Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 01-23-26_FRIDAY_7AM

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

The big storm is the big topic with Greg Roberts, Mr. Outdoors at Rogue Weather. State Rep. Dwayne Yunker decries pathetic Oregon state health outcomes and ratings...oh, but we have insurance....yeah...

This hour of the Bill Myers Show podcast is proudly sponsored by Klausur drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for more than 50 years. Find out more about them at Klausurrilling.com. And yeah, conservative talk, also outdoor talk and fun talk whenever we get around to it. As a matter of fact, at the end of Mr. Outdoors little spiel that we're going to be doing here, we got goodies to give away from the Fox 26, KMVU, Fox 26, of course, our sister station here. And did you ever see that show called Extracted, Mr. Outdoors? Do you ever see that?

I have an interesting concept. I mean, they're dropping these people off in random, quote, unquote. And then their family gets to sit and monitor and watch them. When the family thinks they've had enough, the family will more way to term it. Hit the button. Yep, they hit the button. And then have them taken out. And out they go, income the helicopters or the rescue team, so to speak.

And I know it's going to start. The premiere of season two is on. Monday. Well, I have some pull over hoodie, some pullover hoodies from that, and also some extracted sleeping bags. You know, so it's one of those things work. And, you know, and if you don't use it in your everyday life, put it in your go bag or put it in your car when we have all this bad weather coming, which you're going to talk about, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, that would be a great idea. What kind of thickness and temperature rating and all that? The sleeping bags have probably not rated for temperatures below 40 degrees or something like that.

But, hey, the price is right, okay? Yeah, exactly. All right, so anyway, of course, Greg Roberts is with Rogue Weather.com. He's always holding it down there, and the outdoor report every Friday. It's going to be Monday here for the next few weeks here as you're doing all these outdoor shows around the area. And it's all sponsored by Oregon Truck and Auto Authority on Airway Drive in Medford, Mr. Outdoors. So the big story, of course, is what's happening nationwide, and it's breathless on all the national channels. But I guess it is going to be a pretty big thing because of especially the icing.

Isn't that really what we're looking at here? Yeah, times now where you get this and then the storm just doesn't live up to it and people are like, really, that's kind of why you won't see me do that until we really are going to have something really serious happen because, as I say, sit here watching this on the view from space, this storm is legit, and it is going to create some pretty significant impacts across portions of the country that don't normally deal with really severe winter weather. We have the low that's going to be. Everything is pushing into Baja, California right now. There is a very deep, tropical, subtropical moisture. out in front of it coming up ahead of it. So there's the moisture component. And then everybody's like,

wait a minute, you just said tropical and subtropical moisture. So how do we get ice from it? Well, coming back to our part of the world, the high is parked just off the coast. And watching the systems back out over the open ocean, we've got a significant storm that's moving due north in the Gulf of Alaska, which is atypical. It's moving. north because the high is pushing it north, and over the top of that, there's a jet stream going right through the Arctic regions. It dives right down. So you have all this very cold Arctic air coming in, and it's clashing and meeting up with that subtropical and tropical moisture. That is how you get a major ice storm that is going to hit everywhere, basically,

from eastern New Mexico all the way across over to Georgia, the Carolinas. By the time we get through this thing, the impact is just going to be huge. And the problem is the icing, because anytime you get over a tenth of an inch of ice, now you've got something that's going to be able to do significant damage to trees, to the power grid. and we're looking at spots in the southeastern U.S., there could be an inch or more of ice develop. That is insane weight on power lines when you look at those runs. It's going to totally destroy the power grid back there.

Anywhere that you get over a half inch of ice to develop, it pretty much eliminates your power grid. And for the amount of area that this is going to cover, we're going to see power. outages that you might even have some of the more rural locations be looking at a month or more without power and with that cold Arctic air still coming down into these areas because this isn't going to break down any time soon. We'll probably get started a week from today into next week. They're looking at any number of days back there of coming in in places like Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, northern Florida, into the Carolinas, and then just to the north of that, where it's not so much the ice, it's going to be snow.

And we're looking at some spots, potentially seeing a foot of snow in places that I think their annual average snowfall is an inch. Medford's is four and a half inches. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like when Medford gets a foot of snow or if Medford ever gets a, foot of snow, it's a big deal for that reason. We're not really set up to handle that. Yeah. In winter, I mean, the North Medford gym collapsed.

