Think Out Loud

Last week, a plot of land in North Portland felt a shake, but not one caused by an earthquake, but instead by a machine known as T-Rex. Researchers with Portland State University were simulating a minor quake to test a soil treatment that would fortify the ground from liquefaction. Arash Khosravifar and Diane Moug are both associate professors in Civil and Environmental Engineering at PSU. They both join us to share why their research is important and what they learned from the recent demonstration.

Samaritan Health Services considered closing the birth centers at its hospitals in Lebanon and Lincoln City earlier this year. The move drew pushback from nurses, community members and lawmakers. The health system recently announced it would keep the centers open for at least another year — but not without some changes.

Lesley Ogden is the CEO of both Samaritan’s North Lincoln Hospital in Lincoln City and Pacific Communities Hospital in Newport. She joins us to talk about what it takes to keep maternity services running amid rising health care costs, decreasing revenue and staffing challenges. 

The Salem-Keizer Safe Routes to School program started five years ago, but because of the pandemic, and the inability to reach students in schools, it didn’t really take off until fall 2022 when Beth Schmidt was hired to lead it. Since then, Schmidt has worked with the district and other partners to teach bus, pedestrian and bike safety, including PE classes that started last year in partnership with Cycle Oregon to help kids learn how to ride bikes and follow the rules of the road. 

Next month, the Portland-based nonprofit The Street Trust will be giving Schmidt an award for her efforts to advocate for the successful passage of SB 450, which Gov. Tina Kotek signed into law in June. It designates Nov. 14 as Ruby Bridges Walk to School Day in Oregon to honor Bridges’ courage in helping end school segregation in the U.S. Schmidt joins us to talk about her work in Salem and Keizer to make streets safer for students.

“Syndelics represent a rapidly growing area of drug design, where medicinal chemists create novel compounds inspired by known psychedelic agents like psilocybin and LSD,” van Breemen said in a press release. He joins us with details of the study. 

Fifteen years after the arrest of Mohamed Mohamud, Portland writer Jamila Osman reflects on the aftermath of that time on the local Somali community in a new essay in Oregon Humanities. Osman grew up in the same tight knit community as the young man who would go on to press a button that he thought would blow up the Christmas tree at Pioneer Square. She joins us to discuss the essay.

Two Oregon restaurants appear on The New York Times’ annual list of the 50 best restaurants in the country. Yardy Rum Bar is a Caribbean restaurant in Eugene “celebrating the food and drinking culture of the West Indies using seasonal ingredients from the Northwest.” The Paper Bridge is a Northern Vietnamese restaurant in Portland specializing in house-made rice noodles and chili sauces.

Isaiah Martinez is the chef and co-owner of Yardy Rum Bar. Quynh Nguyen and Carlo Reinardy are the co-chefs and co-owners of The Paper Bridge. They all join us to talk about their respective cuisines and what being included on the list means to them.

On Wednesday, the Oregon Department of Forestry announced that the emerald ash borer has now been found in the Hazelwood neighborhood in East Portland and five other new sites in the north Willamette Valley. In addition to Portland, the highly invasive and destructive beetle has now been found near other urban areas in the region, including Beaverton, Banks and Oregon City. The Oregon Department of Agriculture said that the discovery of EAB in Portland has now put all of Multnomah County into the EAB quarantine zone, which also includes Washington, Yamhill, Marion and Clackamas counties.  

Native to Asia, EAB was first detected in Oregon in 2022 at an elementary school in Forest Grove. Considered to be the most destructive forest pest in North America, EAB has killed over 100 million ash trees nationwide since its arrival in the U.S. more than 20 years ago. 

Joining us to discuss the spread of EAB and how the public can help efforts to contain it are Cody Holthouse, manager of ODA’s  Insect Pest Prevention and Management Program and City of Portland Forester Jenn Cairo.

