Grant County group enumerates reasons to join Idaho

Two years ago, Grant County residents passed a ballot measure that requires the county court discuss the idea of becoming part of Idaho. The measure passed with 62% of the vote. Grant County Court officials will next take up discussion of the idea in August and December. Sandie Gilson is the Grant County captain of Citizens of Greater Idaho, the group that has championed this cause across Eastern Oregon. Gilson joins us to talk through the reasons why this move might be appealing to some Grant County residents.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to Greater Idaho. That’s the name of the movement among rural Oregonians to break away from Oregon and join their more conservative neighbors to the east. About a third of Oregon counties, including Grant County, have voted to have their local county commissions take up this issue. Earlier this month, people in Wallowa County weighed in on this question. At last count, the “join Idaho” votes had a razor thin margin over the “stay in Oregon” ones. Later this week, we’ll hear from a Grant County resident who is in the “stay in Oregon” camp. But right now, I’m joined by Sandie Gilson. She’s the Grant County captain of Citizens of Greater Idaho, which has championed this cause across Eastern Oregon. Sandie, thanks very much for joining us here.

Sandie Gilson: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

Miller: Was there a particular moment a few years ago when you decided you were in favor of moving the state line. What was it?

Gilson: The CAT tax.

Miller: The Corporate Activities Tax?

Gilson: Yes.

Miller: Why?

Gilson: Number one, I feel it’s a very unfair tax. It taxes your gross income, everything over a million dollars is taxed. And you start thinking about the businesses that affects, that’s our pharmacies who have a less than a 3% margin of profit, our grocery stores. It can hit a rancher that’s had a really good calf crop that year that sold that many cows and it’s on your gross. It’s not on your net profit. After you pay all your expenses.

Miller: These were versions of arguments that were made before the vote and arguments that we’ve heard since saying this, this was not a good idea, but obviously Oregonians, overall a majority, voted for it. And it became the law of the state. What was it about?

Gilson: Portland voted for this.

Miller: Well, Oregon as a whole, the majority of Oregonians voted for it. But clearly, much more on the west side than on the east side. That’s when you say “Portland.” I take your point there and maybe that gets to your larger point, I guess. I’m wondering why this was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back for you?

Gilson: Because it limits the amount that the government… the government is limiting the amount that we grow our businesses. No business wants to pay another tax that they can’t afford. Therefore, they’re not going to grow their business any bigger than $800,000 per year. And that stops it. We’ve also seen a mass closing of pharmacies throughout Eastern Oregon who could not afford these taxes.

Plus there was a little line in there that just really ticked me off. The opening line on the [Corporate] Activity Tax says this is a tax on businesses for the privilege of doing business in Oregon. I never thought it was a privilege to work for a state. I thought the state was privileged to have businesses.

Miller: You went door to door to get signatures for the Grant County effort, a successful one,

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: 60 something percent, right, of Grant County residents voted, so now three times a year, the County Commission has to take up this issue,

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: What was your pitch when you would go door to door? I’d imagine you weren’t just talking about the Corporate Activities Tax?

Gilson: No, I was talking about how it feels to live in Oregon. I would knock on the door. I would explain what I was there for, what I was doing. Some people would instantly jerk my clipboard out of my hand, yell for everybody in the house that was a registered voter to come sign and then shake my hand and send me away without any discussion at all. Other people, we’d have discussions about it.

Miller: What were the other issues that people would bring up? Or the questions they would have for you?

Gilson: Minimum wage came up quite a bit. The marijuana. Idaho is not a marijuana state, where Oregon is.

Miller: And so people who would ask you, they would say, “hey, I like living in a place where I can legally buy or use cannabis?”

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: And minimum wage, it’s like $7.25 or so in Idaho,

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: As opposed to, in a rural county now, more like $12 or $13,

Gilson:  It’s $12.50 currently. July 1st, it goes up to $13.20.

Miller: So how would you respond to both? Let’s, let’s take marijuana first.

Gilson: Marijuana, I believe, is gonna be federally legalized. And I was surprised that Trump didn’t do it and I’m surprised Biden hasn’t taken it up and I believe that we’ve got, what, 27 states now that legalize it, we’ve got over 50% of our states. And so I don’t feel that it’s a real state issue anymore. It’s more of a national issue. Minimum wage… nobody pays minimum wage anymore here.

