Think Out Loud

Mike Richman is the host of the “Locked on Blazers” podcast. He joins us to preview tonight's game and recap the major developments of the Blazers’ season.

 In Jennifer Lincoln’s work as an obstetrics hospitalist, she met many new parents who were fearful and felt uninformed about the labor and delivery process, even when arriving at the hospital for their own births. She’s quick to note, however, that this gap in understanding isn’t due to patients being lazy, or their lack of interest in learning, but due to brief prenatal visits and the often overburdened system of maternal healthcare in the U.S.

A 2024 report by March of Dimes, a nonprofit focused on maternal and infant health, found that over 35% of counties in the U.S. are considered maternity care deserts, and labor and delivery units are being stretched thin, especially in rural areas.

Lincoln was finding that patients weren’t given enough time with their healthcare providers to dive into all questions about the complexities of the labor and delivery process, and often turned to resources like TikTok and Instagram to hear from other mothers and get their questions answered. 

Her work as an obstetrician and ability to distill complex topics on reproductive and maternal care led Lincoln to write “The Birth Book: An OB-GYN’s Guide to Demystifying Labor and Delivery.” She joins us to discuss the book which covers the labor and delivery experience from prenatal visits to postpartum care.

This inspired Subedi to organize the recent Refugee and Immigrant Girls’ World Cup Soccer Tournament, inviting the young athletes to compete in a safe environment, as fear and anticipation of federal immigration enforcement activity has burdened youth sports across the U.S.

Subedi joins us to share more about the tournament, and his efforts to remove cultural, linguistic and financial barriers for immigrant and refugee youth and create a safe and welcoming environment for them.

 Over the last year, prediction markets have grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. Prediction markets, such as sites like Polymarket, Kalshi and Robinhood, allow bettors to put down money on the likelihood of an event happening — including for political races in Oregon. Market sites show users are placing their bets on who the Republican candidate will be for Oregon’s governor. OPB politics reporter Dirk Vanderhart covered this story. He joins us to share more.

Portland city councilors are discussing a proposal that would raise take-home pay for Uber and Lyft drivers by limiting how much money the companies can take from each trip. Councilors are considering a limit of 20% for the portion that Uber and Lyft can take from a driver. Currently, the amount isn’t fixed, and can sometimes be over40%.

Uber and Lyft have threatened to leave Portland over the proposal. Uber claims it would force the company to raise its rates or operate at a loss for most rides.

The Portland Metro Chamber and the “We Play for Portland” Coalition, which includes the Portland Trail Blazers, the Oregon Symphony, Portland Art Museum and other Portland sports and arts organizations are opposed to the city council's draft proposal. The groups warned city council in a letter they released that if rideshare companies decrease their services or leave Portland, it could greatly affect audience turnout at Portland events.

We hear from Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guinea, as well as Jon Isaacs, the Executive Vice President of Public Affairs for the Portland Metro Chamber of Commerce, about the draft proposal and what it could mean for the future of rideshare services in Portland.

Portlander Sean Wolfe has been making electronic music off and on under the moniker Salvo Beta for more than three decades. During the pandemic, he started experiencing hearing loss in his right ear and other symptoms such as balance problems and tinnitus, or a ringing sensation in the ear. Wolfe was diagnosed with a kind of rare, noncancerous tumor that left untreated can lead to permanent hearing loss, facial paralysis and worse.  

So in October 2024, Wolfe got surgery to not only remove the tumor, but also get a cochlear implant, an electronic device affixed behind the ear that directly stimulates the auditory nerve. Although the surgery was a success, he had months of rehabilitation and adjusting to a new sonic environment. That includes difficulty hearing certain kinds of sounds and experiencing shifts in sound frequencies.

Wolfe says his cochlear implant has opened new creative doors musically. He contributed two new songs to an album of remixes that will be released later this month by Chicago indie rock band Still Machine. Wolfe wants to compose music specifically for people who are hard of hearing, and he’s finishing work on an album of new, original material. He joins us to share his journey as a musician with a cochlear implant. 

 By 2045, Vancouver’s population is expected to grow by more than 80,000 new residents – a roughly 40% increase. According to Vancouver’s 2025 Housing Report, the city will need to develop 2,500 new units a year to meet housing demand. But the city is falling well short of that goal for both market-rate and affordable housing projects, as OPB recently reported.  