Upward Bound is a faith-based camp that opened in 1978 for pre-teens and adults with disabilities to experience traditional camp activities, from making s’mores around a campfire to hiking, fishing or playing outdoor games. In 2014, the camp bought an 18-acre property in Gates in Linn County that included an elementary school, a gymnasium and high school building. Classrooms were converted into bunks for campers to stay in, along with other modifications made to allow for year-round programming and activities. 

Although the camp was able to successfully pivot when the pandemic broke out with individual tents for campers to stay in and other precautions taken, tragedy struck on Labor Day in 2020. As the Beachie Creek fire tore through the Santiam Canyon, Upward Bound executive director Diane Turnbull and her staff evacuated the camp. When Turnbull returned two weeks later, many of the structures had burned, including the elementary school where campers stayed. 

Turnbull, with the support of Upward Bound’s board, decided to keep the camp going, with outdoor bell tents that counselors and campers now stay in. The camp recently ended its summer session and has since expanded its programming to include activities like archery, theater and music performances. Turnbull joins us to talk about the camp’s recovery efforts, including working with FEMA to rebuild structures lost in the fire that would allow the camp to expand access to people who are visually impaired or require other physical accommodations. Also joining us is Misael Pujols, a camp counselor from the Dominican Republic who recently completed his third summer working at Upward Bound. 

Day use fees for some state parks went from $5 to $10 dollars at the beginning of the year, and the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department will be applying those same fees in locations where there were none previously. According to the department website, the agency manages 259 properties, which include camping at 52 parks as well as the entire ocean shore along 362 miles of the Oregon coast. The parks and recreation department is also raising camping and other fees to close its budget gap, which it says stems from rising costs and decreased contributions from the Oregon Lottery. State parks receive no operating money from Oregon’s general fund. 

We’re joined by Oregon Parks and Recreation Department Director Lisa Sumption to tell us more about how the agency balances access to facilities in the state’s parks and shoreline with maintaining those public resources as costs continue to rise.

 Stella-Jones, a Canadian wood products company, recently pleaded guilty to exceeding legal limits of pentachlorophenol in water discharged from its plant near Sheridan, Oregon. The chemical is used to protect wood from insects and fungi and poses a number of health concerns, including an increased risk of cancer. 

According to a recent investigation from the journalism nonprofit InvestigateWest, regulators have known about Stella-Jones’s history of pollution for years. On Sep. 8, after InvestigateWest reported on this issue, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality issued a $1 million civil penalty against Stella-Jones for “numerous violations of environmental regulations” at their wood treating facility. 

Kaylee Tornay is a reporter for InvestigateWest. Aspen Ford is a reporter and the Roy W. Howard Fellow at the outlet. They join us with more details on their reporting. Ruth Hyde, Western Region Administrator at the DEQ, also joins us to explain the agency’s response to Stella-Jones’s release of contaminated stormwater into the South Yamhill River.

The Columbian recently reported on WSDOT’s current efforts to collect public feedback  about the future of its roadside memorial program and possible changes to it, such as limiting how long the signs can be up for and how often they can be renewed by family members. Kelly Moyer, a staff reporter at The Columbian, joins us for more details, including concerns that family members who had paid for memorial signs shared with her. 

We also hear from Sarah Risser, the treasurer and board member of the Portland chapter of the national nonprofit Families for Safe Streets. In 2019, while Risser was driving with her 18 year-old son in Wisconsin, a motorist crashed into the vehicle, killing her son and leaving her injured. Last year, Risser placed a sign honoring victims at every fatal crash site in Portland, and she has also created  bike memorials at the request of families of cyclists killed on Portland roads.

Although the fire isn’t yet fully contained, the focus in the Sisters community has shifted to recovery. Those efforts are being coordinated by Citizens4Community, a nonprofit that aims to build community in Sisters by convening opportunities for civic engagement, collaboration and social connection among residents, including helping them become more fire-wise. This past spring, the nonprofit organized community forums to educate residents about fire insurance and wildfire preparedness. The nonprofit has recently created a list of resources for how to help fire victims, emergency responders, local businesses and other nonprofits impacted by the Flat Fire. It also helped another Central Oregon nonprofit, NeighborImpact, set up a Flat Fire relief fund and reached out to other nonprofits to learn from their experiences leading long-term recovery needs for communities devastated by wildfires. 