When we had, depending on where you were in the valley, six to nine inches of snow. However, the North Medford gym collapse was actually set up by the big snow bomb we had in 2017 when we got a foot of snow. Yeah, it actually weakened the, I guess it ended up weakening that beam, didn't it? that big cross beam. And you know, it's, you look at something like that and, you know, thinking back to that collapse and how everybody had been under it all those years, you know, over before it, and what could have happened, unfortunately, didn't. Nobody heard in that.

Well, and then the other thing was, let's just be thankful, we did not have a strong earthquake in the gym or we've got basketball games going on because that beam would have failed with a strong earthquake, and I'm talking something 6.5 magnitude or higher, which we could have here without any question. So, yeah, we got very lucky in all kinds of ways that Jim collapsed how and when it did. All right. Now, Greg, what I was wondering here, you were mentioning that this big storm is, of course, going to be hitting areas that aren't really used to a lot of this, like Texas. Is this similar to the storm that brought the Texas power grid to its knees with it being so cold that you couldn't even keep the power going to keep the windmills turning?

Because you had to heat the crankcase. The oil thickened up and everything just kind of froze. Yeah. And, you know, that's just a state of Texas thing. This time that's going to be much more widespread over a bigger portion of the country, but you nailed it talking about that because, yes, we're expecting to see a repeat. Now, Texas has talked about how they improved their system learning from that. I guess we'll find out, huh? We're going to find out. Yeah, well, this is the challenge when you're dependent on that renewable deal.

Of course, if they can keep the natural gas flowing, that's probably going to be the key, you know, the key saving grace, maybe. Well, you know, and we've got so many people who've, you know, lived here and have relocated there, mostly for political reasons. They're what I literally call political refugees. I did hear from one of them who was a good friend of mine. He was basically my wingman when I was in Redmond Fire Department. He and his wife now live in Texas. And I said, oh, brother, you'd be taking this thing seriously.

And he shot a message back. and he goes, no, I'm going to take this one real seriously because he said when I saw what they were predicting for us, he's like, great, we're going to get like Pineville-type snow with Portland Ice Storm. Yeah, well, we'll be watching the news for sure over the weekend, and I guess prep for some disaster recovery in those realms. But, you know, the real thing to think about, though, is what this could be doing to the transportation system, the network, the air network. Without any question. Yeah. I mean, we get people flying out of Medford going. going to get hit so hard by this winter storm. Air travel will be significantly impacted. And then, of course, travel on the roads, well, as if this ice and snow isn't bad enough, you're going to have

things like power poles, power lines, trees, all kinds of stuff coming down, not to mention vehicles that have abandoned or transportation by every form back there will probably be brought to a screeching call. You know, I'm thinking about, you know, my brother, Mike is so proud of his Tesla super truck or whatever they call that thing, the cyber truck. He got one of those. And I'm wondering to myself, okay, now, Mike, don't be one of those people stuck on the freeway in the cyber truck because there's no way to get an extra gallon of electrons to it.

This is also going to underscore what a stupid idea that was. Your vehicle when there's no power. He actually said that he's happy about it because he could actually run his house for a while. And that's true. You can do that. It is a reverse power bank, right? Yeah, but you better be thinking beyond that. And fortunately, most of the people back there have a thing called a generator because if it's not this scenario in the winter, what is far more typical for them are the severe thunderstorms creating winds over 60 miles an hour.

pretty typically 60 to 90 miles an hour that knock out power, then you've got tornadoes. The people back there actually set up better for that in that sense because back there, if you don't have a generator that could run your home, everybody kind of looks at you what, like you're crazy? Oh, yeah. Well, he does have that too. We're just talking about. Yeah, so he does have that.

So he has the generator, and he has the Tesla cyber truck there. But, you know, well, you know, Mike, it's a midlife crisis, I guess. I'm just kidding him about that. Well, that friend of mine I was talking about, he and his wife built this beautiful new house where they live northwest of the Dallas Metro. And one of the things he was showing in the pictures of a grader that itself protected spake. Cool. Why did you do that?

