Think Out Loud

For more than 30 years, Eugene's CAHOOTS program has been in place for situations that don’t need an armed police response, like mental health crises, overdoses and homelessness. The program has gotten a lot of national attention, and the model has been an inspiration for cities across the country, including Portland. But last week, White Bird Clinic, which runs CAHOOTS, announced that the hours of service in Eugene city limits will be reduced to just one shift per week — down from 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Amée Markwardt, interim executive director of the White Bird Clinic, joins us to discuss their funding challenges.

The biggest determining factor in whether someone will become homeless is if they have ever been homeless. Keeping children out of homelessness, so they won’t become homeless as adults is one of the big reasons the Portland-based nonprofit Path Home exists. And as Oregon has the highest rate of children experiencing unsheltered homelessness, the need for the kinds of services the nonprofit provides is greater than ever.

Executive director Brandi Tuck says the nonprofit is committed to the “housing first” approach to solving family homelessness, which includes providing trauma-informed temporary housing to families and connecting them with services and individual support they need to stay successfully housed. She says with the housing shortage and high cost of housing, it’s also important to note — especially during budget shortfalls — that housing whole families can be far less expensive than many kinds of shelters, which can run thousands of dollars a month, per person. We talk with Tuck about Path Home’s mission — and its evidence-based approach.

There are 19 local programs across Oregon that recruit, train, supervise and support volunteers who serve as Court Appointed Special Advocates for foster children and youth. The programs operate independently with their own budgets and are funded through a mix of state dollars, private donations, philanthropic grants and community fundraising. 

This fiscal year, they were also expecting to get a one-time allocation of $1.7 million from the federal government, which was earmarked for community project funding in Oregon. But last month, the Continuing Resolution that Congress passed stripped this funding, which would have been disbursed through the Oregon CASA Network to each of the local programs, based on the number of foster children and youth in the counties they serve. 

Jennifer Mylenek, the executive director of CASA of Jackson and Josephine Counties, and Mary Collard, the executive director of CASA of Eastern Oregon, join us to talk about how they’re coping with the impact of the loss of these funds within their rural communities. 

For about 10 years, researchers at the University of Washington’s Personal Robotics Lab have been developing a robotic arm that can help people with motor impairments, such as quadriplegics, feed themselves. That’s a task they may rely on human caregivers to do. The Assistive Dexterous Arm can be mounted onto a surface such as a power wheelchair or hospital table. With vision and touch sensors, ADA can determine how to best grasp and maneuver a bite of chicken or watermelon, for example, toward a user’s mouth. 
 
The lived experiences of people with disabilities are often ignored in the development of new technologies that could benefit them, according to Amal Nanavati, a recent PhD graduate from the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. But that isn’t the case with the ADA project. Dozens of people with motor impairments have provided feedback and guidance on it over the years, and some have even taken on the role of “community researchers” working alongside the UW robotics team. 

Jonathan Ko is a Seattle-based patent attorney and ADA community researcher who brought the device home to feed himself meals for a week. He and Nanavati are authors on a recently published paper describing this real-world testing of the technology. They join us to talk about what they learned and share their thoughts on the future of robot-assisted caregiving.  

According to a recently published study, more than 40 percent of adults over the age of 55 in the U.S. have a lifetime risk of developing dementia. New cases of dementia are also projected to nearly double to 1 million a year by 2060. 

The cognitive decline and memory impairments associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia can make it difficult to follow the branching storylines of a novel or the flow of facts in a newspaper or magazine article. 

But as traditional avenues for literary enjoyment close, new ones can and should open for this growing population. That’s the guiding mission behind Mirador, a quarterly magazine Nikki Jardin co-founded in Portland nearly four years ago to be accessible to people with dementia. From the font style and size, to the way paragraphs are structured or photos are displayed to accommodate changes to vision and recognition, the whole magazine is designed with dementia in mind.  

Jardin joins us to talk about the inspiration for starting Mirador and the magazine’s recent international expansion and collaboration with other dementia-friendly publications. 