Miller: You mean, because it’s too hard to hire people as it is.

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: So, employers are offering more? So even at, say, fast food restaurants here, they’re above minimum wage?

Gilson: They’re $15 an hour starting, depending on qualifications.

Miller: So you’re not worried? So, if tomorrow, we were sitting not in Oregon but in Idaho, you’re saying you don’t believe employers would have the starting wages for prospective employees, because they could?

Gilson: They could. I mean, it’s always within their wheelhouse to do that if they so choose. But they can’t hire people at $15 an hour and offering things. I mean, our local Subway is offering signing bonuses and they’re not getting people to sign up and they’re offering $15 an hour to start. If you can’t get workers, you have to pay for it. But not only is that happening here, it’s happening in Boise. I take trips into Boise for doctors and other things. You see signs on the McDonald’s there and the other fast food restaurants offering $15 an hour. It isn’t just Oregon. It’s Idaho too.

Miller: What’s your pitch to Portlanders or people on the west side of the state for what’s in this for them? Losing, I don’t know, two thirds of the land mass and losing the beautiful rectangle we have right now?

Gilson: You know, let’s take a look at the mess that Salem’s in right now. There’s no other way to call what’s happening in our current Senate anything but a mess.

Miller: The Republican walkout that has ground [things] to a halt?

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: Ok. So you’re saying “If you let us go, we won’t gum up your State Senate.” Is that your argument, in short?

Gilson: Correct. That’s part of it. I mean, if you don’t have the Republicans to fight with because we’ve all left, then you have the government that you want. We’re offering this to you. Number one. Number two, we had a study done by the Claremont Institute and it said that every taxpayer in the Portland to Eugene area, pays approximately $690 per year of their taxes to support Eastern Oregon.

Miller: Because of the imbalance of incomes.

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: So more money goes from west to east than the other direction,

Gilson: Correct. And what could you guys do in the west-side with that money?

Miller: You are a 5th generation Oregonian?

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: Let’s set aside the Corporate Activities Tax and everything we’ve been talking about so far. What does it mean to you to be an Oregonian?

Gilson: It doesn’t mean as much as it did when I was a child. When I was a child everything was supported by timber taxes and timber was one of the main industries in the state. My family actually did timber and milling on the Oregon Coast for a time and then moved out to Paisley to become farmers. Oregon used to be rural based. It isn’t anymore. And we’ve lost the rural base of Oregon to be overridden by the urban base population.

Miller: You’re talking about a couple of different things there and I do want to talk about what you see as the cultural differences. But part of the loss of logging jobs or milling jobs is not because of Oregon’s policies necessarily. It’s about a whole bunch of complicated things including federal law, globalization, mechanization and automation in mills, which has taken a big chunk of jobs away. We’ll talk, actually, more about mills and forest policy later this week.

But just switching the state line, moving it further west, it’s not gonna necessarily bring a bunch of timber jobs back or do you think it would?

Gilson: It wouldn’t necessarily bring back timber jobs. We’ve just had a mill restart here in Grant County, but yet there’s parts of the mill that can’t restart because Oregon won’t give them permits to do so. So it’s still lacking some of the jobs that it could have. One thing that Idaho does is they value their resources and reasonable use of them. And it would allow more reasonable use of the timber jobs or the ranching or even on federal land.

Miller: You’re saying even on federal land. How is it that more trees could be chopped down on federal land if that’s governed by federal law? How would a state line change that?

Gilson: It changes attitudes. I mean, federally, yes, there is going to be the federal rules, but the state rules for the state lands would definitely change. And same with mining. Mining is more on state regulations than on federal.

Miller: I mean, just to be clear, two thirds of the land in Grant County alone is controlled by the federal government,

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: So the vast majority of the land around us, the management of it, wouldn’t change if the state were to change. I wanna go back to what you were talking about in terms of sort of cultural differences. You’re saying that this has become an urban state. What do you see as the cultural differences between life here and life in Salem or Eugene or Portland or Beaverton or, you know, the Willamette Valley?

