Glass Slipper

All we are saying.

Bend Area Transit hit some rough terrain in its early going - the worst pothole being its purchase of eight lemon buses from a slick used-bus salesman in California.

It was a costly mistake, and it happened because BAT officials didn't exercise due diligence.

It's no secret that tough times have settled on Central Oregon.
Foreclosures are up and 401Ks are down. These are anxious days for our
republic and for our town. But times are a little bit tougher for some
and we as a community got a glimpse of that last weekend when more than
1,800 people in need, many of them children, showed up to Deschutes
County Fair Grounds for a helping hand during a one-day outreach event
targeted at Central Oregon's homeless population. That's a roughly
fifty percent increase in individuals seeking assistance from just last
year when 1,200 people attended the inaugural event

The evidence is clear: homeless is a serious problem in our community that is only growing worse.
A
survey conducted earlier this year found that more than 1,700 Central
Oregonians had no permanent housing or were sleeping in cars, the homes
of friends, shared motel rooms and, in the worst cases, outside. More
than a third of the homeless were children.

As the eminent British philosopher Mick Jagger reminded us, "You can't always get what you want." That's especially true if you're trying to run a local government in a period of shrinking revenues.

Cessna, the small-aircraft manufacturer, wants $4 million worth of improvements at the Bend Airport, including longer runways and a control tower. One way to get the money for those amenities would be to create an urban renewal district covering more than 500 acres around the airport. The district wouldn't levy new taxes on existing properties, but it would absorb any increase in tax revenues that developed after its creation.
Cessna has been pushing hard for the urban renewal district, with the backing of the City of Bend. But because the airport lies outside the city limits, the Deschutes County Commission also must approve it. Last week, though, Commissioners Tammy Melton and Dennis Luke killed the plan by stating they wouldn't vote for it.
We think they made the right call.
Cessna is a good company to have in Central Oregon. It employs about 500 people at (by local standards) decent wages. The other aircraft manufacturer based at the airport, Epic, also is an asset to the economy.
The problem with giving Cessna what it wants is that the new urban renewal district would divert future tax dollars away from important public services, including the county sheriff's department and a rural fire protection district. According to county estimates, the fire district alone could lose something like $32,000 a year.

They don't call this "the high desert" for nothing. Scant rainfall (about the same as Los Angeles gets) means Central Oregon depends on winter snowpack for most of its water.

Justice is done One of your neighbors has a grudge against you and secretly informs on you to the police. The next thing you know you're being held in a prison in a strange country. You don't know what you're charged with or what the evidence against you is, and you can't go to court to find out. You end up staying in that prison for years without any trial.
 
That's the position that many of the approximately 270 prisoners incarcerated at "Camp X-Ray" in the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, find themselves in. Thanks to a landmark decision last Friday by the US Supreme Court, that unconscionable situation will change.
The court ruled, 5-4, that the ancient principle of habeas corpus - the right of an accused person to know the evidence the government has against him - applies to Guantanamo prisoners. Under last week's ruling, Guantanamo prisoners will be able to go into federal district courts to demand that the government show why they should remain incarcerated.

The word "unique" is the most overworked adjective in the advertising copywriter's lexicon, but in the case of Bend's Badlands area, it's justified.
The rugged 30,000-acre expanse just 20 miles northeast of town holds a combination of geological features, archaeological sites, wildlife and vegetation - including rare wildflowers and junipers that were growing before Columbus landed - that would be almost impossible to find anywhere else.
For more than a decade, the Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA) and other conservation groups have been trying to get the Badlands protected as wilderness by the federal government, but their efforts have been stymied in Congress. On Tuesday, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden announced that he's going to take another shot at it.
At a press conference sponsored by ONDA, Wyden said his wilderness bill will include the portion of the Badlands designated by the Bureau of Land Management as a Wilderness Study Area (WSA) plus several hundred additional acres. Creating the Oregon Badlands Wilderness, Wyden said, "will tell the world that Central Oregon is a place with an unbelievable menu of recreation, where you can ski in the morning on one side of town and enjoy the solitude of high desert wilderness in the afternoon on the other."

In the beginning - actually in 1969 - there was Sunriver, and a couple of years later there was Black Butte Ranch.
And Sunriver and Black Butte Ranch attracted thousands of tourists, and that created jobs and brought millions of dollars into Central Oregon, and that was very good.
And when the Oregon Legislature looked at Sunriver and Black Butte Ranch and all those tourist dollars it said: "We need to loosen up the state land use law to allow more places like Sunriver and Black Butte Ranch, because the economies of rural areas like Central Oregon are really hurting and they could help a lot."
And so a peculiar animal unique to Oregon - the "destination resort" - was created, and the legislature decreed that destination resorts could be located outside of urban areas in places that otherwise would be reserved for farms or forests.
But the destination resort loophole turned out to be wide enough to drive an 18-wheeler through, and as time went on "destination resorts" began to look less and less like resorts and more and more like expensive residential communities built around golf courses.