The Boot

If you, or we, owed the City of Bend a couple of thousand dollars in taxes and told the city, “Okay, how about if we pay half of it and forget the rest?” the response probably would be something along the lines of: “Are you SERIOUS?!?”

Richard Gorby likes Tony DeBone. He really, really likes him.
He likes the Republican candidate for Deschutes County Commission so much, in fact, that he made radio ads supporting him and attacking his Democratic opponent, Dallas Brown. Recorded them in his own voice and paid for them with his own money.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.
That appears to be the Oregon Department of Transportation's best excuse for why it decided to put an unsignalized pedestrian crosswalk in the middle of the Bend Parkway.
Bob Hunt, 55, and his 14-year-old daughter, Chelsea, were crossing the parkway with their bikes in the crosswalk at Reed Lane on Saturday when a car slammed into them. Chelsea escaped without life-threatening injuries, but her father was killed.

The stories coming out of Mount Bachelor Academy were shocking. Kids being deprived of sleep, cursed at by other students and staff members, being made to take part in humiliating “role-playing” exercises – including, in at least one case, having to perform a “lap dance” for another student.
The stories were bad enough, and apparently credible enough, for the state Department of Human Services to order the high-priced private school shut down in November 2009.

If we endorsed candidates on the basis of colorfulness, Bend City Council hopeful Ronald “Rondo” Boozell would be a shoo-in.
It's not Boozell's positions that make him colorful, although he does have some interesting ones. A self-described libertarian, he says he's “setting out to do nothing less than change our culture” and “dreaming of a sustainable lifestyle.” He wants to encourage Bend residents to buy locally, and thinks government should “get out of the way … and let businesses prosper.”

Oregon's minimum wage will increase by a dime on Jan. 1, 2011. The weeping and wailing from Oregon businesses, conservative politicians and right-wing think tanks will commence well before then.

Pity the poor Bend office of the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles. For the past year or so it's led a nomadic existence, wandering around like a lost child.
First the lease expired on its longtime home on Emkay Drive on the Westside. That forced it to move into a building on the north end of Third Street that old-timers will remember as the former Bend Welcome Center.

Oregon prides itself on not being afraid to be different. Often that's a good thing, as when the state passed the nation's first beverage container refund bill in 1971, or when it enacted the nation's most comprehensive land use regulations in 1973.
Sometimes, though, it's just a dumb thing – the prime case in point being enactment of the “kicker” law in 1980.