As the head of Willamette Riverkeeper, Travis Williams has worked to protect the river for much of his professional life. The environmental nonprofit’s efforts have been both wide and deep, from helping enforce the Clean Water Act, clearing up trash, restoring habitat, contributing to the Portland Harbor Cleanup, working to protect fish populations and preventing concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, along waterways in Linn County.  

Williams says the nonprofit is strong and does not expect any interruption in the work when he steps away in the coming months to focus on the Willamette River Preservation Trust. It’s a land trust focused on conserving creeks, rivers, floodplains, oak savanna, upland forests and more for the mid to northern Willamette Valley. We sit down with Williams about the health of the Willamette over the last two dozen years, and how his past work relates to his future plans.

Attorney Mike Schmidt is facing a challenge from one of his own senior deputy attorney’s, Nathan Vazquez. Schmidt came into office as a reformer, with the goal of ending mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. We talk to Schmidt about his tenure, and his case for why he deserves to be reelected. We talk to Vasquez on Monday, April 29th.  

Landowners and federal agencies in rural Oregon don’t always have the best relationships, especially when it comes to fire management. But as first reported in the Blue Mountain Eagle newspaper, landowners and managers in Grant County have been working with state and federal agencies to reduce wildfire risk. The Top Road Fuel Break project would clear vegetation from a stretch of public land that abuts private homes and ranches — both reducing the amount of potential fuel for future wildfires and protecting the surrounding communities.

James Osborne is the fire management officer for the Bureau of Land Management’s Prineville District. Irene Jerome has long served as the Firewise coordinator for Grant County. And Bill Newman is the manager of Top Ranch, near Monument. They were all involved in the project, and join us to share more details.

 Traditionally, refugees from around the world who are accepted into the United States receive aid from one of a handful of refugee resettlement agencies. But a new approach is aimed at helping create more capacity to better support refugees in American communities and to help more of them escape violence and persecution in their countries of origin. Last year, Amy Kasari, a pastor at the Antioch Church in Bend, heard a radio story about how local sponsor groups were needed to welcome families into specific communities for a program called Welcome Corps. She said she immediately went to work putting together a local team of volunteers at her church.

It took about a year of preparation, but earlier this year, she and other members of the sponsor group welcomed Maria Del Carmen Chaparro, her husband and two of their three adult children, who escaped violence in Colombia. Kasari and Del Carmen Chaparro join us to talk about the process of preparing for and settling into a new community. Una Bilic also joins us to share more about how this new approach is working around the country and what she sees as the impact of Welcome Corps now and in the future.

The Clark County Sheriff’s Office recently began partnering with mental health providers from Sea Mar Community Health Centers to respond more effectively to people in crisis, who may otherwise go to jail or the emergency department. The Columbian reported on the new Co-responders program which was modeled on a similar partnership launched in October 2020 between Sea Mar and the Vancouver Police Department. 

The program typically involves mental health specialists from Sea Mar being notified by Vancouver police or a 911 dispatcher of a person experiencing a mental health crisis who may be a danger to themselves or others. The Sea Mar team will then meet up with the police officer responding to the call and help by de-escalating the crisis or providing support services to the person in need. Joining us to talk about the Co-responders program and the impact it’s having is Blaise Geddry, a lieutenant in the Vancouver Police Department, and Laura Nichols, a mental health therapist and the program manager of behavioral health services at Sea Mar Community Health Centers. 

In the spring of 2021, Natalie Mastick, a graduate student in the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, dissected filets from nearly 200 cans of salmon, some of which were more than 40 years old. The cans contained filets from pink, chum, coho and sockeye salmon that were caught in Alaska between 1979 and 2021. Mastick acquired the cans from the archives of the Seafood Products Association, a trade organization based in Seattle that provides quality control testing to seafood processors.

Mastick and her colleagues opened up the cans to look for the presence of a parasitic roundworm embedded inside the filets. The parasite requires multiple hosts, including salmon, to complete its life cycle. Its abundance can serve as an indicator of the health of the marine food web, and how infections are changing over time for species like salmon and killer whales. Mastick is now a postdoctoral associate of student programs at the Yale Peabody Museum. She joins us to talk about her recently published findings. 

Portland Police Bureau spent nearly $68,000 on drones and equipment between April and September of 2023. Some of the drones used by the bureau feature cameras that can closely zoom in on people or cars and are made by a manufacturer based in Shenzhen, China. The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have warned companies to be wary of drones manufactured in China because using them can jeopardize U.S. national security. That’s according to a report by independent journalist and researcher Kate Kaye. She covers Portland’s use of surveillance technology and is the founder of RedTailMedia.org. Kaye joins us with more on how the police bureau uses drones

In May, Eugene residents will see a proposal that could change how voting is done in the city. STAR Voting is a system that allows voters to score all candidates on a scale from zero to five. The top two candidates with the highest scores will enter an automatic runoff election and the one with the most number of voters supporting them wins. If passed by voters, city elections for Eugene’s mayor, city council and utility board will be selected using this system for the 2026 elections. Sara Wolk is the executive director of Equal Vote Coalition and the chief petitioner for STAR Voting in Eugene. She joins us to share more on what makes this system different from ranked choice voting and what its adoption could mean for the city if passed.

Earlier this month, Gov. Tina Kotek threatened to veto $14 million in state funding for seven local infrastructure projects across Oregon unless they could clearly show they would result in new housing development. Last week, she announced that no line-item vetoes would be made to the projects state lawmakers had already approved funding for during this year’s short legislative session. Shady Cove, a city of roughly 3,200 residents in Jackson County, was one of the municipalities the governor’s office requested additional information from. According to Mayor John Ball, the city wants to use the $1.5 million it was awarded to develop a municipal water system, which he says is essential for new housing development. Mayor Ball joins us to talk about the status of the project, and to reveal the challenges rural communities in Oregon face to build more housing. 
 

Records show that since the beginning of this year,  there were 9 druggings of University of Oregon students, and the university failed to alert students about what was happening, violating their own protocols. These incidents were potentially linked to fraternity parties. That’s according to a new story from Eugene Weekly. We're joined by reporter Eliza Aronson, who is also a UO  senior studying Journalism and Marine Biology. 

 “Unrelenting pressure” on the nation’s rural healthcare 
safety net means more hospital closures and many operating on the brink. That’s according to a new report by the Chartis Center for Rural Health. The center says hospitals have been in crisis mode for the last 15 years, but even in just the last 12 months the situation has worsened further, with the percentage of America’s rural hospitals operating in the red jumping from 43% to 50% in that time.

Some of the report’s other key findings include:
Access to inpatient care continues to deteriorate, as 167 rural hospitals since 2010 have either closed or converted to a model that excludes inpatient care.
Between 2011 and 2021, 267 rural hospitals dropped OB services. This represents nearly 25% of America’s rural OB units.
Between 2014 and 2022, 382 rural hospitals have stopped providing chemotherapy services.

We get more details about what’s driving these trends from Michael Topchik, director of the Chartis Center for Rural Health. We’re also joined by Dr. Lesley Ogden, the CEO of two Lincoln County hospitals: Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital in Lincoln City and Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital in Newport.