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Submitted By: dixiegainer@gmail.com – Click to email about this post

Sixteen state attorneys general asked a federal judge Feb. 4 to block the federal vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.
The sixteen states represented are Louisiana, Montana, Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia. They filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
Omicron''s resistance to COVID-19 vaccines and healthcare labor shortages are at the center of the argument put forth by the attorneys general. “Simply put, the situation has changed,” the lawsuit reads. “And that reveals a fundamental, structural defect in the rule — its one-size-fits-all approach doesn''t account for developing data and circumstances.”
Fourteen of the attorneys general are from the 24 states that were affected by the Jan. 13 Supreme Court decision that upheld CMS'' vaccination mandate for eligible staff at healthcare facilities participating in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. In a 6-3 decision, the court blocked enforcement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration''s vaccinate-or-test mandate for businesses with 100 or more employees.
Healthcare facilities in all of the 16 states except Tennessee and Virginia face a deadline of Feb. 14 for their employees to receive at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, with a deadline of March 15 for full vaccination. Healthcare facilities in Tennessee and Virginia had a first-dose deadline of Jan. 27 with a full vaccination deadline of Feb. 28. (Deadlines for each state are listed here.)
A CMS spokesperson told Becker''s the agency does not comment on matters in litigation.

Submitted By: barbaraandchuck@nehalemtel.net – Click to email about this post

Chapter 8: Housing is Key for Coastal Businesses to Find—And Keep—Employees from the series: “What’s the Story with Housing in Tillamook County”
In 2002 Debra Greenlee moved to Manzanita. A life-long Oregonian born in Portland, she got a job managing the San Dune Tavern, a renowned Manzanita icon built in 1935 and beloved by locals and visitors. In 2005 she was able to buy the Tavern and changed the name to San Dune Pub. In those days she was open 7 days a week for lunch and dinner from 11:30 to midnight and had 32 employees. Now she has 9 employees, which includes the owners, and is only open 20 hours a week, Fri-Mon 4-9. She can’t get workers because they can’t get housing. The current employees have housing because they have lived here and worked for her for a long time. One 40-year-old employee returned to North County after being away for some years but is living with her mother because she can’t find housing. The San Dune Pub is losing a lot of money and patrons are unhappy that it isn’t open more. Visitors need to be educated about why services are so curtailed. Debra tells them it’s about housing. Investors have approached Debra to ask if she would consider selling her business and she has thought about it. But the investors ask if there is enough housing for employees and she has to tell them there isn’t. As early as 2019 she knew there was a serious housing crisis and went to city officials to find out what could be done. One suggestion from city officials was that she get the merchants together to talk about it. Debra expressed frustration that it can be hard for businesses to add more to their plate. Since she and her partner now work 10-12 hours a day, they just didn’t have the time to take this on. They are baby boomers and feel that they can’t work at this pace forever. If there was adequate workforce housing, they and other merchants could have more employees, be open more hours, and have less stress. But she feels it’s only getting worse. In past years, rentals in Manzanita were available and affordable and a person working at the Pub could make a decent living. Students and young people could get summer jobs at the beach in those days. That’s a bygone era. Now workers have to drive from Tillamook or Seaside or find roommates to share a place if they can find it. Affordable rentals just don’t exist. San Dune Pub is far from the only coastal business facing these challenges. *According to the 2019 Housing Needs Analysis (HNA) 1 in 4 workers in Tillamook County drive over 50 miles one way to work. Debra is one of 85 business owners who responded to an employer survey about housing that was distributed by the Tillamook County Housing Commission in October. 54 of those businesses employ ten or fewer employees. Over 50% of the respondents facing employee shortages were businesses in the hospitality and services sectors. Virtually all employers told the Housing Commission that attainable housing contributes to community vitality. Housing for employees builds stable families and communities, strengthens local businesses'' employee hiring and retention, and builds the customer base to strengthen local businesses. And employers recognize that housing promotes improvement of the social determinants of community health and personal well-being, and ensures that public sector employees who serve the entire community in education, healthcare, governance, safety (firefighters, EMS, police) can find places to live. When asked, “How has your business addressed the workforce housing shortage on behalf of your current or prospective employees?”, Debra, like more than half of the other respondents, said, “We would like to, but not sure how.” And like most employers, when asked, “How has your business addressed any shortage of employees resulting from lack of available workforce housing?”, San Dune has offered higher wages, flexible schedules, shared positions, and shortened business hours and days of operation. It’s clear that economic drivers are wreaking havoc on local housing markets and that it will take everyone working together to find short-term and long-term solutions to increase workforce housing. The Tillamook County Housing Commission is actively gathering input from a wide range of perspectives, which includes re-launching the employer survey in 2022, emphasizing that it hopes to see more businesses offer feedback. What would Debra do about housing if she were “queen for a day”? Her solution would be to buy up property in the surrounding rural area and build a workforce neighborhood with smaller homes that would be affordable to someone making $15-18 per hour. She dreams that all the businesses in Manzanita would have enough employees so that they would be less stressed, and visitors would be satisfied with services. With tears in her eyes and passion in her voice, Debra expressed how important this is to her. She is frustrated and deeply concerned. She is very concerned about where Manzanita will end up without housing, without enough employees, with stressed-out business owners and dissatisfied visitors. She feels change needs to happen.
* The full 2019 Housing Needs Analysis can be found at www.co.tillamook.or.us/sites/default/files/fileattachments/housing_commission/page/57834/tillamook_hna_final_report_v2.pdf
This story is brought to you by the Tillamook County Housing Commission''s outreach effort to increase workforce housing in Tillamook County. For more housing stories and information, visit www.co.tillamook.or.us/bc-hc. If you have a housing story to share, email it to TillamookCoHousingCommission@gmail.com.