And he goes, man, I have to tell you, another place that I lived once, Fargo Moorhead, I never saw hail like I saw there, you know, when you would get through. Of course, I never saw storms ever, even living in Tornado Alley in Ohio back when I was a kid, you know, up in the northern part of the state and things like that. But living in Fargo, Moorhead, and you would just have the ring of lightning going around you, like a curtain routinely in some of those worst storms. We have no weather by comparison to what they put up with. Not even.

And when I went back and I was finishing completing, and we went back to the University of Oakland, and we went out in the field. And the first time I ever saw a tornadic warring paradigm on what I thought I knew about a thunderstorm because that thing wasn't anything like I had ever seen here in Medford. It was just with my mouth wide open because I'd never seen anything like that. I couldn't conceive of anything like that. Nothing in my life experience prepared me to level. of storm and what it was doing even not producing a tornado.

Yeah. Well, welcome to Mother Nature's Power, and we got a lot of that this weekend. This weekend, rather, they were going to be looking at. Now, here it's going to be pretty mild, but the change is coming, right? So why don't you give us an idea before you take off here where we're headed in the outdoors for this weekend? And I guess the change is, what, about a week from now? What are we looking at, huh?

Yeah, we're looking at the change being about a week. week out. I mean, this ridge that's over us got all kinds of strength. So it's going to take it a pretty good period of time to be able to break down and move out. But when we get to the time frame next week, we definitely will have a system that is start just north of the Bay Area in California, a bit of progression inland. Because again, this is going to take some time, to get all of this going, but it is in the following weekend when we're looking at that Friday through Saturday, Sunday, we're probably going to be looking at light amounts of rain, especially along the coast, in the Cascades, and trace amounts in the valleys west of the Cascades.

So, again, it's going to start off as a light event, but that's kind of. kind of cracking the door open, if you will. And as I said, going into this, we will then see the storm activity level pickup as we get into early February. And when it picks up the storm activity level, it also means that the storms will be dropping more precipitation in the form of rain and snow. So we're just about there, but truly we're going to have about another week of what we've got going on right now. All right, very good. Greg Roberts atrogweather.com.

It may have a question here for you, Greg. Hi, good morning. You're on with Greg. Who's this? Welcome. This is Roger. Hey, I had a question. I kind of got up your show a little late, but this new forest manager that Kotech appointed.

What is? I'm kind of curious of who she is and what she's about. Yeah, I don't know her. Greg, I know that they're making a big deal about the fact this is the first forest manager that's a female. It's been appointed here. You know? Well, you know, sorry, but when it comes to Oregon and anybody appointed by Kotech and her predecessor, I'm just like, anything I have seen that I was like, well, first a bit surprised about, but thrilled about is our friend Merv George Jr. decided to step away from the regional office in Portland and is now the supervisor of the Fremont-Winema National Forest over in. in Klamath. So that's the one appointment, you know, on a forestry level that I have seen

recently that made me really happy. I mean, I'm happy we get Merv directly back down here in Southern Oregon overjoyed about that. We'll wait and see what winds up happening on the regional level with Forest Service when we get into fire season this year because last year and the way they attacked fires on the Rogue River Susqueu National Forest in a way that I hadn't seen in years and years, that is what I call the Merv George effect. And I'm a little what happens when we lose that for the Forest Service. ODF, the state appointments, those kind of stuff. The good news is the political appointees in Salem to head ODF point not impacted how they're approaching fighting fire because the regional disdried guys that you hit the fires hard, you hit them early.

And Dan Quinoza, our district forester down here for O'DF in Jackson and Josephine counties, is definitely one of those guys. So I think it's a purely political appointment by Kotech as it usually is in Oregon. But luckily, to this point, that has never impacted the approach on fighting fire. Good. Hey, Greg, I appreciate to take on it. Roger, thanks with the question. And we'll catch you on Monday. Monday is going to be more about, I think, the wolf issue here in Southern Oregon. And we wanted to kind of dig into how the wolves are, well, they're getting used to humans. It's not really a good thing, right, Greg? No, it's not a good thing, but at least, you know, being involved with this, taking a look at it,

expressing concerns and outlining a plan, that got received by the right people, and we are going to change the approach on how we're going to deal with these wolves. And I will tell you right now, it's going to shift from mainly a concern about agriculture and wolves eating cattle to a legit public safety issue, which it really is. All right. Very good. We'll talk with you on Monday. You got it. See you then. Outdoor report, sponsored by Oregon Truck and Auto Authority on Airway. Drive in Metford. Oregon Truck and Auto Authority is celebrating its 20-year anniversary as the Rogue Valley's car truck, Jeep, and SUV accessory outfit headquarters.

