Bulletin E-Edition:
more photosWayne Baron, owner of 4R Recycling, stands in his processing facility in Hines. Baron closed the facility because he couldn’t find buyers — in the U.S. or overseas — for the recycled materials. He hopes to reopen his business next month as a nonprofit.
Melissa Jansson / The Bulletin
Hard times
Harney County is suffering. As the recession deepens, the unemployment rate in this rural area of the state is climbing and there are few jobs to be had. How are residents getting by?
By Story by Lily Raff,
Photos by Melissa Jansson
/ The Bulletin
Published: April 12. 2009 4:00AM PST
BURNS —
In 1973, a young Steven Grasty had recently moved here from Ontario, on Oregon’s eastern border, to work at an auto parts store. Fresh out of school, he earned $350 a month — plenty of money to pay the bills and take his new wife out to dinner.
By Harney County’s standards, however, Grasty was roughing it.
“I had friends that were making $4,000 a month felling trees,” he recalled recently. “I was dumbfounded at the cash that was going around this community.”
Those willing to take dangerous and grueling jobs cutting timber in the nearby Ochoco and Malheur national forests were paid handsomely for it. In Hines, the town next door, a mill churned out lumber as fast as truck drivers could deliver the massive logs.
Harney County had the highest income in Oregon at the time: $5,876 per person, well above the state average of $5,110 and even the U.S. average of $5,231.
Boy, times have changed.
Logging ground to a halt. The mill shut down. And although a string of factories moved into the empty mill buildings, each one eventually shut down. The latest — a Monaco Coach Motorhome factory — temporarily closed its Hines plant in December, then filed for bankruptcy and laid off approximately 120 workers in the area last month.
A growing number of empty storefronts line U.S. Highway 20, the main drag through Hines and Burns.
More than one in five working-age Harney County residents are jobless now, not accounting for seasonal swings in hiring. The county has 20.5 percent unemployment, second in Oregon only to Crook County, which has 20.7 percent unemployment. And Harney County’s per capita income has hovered near the lowest in the state for more than a decade.
“Burns and Hines essentially function as one economy,” said Jason Yohannan, regional economist for Eastern Oregon. “And (the area) certainly is hurting more than just about anywhere else in Oregon right now.”
Government workers make up the largest employment sector in Harney County, including Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and school employees.
“And the government employs fewer people there now than it did five, 10, 15 years ago,” Yohannan added. “A lot of that is because the Forest Service has made cuts.”
Facing an expected $4.4 billion budget deficit in the next two years, the state is considering closing a youth correctional facility in Burns. Harney County leaders are desperately lobbying to keep the facility open so the region doesn’t lose those jobs, too.
“The economy is in the toilet,” summed up Becky Cunningham, a longtime resident who runs three small businesses. “It’s absolutely deader than a doornail. Everyone is depressed, down in the mouth and wondering if they’ve got to get up and move. And if they move, will it be any better elsewhere?”
Of course, Harney County is no stranger to economic distress.
The region was settled by ranchers in the late 1800s. In 1891, the city of Burns was founded and named after a Scottish poet, Robert Burns. Hines was created in 1929 when the Edward Hines Co. decided to build a large mill there and ordered 150 houses to be built nearby for employees.
Timber and ranching were the pillars of the economy for the next 50 years. In the 1970s, the state counted 2,730 jobs in Harney County. In 2008, the county had 2,430 jobs.
Many of the jobs that were lost fell out of the timber industry. The Edward Hines Co. sold its Hines mill to Snow Mountain Pine Lumber in 1983, citing a lack of local timber. The new owners operated the mill on a smaller scale, then closed in the early 1990s when logging slowed to a crawl in the nearby national forests. But the mill reopened when Louisiana Pacific bought the facility and started trucking logs in from Canada.
“When gas prices went through the roof 18 months ago, that didn’t work out anymore,” said Grasty, who is now Harney County judge.
A nationwide drop in home sales led developers to yank the reins on new building projects. Low demand for lumber and building products, coupled with high transportation costs, forced Louisiana Pacific to close in Hines.
Meanwhile, other empty mill buildings and available workers prompted Monaco Coach Motorhome Corp. to open a plant there.
Then, in December, the company put its Eastern Oregon employees on furlough. In March, the company filed for bankruptcy and handed pink slips to its employees.
Ann Lesser, who runs the Harney County Senior Center, where most of the community’s social services are housed, said interest in the food bank skyrocketed. Eight needy families per day now walk into the center and leave with a big box of food, Lesser said, instead of the usual three.
A local economy
So far, however, community donations have kept up with demand.
“I would say the food bank’s probably the best it’s been in awhile,” she said. “People have really stepped up to the plate because they know it’s going to be tough on families.”
When the Monaco plant closed, several families lost both of their incomes. The move gutted all of the manufacturing jobs left in Harney County, Yohannan said.
