Eric Flowers

According to the attorney general's office, there are 28,000 Oregon homes in foreclosure, which is probably more ranchettes, Craftsman and Victorians than there are in the entire city of Bend. It's a sobering number to be sure: the equivalent of an entire mid-sized city completely underwater, mortgage wise.

Short of busking on the street corner with an upturned hat to collect spare change, Ruth Williamson is doing just about everything she can to ensure that the public secures the last major piece of undeveloped real estate along the Deschutes River in Bend, a nearly five-acre parcel just downstream from the Colorado dam.

Carl Killius is a political un-extremist. An unemployed contractor who specializes in carpentry work, Killius was a conservative Democrat who switched parties during the Reagan era. Now, he's a moderate Republican who finds himself agreeing with Democrats on certain issues. Still, when Killius was presented with a ballot during the last general election cycle, he threw up his hands in frustration and anger over what he felt was overly vague and misleading language. Killius said it was the text of the controversial Measure 66 and 67 tax measures that gave him fits. He literally walked away from his vote-by-mail ballot three or four times in disgust rather than fill it out. Election day came and went, but Killius' ballot remained on his kitchen counter. He couldn't bring himself to cast a vote.

With its ample sun for solar, wind for turbines and forest for biomass, Central and Eastern Oregon sit at the intersection of the green energy revolution.
The area's potential for renewable energy has drawn millions of dollars in public and private investments over the last few years. It's big business in the high desert, creating hundreds of jobs and generating millions in lease revenue for landowners and taxes for cash strapped local governments.

When the Rooster Rock fire ballooned from a few acres early last week to more than 3,000 acres in a matter of hours, it threatened more than just homes and trees south of Sisters. The fire, which grew to more than 6,000 acres before firefighters got the upper hand on the blaze, threatened to turn the dream of a community forest outside Bend into a moonscape of smoldering ashes when it started burning into the Bull Springs Tree Farm. The 33,000-acre nursery, known to Central Oregonians as Skyline Forest, is one of the longest running conservation efforts in Bend and one that seemed to be growing closer to realization before flames from the Rooster Rock blaze started licking at the edge of Skyline property, threatening to consume a large portion of the forest as state and federal fire fighters struggled to contain the fast-growing conflagration.

After tiring of bouncing around in his state parks job, Mike Hayward left Bend two decades ago and found refuge in the scenic Wallowa valley, a place of dramatic snow-crusted mountain peaks and remote valleys that’s been called the Oregon Alps. It’s a rugged place that has more in common with central Idaho than it does with the verdant Willamette Valley.
But that same isolation that has kept the din of the 21st century relatively at bay in Wallowa County has invited an old nuisance, at least as Hayward and some others see it, back into the lives of Wallowa County residents. Over the past six months, a pack of gray wolves, or at least a member of that pack, has harassed and killed half a dozen calves in the ranching-centric Wallowa Valley, reigniting a debate in Oregon that has been ongoing in neighboring states since the mid-90s when the federal government reintroduced wolves into the Yellowstone area and central Idaho. The issue came to a head this past spring when the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife asked the federal government to kill a pair of wolves in the Wallowa Valley after non-lethal efforts apparently failed to end the wolf-livestock encounters.

It's a truism that nobody likes paying taxes. So last year when the city of Bend staff proposed to eliminate a loophole in the city's room tax rules that allowed hotels to take a meal credit deduction, several Bend hotels predictably objected.
Leading the charge was local hotelier Wayne Purcell, an influential businessman whose family has been operating The Riverhouse hotel off Third Street at Mt. Washington Drive for two generations.

A decade-long battle to protect endangered Columbia basin steelhead habitat in the John Day Basin got legal recently when a federal court judge ruled that the U.S. Forest Service is not properly administering its grazing allotments on the Malheur Forest. Judge Ancer Haggerty's opinion upheld most of the claims brought against the Forest Service by a coalition of environmental groups, including the Bend-based Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA). The ruling is the most significant win for conservationists in their ongoing campaigning to protect one of the last healthy wild steelhead runs in the lower 48 states by improving habitat along the John Day and its extensive network of tributaries. Ranchers and government officials have defended their practices even as evidence has mounted that public lands grazing combined with lax government oversight continues to denigrate hundreds of miles of high-value habitat. But Haggerty's recent ruling indicated that the court had little doubt about the failure of the Forest Service's grazing program.
“The inordinate exceedances of the bank alteration standards documented in 2007 on the Murderers Creek and Hamilton/King Allotments and in 2008 on the Fox Creek Allotment are particularly deplorable in light of the Forest Service's appraisal of those allotments as containing moderate- to high-potential spawning habitat,” wrote Haggerty referring to evidence that high-value public lands habitat had been trammeled on the Forest Service's watch.