Albany got into the national news over the Memorial Day weekend. Let us hope we never have this kind of dubious distinction again. A friend back east told me she heard the news of the arrest of an Albany high school student for planning to attack his school. Her own town, in Maryland, had been in the […]
The Oregon House today (May 28) is scheduled to vote on a sensible bill to correct an injustice dealing with property taxes and urban renewal, but it won’t do any good in Albany, at least not yet. The bill is HB 2632-A. It would remove local option levies approved by voters after January 1, 2013, […]
Our highway bridges over the Willamette River are not likely to fall down like the one on I-5 over the Skagit River. That one was of a design where failure of one member causes a collapse, and it got hit by a tall load. But there is one potential concern with the bridges we have […]
I have no idea what the details of this story are because there was no one around to ask. What it looks like is that someone heaved a hefty chunk of concrete into the windshield of this car and left it where it fell. I shot this photo around noon on Saturday while walking up […]
About 75 acres of undeveloped land surrounding Albany’s Timber Ridge School is about to come into city ownership because the owners have made no payments on assessments for the street and utility lines there. Now it’s just a question of how the transaction is done, the city council was told. The land has been owned by the […]
The collapse of a bridge on Interstate 5 north of Seattle once again reminds us that our bridges need constant attention, maintenance and occasional repairs. I can’t say whether we’re doing enough on that score in Oregon, but ODOT is certainly doing a lot. A few weeks ago I mentioned the work to protect the […]
A road tax on new bikes
Nobody likes more taxes, but as someone who often rides a bicycle on public roads, I would not mind as modest bike tax that goes into the state highway fund. This idea has been kicking around for years, and Colorado is said to have just such a tax. Now, according to a report in the […]
Tags: bicycles, excise tax on bikes