Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Most people who get sentenced to jail in this country endure harsh conditions. But some — those who can afford it — can now pay their jailers a fee to be housed in better conditions.

Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times has the story, reporting:

For offenders whose crimes are usually relatively minor … and whose bank accounts remain lofty, a dozen or so city jails across (California) offer pay-to-stay upgrades. Theirs are a clean, quiet, if not exactly recherché alternative to the standard county jails …

Many of the self-pay jails operate like secret velvet-roped nightclubs of the corrections world. You have to be in the know to even apply for entry, and even if the court approves your sentence there, jail administrators can operate like bouncers, rejecting anyone they wish.

(Read on …)

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

From the “Do what I say, not what I do” files:

Gary R. Jordan, 58, President of the Colorado Outdoor Adventure Guide School (COAGS) located near Victor, has pled guilty in Fourth Judicial District Court to unlawfully hunting elk without a proper and valid license, and the illegal take of a Samson bull elk. Original charges also included making a false statement in the application of a hunting license, forgery, and criminal impersonation.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife news release goes on to describe how Jordan shot a trophy bull elk last fall without an elk license (he used one of his employees’ licenses). Students in the professional guiding school Jordan runs helped him pack it out. Jordan now faces more than $12,000 in fines and may lose hunting privileges.

If Ray Ring’s massive and authoritative opus on death in the West’s oil and gas fields didn’t convince you that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is a toothless watchdog, you might want to read this AP story, which shows Wyoming and Montana to have the worst workplace safety records in the country. Here’s the operative quote from Kim Floyd, AFL-CIO executive secretary for Wyoming:

“In some instances fines are only $1,000 or $2,000 to a company for a fatality. That’s just a drop in the bucket in reality to these big corporations. It’s cheaper to kill people than it is to put on safety programs.”

And if you still don’t think OSHA needs some reform — and a whole new crop of top managers — take a look at this quote from the New York Times recent story on OSHA’s tendency to play footsie with the industries it is supposed to be regulating:

“The people at OSHA have no interest in running a regulatory agency,” said Dr. David Michaels, an occupational health expert at George Washington University who has written extensively about workplace safety. “If they ever knew how to issue regulations, they’ve forgotten. The concern about protecting workers has gone out the window.”

The Center for Public Integrity came out today with the results of a year-long investigation into the government’s handling of Superfund hazardous waste sites. The large-scale conclusions are eye-opening:

• Superfund site clean-up has slowed down significantly during the Bush administration.
• About 100 companies and the federal government are connected to more than 40 percent of the country’s most dangerously contaminated toxic sites, at least 114 of which “could pose immediate health hazards for people living nearby.”
• Companies connected to Superfund sites have tried to limit their environmental liability through a variety of questionable ownership shenanigans.
• Companies with apparent Superfund liability spent $1 billion lobbying Congress, the EPA and other federal agencies over a recent seven-year period. (Yes, that’s billion, with a “b.”)
• Companies and organizations paid for nearly $12 million in trips for Environmental Protection Agency employees over an eight and one-half year period ending in March 2006.

But the center’s investigation may be most notable for its depth; beyond the stories that explain the investigation’s main findings are a whole series of maps and databases that provide a window into the country’s toxic waste problem, locally and nationally, in macro and micro terms. This isn’t just superior journalism by one of the country’s leading investigative reporting organizations; it’s a research tool for scientists, journalists and citizens who wonder what kind of toxics they’re living with.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

The country’s 540 wildlife refuges are in trouble. Understaffed and underfunded, some refuges have been closed to the public, while others limp along with demoralized workers and decayed buildings.