Minoru Yasui was the first Japanese American to graduate from the University of Oregon’s law school. He was working as a lawyer in Portland when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order in 1942 that allowed the military to impose a curfew on Japanese Americans and relocate them to internment camps. On March 28, 1942, Masui challenged the curfew by walking in downtown Portland after 8pm to get himself intentionally arrested. His case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he lost.  

In honor of Minoru Yasui Day in Oregon on March 28, we listen back to a conversation we recorded on Nov. 24, 2015, with Joan Emerson Yasui, a niece of Minoru Yasui, the same day her uncle was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. Joan Emerson Yasui died in 2016.  

Minoru Yasui was the first Japanese American to graduate from the University of Oregon’s law school. He was working as a lawyer in Portland when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order in 1942 that allowed the military to impose a curfew on Japanese Americans and relocate them to internment camps. On March 28, 1942, Masui challenged the curfew by walking in downtown Portland after 8pm to get himself intentionally arrested. His case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he lost.  

In honor of Minoru Yasui Day in Oregon on March 28, we listen back to a conversation we recorded on Nov. 24, 2015, with Joan Emerson Yasui, a niece of Minoru Yasui, the same day her uncle was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. Joan Emerson Yasui died in 2016.  

In Wallowa County, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has led collaborative research on golden eagles. The pilot project aims to study the survival, movement and reproductive success of the birds. ODFW worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nature Conservancy to capture data. 

The golden eagle uses a variety of habitats and seeks rocky cliffs or large trees. It can dive at a speed of 120 miles per hour and preys on animals including squirrels and foxes. Humans are largely responsible for their decline. The birds collide with wind turbines, face habitat loss and are killed illegally. 

Holly Tuers Lance is the acting district wildlife biologist for the ODFW field office based in Enterprise. She joins us with more about the raptors and the work being done locally. 

The new exhibit at Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center in Grand Ronde features the work of queer indigenous artists reflecting on the role of queerness in indigenous cultures. The exhibit was curated by Grand Ronde artists Anthony Hudson and Felix Furby who created another exhibit two years ago based on the life of Shumkin, a 19th-century Two-Spirit Atfalati Kalapuya healer. That exhibit set out to explore the ways that queerness has always been a part of the Indigenous history, but assimilation had tried to sever the community’s connection to it. This newer exhibit discusses the present and future of queer indigeneity as well. Hudson and Furby join us to talk about the exhibit, along with Steph Littlebird, one of the featured artists. 

Like other federal agencies, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is facing possible cuts to staffing and funding. The federal agency’s green and resilient retrofit program is intended to upgrade aging affordable housing. The program would also help fund proposals that reduced energy use.  

But as the Associated Press reported, funding is being terminated by the Department of Government Efficiency and links to the program on the housing department’s site are no longer available. 

Nonprofit leaders in the affordable housing industry say they’re still waiting for federal dollars that were promised. Managers of Smith Tower, an apartment building in Vancouver, say they were awarded funding but haven’t received the money. The construction is currently in limbo, The Columbian reported.   

Margaret Salazar is the CEO of REACH Community Development,  a nonprofit affordable housing provider. She joins us with more on how this affects Oregon’s housing crisis and what it means for low-income residents.  
 

The for-profit prison company GEO is doing very well financially. It runs 16 facilities around the country including the ICE detention center in Tacoma, and its stock price doubled after Election Day.  With the number of ICE detainees now at a five-year high under President Donald Trump, how people are being treated and compensated for their labor is as much an issue as it ever was. The company was paying detainees a dollar a day to do cleaning and other jobs that it would otherwise have to pay contract workers at minimum wage to do. Washington state sued the company for not paying the state’s minimum wage, and won in federal court in 2021, a decision that was affirmed earlier this year by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The company petitioned last month for a rehearing of its appeal by all 9th Circuit judges. McKenzie Funk is following this story for ProPublica and joins us with the details.

A proposed utility project in Forest Park has caused a monthslong clash between environmental groups and Portland General Electric. The Harborton Reliability Project would remove roughly 400 mature trees on 5 acres of parkland to make way for new power lines. PGE says the grid upgrade is necessary to meet the region’s growing demand for electricity, but conservationists say it will damage one of Portland’s most important ecological assets.

