Michelle Wilde Anderson's new book, The Fight to Save the Town, features the stories of three municipalities and one county, the latter local government entity being Josephine County, Oregon. I've written about Josephine County in prior posts, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Now, I'm sharing just a short excerpt about "JoCo" from Anderson's book.
As many locals say with both pride and shame, rural Josephine is a “rough and tumble” place.
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So it was that Josephine managed a radical experiment in local government downsizing. In recent decades, budget cuts eliminated most local public functions other than law enforcement, then leveled law enforcement, too. For years, the county ran by principles of independence: if you want a library, volunteer to fundraise private dollars to support one. If you want to reduce break-ins, volunteer to patrol your streets at night. If you want emergency law enforcement, sign up to take your neighbors’ calls on your cell phone and dispatch with your own gun.
The remaining local officials, however, still had to govern. The words “Man in the Arena” float around as the screensaver message on Josephine County Sheriff Dave Daniel’s desktop. He keeps it as a reminder of Teddy Roosevelt’s speech celebrating the man who is not just a critic, but “who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.” The sheriff has to be like that—a man who fights from within government, trying to hold on to at least a “night-watchman state” as politics and funding tighten around him. “We’re driving an eighteen wheeler, and we’ve got ten wheels on right now, maybe nine,” Daniel said in 2016.
Back then, Sheriff Daniel was bracing for even further cuts. The federal government had been sending special funding to Josephine and other “timber counties” in Oregon for more than twenty years, but those payments were sure to end. Federal funding dated back to an infamously polarizing environmental conflict: the battle over logging the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, where the endangered northern spotted owl nests in one of the world’s most complex ecosystems. Recompense for the lost local jobs and public revenues could not go on forever, but neither could Josephine easily replace federal dollars. A 1990s tax revolt in Oregon cinched Josephine in a legal straitjacket by locking local taxes into an unsustainably low rate and requiring voting majority approval of any increases.
Given those tax laws, it wasn’t enough that Sheriff Daniel and other government officials believed that the cuts to services had gone too far. To do something about it, they had to build a grassroots movement in favor of new taxes in one of the most anti-government places in America. You can still make your own damn coffee, they argued, but a local government needs a few jail cells and some trained patrol officers to dispatch for 911 calls. It needs the kind of investigators who can coax witnesses and family members out of the shadows in cases like Caitlyn Strauser’s murder. Josephine has become a pioneer county once again. Its residents have been called upon to restore the public law enforcement that their Gold Rush forefathers built 150 years ago. Or to let it go. (pp. 84-85)
Not long after this passage, you learn about how the tax cuts in Josephine County caused a deputy based in Wolf Creek to have to move back to the county's urban core, and the deleterious impacts of that move on the well-being of Wolf Creek's residents.
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