Citizens4Community Executive Director Kellen Klein joins us to share more details about community building in Sisters and its recovery needs.

 Portland Mayor Keith Wilson made ending unsheltered homelessness central to his policy agenda. He’s leaned into one kind of shelter to do that, overnight-only shelters. And he’s successfully opened five of these this year, as part of his plan to provide an additional 1,500 beds by Dec. 1. Last month, the mayor announced plans to open what will eventually be four centers where homeless Portlanders can access services during the day. But Multnomah County estimates the number of people who are unsheltered in the county - most of them in Portland - to be more than 7,500. Mayor Wilson is also facing skepticism and concerns among homeless service providers, neighborhood associations and Portland city councilors about his plan to end unsheltered homelessness as his December deadline approaches. 

This week, the mayor sent out a plea to an email list of approximately 17,000 people, urging them to donate to or volunteer their time at one of the city’s shelters - and seemed to warn that the Trump administration might choose to send in National Guard Troops as it did in Washington D.C. if Portland did not “address the humanitarian crisis on our streets.”

Reporter Lillian Mongeau Hughes covers homelessness and mental health for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She joins us to share more about the recent opening of another overnight-only shelter despite opposition from a Pearl District neighborhood association, and the progress the city has made toward the goal of ending unsheltered homelessness.

Last year, Oregon ended its three-year experiment with drug decriminalization known as Measure 110. This came when Oregon lawmakers passed House Bill 4002 to implement new criminal penalties for drug possession and fund efforts at the county level to deflect drug users away from the criminal justice system and into treatment as a way to avoid charges. Those deflection programs look different in every county across the state. It has now been a year since that program began in Washington County. District Attorney Kevin Barton joins us, along with John Karp-Evans, the deputy director of the Peer Company, to talk about Washington County’s legal and behavioral health responses to drug use.

Class is now back in session for students across Oregon. Schools are navigating a new statewide ban on cellphones in the classroom, as well as the growing use of artificial intelligence among both students and educators. Meanwhile, aggressive federal immigration enforcement tactics have raised fears in some communities that schools could become hotspots for arrests.

Natalie Pate covers K-12 education for OPB. She joins us to talk about these issues and more.

This summer, the Oregon Arts Commission is marking the 50th anniversary of the Percent for Art program, which has helped 900 artists create 3,000 pieces of public art. The 1975 law requires that one percent of the cost of new and renovated buildings go toward a piece of art that’s accessible to the public. The arts commission and Travel Oregon launched a “50 for 50” program in August, highlighting 50 pieces in the collection that span across the state and encourages people to get out to see them. We talk with the Oregon Arts Commission Public Art and Artist Programs Coordinator Ryan Burghard about the campaign, along with artist Christine Clark. She is one of the 900 artists included in the collection. Her piece, “Gathering Panes and Shapes,” is installed at the Eastern Oregon University library in La Grande.

A recently published study from the University of Oregon found that the fear of deportation declines with age among immigrants without protected status. The research is based on interviews with Mexican immigrants over the age of 50 in the California communities of Oakland, Fremont and Berkeley. The interviews were mostly conducted in 2019 and some in 2022, before the second Trump presidency.

The study found several factors that affected the fear of deportation. For example, older undocumented immigrants tend to have children who are now adults, and so family separation was less of a concern than for an immigrant with minor children. The study also found that “life course mechanisms,” such as leaving the workforce because of retirement, and the older immigrants’ own perception that their age made them less visible targets, also shaped their fear of deportation. 

Joining us to discuss the implications of these findings is the study’s author, Isabel García Valdivia, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.