Hi, I'm Cassie from Clauser Drilling, and I'm on KMED. Hey, appreciate you being here. 737. You know, I just realized that I had forgotten to give away the swag from Fox 26, you know, on the extracted show. I'll do that here before the top of the hour. Sorry about that. I got so involved with the conversation with Greg Roberts, it happens, okay?

Now then, the next conversation that I will get engrossed in, and I guess probably confused and forget about what else I'm really supposed to do. State rep Dwayne Yunker joins the show. Hello, Dwayne. Great to have you back. Morning, sir. Thanks, Bill. Thanks for having me back. It's great to talk with Southern Oregon and whoever else is following you that talk about the issues in Oregon.

All right. Now, are we still in legislative days right now? Where are we when it comes with the upcoming legislative session? I haven't paid as much attention to it as I probably should. Les of the days were last week, or, yeah, it's last, last week, not this week, but the week before. And we go into session a week from Monday, and 35 days of just hoping to get out of there without hurting Oregon more. Yeah, that's going to be the real challenge. What I'm really curious about is this whole situation in which the top Democrats are all saying,

we want to move the referendum on the ODOT gas tax and everything else. we want to move it to May, and they probably have the votes to do it, don't they? Yeah, they only need 31 votes to do that. We're going to fight them to the end because, you know, the referendum that people signed said November. I think it's November 2nd. That's what they wanted. That's the people signed. That's a quarter million people said, yes, we want this on the ballot in November.

Yeah, we want it in November, not in May. We didn't do it from May. We said November. Yes. But yet there does appear. to be constitutional authority or statutory authority for the legislature to do this. I don't know. You think there could be having to have some legal, legal fighting on this?

Hey, this is what the voters signed up for, and the legislature shouldn't be messing with this. I don't know how this works. I don't know if you've been talking with anybody or not about it. Yeah, I mean, this message just came out a couple days ago. Yeah. We had an idea they were going to try to pull anything they can to get this off the November ballot. Oh, yeah. First, they were going to try to have it repealed in the short session.

That's what they were trying to do. This one coming up, you were talking about. Yeah, they don't want to run against their record. So if they can get time between the May and November, it helps their chances of taking back seats or taking up more seats. The governor doesn't want to run on a record. I mean, we need her to run out her record. And so if it was on the November ballot, it would be there for her and her, her, her name there that, hey, she wants to raise taxes on Oregonians. And obviously, Republicans are saying, no, no, no, no. Yeah, and it would be a reminder then of just who

was at it. Remember, she dragged her feet on signing it so people couldn't fight it. It was all, it's Tina's Bill. She doesn't want to own it, I guess. Well, she wants to own it in maybe May. But she doesn't want to... Every Democrat voted for it, you know, so that's running again, so they have to, you know, they're mad because they were forced to, you know, support their governor. And so it looks bad on them. Let's going to look bad on them no matter what they do, because if they move it to May, we're going to hold them accountable for that, too, because they don't listen to the voters. They don't care. They just don't care. And another, so I guess the idea is fight as best you can. Keep us in the room on that one,

Dwayne. Now, another fight going on, the fight for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. And you were hanging out with that deal the other day, weren't you? Yeah, I was there. And his, um, uh, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, announcing thing a couple days ago. It was great. Over 500-some people packed in this thing. We had to open up the garage doors.

And Ed's been a great friend and a great colleague. He shares the office next door to me. And, you know, I've just grown to like Ed in his way of taking on things. He's a smart. You know, he's got a bachelor's and a master's degree from Stanford and engineering. And he owns his own key on his own company. He made, you know, the cone for a rocket ship for Elon Musk. You know, he's just a brilliant guy to have around, and he just tackles things.

So he has the finesse. You know, I just really impressed by his leadership. I'm just, I'm curious how he could bring the administrative state in Oregon to heal and actually make it work, because that's one of the biggest challenges that we have here. We hire all of these governors who, well, I guess, essentially, potentially our attorneys don't seem to really have executive experience other than the fact that they were able to get a lot of votes from the Democratic Party and a lot of campaign funding, you know, that kind of thing.