Gilson: I was raised in Paisley. We talked about that. I was raised on a farm. I started driving when I was five years old. I started working full time in the summers when I was eight in the hayfields. At 16, I drove a swather for the ZX Ranch down in Paisley 12 hours a day, six days a week and only 10 hours on Sunday for three months. It’s a different culture. We value work. We value self-reliance. We value getting out and taking care of yourself. We don’t run to the grocery store just because we run out of a cup of sugar. We know that if something happens, we’ve got to have enough supplies with us, you know, not prepper style. But we’ve got to be able to feed our family for a couple of weeks or a month if we have a major fire and we get cut off or if there’s a major snowstorm and we’re cut off for an amount of time because we can’t…we have to be self-sufficient here.

Miller: What’s wrong with a state where, what you’re describing exists, and, you know, a more densely populated urban life exists? I mean, there are plenty of people, and I think we’ll talk to them later this week, who say that there is beauty and value in that diversity?

Gilson: There is. But when there isn’t any compromise…one of the great things about our Republic that we started was it was supposed to be a compromise between different factions so that the compromise is where things works the best for both people. We no longer see that in Oregon. There is no longer a compromise or a work between the two sides.

Miller: What do you see as the logical end point to this? I mean, if you can switch states to join a political majority, then what about Democrats in Boise? Almost 50% of Boise residents voted for Joe Biden in 2020. It was very evenly split. What about Republicans in Multnomah County? I mean where does a splitting end and to which minorities are you ready to say “sorry, suck it up. You just have to stay there even though you’re not in control of that place?”

Gilson: Don’t we all pick and choose where we live?

Miller: But you’re not talking about picking and choosing where you live. You’re saying, “I want to get to stay where I live…”

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: “…the line should move.” But you’re saying other people, they should have to move.

Gilson: I’m saying that there needs to be compromise in government. And everybody should listen to the minorities as much as they can and make it part of the final bill that comes. Whether that’s in Idaho with the Republicans, they need to listen to the Democrats, take in their concerns. The same is true with Oregon and Oregon is not doing that.

Miller: This gets to such an important point that Democrats in Florida or Texas and Republicans in Oregon are asking. I guess, at its simplest: what does the majority owe to the minority? What does it mean to actually listen to somebody but then to still go forward with some binary decision. Not everything can be evenly split down the middle.

So I guess I’m wondering what it would take for you, as a conservative Oregonian in a rural part of the county, to say, “yeah, I was listened to. I didn’t get exactly what I wanted, but I honestly feel like my concerns were taken seriously.” What would it take for you to say I still have a home here?

Gilson: To see changes in legislation and the way the governor reacts, the way the senate majority leader reacts, the way leadership reacts to us. Right now, they don’t. You hear from everyone from our president to our senate leaders and to our governor, “No, this is what we’re going to do and we don’t care what you have to say.” That’s very, very specific. You’re hearing that on [Oregon State Senate President] Rob Wagner. He will not negotiate on any of the senate bills that are making the Senate causing this walkout.

Miller: Is a negotiation for you saying, “OK, I will take this bill away, we won’t pass this bill on abortion or trans rights or we will repeal the corporate activities tax even though, you know, a pretty big majority of Oregonians vote in favor.” I’m still wondering what it takes for you to say, “OK, even though I don’t hold a political majority, I will abide by what the majority says?”

Gilson: It would take tempering of this stuff. I’ve read through the bill on what they called abortion rights and the transgender rights. The thing I object to is reducing the age to 10 years old without parental consent and minors being able to authorize medical.

Miller: So for you without getting into the specific details of bills, you’re saying that there are, for any given bill, some specific things where you’d like to see compromise?

Gilson: Correct.

Miller: How hopeful are you that you will feel at home in Oregon?

Gilson: Not at all.

Miller: Does this make you sad?

Gilson: Extremely. I mean my great, great grandfather was one of the first people to come out here and settle this area. And Oregon has totally and completely changed from what it was and what brought us out here on the Oregon Trail and brought everybody the chance of prosperity. And now we don’t see that chance of prosperity anymore to be able to start something, run a business and achieve things because the government is limiting what we’re doing.

Miller: Sandie Gilson, thanks very much for joining us here. I really appreciate it.

Gilson: You’re welcome. You have a good day.

Miller: You too. Sandie Gilson is one of the local leaders of the Greater Idaho movement in Grant County. As I mentioned later this week, we’re going to talk to a Grant County resident who wants to remain an Oregonian.

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