Category: Local

Follow-Up On “Sunriver Police Can’t Do Anything” Story

I passed on a story a few days ago about how Sunriver police can’t really do much of anything now. The story is now all over the blog world, with everybody getting a laugh out of it. Since, then, and after talking to some folks I work with, they have some concerns, too. For example, I work at a company that rents homes on a nightly basis to tourists. What if we need to evict somebody from a home because they’re being disruptive (which has happened before)? Can the Sunriver PD help us? This was among several concerns that came up, but basically, my understanding was the decision was made because a cop here pulled over the wrong guy: a lawyer who knew the laws about law enforcement on private roads, and it came back to bite ’em.

If anybody’s interested, the Sunriver Owners Association is having a town hall this weekend to discuss the issue. From the announcement:

TOWN HALL MEETING

“Law Enforcement in Sunriver”

Saturday, March 10, 9 a.m.

Pineland/Pathfinder Rooms

Sunriver Resort Lodge

Sunriver Owners Association invites you to attend this town hall for a presentation followed by a community conversation about the issues.

Audience participation is encouraged.

I’m not really in the mood to drive out to Sunriver at 9 AM on my day off (I drive out here every other day of the week), but if anybody does make it out here and wants to share what happened.

March 8, 2007

I Can Now Freely Drive Like A Maniac Through Sunriver

This will make any driving I do through Sunriver a whole lot easier.

SUNRIVER, Ore. — No seatbelt? No citation. No tail light? No ticket. In to [sic] much of a hurry? Not to worry.

Sgt. P.J. Beaty watches people in this upscale development breaking traffic laws, and sees plenty of them. But he can’t pull them over. A man swerved head-on into Beaty’s lane, and then back out again and Beaty couldn’t lay a glove on him.

For years, he and the department’s 10 other sworn officers could have pulled him over.

But the Sunriver Service District, which governs police and fire departments, voted in February to tell officers to make Sunriver’s roads, which are private but open to the public, exempt from minor vehicle infractions.

This basically puts the cops back to the security-guard status they had for years.

Granted, I want them to be able to enforce the laws here, but they were going totally overboard here on minor things for quite a while, especially picking on the locals. My dad, who has worked out here for over 25 years, as well as my boss and two other people I know, all got pulled over for not wearing their seat belt. The thing is, they were all just moving cars around in a parking lot — they weren’t actually going anywhere. And if you went 26 MPH through Sunriver where it’s 25 MPH all throughout, they would’ve given you a ticket. But whenever there’s a tourist driving the wrong way around one of the 10 one-way traffic circles (which I’ve seen many times), there’s never a cop to be found.

That being said, if a drunk is wreaking havoc through town, they now have no authority to do anything, which is no good at all.

You can read a bit about it in the latest Sunriver Scene, where they talk about the minutes from the meeting where this vote took place. But from what I can tell by reading just the bits I am there (and I can’t read the Bulletin version of this without paying, so I don’t know if they explained this better), they’re doing this basically because of the way state laws work on enforcing laws on private roads.

Update: There are several other blogs and forums talking about this now. And just think: The Bulletin could’ve gotten a bunch of ad revenue-generating traffic, but they decided to lock-down their article instead and send all the traffic for folks looking for this article to a Seattle paper. Their loss.

March 4, 2007

Send Your Support To A Local Legend

Vince Genna, a true Bend icon needs your support. Read on for the e-mail I received regarding his condition from a friend of his. I will not put who sent this to me as apparently there are family issues in the Genna family and I don’t want my source to get harassed (as it seems some family members aren’t very supportive of Vince), but Vince has approved the posting of this. Read On….

(more…)

February 28, 2007

There Are Some Weird Dudes On Bend Blogs

Obviously, BendBlogs.com and the 260 blogs it indexes, is bound to get some oddball posts come through. But this is probably one of the weirdest (and dirtiest) ones I’ve read in a long time (MySpace blog and naughty talk warning). If you read the rest of this guy’s writings, this kind of writing is commonplace.