Ed actually seems to know how to run stuff, right? Seems that way. Yes, he has an experience of him and his wife. They're both engineers from Stanford, and they have run business. They have business smart people. His wife is, I mean, everywhere almost Ed goes, his wife's there. They're a team, and he's just a brilliant. man. And, you know, he has just a great way of, you know, explaining how things are working

wrong in Oregon and ways to fix them. And I just admire the guy. You know, him and I talk several times, like, talked several times a day. We're bouncing ideas, how to fix things. And he's been a great mentor because he's been there longer than I have. And so I just look up to him. And for me, I'm going to throw my hat behind the guy, I think, has the best chance. And one that I think you turn Oregon around if he's elected. Are we getting into a circular firing squad in the primary again? How many candidates do we have for the Republican nominee? I don't actually know.

I know one did announce it. I think it's named Patrick Hill. He's going to go behind Ed. And so there's some – you know, I would hope that some to say I don't have a chance of winning. I'm just putting my name out there. I mean, because there is. Lots of people, and they just don't have, you know, the push of the people. the support, the infrastructure.

And I'm going to tell you right now, speak with Ed. He's going to have some big guns to help him from outside the state of Oregon to help him campaign and everything. I mean, he's going to be big. Yeah, it does appear that the former Trailblazer is not going to be running. I haven't heard any word of you. I haven't heard any word about that. See, it's been very quiet. I hear lots of rumors, maybe Monday, you know, but again, I heard, you know,

I think someone on your show said that he'd be better off running for, against Merck. Merckley, I mean, I think so. Mercury needs to go. We can point to 40 years of our doom loop in Oregon, and it's one-party rules. So, you know, we need to change. Yeah, yeah, going on the news cycle here in Oregon is like doom scrolling, isn't it? Oh, right, we're doing that. Oh, no, we're doing this.

Speaking of which, I want to go into the latest story that you were bringing up here, and it had to do with Oregon's low rankings in America's health rankings. And I was reading this, this is a nationwide report, which came out recently, America's health rankings. And I downloaded that and I was taking a look at that. And Oregon has some good news, but it's amazing how many areas that this so-called health-conscious area just is, okay, well, we're circling the toilet pole in some ways. And I thought you had an interesting take on it. What happened? Yeah, I mean, there's several areas that, I mean, we can take them, you know, like,

insurance. Yeah, we have a lot of people insured, but they're all on Medicaid. You know, and that's not a healthy system. And we have a high homelessness rate. I think we're 48. We have overdose, suicide, mental disper. I mean, these are not great statistics to have. But what Oregon will tend to crow about is that we have a very low uninsured rate, which means that, yes, we have a lot of people who don't make enough money to buy their own insurance so they go on the Oregon Health Plan, right? That's what we have. that's not a healthy system. It's not healthy for our hospitals. I mean, I just spent the, I think it was Monday with Asante in talking to their people about the health of their, you know, their hospital.

We have to have good hospitals. As much as we complain about we need good hospitals, you know, I'm saying we all need care. And the regulations and things on them does not make them a healthy system to help out the people they need to care for. So, you know. Well, the high Medicaid, the high Oregon health plan patient mix that we have here, isn't that, you know, essentially breaking the hospital systems, Asante and Providence that comes right down to it. Yeah, like Asante told me another day, I think it's, they're at a half a percent margin on the plus, you know what I'm saying? That's not very healthy.

They would love to be in a three or even a two or maybe even a one, but they're in a half a percent of, you know what I'm saying? Unlike a profit margin, even though it's a nonprofit, but still it's like that's the margin, one half of 1%, that makes your typical grocery store look like a big, a better bet by comparison, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, and that's a or grow where we need to grow because, you know, as our population grows or needs, how do you get those things that we need to expand, maybe a cancer area or whatever, and you have a half a percent growth, and then you have the state mandating,

you know, certain wages for nurses or unionizing, you know, Assange over in Medford. These are just, they're hurting the system, and then you've got organ paid leave. And then, you know. Well, then also the push to, the Democratic push to have striking unionized health workers paid unemployment under certain circumstances. Isn't that right? Unionized workers can be actually paid by the unemployment system to argue with their boss. That's what happened.