City permitting staff recommended against the project in January, but a hearings officer determined earlier this month that it should be allowed to proceed. The Forest Park Neighborhood Association and the Forest Park Conservancy have appealed that decision to the City Council.

Randy Franks is a senior project manager for PGE. Scott Fogarty is the executive director of the Forest Park Conservancy. They both join us to share their perspectives on the plan and what it could mean for Portland’s largest park.

After joining the Big Ten Conference, the Oregon Ducks basketball team has traveled more than 27,000 miles. That’s more than the circumference of the Earth. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Oregon players are not alone as dramatic increases were seen for all of the 10 schools that left the Pac-12, ranging from 47% to 222% more miles. Laine Higgins is a sports reporter for the WSJ and reported on this trend. She joins us to share more.

When public radio reporter Anna King first heard that ranchers in remote areas of rural Oregon were finding the bodies of cows and bulls drained of blood and mutilated, she immediately began to investigate. What she found could have provided the script for an episode of "The X Files." Various arms of law enforcement had investigated this phenomenon, but the mystery remained unsolved. The NPR story she filed in 2019 drew more than a million hits.

She ultimately teamed up with two New York-based documentary filmmakers, Jackson Devereux and Lachlan Hinton, who found the story compelling and wanted to collaborate with her to explore a full-length feature film. After an intense three years of research, interviews, filming and editing, “Not One Drop of Blood” premiers at the Treefort Festival in Idaho this week. King joins to tell us more about what the documentary reveals about the bizarre and as yet unexplained phenomenon.

Earlier this month, Oregon joined nine other states in meeting a goal to get 3.3 million electric vehicles on the road by 2025. That number is set to grow under a rule that requires all new passenger cars, SUVs and pickup trucks sold in Oregon to either be fully electric or plug-in hybrid electric by 2035. 

But adopting cleaner, more fuel efficient vehicles also means that Oregon and other states are grappling with reduced revenues from gas taxes. Electric vehicle owners also don’t pay any gas tax, which have led states like Oregon to explore launching programs which charge motorists a fee based on how much they travel instead of how often they refill at the pump.

The Oregon Department of Transportation has operated a voluntary, pay-by-mile program since 2015. Roughly 800 people are currently enrolled in OReGO, which charges participants 2 cents for every mile driven in Oregon. Joining us to talk about what’s been learned after a decade of this pilot program is Travis Brouwer, assistant director for revenue, finance and compliance at ODOT.  

In Oregon and the rest of the country, Black infants are more likely to be born underweight, and both they and their mothers have a lower chance of surviving that first year of life than white and Hispanic ones. A package of bills in the Oregon legislature seeks to support perinatal health by expanding access to doulas, protecting young families from housing loss and eviction and expanding the Oregon child tax credit, among other things. Kaylee Tornay, investigative reporter with InvestigateWest, recently wrote about Black maternal and infant health and joins us to explain.

Oregon lawmakers are crafting a budget for the next two years. They're facing a lot of uncertainty since nearly a third of the state’s funding comes from federal dollars and budget committee members have mapped out several scenarios.

Meanwhile, hundreds of bills failed to meet a legislative deadline last week.  But one proposal that narrowly passed the Senate would give public workers who go on strike access to unemployment benefits.

We get an update on what’s ahead for lawmakers from OPB political reporter Dirk VanderHart.  

Oregon Health & Science University began its Long COVID-19 clinic in 2021, a year into the pandemic as the first vaccines were just becoming widely available. We talked with doctors in the clinic in 2022, and we wanted to check back in to see what clinicians have learned after treating thousands of long COVID patients. Aluko Hope is a pulmonologist, critical care doctor and the medical director of OHSU’s Long COVID-19 program. Jen Arnold is a lead nurse with the program. They both join us to tell us what they’ve learned about caring for patients with long COVID in the last four years and what they hope to learn more about from the research that’s currently underway.