The sorry state of the refuge system is detailed in a new report, “Restoring America’s Wildlife Legacy 2007,” from a coalition of advocacy groups, the Cooperative Alliance for Refuge Enhancement (its 21 members include the NRA, Ducks Unlimited, and the Wilderness Society). According to the report, the refuge system received only $765 million last year — that’s half of the funding it needs to carry out its wildlife conservation mission:

The nearly 40 million annual visitors to America’s national wildlife refuges now confront with increasing frequency:
• Shortened or eliminated visitor center hours, and closed roads;
• Dilapidated viewing platforms and hiking trails;
• Eliminated biological and education programs;
• Reduced or cancelled hunting and fishing events;
• Outdated outreach materials, maps, brochures, and websites.

It’s all a matter of national priorities and where our government chooses to spend its money. As writer David Oates says in his essay “Imagine“:

One way to understand our Iraq war, with its terrible costs, is that it happened partly because war-making was the only compelling thing the governing party could imagine doing with the vast wealth and human resources of our nation. If not war, then … well, just send the money back. “The American people know best what to do with their own money.” Tax cuts. Cuts to health services, to environmental regulation and remediation, to student loans, the poor, even medical research. None of it apparently really worth doing.

The Iraq war costs $177 million per day. For the cost of 4.3 days of war, we could fund a year’s worth of staffing and maintenance on the nation’s 96 million acres of refuge lands.

Imagine.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

By mid-July, independent publications like High Country News will face a major hike in postage costs – 20 to 30 percent. Meanwhile, big corporate publications like People and Time will see increases of less than 10 percent, according to a scheme just approved by the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission. The commission recently rejected a proposal from the U.S. Postal Service to raise mailing rates equally (by about 12 percent) for all publications, large or small. Instead, without public involvement or congressional oversight, the commission opted for a version of a proposal from Time Warner that gives the lowest postal rates to the biggest publishers.

For more than 200 years, postal policy has supported a competitive “marketplace of ideas” in which independent publications of all stripes can thrive. This new plan puts small and medium-sized publishers at a distinct disadvantage. Here at HCN, we’re evaluating the increase and figuring out how to absorb the added cost.

The editors of a dozen independent magazines sent a letter to the Postal Board of Governors protesting the unfair policy; see The Nation’s Web site for an abbreviated version. If you think the disparate rates are unfair, mail, e-mail or phone your congressman and U.S. senators.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

The AFL/CIO released their annual “Death on the Job” report, and the findings don’t surprise: Wyoming and Montana are the worst in the country when it comes to occupational fatalities. Wyoming workers died on the job at a rate of 16.8 per 100,000 workers, more than four times the national average. Montana came in a distant second with a 10.3 death rate (the national rate is 4.0/100,000). Also above the national average for fatalities: Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.
Perhaps the cause is the Western push to just “git ‘er done”, or our ethos of pathological independence. Or maybe it has something to do with a booming energy industry. There’s quite a few gas wells and coal mines in these states, mining has long been one of the most dangerous occupations and, as Ray Ring reported in his excellent investigative piece in High Country News, fatalities have boomed alongside profits in the gas fields.
Goin’ to work today? Be careful out there.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

Political P.R. stunts can be really annoying. But Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s is pulling one off that might actually be useful. For a week, he and his wife are living on a grocery budget of $3 per day, the same as two people get on average from food stamps. Though he was chauffered to the grocery store in a state-owned car and accompanied through the aisles by bodyguards, he’s sticking to his pledge to eat for just $42 per week in order to draw attention to poverty in his state. He’s also probably learning a lot about how many of his constituents live. All the time. The Portland Oregonian wrote about the Guv’s shopping trip here.

Emma Brown wrote a poignant article about a homeless family in Oregon for High Country News in January. Read it here.

Jonathan Thompson

Editor in Chief

This time of year can be especially beautiful down in the Sonoran Desert along the U.S. - Mexico border. The cactus are in bloom, streams sparkle in lush canyons where birds sing jungle melodies and the long scarlet fingers of the ocotillo in bloom seem to have been dipped in blood.

But there’s quite a bit of real blood out there, too. So writes Michael Marizco in a rather long feature in the most recent Tucson Weekly.

