Eric Flowers

Council Roundup
The Bend City Council and staff head into an intensive round of budget talks this week that will produce the blueprint for next year's spending priorities. One person involved with the budget process said it's off to a positive start, but expect some tough negotiations this year between staff who are facing another round of potential lay-offs and the council. Also, it remains to be seen how well the council will work together to prioritize and, ultimately, compromise. To date, there hasn't been a lot of consensus on the council over issues of budgeting and planning. A recent vote to continue weekend transit operations with money previously designated for a left turn lane at the airport narrowly passed on a 4-3 vote. Similarly, a proposal to raise construction fees on builders to a rate that would allow the city to fully recover its costs was approved recently on a slim 4-3 margin.
In other city news, the council approved a new downtown taxing district that will generate about $120,000 for downtown improvement programs and administration. The move is a continuation of the existing downtown economic improvement district (EID) with some tweaks. The new district will tax property owners at a slightly higher rate (15 cents per square foot per year versus 11 cents) and the additional funds will offset loses from the dissolution of the fee-based Downtowners group, essentially creating one pot of funding.
Downtowners Executive Director Chuck Arnold said it's a more equitable way to fund activities that benefit all of downtown, including beautification efforts, marketing, event planning and his own full-time position.
"We're all in this together. Certainly there are those who don't want to be a part of something, but you have to wonder why they would have located where they (did) if they didn't want to be part of where they located," Arnold said - and if you can make sense of that you're probably a Navajo code talker. Regardless, Arnold points out that less than three percent of property owners objected to their inclusion in the district, as opposed to the 11 percent who opposed it during the last tax election in 2007.

An artist's digital rendering of fish entering the control tower. Bill Bakke isn't exactly a celebrity. But if you fish in Oregon, particularly if you fly fish - which it seems everyone does these days- you owe him a debt of gratitude.
A lifelong conservationist, Bakke is the man responsible for removing hatchery fish from the Metolius River in the mid 1990s and imposing a slot limit on rainbow trout on the Lower Deschutes, a move that has resulted in bigger fish in the river year round.
I called Bakke this past week to get his take on the somewhat spectacular setback at the multi-million dollar fish collection facility at Pelton Dam. The fish tower, as it is sometimes called, is the linchpin of a plan to reintroduce salmon and steelhead to the Upper Deschutes Basin, which includes parts of Deschutes, Crook and Jefferson counties. Just a few weeks earlier, crews working on the fish passage system watched as a critical piece of the mechanism, a 40-foot wide, 140-foot long tube that cycles water from the fish collection facility into the dam's turbine system, split into pieces during its installation. A portion of the nearly 290-ton conduit floated to the surface, while several other pieces dropped to the bottom of the lake.
The mishap is expected to delay the completion of the tower, which project managers had hoped to bring on line this week, by a minimum of four months at a time when thousands of juvenile fish are beginning their ocean migration.