City officials point to a range of factors for the slowdown. That includes rising construction costs, high interest rates, the ongoing effects of tariffs and the difficulty of accessing state funds to develop multifamily, affordable housing units. 

Meanwhile, Vancouver is close to finalizing a new comprehensive plan to guide the city’s growth over the next 20 years. The draft calls for updating zoning codes to ease higher-density housing development in neighborhoods, for example, which would align with new state requirements to boost housing development. 

OPB’s Southwest Washington Bureau Chief Erik Neumann joins us for more details. 

On Saturday, a climate justice summit will take place at Lincoln High School in Southwest Portland. The event is free, open to the public and is being organized by students at Lincoln’s environmental justice class and students at Ida B. Wells’ Eco Action Club. It’s the first time students at the two PPS schools have collaborated to create a climate justice summit, according to Tim Swinehart, a Lincoln social studies teacher who launched the environmental justice course in 2016.   

Lincoln and Wells students will moderate a panel discussion at the summit and present workshops such as one on lobbying and giving testimony, which they did at the state legislature in Salem earlier this year and last December during a Portland Planning Commission meeting. The students also invited advocacy groups such as the Braided River Campaign, Sunrise Movement and Neighbors for Clean Air to give workshops on how to organize a protest and other topics.

Lincoln High School senior Leah Almeida and Ida B. Wells High School junior Emma Lopez join us, along with Swinehart, for a preview of Saturday’s activities. 

The Trump administration announced a massive reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service last week. The agency’s headquarters will move from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City, Utah, and its regional offices will be replaced by 15 state-based offices. Additionally, more than 50 research stations will close across 31 states, including one in Oregon and two in Washington. 

Christine Peterson is a freelance reporter covering wildlife, the environment and outdoor recreation. She wrote about the reorganization for High Country News and joins us with more details.

The Oregon justice system imposes fees, fines and restitution on people found guilty of a wide range of crimes. These different kinds of financial penalties are having a severe and disproportionate impact on people of color and those in low- income neighborhoods and rural communities, according to a new report called “The Price of Justice in Oregon.” The broad look at jurisdictions all over the state was years in the making and resulted from the combined efforts of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, the Policy Advocacy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law, and the Portland-based CLEAR Clinic, which provides free legal services to Oregonians. We get more details and the report’s policy recommendations from Portlander Gus Patel-Tupper with the UC Berkeley School of Law. 

In February, a bright blue, 38-foot-long, custom-built mobile health clinic rolled into Jackson County. Five days a week, it provides an array of free or low-cost services in Medford and Ashland that range from filling medications and running lab tests to dental exams and wound treatment. The mobile health clinic is operated by La Clinica, a nonprofit that for nearly 40 years has been helping meet the health care needs of primarily low-income residents in Jackson County. 

This is La Clinica’s third mobile health clinic and the first time it has been able to provide these services in nearly three years after an arson fire destroyed its previous mobile clinic just a few days after it began seeing patients. Roughly 160 patients have already visited the new mobile clinic during its stops at food pantries, campgrounds, apartment complexes and other sites, according to Zulma Larios, La Clinica’s field-based care manager. The patients include Latinx residents afraid of visiting hospitals and clinics because of increased federal immigration enforcement, unhoused people and former adults in custody reentering society. Larios joins us to share more details about the impact the mobile health clinic is having.

Access to preschool in Oregon remains limited, with more than half of the state’s school districts reporting that demand has outpaced available slots. The deficit could leave many children without the early literacy and math skills they’re expected to bring into kindergarten. 

The Kinder Coaching Program at Oregon Health & Science University aims to incorporate school readiness into medical care. During a routine visit, medical providers can refer children on Medicaid to a team of community health workers who help them develop the cognition, communication and social-emotional skills they need for kindergarten.  

Jaime Peterson is a pediatrician at OHSU and director of the Kinder Coaching Program. Isha Syll is a certified community health worker and one of the program’s “kinder coaches.” They both join us to talk about the importance of providing early learning opportunities for low-income families.

OSH has been out of compliance with federal standards in recent years, and it has been found in contempt of court for not admitting mentally ill criminal defendants quickly enough.

Last year, Lindsey Sande, the deputy chief nursing officer at OHS was so concerned she made a formal complaint. But she says nothing was done, and the patient died 9 days later. She says she was demoted shortly thereafter, along with two other whistleblowers.

We’ll talk with Lillian Mongeau Hughes who covers homelessness and mental health for The Oregonian/Oregonlive.com. And we hear directly from Sande about how she sees OSH patients being cared for and how employees who speak up are being retaliated against.