The school systems. Yeah. We're talking about health care, but you have it in the school system. Two. A school is supposed to run the school, and then they're paying for them to go on strike, and it just makes for an unhealthy school system, unhealthy health care. You know, this fight continues to go on. And, you know, I hear this all the time, well, we need to bring more grants to dream money back.

That is not our problem. Our problem is policies are hurting our health care, our education system, our business community. If you go down this healthy thing, it's right here. It says 40 years of just bad policies are making us at the top of the bad list. Well, yeah. Well, single family, single-party rule, though, is really at this. And by the way, just about any place that a single-party ruled ends up going down at some point

because you get kind of arrogant about it. And you're thinking you can do no wrong. And you were mentioning, though, in your press release that the Denver are telling us their biggest priority is preventing federal overreach, but yet they want the Grand Stream funding? I'll try to figure that one out. Huh? Yeah, that was very interesting. And you just look at their priorities for this coming short session. There are nothing to fix these issues we start talking about. They're, you know, I'm saying. Oh, yeah. How much of this short session coming up here, Representative Younger,

do you believe it's going to involve in how are Democrats going to resist Trump? Do you have an idea? Have you seen some of the bills that might be floated? I've seen some of them. The focus is definitely not on fixing the life of Oregonians or making businesses more profitable. I actually have a meeting today at 11 o'clock with the governors, people about their prosperity. And I'm going to tell you right now, I've looked at this stuff, and it's just laughable because there's nothing in there. They're going to help businesses or promote businesses from staying here or anything because they don't want to cut taxes.

They don't want to cut the tax. They don't want to do anything that makes it easier for business to operate in Oregon. Now, I suspect, now, is this meeting today that you're having 11 o'clock with the governor's people? Is this former Senator Tim Knobe? No, it's not. It's staff people. There's an LC bill that it's a bill that concept bill, whatever. But it's just a, I look at it as just a bunch of talking points for the governor to say, look what I did.

You know what I'm saying? No, you didn't do anything. Well, what I'm suspicious of, though, with his prosperity director with Tim Knope, well, of course, you know, Tim needed a few more years on the purrs. That's kind of how I looked at. It's just like how everybody's always the fire chief for three. or four years before they retire, you know, that kind of thing. But still, I can't help but think that what the Prosperity Center or this prosperity

directive that Governor Kotech is talking about is going to be nothing more than handing out a bunch of taxpayer money to Tina Kotech's friends. I can't help but think that that's what it's going to be. Probably in the nonprofit world. Am I right or wrong about that, you think? You have an idea? I don't, you know, nonprofit world, I heard you earlier for a little bit, they're talking about how many nonprofits there are in, you know, Medford, Ashland. And, yeah, again, they don't, they only take, and I don't want to say all nonprofits.

Yeah. But they're not contributing to make it healthy. They don't bring jobs usually, you know, they're small jobs, but they're not bringing the workforce in. they're not providing, you know, the proper housing and building houses. For the most part, they're not, for the most part, nonprofits could be performing interesting and needed services. I'm not downplaying this. But they are, in essence, a net drain on society because, you know, essentially there are costs. There are costs. They're not paying property taxes on their buildings.

And yet everybody else then has to make that up on their side of it. A lot of times the wages aren't that good either. and yet nonprofit doesn't mean no money either, as we well know with some of the health care systems. You know, our nonprofit that we were talking about a little bit earlier. I'm just concerned, though, that we're going to get to the point where we're going to be non-profited to the point where, well, everyone's riding in the cart and nobody's pulling the cart and actually generating some wealth and income. That's kind of what I'm concerned about here. I would say you're basically soft socialism.

And if nobody's working and making, performing, you know, the taxes that give to these nonprofits or provide these services, then it's just complete, you know, socialism. We need people working. You need a balance in the state. And, you know, you look at Josephine County, which I represent most of it, and we have one of the highest unemployment rates. Why do we have the highest unemployment rate? is because of business policy in Oregon is driving them out of here.

It's not because they have all the great pieces of land and all the stuff there, but why would someone want to come to Josephine County and start a business if they're going to be taxed to death? And then for three months out of the year, they might have someone lead because they're stressed out and they have health. And now I can't fire that person. They're just really bad policies where I can go to another thing, you know, and have, you know, competitive wages, and the tax burden's low, and I can expand employees,

and there's great housing, there's great schools there. And you also haven't even touched on, which I think is something worthy of consideration, the fact that the state of Oregon deems itself the controller of land use in the state. You know, we're going and begging for permission to be able to do developments in certain issues, having to go to the LCDC, always going to court. It just, I remember, you know, people I knew in North Dakota. Was it North Dakota or Minnesota? I forget it what it was.