Weird stuff…

February 27, 2007

Lack of Affordable Housing A Myth?

According to Becky Breeze, the lack of affordable housing in Bend is a myth, saying that there are lots of homes under $250,000 in Bend. Now, if you do the math and assuming you have good credit and can get a good 30-year rate at 6% (the lowest rates right now are 5.75% and first-time home buyers aren’t likely to get that low), that’s still a nearly $1500 payment per month, not counting taxes and insurance. I’m fortunate enough that I bought my house years ago and have great credit so that my monthly payment is less than $900 (with taxes and insurance), but considering that most folks here are already not making a living wage, I don’t have a clue how anybody could make that kind of payment on a $250,000 home.

So I used her site’s MLS search, and from what I can tell (and I don’t have raw MLS access, nor am I at an office today with anybody who does, so somebody correct me if I’m wrong here), here is what I see:

  • 30 Homes less than $250,000, but all higher than $185,000 (most over priced, a few in Deschutes River Woods).
  • 35 Manufactured homes between $250,000 and $116,000, many in Deschutes River Woods or in the Sunriver area, so not really in Bend.
  • 24 Condos, priced between $235,000 and $125,000, but many of the lower-end ones are up at the Inn of The 7th Mountain, and those things are pieces of junk.

So yeah, I guess there is cheap housing, but not any that I’d want to live in, and not much of anything under $200,000 in the city limits. And yet somehow the area is full of affordable housing.

I’m just thanking God that I bought my house when I did — it was a total struggle to make monthly payments when we bought it, but there is no way I could afford a house now.

BendBubble2, am I missing something?

February 26, 2007

Is Winter Over Yet?

All of us Bend woke up to a bit of snow — which meant there was a ton at my office in Sunriver (we’ve got about six to eight inches in some spots and it’s still coming down). I’ve ranted about my commute before, but it’s days like this I fear the worst. I have no problems driving in the snow at all, but it’s everybody else’s ability I worry about.

So I brushed the snow off my car, and sat down in my car, realized it was leaning to one side a bit more than usual. My fears were confirmed when I got out of the car and saw a completely flat tire in the back (my guess is a stud went through). My wife needed the minivan off and on all day and really couldn’t drive me out to work and back (she has to run the kids someplace as I was getting off work), so I called the office, said I’d be late, and called my in-laws to see if I could borrow their car (as they don’t like driving in this anyway). It only has studs on the front, so I was sliding around pretty much every corner I took.

On my way out to Sunriver, I saw several people off the road, including this unlucky sap who managed to throw himself on his side right across from the High Desert Museum:

02-22-07_0941.jpg

(Sorry about the picture quality, but cell phone cameras aren’t known for their quality, and I was driving slowly by while I took this blindly.)

It was a small SUV that was on its side, and I have no idea what state the plates were from, but it appears that everybody’s fine as there were no medical personnel there. No idea how he did that.

The mountains can have all the snow they want, I just want to drive to work without having to worry about these guys.

February 22, 2007

Where’d ABC Family Go?

If you have Bend Cable Broadband, turn to channel 35. ABC Family, which I loved watching this time of night for “Whose Line Is It Anyway” reruns, has been replaced with Noggin — a preschooler’s channel. It’s now listed on Bend Broadband’s Channel Guide, but not as a new channel like AMC.

Don’t know when or why this happened. Any ideas?

February 20, 2007

Cheryl Howard Link Dump

OK, we all know that Cheryl Howard has contributed more than a few links for this site. Hell, she was sending me so many links for a while there that I even set her up with account to post here herself (she never did). I’ve been so stupidly busy lately that I haven’t posted as much as I used to, so I haven’t been posting much in general, let alone her links.

