-Herald, March 19, on drones offering a new tool to firefighters:

Tuesday was the first day of spring, which can only mean that the first wildfires will be starting up throughout Oregon in a matter of weeks.

An unusually warm and dry winter in Oregon suggests we may be in for another busy year for wildfires, particularly east of the Cascades. The March 1 outlook from the National Interagency Fire Center took note of above-average temperatures in January and much of February and precipitation that was at or below average, two indicators of potential trouble down the road. It remains to be seen to what extent our recent spell of cooler and wetter weather will help.

There is some promising news on the wildfire front, however: Firefighters are excited about how drones - those unmanned aircraft that can offer a wealth of information about fire conditions - can help battle these blazes.

A recent story in The Washington Post about how firefighters increasingly are reliant on drones started with an example from a fire last year in Oregon, in the Umpqua National Forest. A Bureau of Land Management employee was piloting a drone over the fire, close to the California border, when he noticed something amiss: A spot fire, likely ignited by a windblown ember, had broken out beyond the main blaze.

The fire was picked up via infrared camera, since smoke at the time was limiting visibility to 100 feet.

Because of the early warning provided by the drone, firefighters were able to get a jump on the blaze. The BLM estimated that the early detection saved about $50 million in land and infrastructure value that otherwise could have gone up in smoke.

Last year, the Department of the Interior (which includes the BLM) flew 707 drone missions on 71 wildfires. Interior’s increasing use of drones to gather information about wildfires is part of the department’s growing reliance on the vehicles for other uses as well, such as drawing maps or surveying wildlife: In total in 2017, the department flew nearly 5,000 drone flights, up from about 750 the year before.

At present, the drones are used to gather information about fires. While that work is important, research is underway to use drones in other capacities as well; they could, for example, be used to drop retardant on fires, even in the nighttime hours when visibility makes it too risky to send a manned retardant plane.

And the Post reported that research is continuing into the possibility of using drones to start prescribed burns that could control invasive species and to help prevent more dangerous uncontrolled fires.

It’s good to see progress in this area, because there isn’t any progress apparent in Congress on the issue on how best to pay for firefighting costs.

This has been a lingering embarrassment for years in Congress. As matters now stand, the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service (the two agencies mostly responsible for fighting fires on federal lands) must take money from other parts of their budgets when their firefighting budgets run out of money. Worse, the money that often is diverted would have gone to pay for maintenance work on federal lands - work designed in part to prevent wildfires from burning with the increased intensity that fire officials have noticed in recent seasons. This so-called “fire borrowing” fuels a vicious cycle.

Congress has had before it a variety of proposals to stop this practice. One reasonable proposal would treat the nation’s very biggest fires as natural disasters, allowing funding to fight those blazes to come from other sources - and preserving money intended for that essential maintenance work.

How many more seasons of rampaging wildfires will we have to endure before Congress finally acts? We’re not holding our breath: We may need to do that when smoke from another season of wildfires chokes the mid-valley.

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The (Bend) Bulletin, March 17, on lawmakers not being able to duck Oregon’s PERS burden:

Both Gov. Kate Brown and the Oregon Legislature deserve credit for acknowledging the seriousness of the state’s public pension problem.

A task force commissioned by the governor kicked the tires last year on a handful of options for reducing the pension system’s $25 billion shortfall. And the Legislature followed up with modest efforts to fill the massive hole.

Voters this year should insist that their representatives keep the momentum going. The PERS problem remains huge and long-lasting, as indicated by the above graphic, which does suffer from one significant flaw: It doesn’t show how bad things really are.

The information in the graphic comes from a presentation prepared for a February meeting of the High Desert Education Service District board. The ESD, which focuses primarily on Crook and Deschutes counties, provides regional services to schools. But what the ESD does is less relevant here than what it is: a publicly funded entity that employs people on whose behalf it accrues pension liability. Its PERS outlook is roughly similar to those of many other government agencies.

The graphic shows projected payroll and projected PERS contributions over a 20-year period beginning in 2017. The ESD developed the data with the help of an employer rate projection tool made available recently by PERS. The tool has its limitations. Payroll, for instance, is simply assumed to grow at a rate of 3.5 percent annually. Still, it provides a useful look ahead and allows public entities to model cost-containment options.

The look ahead, in brief, involves a lot of dollar signs. The ESD’s pension contributions are expected to keep growing for many years. They’re also expected to continue growing in relation to payroll before the pressure begins to ease. During the 2029-30 biennium, PERS costs are expected to top 30 percent of payroll. Ouch.

But the pain is even greater than the graph indicates, at least in the near term. The ESD’s PERS costs appear to jump dramatically after the 2027-29 biennium. But reality is more complicated, explains ESD Director of Business Services Greg Munn. The ESD has created a side account, funded by bond sales, that will continue to depress PERS rates over the next decade or so. When that side account expires, PERS rates will jump.

What the graphic doesn’t show is the ESD’s debt service on its side-account bonds. If it did, says Munn, PERS costs in the near term would look more substantial and the escalation would be smoother.

Here is how the side-account math works. Public entities sell bonds, as the ESD has done, and plop the proceeds in the state PERS fund, which is managed fairly aggressively. The public entity reaps the rewards (and risk) of aggressive management while paying back the bonds at a conservative rate.

During the current biennium, PERS would normally assess the ESD a rate that would be the equivalent of more than 20 percent of payroll. But the side account earned a rate reduction of roughly 10 percentage points, says Munn. That’s reflected on the graph, which suggests that PERS costs amount to less than 14 percent of payroll. What the graph doesn’t show is the debt service on the bonds, which is somewhere between 8 percent and 9 percent of payroll, says Munn. There’s a lesson here for taxpayers, who will soon begin voting on legislative and gubernatorial candidates who will have varying degrees of interest in PERS reform. Some may say, incorrectly, that recent state Supreme Court decisions that have made further attempts to control PERS costs a fool’s errand. Before buying the PERS-surrender arguments, voters should consider the scale of the problem, which is so significant that public entities like the High Desert ESD have been willing to create side accounts and invite risk in the hope of realizing even one or two percentage points in net savings. A problem that big ought to favor the candidates with the greatest commitment to addressing it.