The ranching industry, meanwhile, continues to be a major part of the region’s economy. But the state doesn’t have a great way to estimate agricultural employment, according to Yohannan.
“That’s primarily because the rules for administering unemployment (insurance) make large exceptions for agriculture,” he said. “So a mom and pop store with one employee has to file that (unemployment program) report. But a farm with three or four or five employees probably does not.”
The best the state can figure, Harney County had 470 agriculture-related jobs in 2008. Most of that involved cattle ranching.
“They have their ups and downs with cattle prices,” Yohannan said.
Many other businesses in Harney County were built to support the cattle and timber industries. Farm equipment dealers, gas stations and mechanics, for example, all rise and fall with the county’s two strongholds.
Even seemingly unrelated businesses have their ups and downs.
Cunningham runs three small businesses, including a massage therapy practice based in a local chiropractor’s office.
“My business is basically taking care of people on (workers’ compensation) claims. So now that people are unemployed, they don’t have (workers’) comp insurance anymore so business is extremely slow,” she said.
“What I’m busy with is people who do not have health insurance coming to me and saying, ‘Do you know what this is?’ I’m handing out grandma advice on basic health care issues. These people should be going to the nurse practitioner and the emergency room, but they can’t afford basic health care.”
Denise Rose, development and recruiting coordinator for Harney District Hospital in Burns, said the hospital has seen a recent spike in charity cases — or patients who cannot afford to pay for their care.
Brandon Baron, a real estate broker, said property sales have plummeted.
“Two years … ago, it was just nonstop phone ringing,” he said. “There was actually something to do in this office. Now we’re lucky if we get one good call each day.”
Global forces
Baron’s father, Wayne Baron, started a business called 4R Recycling in Hines in the middle of 2007. Residents could drop off almost any type of material — water bottles, books and bailing twine, for example — at the collection facility, for free. Wayne Baron sorted the materials and found buyers for them. Then he arranged to haul and ship the materials to their destination.
Last summer, business was booming. Baron had 10 employees and noted that some households in the area were recycling 75 percent of their waste.
But as the global economy tanked, so did demand for recycled goods.
“The first of November, right after the Olympics were over in China, China quit buying. And higher grade plastics, for example, went from $400 a ton to $40 a ton,” he said. “Low-end plastics and paper, there was no market at all for them.”
Baron had to pay to transport the materials, but with no buyer, he couldn’t recoup the costs. The business started losing money fast.
On March 28, the facility stopped accepting materials and Baron put his three remaining employees on furlough. He is scrambling to reorganize the company as a nonprofit and hopes to reopen in May.
Recyclables are “a normal commodity-type thing,” Baron said. “We deal with some up, some down. But not everything down at one time. That’s what really hurt us.”
Despite the grim outlook, Brandon Baron expressed determination that is echoed by other Harney County residents, many of whom outlasted previous recessions.
“We’re survivors and we’re going to be fine,” he said. “The people that live here, for the most part, they don’t live here because they’ve got a great job. They’d rather live here and be poor than live somewhere else and be rich.”
An ongoing cycle
Grasty, the county judge, wishes residents didn’t have to make that kind of choice.
“This is a good place,” he said, sitting in his office, which doubles as a conference room. “It’s the people; I love the people.”
In the last 38 years, Grasty has witnessed a recurring cycle of economic ups and downs. When the Monaco Coach factory permanently closed its doors last month, Grasty knew what would happen in Burns the next day.
“The bars and taverns fill up. The jail fills up. There are more arrests for spousal and child abuse. There are more demands on mental health services. You go into the stores and you can feel it … immediately,” he said. “It’s tearing this community apart.”
Grasty and other county staff are working to bring steady employment to this chronically depressed rural area.
The county, Grasty likes to point out, is rich in timber, minerals, rangeland and wind — almost all on public land. But, he adds with frustration in his voice, environmental laws prevent the county residents from profiting off those resources.
“I personally blame the environmental movement,” he said. “They brought an awareness that probably should have been made. We probably shouldn’t have been logging as much as we were. But they went too far past that.”
Environmental groups are opposing plans for a wind farm near Steens Mountain that champions like Grasty argue would bring jobs and tax revenue to Harney County. Grasty thinks it’s ironic that the federal government is spending billions to help pull places like Harney County out of a deep recession.
“We don’t need money from the national coffers. We need (to be allowed to use the surrounding) riches that we’re not allowed to touch,” he said.
Meanwhile, rumors have started rumbling through the community that another manufacturing business is set to open in the old mill buildings in Hines.
“It’s just gossip right now; nobody has said anything official,” Cunningham said. “But … you know, we need some hope.”
Lily Raff can be reached at lraff@bendbulletin.com or 541-617-7836.
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