But they were talking about they could actually get a building permit and start building their factory or their building or just their business in general and start doing positive things within about, what, 90, 120 days. You know, that kind of stuff. It was not a big deal. And a lot of these other states just, hey, come on in. We love you. And it's like here, it just seems to be, hey, you know, we don't know. We don't know if we want to grow. It's like, oh, there could be a, you know, endangered species in the neighborhood.

It's just an entirely anti-business, anti-prosperity kind of thing that we do in Oregon. And it's because of single-party rule. It's what's doing it. Yeah, I talk to businesses and even people that are trying to build housing, in an affordable housing, it's red tape, bureaucracy, it's government. agencies, putting the stop to them, they're permitting cost here, just jumping through the hoops. You know, most of our projects are taking years to get off the ground from conception. That's, you know, then the cost keeps going up.

And if it costs years, people say, hey, I'm going to go someplace where it doesn't take me years to do something. Well, yeah, I mean, let's go back to something. They're half a percent. I mean, I'm a realtor, but most people are not going to invest anything if they're not making a certain profit. I think most of the, you know, guys want 6% or more off their money. Well, if you're only making a half a percent or one or two percent, why would you start a business here? Why would you do things like that? You know, you've got to make a living. You've got to be able to expand. And you need the workforce. And look at if we need workforce, we need educated people,

but look at our graduation rates and our, you know, fourth grade reading levels. We're having poor there. So it just keeps going back to our health. You know, and I keep staying these things in the capital, and obviously the Democrats want to punish me for that. But that's the problem. We need strong people to stand up and say, hey, you're hurting Oregonians. You're hurting Josephine County people, Jackson County, Klamas, wherever it is. And that's where our prosperity problem is, is policies. Are there any other Republicans that can start, you know, standing up and actually saying similar things?

You know, you need to call it out. And, you know, if you're going to go out there and not say anything because you're worried about, so some Grantstream funding might not come to me because I wasn't friends. Gosh, is anything ever going to change here? Well, that would be my state always to, you know, my caucus or anybody that I talked to the Republicans, when are you going to start saying the things that mean said and just, I'm not in it for the peanuts. You know what I'm saying? I want to make big changes for Oregon and big changes for Southern Oregon.

and just going along and getting small little peanuts here and there, but you vote for bad bills or, you know, give them a courtesy yes at a committee so they can hit the floor and you know if it goes to the floor. Right, and then they can call it a bipartisan vote, yeah, and then there's political cover for the single party rule here. But it kind of, well, even here locally we're talking a big deal about how the Medford City Council this week reversed course. It's going to cost the city some money.

they're going to have to pay back a grant. But what they did, what was done to destroy downtown Metford's Main Street with their ridiculous bollards and bike lanes, two-way bike lanes and all the rest of it, never asked the people. People didn't want this sort of stuff. But that's what all of this focus on grant stream funding gives us, because you're always having to dance to the tune of the Salem progressive agenda when you're taking the money. Isn't that the reality of it, Dwayne? Yeah, yeah, it's people, these are, I mean, all the things that come to have, are very progressive ideas coming from the left. You know, we just, we've kind of talked about that.

And let's talk about the main street. If you really want Main Street to do well, that's the shops and things downtown, Grants Pass or Medford or Ashland, you need to, you need good paying jobs in the surrounding area, Medford, or Grants Pass, or Ashland. Well, if businesses don't want to start up because the unfriendly businesses, Then they have no money to spend downtown the Main Street area. That's the only way Main Street's going to thrive is if we have jobs, so we have money to spend. And it's not I call it the cycle of money.