Goat has blogged on some of the killings already, when migrants were ambushed by murderous thugs and bandits. Marizco shows us that these weren’t just isolated events, but rather part of a pattern of violence and murder aimed towards migrants, cops and journalists and breaking out between drug traffickers. An anonymous source tells Marizco:

“The closer you get to the border, two things occur: The border is actually erased and becomes a new territory, and mass chaos exists. This is the primary reason that today’s trafficking has changed from storing or staging at the border. Instead, it makes its trek north and is immediately crossed, causing problems on our side.”

That seems to sum it up pretty well. Marizco also wrote about the border for High Country News last spring. Read those articles here and here.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

Kane and Garfield counties can no longer draw on state money to fight a grazing lawsuit, according to a ruling by Sixth District Judge David Mower. The southern Utah counties had been using a state defense fund to cover legal costs — so far around $175,000 — for ranchers who’d filed suit over grazing permits that were bought and then retired by the Grand Canyon Trust (see our 2005 story “The Big Buyout“). The ranchers argued that the BLM had broken the law by retiring over 100,000 acres of permits without notifying Congress; Bill Hedden of the Grand Canyon Trust says the total was only 92,000 acres.

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

“The counties are not receiving any clear present benefit for the money they are paying on behalf of the private individuals,” Mower wrote last week in issuing an injunction. …

Hedden praised Mower’s ruling, arguing it benefits taxpayers and levels the playing field in the federal case.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

The Center of the American West and the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project have just released a new report, What Every Westerner Should Know About Energy Efficiency and Conservation: A Guide to a New Relationship. The report, the second in a planned series of three, focuses on realistic ways that all of us can break out of our “mad romance with fossil fuel” and save both energy and money.

Written in an upbeat, frequently humorous tone, the report clearly aims to make energy conservation as palatable as possible: “You and fossil fuel have had, after all, thousands of good times together, and there is no justification for ingratitude or for the denial of those pleasant memories.”

Although the authors cover a lot of familiar ground (wash your clothes in cold water, use compact fluorescents, insulate your attic), they also provide case studies with facts and figures, examine emerging technologies (ever hear of condensing gas water heaters or electrochromic glazing?), and include useful charts and graphs galore.

And you’ve gotta love energy conservation advice that comes in the form of haiku:

Low flow shower heads
Display strengths in character.
More sex will follow.

Jodi Peterson

Associate Editor

This year’s State of the Rockies Report Card was just released by Colorado College. Every year, undergrads at the school study important issues affecting the Rocky Mountain region (defined as Colorado, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming). Their cheery conclusions, unfortunately, are all too familar:

The elements of a “perfect storm” loom on the horizon for the Rocky Mountain West: drought, diseased and infested forests, struggles for water, new demands for domestic energy production and a population growing at 4.5 times the national pace.

Other findings from the report:

• Twenty-one million acres of the region’s forests suffer from pine beetles, blister rust and other diseases.
• The region’s population grew 9 percent from 2000 to 2005 (the national growth rate was 2 percent).
• Irrigation sucks up nearly 90 percent of the region’s water; the next largest use, public water supply, takes only 6.4 percent.
• More than 90 percent of federal lease and royalty payments for oil and gas development last year went to states in the region.

Plus there’s a nicely-done summary of the history of land management in the Rockies.

I understand boredom. I understand wasting time on the Internet. I even understand YouTube, to a point.

But could someone really be so bored as to spend time tracking the progress of a piece of a bridge as it travels — very, very slowly — from Texas to Washington state? According to the Seattle Times, lots of someones are that bored. In fact, the Times reports, there has been huge public interest in the progress of a large expansion joint for the new Tacoma Narrows bridge; the joint was stranded near Spokane for a while because of a weight problem, but is now on the road again. Interest was so great, the Washington State Department of Transportation put a GPS unit in the truck hauling the joint and created an online tracking map, so the bridge-joint-obsessed demographic can know exactly where the truck hauling the bridge part is, day or night.

I’d just as soon watch Bob the Builder, but if you must, here’s the way to the silly map.