If you don’t like the price of gasoline, closing in on $4 a gallon in Oregon again and way beyond that point along I-5 in California, don’t buy any. That sounds like a useless thing to say. But it hits the mark. The main reason the price of fuel jumps this time of year is […]
As far as I’m concerned, a town can never have too many parks. So whether Albany has enough is a tough call. But there’s no question that it has a wide variety of very attractive parks, from the tiny and little-used Eades Park, which has modern play equipment for kids, to the big ones with […]
Brian Boquist is a state senator from Dallas. He’s also a retired career Army officer and something of an idealist. He thinks there must be a way to reduce the costs and complexities of state government. After all, with fewer than 5 million people in Oregon, do we really need almost 80,000 state employees? When […]
Oregon puts a lot of people in prison, and this is very expensive. Legislators including Albany’s Andy Olson, who served on a special commission on sentencing, have been looking for a solution. The most obvious answer is for fewer people to become criminals. If everybody acted the way the vast majority of law-abiding citizens act, […]
Public school authorities in Albany — and most likely elsewhere too — are spending part of the summer reviewing what else they might do to enhance security. Let us hope they don’t go overboard. In Albany, they seem to be taking a sensible, level-headed approach. They don’t want to leave open any obvious vulnerabilities, but […]
The not-guilty verdict in the Zimmerman murder case in Florida on July 13 confirmed what the local police had concluded last year — that this neighborhood volunteer had shot and killed a young man in apparent self defense. George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder only after a campaign of political pressure in which even President Obama […]
An urgent need: More water
There’s not enough water in the interior of the West for everything we want or need to do. Part of the answer is to conserve as much as we can, but conservation goes only so far. Doing with less or without does not serve the purpose for long, whether you need to wash your truck […]