In the 1990s, a beloved high school teacher in Seattle was rumored to be sexually abusing a student. Students at the school newspaper started investigating. The teacher later died by suicide. A new podcast from KUOW dives deep into the story - exploring what really happened back then. Isolde Raftery, managing editor at KUOW, was also a student in that high school in the 90s. She brings us the story.

Nearly a century ago, fish traps were banned on the Columbia River. The practice had been used by indigenous communities of the Northwest for a millenia, but when European settlers expanded west, they set up their own industrial versions, catching as much as 73 tons of salmon a season. Voters would ban these traps in Washington and Oregon in 1934 and 1948, respectively. But now some permitted experiments are being conducted using traps to sustainably harvest fish. Zach Theiler is a freelance writer who covered this issue for the Smithsonian Magazine. He joins us to share more.

Historic-low snowpack and drought in the West this year has come with a myriad of complications for the agricultural industry. As irrigation season begins, this winter’s drought combined with record-high temperatures is creating a stark reality for Oregon’s farmers, ranchers and water managers as they look to the coming summer.

We’ll hear from Jeremy McCulloch, a rancher in Wallowa County, and Gordon Jones, an agronomist with Oregon State University’s Extension Service, to discuss the challenges of this year’s irrigation season.

With the WNBA expansion draft on April 3, the Fire were finally able to start building their team roster. The draft was delayed several months due to tense contract negotiations between the WNBA and the players’ union. The season is set to tip off May 9 at the Moda Center.

Kimberly Veale is the senior vice president of communications for the Portland Fire. She joins us to talk about the draft and the team’s upcoming season.

The Portland Clean Energy Fund was passed by voters in 2018. The 1% tax on retail sales of companies that make a billion dollars or more has generated a fund much bigger than expected. Many non-climate projects have asked for some of this money. Now the mayor and other officials want to spend $75 million in PCEF funds to go toward Portland’s share of the $600 million in total taxpayer money for the Moda center remodel. We talk with Portland City Councilor Steve Novick, who is opposed to this plan, about how he’d like to see the fund spent, and what he thinks of the city’s current approach to climate change.

On Tuesday, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation signed an agreement with Fred Mitchell to acquire his vast collection of Columbia River Plateau tribal artwork and artifacts. The collection includes 15,000 stone points and tools, 1,250 historic photographs, 800 beaded bags and pouches, baskets and other items. Mitchell is a retired former mayor and firefighter from Walla Walla, Washington who started collecting arrowheads when he was 5 years old and amassed other tribal items over the past seven decades. 

The Fred L. Mitchell & Family Collection also includes objects collected by Mitchell’s parents and other relatives, according to Bobbie Conner, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute. The museum has featured several temporary exhibits in recent years with items loaned by Mitchell, including one that showcased beaded depictions of horses made by Columbia Plateau tribes. Conner joins us to discuss the cultural and historical significance of the items within Mitchell’s collection, including Native American cradleboards, or infant carriers, that will be featured in an exhibit at TCI in June.

Last spring the U.S. Forest Service cleared out a large number of people living in the forest south of Bend in an area known as China Hat. More than 100 vehicles and numerous personal effects were left behind. According to a new story from Investigate West and FORJournalism Lab, the Forest Service may have fallen short of constitutional obligations to give China Hat residents a “reasonable” opportunity to retrieve their belongings. David Dudley, a special project reporter with the Homelessness: Real Stories, Real Solutions FORJournalism, joins us to discuss the story.

California condors, the largest land bird in North America, almost went extinct in the late 1980s. But successful breeding programs such as the one at the Oregon Zoo have helped raise their worldwide population from a low of 22 birds to roughly 600. 

Since 2022, the Yurok Tribe has partnered with Redwood National and State Park to release condors bred in captivity into the wild. A pair of those birds are believed to be tending the region’s first egg in more than a century. The nest is too remote for wildlife managers to see the egg itself, but they say the birds’ behavior is consistent with nesting and incubation.

Marti Jenkins is the lead keeper at the Oregon Zoo’s Jonsson Center for Wildlife Conservation, which hosts its condor breeding program. Chris West is the manager of the Northern California Condor Restoration Program and a senior wildlife biologist with the Yurok Tribe Wildlife Department. They both join us to talk about the significance of returning California condors to the Pacific Northwest.