Submitted By: dixiegainer@gmail.com – Click to email about this post

legislative bills with no sponsor.

I always look to find out the sponsor of bills – Who wants this particular bill passed? It is getting harder and harder to access any information from our state legislature. I found out today that our legislature is not open to the public and they are taking public commentary with “ZOOM” If they don’t like what you are saying they press the “MUTE” button. In my mind this is no representation at all and I do believe there is a law that says that the legislature can not pass bills unless it is open to the public. This is not Democracy people, but I suspect that people don’t care very much today about Democracy.

Here is a mystery: Help us find out who are the legislators behind certain bills.
Most bills this session or any session have a chief sponsor, maybe even a bunch of regular sponsors. They make it clear which legislators wanted their fellow legislators to consider a bill. Their names are right there on the bills.
But there is a subset of bills without any such clarity. The residents of Oregon can’t know by looking at a bill who is behind it.

We went through the bills that were scheduled for some mention during the legislative session on Tuesday, Feb. 1, and found three, Senate Bills 1521 and 1522 and House Bill 4031.
SB 1521 would prohibit a school district from firing their superintendent for acting in compliance with state or federal law. This bill was introduced, at least in part, to prevent superintendents from being fired for complying with pandemic restrictions, such as masking and distance learning. It was apparently introduced at the request of the Senate Interim Committee on Education. All the members of the committee? One of them?

SB 1522 has so many disparate pieces it’s hard to sum up. It’s 20 pages long. It also has to do with education. It covers access to contact information for graduate students, requiring school districts to allow students to apply certain credits toward graduation, requirements for homeschooled students to participate in athletics and more. It was also at the request of the Senate Interim Committee on Education.
House Bill 4031 establishes a state goal that the percentage of diverse employees employed by the Department of Education reflects the percentage of diverse students in public schools. This one comes from the House Interim Committee in Education at the request of the Department of Education.
Now why would legislators allow bills to be introduced without putting a legislator’s name on it? It’s not because legislators are dissolute, lazy and work-shy or too busy.
It’s, in part, because they can. The rules of the House and Senate allow it. It’s Rule 12 in the House Rules. But legislators make those rules for introducing bills. So they must want it.
We aren’t particularly worried about any of these three bills. The concern is the mystery that enables legislators to conceal what they are doing from their constituents. The power to act in hiding and set in motion new laws in secrecy is great power. And that has no place in a government that is supposed to be transparent. It has no place in the Oregon Legislature.

This article is from The Oregon Catalyst