The Boot

It looked like a pretty good deal at the time: For $269, you could buy a voucher for five all-day lift tickets at Mount Bachelor at Joe's Sports & Outdoor stores - a savings of anywhere from $4 to $15 per day, depending on which days you skied.

The deal turned out to be not so sweet, though, when Joe's filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early March - and then Mount Bachelor management decided it wasn't going to honor the vouchers, except for those sold at the Joe's store in Bend.
The mountain's marketing manager, Alex Kaufman, told reporters that Joe's still owes the resort more than $100,000. "Normally, Joe's would pay Mount Bachelor for the amount they sold by month. December, January, February, we never received that money," Kaufman said.

Oregon's open public records law was a fine idea when it was enacted in 1973. Over the ensuing 35 years, though, special interests have carved out so many exceptions that the law now has more holes in it than Bernie Madoff's account books.

And as if that isn't bad enough, the state legislature wants to carve another one.
State Rep. Kim Thatcher (R-Keizer) and other lawmakers are backing HB 2727, a bill that would make all records pertaining to concealed weapons permits exempt from the open records requirements. The ostensible reason for it, Thatcher said, is to protect the holders of such permits from "stalkers, identity thieves and people who could otherwise do them harm."

We don't know why, but some folks just don't like bicycles and the people who ride them. Maybe it's resentment directed against the cyclists' perceived "elitism" for choosing two-wheeled self-propulsion over a Dodge Ram 3500 Quad Cab 4×4 with the 345-hp Hemi V8. Or maybe it's the silly Spandex shorts.

Anyhow, there's a lot of hostility out there toward cyclists. And we're inclined to think HB 3008 is one expression of it.

Don’t mess with successTimes are tough in Oregon, and all of us - including beer lovers - have to swallow hard and bear our share of the pain. But a proposal to raise the state tax on a barrel of beer by almost 1,700% is asking beer drinkers and the state's craft brewing industry to swallow way too much.

Oregon's state tax on beer currently is a mere $2.60 a barrel, one of the lowest in the country. Raising it by a moderate amount - even to about $8 a barrel, the national mean - would be completely justifiable in this fiscal emergency.

Times are tough all over, and they're even tougher in Central Oregon than in a lot of other places. So we don't blame Bend realtors and builders for being scared.

We don't even blame them for trying to use these tough times to push their own agenda. But when they do it with bogus statistics and misleading rhetoric, that's a different story.
The Bend Metro Park and Recreation District is taking a look at the formula it uses to calculate Systems Development Charges, or SDCs, which are fees levied on new home construction to pay for things like roads, sewers and (in this case) parks. It's a routine move; state law, and local ordinance, requires the district to do it periodically.

Assuming they're able to read, some of the morons who get their jollies
from trashing the natural landscape might have read that the Badlands
wilderness bill is about to get passed and decided to get out there and
do more damage while they could.

David Eddleston, organizer of the
group Friends of the Badlands, sent us a report from the battlefront
last week. According to him, he and other "Fobbitts" patrolled the area
on Jan. 8 and found signs of "recent incursions from both quad ATVs and
powered dirt bikes at various points."
Signs marking the area
as closed to motor vehicles had been blasted with gunfire. "Oddly, a
locker had been dragged approx 200 meters into the Badlands and
securely installed on a rimrock ridge. And that had also been used as a
target," Eddleston added.

Being mayor of Bend is no big deal. Rather than being elected by popular vote, the mayor is chosen by a vote of his or her fellow city councilors. And the position is largely honorific; the mayor chairs city council meetings, but aside from that has no powers beyond those of any other councilor.

So the City of Bend most likely will survive the selection of Kathie Eckman as its new mayor. Just the same, the choice is disturbing both because of the way it was made and because of what it says about the temperament of the new council majority.
Eckman was elected last November, along with Jeff Eager and Tom Greene, as part of a slate of candidates heavily bankrolled by the real estate and development lobby. She was picked as mayor on the strength of those three votes plus that of Chris Telfer, who immediately waved good-bye to the council to take up her new job as a state senator.

Rabbit ears work just fine for rabbits. They don't work so well for TV reception, especially here in Central Oregon, aka "The Middle of Nowhere," where over-the-air TV signals are few, weak and far between.

But rabbit ears will be the only technology available for Bend-area viewers who want to watch Fox Network programming after Dec. 31, unless KFXO, the local Fox affiliate, and BendBroadband, the only local cable TV provider, can come to an understanding before then. At this writing, negotiations appear to be stymied.
The dispute is pretty basic: KFXO says BendBroadband should pay it for Fox Network programs and BendBroadband says it shouldn't. From where we sit (parked in front of our 46-inch flat-screen high-definition TV watching the Giants play the Vikings on Fox) it looks like BendBroadband has the better argument.