Speech: Northwest Area Foundation Board

Speech to the Northwest Area Foundation
Board of Directors delivered by Crook County
Judge Scott R. Cooper in Prineville, Oregon
October 10, 2002

Good morning, and welcome to Prineville. It’s our pleasure to host you, and to share with all of you a little bit about the situation in our community. As I understand your purpose, you are studying community-based strategies to deal with the issue of poverty.

One of the things I find interesting about poverty is that I do not believe that “one size fits all” models of the “Great Society” variety can effectively address this pervasive problem. I do believe that the unique economic and social circumstances that leave certain individuals and groups in any given community in poverty, are best addressed by locally driven strategies which take into account unique local conditions.

To the degree that the Northwest Area Foundation is attempting to implement this strategy, I congratulate you. I believe you are on the right track. I also congratulate for recognizing that you cannot address an issue of this complexity in a year or two. Strategies must be long-term and results often come at the end, not the beginning of the investment period.

For you to fully understand the nature of the poverty in this community, I think it is important that you get inside the heads of those individuals whom we consider impoverished in Crook County. This morning, I’m going to tell you about three individuals: Bob, Dena and Marie. These are all real people. I know or have known them. They live in Crook County, and I think their stories are representative in many ways of the significant challenges your organization faces as it struggles to eliminate a social problem of massive dimensions.

I’ll begin with the story of Bob

Bob’s a local boy, born and bred. He’s married to Evelyn, who’s also a native, and they have a son.

Bob used to work as a timber faller, but that ended about 15 years ago when the mills started shutting down around here. Many of his buddies left to go to work in Roseburg or Albany, but Bob has lived in Prineville for 45 years. He can’t imagine living anywhere else. A man needs a job, though, so once the unemployment ran out, Bob decided he might as well keep doing what he’s always been done: cut trees, although these days its juniper, not pine that he cuts up into 16” lengths for firewood.

On a good day, Bob and his kid can cut and stack about 5 cords a day. Before the kid turned 14, Bob used to have to cut it all himself, so he could only get out about 3 cords. They cut about 3 days a week, and they spend the rest of the week knocking on doors in neighborhoods looking for potential buyers. People advertise firewood in the paper for about $140 per cord, but Bob sells his for as little as $110 to undercut the competition.

Most of Bob’s wood comes from the public lands. He used to cut in the national forest, until the feds ran him out with their permit restrictions and permit costs. It was nice up there in the forest. It was pretty and cool and you can buzz up a tamarack snag in just a few hours. Juniper grows down on the flats, away from the water where’s it’s a lot hotter, and the wood’s got a lot more pitch and pockets of dirt and gravel. To Bob’s way of thinking, the world was a lot better place before the tree huggers moved in with their wacko ideas and ruined the economy and put all these stupid rules on the forest.

The other problem with the woodcutting gig is that you can only do it about 4 months a year. That means the rest of the year you have to find some other way to live. Fortunately, Evelyn got a job at the nursing home. She only makes minimum, but that keeps the family in groceries.

The biggest problem Bob has on a day to day basis is medical care. There’s Oregon Health Plan coverage, but the doctors in town only accept a limited number of patients and a lot of treatments aren’t covered. He’s heard about a new low-income medical clinic opening in town, but he also heard that its mainly for Mexicans. Bob may not be living the high life, but he still has his self-respect. You won’t catch him there. Worse comes to worse, there’s always the emergency room.

Bob’s other big worry is what will happen when he gets old. Woodcutting is hard work. He won’t be able to do it forever. The nursing home has no retirement plan. He and Evelyn can count on a little social security check from his days in the mill and Evelyn’s work in the home, but it won’t make ends meet. Down at the bar, Bob’s been joking with his buddies that maybe he ought to slack off hitting the boy so much—after all he might have to move in with him one day.

So much for Bob. The next person I’d like to tell you about is Dena.

Dena is 28. She works full-time at a local manufacturing plant as an order clerk. She makes $8.50 per hour. She has two kids who are the most important thing in the world to her, she says. She’s tried to make a good home for them. She wishes she had a little more money so she could get them out of the trailer park and buy a house where they could have separate rooms.

