In the mountainous high desert of Grant County, Ore., America’s battle over infrastructure appears hopelessly misguided.
On paper, Grant County appears no different from any other solidly Republican rural area. More than 75% of residents voted to re-elect Donald Trump last year.
Grant County was a timber-producing powerhouse until changes in the forest-products industry and environmental regulations upended the local economy. The county has lost jobs and population almost every year since the 1990s.
Though the poverty rate matches some of urban Portland’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, historically, there has been little appetite for the sort of ambitious, expensive government proposals in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan.
Politics here often follows a simple rule: If Portland likes it, we’re against it. Yet, Grant County has hatched a counterintuitive effort to reverse years of economic decline by becoming more like … Portland.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
John Day, the county’s largest city with roughly 1,750 people, has embarked on a series of infrastructure projects to transform it into a model environmental community, what City Manager Nick Green called “the first self-sustaining community in the country.” The plan rests on a $13 million wastewater treatment plant that will replace the city’s existing 72-year-old facility with a hydroponic system capable of recycling up to 80 million gallons of wastewater per year — essential in a dry region prone to drought and wildfires.
The recycled water will be used in a network of high-technology greenhouses where the city is test-piloting a program to grow fruits and vegetables under controlled, water-efficient conditions for local consumption and export. Most county agriculture is dedicated to cattle feed, forcing local stores to import produce.
The water also will be used at Malheur Lumber Company, Grant County’s last remaining sawmill, which was saved from obsolescence nearly a decade ago by an unusual coalition of loggers, environmentalists and state and local lawmakers.
The plan’s final step calls for replacing another local sawmill, shuttered decades ago, with a wood pulp digester that will use lumber mill byproducts to generate energy for the wastewater treatment plant and greenhouses. Surrounding land will be developed into a recreational area and what the city calls an “innovation hub,” with office buildings, greenhouses and, some hope, a community college.
“John Day is like a 100-year-old startup,” Green said.
How did such a future-oriented, climate-friendly plan take root in Trump country?
The initiative is the result of a countywide “Future Vision” series of surveys and conversations conducted in 2017, during which residents overwhelmingly supported development projects that addressed local environmental problems and boosted the region’s attractiveness to tourists and remote workers — people impressed by wood pulp digesters and intact old-growth forests.
After years of back-to-back wildfires, drought, job losses and shrinking towns and schools, it became obvious that “we need to adapt to survive,” he said. “We can’t live in the past anymore.” Some longtime residents still hold out for a return to timber-harvesting glory days, Green said. Others balk at the plan’s high cost — $23 million so far, paid for with a combination of state and federal grants and loans plus local taxes and a sewer rate increase.
Blue Mountains Forest Partners, the nonprofit that helps to guide sustainable forest management in Grant County, is among the first in what is now a network of roughly two dozen similar organizations throughout the Pacific Northwest.
The forest collaboratives, as they are known, are credited with helping to broker a fragile truce in the region’s timber wars.
Today, alongside the timber industry and agriculture, Grant County’s dominant economic sectors are health care, local schools, transportation services and local and federal government. A recent economic assessment staked future growth on high-technology agriculture, tourism, telecommuting and higher education.
The 4,529-square-mile county has a well-staffed hospital with specialist doctors and a nursing home but residents must drive two hours across two counties to attend community college.
Jim Hinch is a senior editor at Guideposts magazine.