Category: Local

Busy week this week for events. The McMenamins Old St. Francis School here is Bend is having their grand opening on Thursday, Nov. 18 (actually, it’s the 19th and 20th as well, and they’re actually doing a “soft launch” tomorrow). Some local bloggers are planning a meetup there on Thursday at 7:00PM. Jon, Simone, Shannon and Dane (assuming he’s productive and beats his deadlines) should all be there, but we’d love to have more locals!

I won’t be able to make it as I’m busy as heck with other obligations all week. I have rehearsals for three Central Oregon Symphony concerts this weekend. We’re playing a planetary series with Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”) and Holst’s The Planets suite. It’s going to be a dang good show. If anybody wants tickets, do let me know. The tickets are free, but they’re hard to come buy, but I can probably get ahold of some for you. And there’s free snacks, drinks, and munchies during intermission, so that’s never a bad thing, right? Just make sure that you say “Hi” (you’ll probably just barely see my head at the concert, as I’m a percussionist).

Coming up in a couple weeks is a concert I have with the Cascade Winds Symphonic Band. That’s going to be a great show with tons of great percussion and music, so stay tuned for more details on that one.

Because of a printing problem, some random ink-blobs were spattered onto a very small amount of Redmond-area ballots. Because of that ink blob’s location, the vote-counting computers read it as a vote for the Kerry-Edwards ticket. If somebody with a ballot like that had voted for Bush, the blob in the Kerry section would’ve nullified both votes. Luckily, they’ve only seen in on a few ballots, and they’ve corrected them.

That’s basically what I get from this. A Portland environmental group, the Oregon Wildlife Federation, claimed Friday that its own investigation had concluded that the August 2003 Booth Fire, one of two blazes that merged to form the almost 92,000-acre B&B Complex Fire west of Sisters, “was most likely caused by political arson.”

I remember sort of believing something along these lines when Bush came to visit before (as did others). It just seemed a little peculiar that there was no evidence of lightning in the area, and suddenly there’s a fire just before his visit. I just wish that if this evidence and investigation has any sort of merit that it would’ve been brought to light a few months ago so it could actually have an affect on the election.

Most of it has melted off by now, but this is what I woke up to this morning in Sunriver (just south of Bend):

I can only see this causing trouble:

A decimal point here, a decimal point there, and soon you’re talking real money — or in this case, an error in a key element of the printed ballot summary for the Bend-La Pine school funding measure. No doubt, some voters won’t notice that two rates are presented — one right, the other wrong — while others are likely to be either confused or misled by the typo, meaning it is likely to affect some votes, one way or another.

The Bend-La Pine School District’s 5-year, $34 million local option tax, Measure 9-28, has a property tax rate of 85 cents per $1,000 of assessed value — actually, that’s a maximum rate, due to the way state law lays out local option taxes (see www.yesforlocalschools.com to calculate your own property’s yearly cost).

The only problem is, the ballot question, which has the number right ($0.85, or 85 cents per $1,000 of assessed value) is followed by a ballot summary that lists it as “$.085 per $1,000.” That’s 8 ½ cents — one-tenth the actual rate.

It appears that the AP has picked up the story, too.

This is a huge mistake, and one that could cause trouble for the school district and the tax assessor’s office. I can picture people griping once they see their tax bill (just because that’s what people like to do around here). If the measure passes, people will gripe that they were billed too much, and that they only want to be billed a tenth of what they were actually billed. It may not sound like a big deal now, but it will be if this passes.

In this story on CNN Money about how political signs influence homebuyers, and the first image on the article is an image of what I think is a West-side home here in Bend (I’ve seen the sign, and I’m pretty sure it was on the Westside — feel free to post here if I’m wrong). It’s a cardboard sign on a fence that says: “‘Nuclear:’ If you can’t say the word you shouldn’t be able to launch one.” Thanks Barn for the tip.