Think Out Loud

Oregon fish and wildlife commissioners approved a new plan last week for gray wolves. The plan sets protocols for potential hunts and new thresholds for when the agency may kill wolves after attacks on cattle and sheep. OPB’s Tony Schick fills us in on the details.

The Medford city council is considering funding one-way bus tickets for homeless people who have the option to live with family members in another place. Portland has a program like this that’s been up and running for a few years. We’ll hear from Kevin Stine, the Medford city councilor who has championed this idea and George Devendorf, executive director of Transition Projects, the organization that runs the Ticket Home program in Portland.

Jacob Hendrickson pushed off from the coast of Washington last July in a boat made especially for him by a boat builder in Portland. He spent the next 10 months rowing across the Pacific Ocean. He’s now anchored 30 miles off the coast of Australia, waiting for the weather to allow him to complete what will be the longest solo rowing voyage from North America across the Pacific.

The entire Wheeler County sheriff’s office resigned last year after then-sheriff Chris Humphreys retired. Humphreys said that the lack of resources made the job too difficult. Mike Smith became the new Wheeler County sheriff in December, 2018. He tells us why he wanted the job, and what it’s like to be a sheriff in rural Oregon.

We get opinions and analysis of some of the week’s big news stories from Alejandro Queral with the Oregon Center for Public Policy, Laura Gunderson of The Oregonian/Oregonlive.com, and Doug Badger of Quinn Thomas.

Before the company town of Kinzua closed in 1978, it was the largest town in Wheeler County. At its peak, the logging town was home to about 700 people, a golf course, a lake full of trout, as well as grocery and department stores. Fossil resident Otis Cody and his father worked for Kinzua before it closed. Cody tells us about life growing up in the company town, and the lasting effects it’s had on the county.

Asher Community Health Clinic is the sole health care provider for all of Wheeler County. Dr. Robert Boss, health officer for Wheeler County, has been working in the clinic for decades. He tells us about health care in rural Oregon.

The Cottonwood School in SW Portland emphasizes place-based learning, but when Sarah Anderson started teaching civil rights to her middle school students, she discovered that materials about Oregon’s civil rights history were scarce. She set out to remedy that. A curriculum called “Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs: The Black History of Portland, Oregon” is the result of her efforts, and Anderson is sharing it in a teacher workshop for the second time this summer. She hopes to empower educators from across the city to use it in their classrooms. We hear from Sarah Anderson as well as Darrell Millner, professor emeritus of African American Studies at Portland State University, who helped develop the curriculum.

Mollie Carter moved from Portland to Fossil three years ago to take a job teaching at the local high school. She says the students ask her a lot of questions about what it’s like to live in a city, and she asks them a lot of questions to try to understand her new rural life.

With less than a month left in the Oregon legislative session we get the lowdown from OPB political reporter Dirk VanderHart.

Painted Hills Natural Beef, a collective of ranches based in Fossil, supplies grass-fed beef to upscale restaurants and grocers in Portland and across the state. We get a tour of the ranch from Painted Hills Beef chairman Merton Homer and his son Will Homer, the collective's chief operating officer.

With less than a month left in the Oregon legislative session we get the lowdown from OPB political reporter Dirk VanderHart.

While service providers in big cities often use big telecom companies for cellular and internet connections, many small telecommunication providers in rural areas rely on more affordable technology from Chinese companies, such as Huawei. An executive order banning purchases from companies that pose a national security threat includes Huawei. That’s causing worry among rural service providers. We hear from Eastern Oregon Telecom CEO Joe Franell.

Mitchell Mayor Patrick Farrell also serves as the town’s pastor, barber and school bus driver, and he and his wife operate the Spoke’n Hostel, an inn for cyclists passing through Mitchell. We talk with Farrell about the many hats he wears in Mitchell, and his hopes for the town’s future.

Wheeler County is Oregon's most sparsely populated county, and has oldest population of any county in the state. This year, the graduating class of Wheeler High School in Fossil has three students. We talk with Katie Jaeger, one of the newly graduated seniors about growing up in Wheeler County and her plans for the future.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will meet Tuesday in Portland to hear arguments in the constitutional challenge to climate change policy brought by 21 young people. The plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States were assembled by an Oregon lawyer and the lead plaintiff is a University of Oregon student. They argue that because government policy is worsening climate change, it is violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, and failing to protect vital public resources. We’ll hear what they’re thinking about the day before the judges meet to consider the case.

Mitchell rancher Jim Bob Collins’s family has lived in Wheeler County since 1873, and he’s the fourth generation to work on his family’s ranch, Table Mountain Cattle Company. We join Collins in Wheeler County to talk about his work and what he wants Oregonians in urban areas to know about life as a rural rancher.

From 1998 through 2013, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs sought to develop a casino in Cascade Locks, Oregon. This prompted objections from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Southern Oregon University professor Brook Colley’s new book, Power in the Telling, looks at the history of this dispute and how tribes manage disagreements with each other.

A new curriculum in northeastern Oregon schools features Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce War of 1877. We hear from Fishtrap youth programs manager Cameron Scott and Veronica Andrews Redstar, a descendent of the Joseph band of Nez Perce Tribe, about using historical fiction and multimedia tools to teach elementary and middle school students about an important piece of Oregon history.

Earlier this year, we devoted an hour to Oregon’s troubled Public Employees Retirement System (PERS). At that time, the estimated unfunded liability — the gap between what employers will have to pay out in pensions and the money that’s currently in the system — was $22 billion. Now, it’s more like $27 billion. OPB’s senior political reporter Jeff Mapes fills us in on a controversial bill lawmakers are considering — how it would address the PERS debt and where it falls short.