It's not about giving a grant to a business downtown. It's going to close at some point because there's no money to spend there. You've got to fix the other parts to make Main Street good. You have to stop forcing these ridiculous rules and bike lanes. We don't all ride bikes. And it needs to be. safe. You have to be able to control the homeless and the criminals. You also have to make the area convenient. And in the progressive policy world, convenience of actually going to visit and shop

and, you know, go to a restaurant or recreate or go to a shoe store there or the antique store, whatever might be, it has to be convenient. And that seems to be lost in all of this progressive policy machination, Dwayne. Yeah, you've got to have parking. You've got to have, it's got to be for cars. We drive cars. We're not big, you know, we have a lot of rural people, and they like that lifestyle, so they're going to drive their car into downtown Main Street. They're not going to ride their bike in the down, and they're not going to ride their bike today, because they're probably going to get hit because it's so foggy outside, no one's going to see them, so they, you know, it's just common sense that people drive cars. I'm just hoping, I am just

hoping that what happened with the Medford City Council is a teachable moment for other city councils, other, you know, county commissions, other things to be careful about the grants and try to find ways to make your cities more inviting and convenient. And that doesn't mean trying to turn them into Holland, okay? You know, it's just... Yeah, yeah, we're, you know, we're a very large state. People don't understand this state is large. We don't have a huge population compare of them, But we have a large state. There is a lot of land to travel in. We're not going to be doing public transportation.

You know, if you live in Burns, you're not driving the bus. You drive a car to get to places. You know, if you live in Shady Cove, you're most likely going to drive a car to get to downtown Medford. You know, there probably is some public transportation, but you drive a car. You know, a bike would take you a long-ass time to get there. And if you want to actually visit and go to the multicultural festival or whatever other scheme is planned for that particular weekend, make it convenient, make it convenient, make it easy. And by the way, don't punish you with speeding tickets, too, going in. That's the other thing that people are really irritated about.

Friendly to people. We have to understand that the people are what brings tax dollars in. We've got to stop trying to punish people. We're always trying to punish people for everything in Oregon. It's just bad policy. Let's let freedom. Let's just public safety. Roads are good.

And let people work and stop taxing them to death. Let them have a little fun occasionally. You know, okay. And if they're doing 21 miles an hour, don't nail them with the $165 ticket. Okay? It's just getting too punitive everywhere you're, talking about it here, state rep.

I hope that there's some sense in this session. I hope that there's as little damage as possible, Duane, but keep us in the room. And thank us for, well, thank you for letting us know about this, the health concerns that we're still certainly struggling with here in town, okay? Thanks so much. Okay. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, everyone.

State rep, Dwayne, Yunker. This is KMEDE, KMED, HD1, Eagle Point, Medford, KBXG, Grants Pass. I promised that we were going to give away some swag from Fox 26 because they had this great show, extracted in which, you know, you had these people that are going out into the Canadian wilderness and the bears are attacking him and everything else. And then the family's sitting there in another room and they could hit the button and have their loved one extracted. They're the

ones that decide, okay, it's too much. He's not going to handle this. Boom. Out they go. I love the concept. But I'll tell you what, if you're Calder 9, I'm going to give you not only an extracted it is, well, it's in a shrink bag here, but the extracted sleeping bag, but also the extracted Rain hoodie. You can put it like a hoodie and I'll tell you what. Caller 9 and we'll try to size it to you if it all possible. 7705-633-770 KMED. Hi, this is Cassie with Clauser drilling. Many wells in southern Oregon have been declined. The Bill Myers Show is on News Talk 1063 KMED. Season two of extracted premieres Monday night, Fox 26. Check it out here.

Now, I've gone through eight callers, so I have one person left to pick up and see if they're the winner of the extracted swag bag here. Hi, good morning. Who's this? Welcome. This is Chris in Medford. Chris in Medford. You're nine. You win. Yay! Yay! We got that.

We got the extracted branded sleeping bag, and also you get the hoodie, too. What size? I'll try to get the right size for you. Do you need it really big, really small? What do you say? Just a large. Just a large. Okay, I'll try to find a large for you, and we'll get it up for you. So that's kind of a cool thing to win for the weekend.

And if nothing else, just make sure you have it in your go bag in the back of the car, right? So you get another sleeping bag. That's always cool. So hang on. We'll get you all set up. KMED, KMED, H.D. H.1, Eagle Point, Medford, KBXG, Grants Pass. We'll give away some more of those.

I don't know if we'll give it away today. Maybe we'll give away some more on Monday. We'll have a Diner-S62 quiz coming up a long. with a bunch more. Dr. Carol Lieberman joining me after news too. For service?