The latest on the work to clean out Albany’s Santiam Canal from the Union Pacific tracks to Seventh Avenue, a $384,000 project being done by Richard Phillips Marine Inc. of Boring under contract with the city: This is what it looked like just downstream from Ninth Avenue on Thursday night. Most of the flow goes […]
The aftermath of Sandy, the big storm on the East Coast, reminds us all that we ought to be better prepared, even here in the tranquil mid-valley, where severe weather is very rare indeed.Our last really big wind storm was 50 years ago, and though it was bad, it was nothing like what hit the […]
A week ago I reported on the $2.6 million cable barrier project in the median of Interstate 5 in Lane and Linn counties, from the Harrisburg exit south for 35 miles. I wondered whether ODOT had any plans to extend that feature north, where some of the crossover accidents have happened, the type of crash […]
An Albany tidbit from the public works front: What’s that pipe doing in the Santiam Canal? It’s about to the carry as much of the canal water as it can, but that’s only temporary. The snapshot was taken Tuesday afternoon after a contractor had laid the 48-inch-diameter pipe from just above 12th Avenue to just […]
Here the general electon is just around the corner and you have heard almost nothing about Ballot Measure 80. That’s the initiative that would legalize marijuana in Oregon — and try to regulate and tax it. Nobody is spending any money for or against its passage. You may have seen an occasional newspaper editorial about […]
Getting rid of refuse is getting more costly everywhere. In Albany, the price of trash collection jumped more than 10 percent from July 2011 to July 2012. Come January, it will go up again, by 3.6 percent. That makes for roughly a 14 percent jump over a year and a half. Trash and recycling services […]
Those pesky parking fees
For almost a year now, if you visited the E.E. Wilson Wildlife Area northwest of Albany, you were supposed to display a parking permit. The permit would have cost you seven dollars. Or you could have bought one good for the whole year, and then the price would have been 22 dollars. But if you […]