Cascade CounterPoint

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates up to 500,000 birds are killed annually in the United States due to wind turbine collisions. The number of deaths will continue to increase as more turbines populate our nation’s landscape.

Raptors are especially vulnerable to colliding with wind turbines due to their flight patterns. They typically soar during high winds, bringing them in line with spinning turbines that appear to them as nothing more than a blur.

The first wind farm to formally ask the Fish and Wildlife Service for permission to harm golden eagles is located right here in Central Oregon. The Obama Administration later passed a rule allowing energy companies to apply for 30-year permits for any “non-intentional eagle deaths at wind farms.”

However, Norwegian researchers may have a simple solution to save their lives.

Dr. Roel May from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research presented a decade-long study to the Oregon House Committee on Natural Resources earlier this year about how black paint could minimize fatalities.

Researchers painted one turbine blade black, reducing the “motion smear” that makes it difficult for birds to see the spinning blades. The result was an astonishing 71% decrease in collisions.

Wind farms should not get a free pass to kill a protected species. However, if the government continues to turn a blind eye, wind farms should at least consider the results of this study and paint turbine blades black to save our birds.

Governor Kate Brown recently decided to take her Coronavirus “two-week pause” one step further by issuing an aggressive statewide “two-week freeze” running from November 18th through December 2nd (with an additional two weeks for Multnomah County).

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Among its many restrictions, the freeze forces restaurants and bars to offer take-out only, and gyms, museums, and many indoor entertainment activities will be required to close once again.

The freeze comes at a time when more Oregon restaurants and bars are permanently shutting their doors due to lost revenue from the pandemic. Unfortunately, they will feel some of the hardest effects of the freeze even though health officials found that restaurants are not to blame for the recent rise in covid cases. Oregon health officials stated that social gatherings, including at least five Halloween events and parties, are the main culprits for the case increase over the past few weeks.

According to the president of the Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association, “Few cases of the virus have been linked to the state's food and drink establishments, which provide a needed refuge.” Placing stricter rules on restaurants and bars may very well backfire on officials as Oregonians shift their outings elsewhere, increasing the number of private gatherings where social distancing is less likely than in a formal restaurant setting.

Restaurants represent many Oregonians’ livelihoods and should not be used as a scapegoat for the state. Governor Brown should rescind her restriction on restaurants.

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“What is going on?” That’s what many Oregon parents are asking as their kids struggle with online learning, all while public officials flip-flop on education policies during a wave of COVID-19 cases.

On October 30th, Governor Kate Brown added to the mayhem. On the same day the state announced a record breaking number of cases, the governor rolled out relaxed safety standards for reopening Oregon elementary schools. Since then, the case count has climbed higher by the day.

The Oregon Department of Education explained that the change in direction was because the benefit of in-person education outweighed the risk of spreading the disease. But why was this announced when cases are at an all time high...after two months of distance learning?

The governor’s relaxed standards at a time when cases are trending dramatically in the wrong direction is a cognitive dissonance for exhausted parents who have been told that keeping their kids behind a laptop was for the greater good.

Students and families can’t afford to ride the ODE’s wave of ever-changing priorities and promises. A money-back guarantee would be a lifeline for students struggling in the public school system and needing a solution urgently. Oregon needs to make school choice a priority during the 2021 legislative session. Children’s futures depend on it.

Learn more at cascadepolicy.org or by emailing [email protected]. 

While many people in the Portland region value efficient governments, prevailing wage laws are rarely questioned. Prevailing wage laws drain tax-payer funded resources by increasing the labor costs of public construction projects such as affordable housing. These laws were originally enacted to shut out minorities from construction jobs in the 1930s. Portland and Metro are currently using more than $900 million in tax dollars to build affordable housing projects. Both jurisdictions are subject to prevailing wage laws that significantly decrease their efficiency.

Portland and Metro’s housing bonds are already spending roughly $300 thousand per new unit, which is nearly double market-rate projects. The Bond Stakeholder Advisory Group of the Portland Housing Bureau found that “[p]revailing wage typically increases the labor costs in a project by approximately 12% to 18%.” This means fewer housing units can be built.

One of Portland’s recent projects avoided paying prevailing wages by limiting the number of project-based vouchers that their building contained. This clearly shows that prevailing wages inhibit the creation of affordable housing. To increase efficiency in affordable housing construction, Oregon must end prevailing wage laws.

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Did you know that more than three-fourths of Metro’s park lands purchased with bonds since 1995 are hidden from the public? You might as well call Metro’s lands haunted.

Metro has no problems with this fact, no matter how shocking this number is to its residents. In fact, with its newest land acquisition -- an 86-acre property in the Sandy River Basin -- Metro makes it painstakingly clear that this land (along with its 1,400 acres already in the area) is not for human use.