As I’ve mentioned before, she also sends many of her links to Dave Barry, which has now made her (semi) famous. So before she thinks I haven’t forgotten about her, here are all the links I have sitting in my “to-blog” folder from her that need to get posted (and the offer still stands, Cheryl, if you want an account here):

She’s sent me far more, but these are the ones that still worked. So yes, I’m a bit behind.

But again, thanks Cheryl for all your contributions and keep them coming (that goes to everybody — everything worthy/timely gets posted, eventually).

February 20, 2007

Unicom Getting Bought Out By Eschelon Telecom

I know there are a few folks locally who read this site that use Unicom‘s services (either phone services or Internet service). We have a T1 with them at one of the offices I work at as well. And that service will soon be provided by Eschelon Telecom. Here’s the press release from Eschelon, press release from Unicom, and Custom Service info from Unicom.

Now Unicom bought up OneEighty back in the day. OneEighty bought out HighSpeed Communications (aka the ol’ EmpireNet) and also owned OregonTrail Internet. So Eschelon now owns all these former companies and domains, too.

My worry is thus: I’ve had less-than-stellar dealings with support at Unicom (the T1 was there before I got there), and they didn’t integrate the clients they bought very well (we were former OneEighty and previously EmpireNet clients). When I call them, it always seems to take them a year and a day to bring up my account info, and when they finally do, they have to escalate my call because the person answering the phones can’t help me with my usually complicated problem. They have a dedicated support line for their high-capacity lines (T1 or larger), but this wasn’t brought to my attention until after many calls to them. Generally speaking, I’ve had to work around Unicom versus working with them (their DNS servers were caching a domain name totally wrong for example, and it was easier for me to route the office’s request to different DNS servers than to deal with them). My guess is this is only going to make things worse.

My question for the local community is thus: Who out there is locally-based and is provided business-class ‘net access now? I know BendTel (who I use at the other Sunriver office I work at) and Bend Broadband (who I use at home) are still here and doing fine, but I think that most of the local companies that are around are local branches of larger national corporations (like Unicom) or sold out a long time ago (BendNet bought up by Rio Communications). I remember back when Dial-Up first came up here, everybody seemed to be selling it (mostly through reseller companies — very few of them actually owned their own modem banks). But any more, it seems like everybody’s who’s offering DSL or Dial-Up is doing it through another company. Am I wrong on this?

To throw another thing into the mix, there are a few folks who provide Internet service via Wireless (Yellow Knife, Webformix, Clearwire, among others).

Am I missing somebody really obvious here? Anybody have any experiences/stories to share? Discuss…

February 19, 2007

NEED: Percussionists in Bend Who Can Read Sheet Music

As many of you know, I’m a percussionist (fancy word for a drummer who can read sheet music) and have played in the Cascade Winds and the Central Oregon Symphony for about 13 years. It’s been a fun experience. In recent years with our new director, we’ve gotten some pieces in the band that have really featured the percussion or have at least had hard percussion parts. While we’re never really at a need for percussionists in the symphony (the pieces in there don’t feature us much), we always seem to be short in the band, and this term is no exception.

I’ve heard much of the term from various folks in the band that this person or that person is going to show up, but it’s never materialized. So I’m making the open call here: If you’re a percussionist in the area with some concert band experience, the we’d love to have you. We only have three rehearsals left until our concerts. Right now, we have three percussionists and could ideally use six as currently the three of us are trying to cover the parts for six or more players on a couple of our pieces. The music is tough, and if you can’t read in anything other than common 4/4 time, you’re in trouble here, but if you have some experience and want to play some great music, this is the place. That, and it’d be really nice if I wasn’t trying to read off three parts and jumping around like a maniac (on one piece, I have the timpani, snare drum, suspended cymbal, triangle, and bass drum all wrapped around me — I’m basically trying to cover three parts, and it’s a royal pain in the butt).

Ideally, we’d love for you to stick around next term as well so if we do get enough people we can play the percussion ensemble I mentioned a long while ago.

If you have any questions at all, contact me via my contact form on the right column of the page or comment below.

February 15, 2007