Three Words: Housing, Water, Power

August in Eastern Oregon means combines in the hay fields, county fairs in full swing and the smell of smoke never far from anyone’s mind. It is the season when this country shows you both its abundance and its risk in the same afternoon. 

     In June, neighbors and leaders from across the region gathered at our Baker City headquarters for the fifth annual Power Eastern Oregon Summit. Sam Kem of the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corp. laid out the economic road ahead, and AI educator Dan Chuparkoff made new tools feel usable. Look him up at danchuparkoff.com. The room did not agree on everything. It rallied around three words: housing, water, power. Find the full story beginning on Page 4. 

     What struck me most was how plainly people said the hard things. Jake Seavert, Union County commissioner, called housing the buzzword of the decade. The state’s own count says Oregon needs roughly 490,000 new homes over 20 years. Ginger Savage of the Crossroads Carnegie Art Center said the arts are no longer an extra, they are a necessity. 

     State Representative Mark Owens, who farms near Crane, talked about snowpack and water the way only someone working the land can. By mid-March, Oregon’s snowpack sat at 29% of normal, the second lowest on record. Power planners say the Northwest could need nearly twice as much electricity by 2046. 

     These are not abstractions in Salem. They land at the end of your power line, in Baker City and La Grande and John Day and Burns. 

     That is the work in front of us. Earlier this year, OTEC and Idaho Power announced together that we intend to bring Idaho Power’s Oregon service territory into the cooperative. It is the same path our founders walked in 1988, when they bought out the investor-owned utility and made this a member-owned co-op. 

     Nearly four decades later, the same partnership is funding the next chapter. We will keep you posted here in Ruralite and at otec.coop/IdahoPower. 

 

 But August asks something of us right now. As I write this, the Oregon Department of Forestry has raised fire danger to extreme across our region, and three lightning fires are burning in our counties: the Anthony Fire in the Elkhorns north of Baker City, and the Salmon and Olive Butte fires near Greenhorn and Granite. Together they have burned nearly 7,000 acres, which will likely be more by the time this hits your mailbox. 

     We all remember what lightning did in 2024, when the Durkee Fire burned nearly 300,000 acres through Baker County. Lightning we cannot prevent. Most fires we can. Nearly nine out of 10 wildfires nationally are started by people, and on Oregon-protected land that figure is roughly three in four. Of the people-started fires with a known cause, escaped debris burns account for about 29%, arson about 21%, equipment use about 11% and campfires about 5%. For all the worry about power lines, utility equipment causes about 3% of wildfires nationally. 

     If you were raised in fire country, you already know what the season asks. You have drowned a campfire, felt for heat and taught your kids to do the same. OTEC team member Paige Witham built WILD, the other feature in this issue, to make those lessons easier to pass along. Ember Hare and her cast of characters cover everything from drowning a campfire the right way to hitching a trailer so chains do not drag and spark. New families get a place to start. The rest of us get a hand with teaching what we already do. 

     The cooperative model has done this work for nearly a century. We keep the lines up, we keep the rates competitive, and we look after the people who call this place home. So, take an hour this weekend, before the fair and before the harvest, to walk your property and clear what would burn. We are doing this work together, the way Eastern Oregon always has. 

Les Penning, CEO

Read August's Ruralite