But Dena’s a divorced, single mom, and divorced single moms can’t afford more than $450 per month, which is about a third of her paycheck. She’s tried to cut back on expenses and save for a house, but she’s kind of discouraged. Saving is hard. The kids want to eat at McDonald’s a couple of times a week, she’s got to buy lunch for herself every day, the cable keeps going up. She thought about giving up the cell phone, but she wants the kids to be able to reach her if there’s an emergency. She knows she ought to give up the cigarettes, and that’s even more true now that the government raised the cigarette tax, but there’s no way she can afford the “patch” and insurance won’t cover it, anyway. Besides, to be real honest, its one of the few pleasures in her life right now.

She thinks about going back to college sometimes. She once thought she would, but she got pregnant while she was still in high school, and that ended that plan. Now the college is 35 minutes away, and she has kids to take care of. She could leave them with their Dad and his girlfriend, but if that lousy bum hadn’t left her in the first place, she wouldn’t even need to be thinking about college. Having loused up Dena’s life, she isn’t sure she wants to let him foul up the kids, too. She also could leave the kids with Mom, but Dena thinks Mom might be drinking again, and she saw enough of that when she was a kid to know that she doesn’t want to put her kids through that.

Recently, Dena hit on a new plan for getting out of her economic woes. She’s been going down to the Sagebrush Palace on Friday nights to sing karaoke from 9 ‘til midnight or closing. She feels a little guilty about this, because it means she has to leave the kids at home alone, but she figures if she leaves late, they’ll fall asleep watching videos and they’ll be OK until she gets home. Dena’s logic is that she used to sing in the high school choir and a little bit around the community, and everyone said she had a beautiful voice. Maybe if she puts herself out there, a talent scout will discover her. Then again, she would also settle for just meeting a nice guy. A lot of the guys in the bar on Friday nights work at Les Schwab. She wouldn’t mind hooking up with one of them. She’s heard the bonus money is incredible.

Lastly, I’d like to tell you about Marie.

Marie looks back on her days in high school as the finest days of her life. 1976 to 1980—what a glorious time. No kids, no responsibility, a nice new tract house in a subdivision with Mom and Dad putting food on the table every night. Those were the days. Not like now.

How did she end up like this, spending half her day with a juvenile counselor trying to keep Joey out of jail and spending the other half of the day listening to children’s services criticizing her housekeeping and lecturing her on how to raise her kids.

And whatever free time she does have, she spends in the local job-training program. What a thrill. Secretly, Marie would tell the JOBS program to stick it, but the fact is, she can’t: the lady at social services told her that she can’t qualify for public assistance anymore if she isn’t enrolled in school or job training. And as much as she hates the job training, she hates school more. Besides, her lazy husband, Larry, quit his perfectly good job at the tire factory last month. He says he’s going to get a grant from the government and set himself up in business as a house painter. She’ll believe that when she sees it.

Overall, Marie thinks her life pretty much is bum rush. She did finish high school. She was an average student and went to work in the mills right after she graduated, but since the mills went down she hasn’t been able to find work. When she first went to the job-training center, she just wanted help finding work. Instead, they told her she had to gain something called remedial skills. They stuck her in a lab full of people at the local community college center. She’s supposed to work on improving her math and English. Marie never did well in school even when there was a teacher to ask for help. She sure can’t ask the stupid computer for directions.

And then there’s the on-the-job-training program. When Marie talked to a counselor, she remembers being told that the training people are supposed to be the best in the state. She doubts that. Oh sure, they sent her out on a couple of assignments, for which she got no pay, but they expected her to work like a dog doing menial labor that nobody else in the office would do. That isn’t what she had in mind.

Marie’s dream is to be a receptionist. You know, one of those ladies with the beautiful finger nails and the nice hair who sit behind a desk, answers the phone, type on the computer and chat with the other beautiful ladies in the office. All she ever heard from would-be employers was lectures about starting at the bottom and working your way up.

