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Well, it’s not ALL circumstances beyond our control.

I join Cheryl Gushman in her lamentations about the poor state of Baker City’s healthcare in general and the decline of St. Alphonsus Hospital in particular.

But let’s not forget that Baker City, Baker County and most of Eastern Oregon have adhered to, promoted, and proudly crowed about “no growth” attitudes and policies for nearly a century. So it’s a little harder than it may appear to play the victim now.

Baker City has not substantially changed either in population or economics since my folks were youngsters here in the 1950s (a broad period of growth, by the way, for the United States as a whole).

As the saying goes, “You’re either growing, or your dying.”

Way back when, Baker City passed on what has become Eastern Oregon University. City fathers hardly bothered even discussing it, opting instead to accept a prison. We like our newcomers locked up, I guess, rather than wandering loose, spending mom and dad’s money on housing units and in coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores, entertainment venues and myriad other businesses.

Similarly, over the years, Baker City has been notorious for not “playing ball” with other moderately sized businesses, some of them big employers, that considered locating here. Greg Smith was once an economic development coordinator for both Baker and Morrow counties. In 2013 or so I asked him, pointedly, why every outfit that looked at BOTH places ended up in Morrow County. I’ll admit I thought Smith was doing a disservice to Baker County. But he had an easy answer. In general, it seemed, Baker County and Baker City weren’t willing to give businesses any breaks on sometimes-hefty system development fees that other places negotiated as normal practice. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, our welcoming spirit didn’t extend to those folks.

Baker County terminated the contract with Smith’s company in 2019, citing as a reason the continued drop in county lodging tax revenues that paid the economic development bill.

Again: “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

We don’t want, apparently, the tax revenues associated with all those businesses, housing units, and unknown etcetera that we’ve missed out on. We don’t want to embrace a new tax source like marijuana dispensaries because. … well, just because we’re old fashioned. We don’t want Baker to change.

It’s easier, I guess, to erase services year after year from the list of city offerings to residents. And then cobble up special fees when budget shortfalls happen year after year, because the only thing that reliably grows in Baker City is the cost of government.

The economic world Baker City now negotiates has changed. When events like the recent pandemic shuts down businesses right and left, those revenue sources might not open up again. Corporations like the one that controls St. Alphonsus Hospital have no interest in taking care of Bakerites just because it’s “the right thing to do.”

The more Baker City becomes a backwater removed from the modern economic flow, the fewer professionals like doctors and nurses will want to move here. The less monetarily successful a birthing center and an intensive care facility become, the less distant stockholders will care about us.

Because, sad but true, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And, sad but true, you’re dying, Baker City.

Doug Darlington

Baker City