The Boot

Waldo Lake, in the high Cascades west of the Deschutes County border, is one of the most ultraoligotrophic lakes in the world. That fancy nine-dollar word means the water is clear – amazingly clear. Experiments have shown that objects in Waldo Lake can be seen at a depth of nearly 160 feet.
But whether Waldo Lake will continue to provide a near-pristine wilderness experience for Oregonians and visitors is far from clear. The state Marine Board appears to be on the verge of doing a flip-flop that will threaten the clarity and tranquility of the lake and its surroundings.

conflict of interest – a situation that has the potential to undermine the impartiality of a person because of the possibility of a clash between the person’s self-interest and professional interest or public interest. Source: BusinessDictionary.com
It seems like a pretty simple concept, but we felt obliged to post that definition of “conflict of interest” because the Deschutes County commissioners appear to have a tough time grasping it.
Deschutes County is responsible for maintaining more than 900 miles of roads in unincorporated areas, and it's having an increasingly hard time finding enough money to do it. Tax revenues of all kinds have fallen off since the real estate bubble burst, and the payments the county gets from the federal government in lieu of timber receipts are shrinking and may soon disappear completely. This “perfect financial storm,” as the county calls it, has resulted in a shortfall of some $3 million a year in the county road maintenance budget.

A river wants to be a river, not a pond. You can make a river behave like a pond for a while by putting a dam in front of it, but sooner or later – sooner if the pond is shallow – the area outside of the main channel will fill up with sediment and the river will go back to being a river again.
Therein lies the dilemma for the City of Bend, which for decades has been wrestling with what to do about Mirror Pond.
The pond, formed by a dam built a century ago, is often described as “the jewel of downtown Bend,” but that jewel has a tendency to tarnish. Silt keeps building up until the pond threatens to become a mud flat – a problem exacerbated by spring and summer irrigation flows, which wash soil away from riverbanks upstream.

We have nothing against realtors. Many of them are fine human beings and decent, upstanding citizens. As individuals, realtors are all right by us.
When they band together, though, they sometimes have all the charm of a pack of ravenous piranhas.
Current case in point: the Oregon Association of Realtors' campaign to write a ban on real estate transfer taxes into the state constitution.
A real estate transfer tax is a tax on real estate sales. Currently there's only one locality in Oregon that has such a tax: Washington County, which charges a fee of 0.1 percent – that's a puny one-tenth of one percent – on each property sale. On a $250,000 house, for example, the tax would be $250. The tax, paid by the sellers, brings in about $2.5 million a year for the county.

America's founders knew history, and history had taught them that religion and government don't mix.
They knew that for centuries Europe had been wracked by religious wars, inquisitions, persecution of “heretics” and burning of “witches.” They wanted no part of that in the new republic they were creating, so they laid down a clear rule in the First Amendment of the Constitution: Government shouldn't mess with religion.
But some people have always thought they knew better. Among them are the members of the Prineville City Council.
For decades the City of Prineville put up a Nativity scene in front of City Hall and nobody had any problem with it. But last year a group called the Freedom From Religion Foundation complained – correctly – that the display violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
That didn't sit well with some of the good Christian people of Prineville, who demanded that the Nativity scene remain. The council tried hard to accommodate them by finding a detour around the Constitution.

When magnet schools first came into favor in the 1960s and 1970s, the idea was that they'd promote desegregation by drawing students from predominantly white areas (like a magnet, get it?) to schools in mostly black areas that offered an enriched curriculum in things like science or the arts.
While the success of magnet schools as a desegregation tool was mixed, there was no question the kids who attended them reaped a significant benefit, and the magnet school idea took off. By the start of the 21st Century there were more than 3,000 magnet schools all over the country, in small cities as well as big ones.
As magnet schools became more popular, the challenge became not how to attract students to them but how to fairly determine who got the limited number of spots available. It's a challenge the Bend-LaPine School District has sadly failed to meet.

Back in the 1970s, when Steve Jobs was taking acid trips in what would later become known as Silicon Valley and Mark Zuckerberg hadn't even been thought of, the State of Oregon came up with a special approach to taxing businesses like utilities, railroads and communications companies.
Unlike other businesses, which can be taxed only on tangible property like desks, computers and trucks, Oregon says companies in that special category can be taxed on their intangible assets – things like worldwide value, brand recognition and goodwill.
And that's opened up a really squirmy can of worms for Facebook.
The social networking company got a 15-year exemption from local property taxes for building its new data center in an enterprise zone in Prineville. But last month the state Department of Revenue informed Facebook it could be subject to state taxes of as much as $390,000 a year.
As it turned out, the state had to quickly back away from that number; the actual amount of state property tax Facebook would owe is more like $26,000 a year.