And they were so mean. Can you believe that the phone they gave her had four lights on it? Sometimes they all ring at once, and her boss actually expects her to answer them all! Marie would like to see the boss get off her butt and answer a phone once in a while instead of breezing around, telling people how to do their jobs and smiling, smiling, smiling at the parade of people who come in and out of her office all day on business. Oh, and to make it worse, they even expect Marie to get them coffee. This is not the job she had in mind.

Maybe Larry’s house painting thing will work out. In the mean time, they’ll make ends meet somehow. There’s still the welfare check, and there are food boxes from St. Vincent DePaul each week. Her sister can give her a ride to the job training center most days, and Prineville’s small enough that she can walk home when Sis isn’t available. On really cold days, she calls in sick. Recently, she and the husband got a low interest loan from the county to make some repairs to the house. They were supposed to start paying it back a few months ago, but she doesn’t really believe that in the end the county would really take her house away from her, so she hasn’t worried about it yet.

Besides, Marie does have a long-term plan. She’s buys $20 worth of Lotto tickets every week. Someday, she’s gonna win.

Summary

I paint this picture of Bob, Dena and Marie because they are typical of that underclass that is Prineville residents in poverty. The way they view the world is not uncommon or unique. They have some bizarre ideas ranging from Bob’s inability to change his life to keep up with changing times, Dena’s disconnect between what constitutes a necessity and what constitutes a luxury and Marie’s expectations about the world of work.

Bob, Dena and Marie are also representative of our community and its statistical profile of families in poverty. Like them, just over 1 in 10 Crook County residents lives below the federal poverty line. Almost 1 in 5 children lives below the poverty line. Among female-headed householders, over half live with children under the age of 18. Approximately 1 in 8 household are not covered by medical insurance, and as Oregonians, all three are more likely to go to bed hungry than are residents of any other state.

Opportunity for improving their individual situations are limited in Crook County. The county unemployment rate approaches 10 percent. While the city and county have been adding new employers steadily, the continued loss of wood-products related jobs has continued to hold net gains in employer number to virtually zero.

Bob, Dena and Marie are representative of their fellow citizens in that their educational attainment levels are low. Less than 13 percent of the county’s citizens have a bachelor’s degree. Almost 20 percent do not have a high school diploma.

But even as Bob, Dena and Marie are living examples of the poverty that confronts our community, I think they are an even better example of the what is perhaps the greatest challenge that faces this community in addressing the issue of poverty, and that is the culture of unrealistic expectations which permeates the underclass.

Bob thinks the forest economy might come back some day. He thinks that his child is going to be there for him in his old age. Dena thinks she’s going to marry her way out of her problems. She thinks that even though she lacks money, she is entitled to a certain lifestyle which includes cell phones, McDonalds, cable TV and nights out on the town. Marie dreams of the lottery, government grants for small business start-ups and a job where bosses work and staff visit.

I don’t know what is to be done with people like Bob, Dena and Marie. Reality’s a tough nut to crack. Existing programs work to some degree, but many people fall through those cracks.

In Bob’s case, he lost his connection with the workforce system which might otherwise redirect his misconceptions long ago when his unemployment ran out. In Dena’s case, the ancillary issues such as childcare and housing seem so insurmountable that she can’t get a plan together for the rest of her life. And Marie? Marie just needs somebody to set her down and explain that the world of work is a bottom’s up place and there’s no free ride to the top.

The Bob’s and Dena’s and Marie’s of the world are out there. I know it. I’ve met them. I’ve heard their stories. All three of them would tell you that they are victims of circumstance and of society. I don’t buy that. I don’t think most of my constituents do, and their own descriptions of their personal situations are laughable to everyone except themselves.

You’ve asked me here today to talk about what can be done about poverty in Crook County. My answer is this. To the degree that the Northwest Area Foundation can structure a means of reaching the Bob’s Dena’s and Marie’s of this county and addressing their situations on a personal and individual level, pointing out to them in an honest and forthright manner that they are not the victims of society’s whims and injustices but that upward mobility begins with accepting personal responsibility, you can make a difference in their lives.

It’s a tall order. Obviously, someone has failed to communicate this before, or these folks would not be in the situations they are in. To the degree that you are willing to take on the task, Godspeed!