What will the land accomplish for taxpayers? Unfortunately, the answer is a bundle of vague promises, none of which help the average Oregonian. For example, Metro promises that the land will “improve landscape connectivity and climate resilience” as well as “provide potential opportunities for native plant harvest by Indigenous communities.”

These promises have very little to do with Metro’s residents and everything to do with Metro’s mission creep. You might as well call it “nature creep” because the restoration and conservation work supposedly occurring on 88% of Metro’s properties has no end date. Even Metro’s promised Chehalem Ridge park, which has been undergoing supposed restoration for over a decade, will periodically close to visitors for restoration once finally opened.

It’s time for Metro to stop investing in haunted lands and end its nature creep. Taxpayers should encourage Metro to use its 2019 bond money to build more parks that are useful to the public.

Learn more at cascadepolicy.org or by emailing [email protected]. 

Metro is proposing $5.2 billion in additional payroll taxes to fund a train that creates congestion, a pedestrian bridge that is minutes away from another, and a roundabout that cost over 18 times its original price. Rachel and Vlad go over some ridiculous flaws in Metro’s Measure 26-218 and urge a “no” vote.

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On Thursday, October 15, Portland General Electric pulled the plug on the Boardman Coal Plant, PGE’s largest power plant. Boardman had a nameplate capacity of 550 firm megawatts of power and was decommissioned 20 years prematurely.

While environmentalists celebrate the plant’s closure, utility executives are still trying to figure out how they will keep the lights on in our region.

That’s because the more coal plants our region removes from the grid, the more likely we are to experience future blackouts. Multiple studies from groups like the Northwest Power Pool, E3, and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council all reached the same conclusion: Our region will have a shortage of power by the mid-2020s that could lead to blackouts and extreme price volatility.

Curious about what this would look like? Look no further than California. In August, the state experienced rolling blackouts because it leaned too heavily on imports and didn’t have enough of its own firm power.

Our utilities aren’t far behind. Large Northwest utilities plan on investing in wind, solar, batteries, and—like California—market purchases.

To avoid California’s same fate, our utilities and officials need to acknowledge that an intermittent resource powered grid is not a reliable or an affordable grid. Instead of celebrating Boardman’s closure, they should invest in firm power sources like natural gas and clean nuclear power.

Learn more at cascadepolicy.org or by emailing [email protected]. 

A RealClear Opinion poll released at the end of September revealed that parents with children in school increasingly—and overwhelmingly—favor the concept of school choice. More than 2,000 registered voters were asked this question:

“Recent federal legislation gave governors new funding they can use for K-12 education. Some governors have let families control the funds for the purchase of education technology and materials, private school tuition, and home education. Would you support or oppose your governor sending the funding directly to families and allowing them to choose how to use those funds to support their child’s education?”

Seventy-eight percent of public school parents and 79% of non-public school parents supported that statement.

As families today struggle with school situations that aren’t meeting their children’s learning needs, options have suddenly become necessary for many parents, especially low-income and single parents. If their zoned public schools aren’t working for their children or families, Oregon parents should get a kind of “money-back guarantee” that will enable them to make other arrangements. One simple way to do this would be an Education Savings Account program, like those already operating in other states. ESA programs give parents control of a portion of their state’s allocated education funding, which they can use to pay for out-of-pocket education expenses.

An ESA program would be a lifeline for Oregon families whose kids are not being served well by their zoned public schools. The purpose of education funding should be educating students, and all parents should be empowered to obtain a quality education for their kids.

Learn more at cascadepolicy.org or by emailing [email protected]. 

On October 2, Helping Hands unveiled its latest transitional housing facility. After Wapato Jail collected dust for 14 years, Jordan Schnitzer bought the facility to create a homeless shelter. Allen Evans, someone who spent years battling homelessness, was eventually tapped to lead the effort. During months-long negotiations and media coverage, many public officials denounced the plan to house homeless people in what they still thought of as a jail. If a deal had not been made, the whole building would have been demolished.

All of their concerns were addressed by Helping Hands, the data-driven nonprofit organization that is now set to offer transitional housing to the homeless population. Under the leadership of Allen Evans, Helping Hands worked with many organizations to supply the Bybee Lakes Hope Center with education, internet access, and transportation.

At the grand opening, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler admitted, “Government couldn’t do it alone.” Even when a solution was presented, the government didn’t back the shelter for months. The philanthropic community and private businesses banded together to solve a problem in an innovative way without the need for public money. To solve homelessness, Portland should embrace public-private partnerships that are led by people who know how to get things done.

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Listen to Helen Doran, program assistant for External Affairs at Cascade Policy Institute, talk about her homeschooling background and how this drives her support for school choice!

Do you have any questions or feedback? Email Helen at [email protected], and as always, be sure to leave us a review on iTunes and share with your friends!