At a Thursday board retreat in Pendleton, officials from the Oregon Department of Forestry went over the grim statistics that have come to define modern fire seasons: In 2024, fires burned more than 1.93 million acres in the state, 18 times the amount compared to 2023.

Department staff also highlighted the ripple effects that go beyond acres burned and firefighting costs.

Joe Hessel, an ODF incident commander and former district forester for northeast Oregon, said the department normally relies on landowners like Eastern Oregon ranchers and farmers to share knowledge of their land with firefighters. While that relationship persisted, Hessel said there was a growing sense of dissatisfaction among some landowners over how the department responded to the fires this year.

Landowners peppered officials throughout the season with questions about the number of personnel the department sent, the equipment they used, the length of time they spent fighting the fire and their overall approach, Hessel said.

“Landowners didn’t want to hear about all the other fires, the lack of resources, or anything else that could be viewed as an excuse for what they viewed as a less than full fledged effort to deal with an emergency on their property,” he said.

The rising fire protection rates landowners are paying to the state add to the tension.

“It’s sort of a perfect storm for frustration to boil over,” he said. “I believe higher than desired rates have created tension between ODF and landowners at a level that didn’t used to be there, and that the partnership we relied on for years is under significant stress.”

Hessel said the main obstacle is that the system is overloaded. The size and intensity of the fires this year didn’t match the resources the department and its partners had on the ground.

Eastern Oregon ranchers were hit hard by fires almost immediately. The Durkee Fire, which burned nearly 300,000 acres in Baker and Malheur counties – destroyed wide swaths of rangeland. Local farmers said they considered selling some of the cattle that weren’t killed by the fire because they might not be able to feed them anymore.

While the department will continue to fight fires each summer, the board didn’t have any easy answers for a long-term solution.

Board member Brenda McComb, a retired forest science professor, asked if officials should revisit the state’s fire suppression laws to focus more on fires threatening human life and property rather than trying to put out every wildfire.

“My question wasn’t looking for the financial fix, but rather the financial balance,” she said. “Can we spend less money with the military approach to putting out fires and divert that money to post-fire recovery?”

It was a suggestion that wasn’t fully embraced by other board members and department staffers. State forester Cal Mukumoto referenced a cattle pasture the board visited the day before.

“That’s someone’s life. That’s someone’s livestock. That’s what we’re talking about here. People live in and are part of this community and have generations here that have this culture,” he said. “We’re told to go out there, suppress those fires, and that’s what we’ll do.”

Mukumoto said firefighting policy would have to be left to the Legislature. At least one legislator was listening: state Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, who was in the audience. Last session, Golden co-sponsored a bill that proposed a ballot measure that would have taxed timber companies to help pay for wildfire costs. It died after receiving a committee hearing.

The Ole Miss Rebels are in the midst of a bye week, so that gives plenty of time for some big-picture questions to the team’s head coach.

According to FootballScoop.com, Lane Kiffin was asked on Wednesday’s SEC Coaches Teleconference about a particular move made by the Oregon Ducks in last week’s win over the Ohio State Buckeyes. Essentially, Oregon seemed to intentionally put 12 men on its defense for a penalty during a crucial Ohio State possession.

Since the clock did not reset after the infraction, the Ducks were able to defend the Buckeyes with 12 men on the field and run time off the clock in the process, just giving up five penalty yards in return. This move has been the talk of college football since Saturday, and Kiffin tied this instance to Ole Miss’ controversy of allegedly faking injuries to slow down offensive possessions.

The allegations had become so strong recently that the Rebels released a statement on the matter last week.

“It’s interesting, though,” Kiffin said, per FootballScoop.com. “I find all this national talk about someone faking an injury, and people shouldn’t do that; I’m not saying I don’t agree with. 

“But, I just found it interesting that everybody thinks this is awesome that you went against the rules and put more people on the field, but then everybody’s [up in arms] when faking an injury. So just found it interesting.”

Kiffin does have a point: it does seem like a bit of a double standard. Of course, injuries are a much more serious matter in football than simply playing with 12 men on the field. Injuries are real and can hamper a player’s physical health and future career, and faking those is a bad look.

Regardless, it appears the NCAA closed that loophole that the Ducks potentially exposed last week, issuing a rules “interpretation” that gives the offense in this scenario the choice of resetting the game clock to the time before the snap. If Oregon did this move on purpose, it will now be a thing of the past.

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A house in Bend that sold for $2.5 million tops the list of the most expensive residential real estate sales in central Oregon in the past week.

In total, 91 residential real estate sales were recorded in the area during the past week, with an average price of $728,688. The average price per square foot was $357.

The prices in the list below concern real estate sales where the title was recorded during the week of Oct. 7 even if the property may have been sold earlier.