 Portland’s own junior ice hockey team, the Winterhawks, commemorate their 50th anniversary playing on the ice this season. With over 15 divisional championships, 13 conference titles and more than 135 alumni now playing in the National Hockey League, the team is the second-oldest professional team in Portland after the Trailblazers - and one of the best teams in the Western Hockey League’s U.S. Western Conference. Mike Johnson is the general manager of the team. Griffin Darby plays defense for the team. They both join to talk about how they're celebrating the team’s anniversary and their hopes for the future of the team.

A once popular teacher at St. Helens High School pivoted his career to communications, becoming a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education and the Department of Human Services. In now-public allegations, two former students say he sexually abused them when he was a teacher. OPB reporter Joni Auden Land joins us to lay out the investigation.

Many of Oregon's county health officials are asking for a little extra consideration from lawmakers this year as they decide where to allocate funding. Two counties, Wallowa and Curry, have no public health staff and rely solely on the Oregon Health Authority to meet their needs. With the fifth anniversary of the initial COVID-19 lockdown this week, perhaps nothing is a bigger reminder of the need for a stable funding source for public health infrastructure.

Sarah Lochner, the executive director of the Oregon Coalition of Local Health Officials, told OPB that not only is the state not ready for the next pandemic, counties are in dire need of stable funding just to deal with the everyday public health needs of the communities they serve — from vaccinating against whooping cough and measles, to providing needed treatment for alcohol and substance use disorder, to preventing HIV, hepatitis C, syphilis and other communicable diseases. 

Jackson county public health worker Tanya Phillips said because grants are often available only when the health of a particular population declines, the system sets up a kind of unreliable boom and bust cycle for funding, which does not support healthy communities long term. Phillips and Lochner join us to share the impact that unpredictable and insufficient funding is having in Jackson County and around the state.

 If you could eliminate a memory from your mind completely, would you do it? And what would that kind of erasure mean at a societal level? These are some of the questions at the heart of Portland writer Karen Russell’s latest novel, “The Antidote.” The book opens on Black Sunday, the dust storm in April 1935 that swept thousands of tons of topsoil into the air over the Midwest. One of the central characters, a "prairie witch" known as The Antidote, can remove people’s memories and store them in her own body. As she and the other main characters' lives intersect, they learn more about the value of those memories and the history of the land and the people who came before them. And filling in those holes in the past enables them to see alternate futures. Karen Russell joins us to talk about the book.

A new resolution centered around protections for undocumented students passed unanimously by the Evergreen Public Schools board last week. As first reported on by the Columbian, the vote was initially planned for early February, but with testimony from more than 20 students, parents and community members, the vote was postponed. Students within the district provided input and helped shape the new resolution that eventually passed. Caiden Mizrahi-Boyarsky is a senior at Union High School and president for Students Advocating for Equity. Isabella Garcia and Sarah Barrios are both seniors at Mountainview High School and are senior representatives for the Latino Club. They join us to talk about their testimony and how they helped shape the new resolution.

A new study led by researchers at Washington State University showed that butterfly populations in the U.S. shrank by more than 20% from 2000 to 2020. More than 100 butterfly species declined by more than 50% during this period, including nearly two dozen that plummeted by more than 90%.The findings are based on more than 12 million observations of hundreds of butterfly species recorded by citizen scientist volunteers and biologists during surveys conducted in the Pacific Northwest and six other regions across the continental U.S. 
 
Cheryl Schultz is a professor of conservation biology at Washington State University and a senior author of the study. She joins us to share more details and how the public can help with butterfly conservation – including  species like the Fender’s blue butterfly which is native to Willamette Valley and was reclassified from endangered to threatened status in 2023. 
 

In 2023, Oregon was awarded more than $58 million in federal grants from the Inflation Reduction Act to plant and maintain trees. The availability of much of those funds remains uncertain. 

Earlier this month, the Oregon Department of Forestry, city agencies and nonprofits told Inside Climate News that at least $40 million dollars in grant reimbursements to boost urban tree canopies in Oregon remain unpaid. 

Last week, several U.S. farmers and nonprofits sued the Trump administration for withholding grants funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.  

Vivek Shandas is a professor of geography at Portland State University and a member of the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council. He joins us with more on the future of the state’s tree canopies and what they mean for Oregonians.