A group of local residents made a bit of a splash when they turned up at the April 5 meeting of the Grant County Court, one of three meetings a year at which the court is required by law to discuss the possibility of the county leaving Oregon to become part of Idaho. As is always the case, a number of people were on hand to speak in favor of the Greater Idaho movement, including Move Oregon’s Border President Mike McCarter, who addressed the court via telephone. What made this bunch different is that they were there to speak against moving the border.

While not a formal organization, the group of 10 or so Grant County residents — some wearing matching green “Just Say No to Idaho” T-shirts — were united in their insistence that Oregon should remain one state. Their arguments to the court focused largely on economic interests, pointing out that Idaho’s minimum wage is substantially lower than Oregon’s and that workers here have better access to benefits and health care than in our neighbor to the east.

But in a meeting in the newspaper office afterward, several members of the group touched on some larger points. Oregon, they said, is not just composed of liberal westsiders and conservative eastsiders, with fundamentally opposed interests and values. It’s a complex mosaic of individuals with a multiplicity of nuanced beliefs on a whole host of subjects but with one overriding, unifying thing in common: We all call Oregon home.

The group’s appearance at the county court meeting was noteworthy as an isolated instance of organized opposition to the Greater Idaho movement in Eastern Oregon, where 11 of the region’s 15 counties have passed ballot measures expressing some level of support for the notion of seceding from Oregon and casting their lot with Idaho. It’s worth noting that all of those ballot measures passed with solid majorities. Here in Grant County, for instance, the 2021 measure requiring the county court to meet three times a year to discuss secession passed with 62% of the vote. The flip side, of course, is that there were also substantial minorities in each county that voted against the measures.

None of these ballot measures has the effect of actually transferring sovereignty of any county from one state to another — that would take approval by lawmakers in both Oregon and Idaho as well as an act of Congress. But the simple fact that they passed makes a powerful statement about just how disaffected many Eastern Oregonians feel with the way they’ve been treated by the Legislature. The majority of the state’s population is concentrated in urban centers west of the Cascades, cities like Portland, Salem and Eugene that skew heavily Democratic and have little in common with largely Republican, rural areas east of the mountains. With the balance of power in the Legislature controlled by westside Democrats, it’s not surprising that some laws coming out of Salem seem to have completely disregarded the needs and interests of the eastern part of the state, such as the 2019 cap-and-trade proposal that spawned the Timber Unity movement (and lent momentum to the early stirrings of what became Move Oregon’s Border).

The political divide between Eastern and Western Oregon is real, and the enduring support for the Greater Idaho movement on this side of the state is testimony to that fact. But there are signs that the voices of protest raised by rural conservatives are beginning to be heard in Salem — the most salient example being the three-tiered minimum wage law with higher rates for the Portland metro area and lower rates for rural areas.

If nothing else, the Greater Idaho movement has brought attention to the very real concerns that East Oregonians have. Now the pushback to that movement is calling attention to another important point: While we may have our differences, we are all Oregonians, and this state is worth fighting for — not to break it up, but to make it better for all of us.