The Boot

Back in the dying days of the Central Oregon timber economy, mills were closing, unemployment was in double digits and downtown storefronts were sitting vacant. Things weren't a whole lot better at the national level in the early 80s with the country mired in a deep recession.
Out of this economic morass came a proposal to pump up Oregon's tourism economy by easing the state's land use laws for resorts that would draw tourists from around the country to our state where they would spend money, creating jobs and injecting cash into our local economies. With its proximity to the mountains and disproportionate amount of sunshine, Central Oregon was a natural choice for developers. Fueled by a national real estate boom and easy credit, real estate and resort developers converged on Deschutes and Crook counties over the past few years floating one proposal after another for increasingly massive resorts.

At the Deschutes County Commission hearing earlier this month on a plan to metamorphose Aspen Lakes Golf Estates into a destination resort, there were a lot of comments about how the owners of the development, the Cyrus family, are longtime Central Oregonians and good people.
It's true that the Cyruses have been here for generations, and we have no doubt they're fine folks.

We almost had to buy out the contents of a medium-sized shoe store this week to get enough BOOTs to hand out to Crook County officials.
The beginning of our story takes us back to early August, when Gene Gramzow did a neighborly thing and picked up the tab for several members of the county planning commission who were drinking at a Prineville restaurant.

A local group called Infrastructure First is pushing an intriguing idea: Instead of letting growth happen helter-skelter and worrying later about paying for the sewers, water mains, streets and other stuff that growth requires, do the infrastructure first - or at least within two years of when the new development happens.

Infrastructure First has been trying for a couple of years to get enough signatures to put its idea on the local ballot in the form of an initiative. It's been an uphill slog: The group has no big-bucks supporters to buy TV ads or pay signature gatherers. It's a true grassroots campaign.

Infrastructure First turned in 5,100 signatures to try to put its measure on the November ballot. That was about 1,000 names short. Now it's hoping to collect enough to qualify the initiative for the ballot next spring.

That irks Bend City Councilor Mark Capell, who wants the city to impose some sort of limit on the amount of time petitioners have to gather signatures. Last week, a majority of Capell's fellow councilors went along with him and asked city staff to draw up an ordinance.

Grass roots right wing style. In the PR game they call it "Astroturfing." It means creating a movement or organization that looks like it's "grassroots" but really isn't.

One of the more noxious sprouts of Astroturf we've encountered this campaign season is an outfit called the Employee Freedom Action Committee. The Washington, DC-based group is registered as a non-profit, which means it doesn't have to disclose where its money comes from. But it operates out of the offices of lobbyist Richard Berman, a notorious Astroturfer who has operated front groups supporting the restaurant, liquor and tobacco industries and opposing (among other things) consumer protection, animal rights, increases in the minimum wage - and, almost needless to say, labor unions.

In a 2007 "60 Minutes" segment, correspondent Morley Safer described how Berman "has come up with a clever system of non-profit 'educational' entities. Companies can make charitable donations to these groups, which … are neutral sounding but 'educating' with a particular point of view, all perfectly legal."

Right now, EFAC is flooding the Oregon airwaves with an ad attacking Democratic US Senate candidate Jeff Merkley. "Some union bosses and their politician friends want to effectively do away with privacy when it comes to voting on joining a union," the narrator says. The screen shows a picture of Merkley looking sinister, then a scene of a big, scary-looking guy - a "union boss," presumably - looming over a poor little old lady.