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 […]
Under Governor Kitzhaber and the people in charge of the legislature, Oregon is setting up an elaborate but only vaguely defined government machinery to be in charge of bringing up children. Over the objections of most Republicans in the House and Senate, the legislature approved House Bill 2013, which deepens the state’s involvement in family […]
At Albany’s Woodland Square trailer park, the plan is still for Innovative Housing Inc., a Portland developer of affordable housing, to turn the site into a 54-unit complex for working people. But the $10.6 million project hinges on state approval of grants and federal low-income housing tax credits, and that request is “still pending,” Julie Garver […]
Our parks: Worth the money
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 […]
Tags: Albany parks, Grand Prairie Park