UtterlyBoring.com

I mentioned last week about how the Deschutes County Sheriff is introducing quotas sorry, performance standards for its officers. The Sheriff, Les Stiles, is still denying the minimum quotas charge, and is accusing Bend.com of writing an inaccurate and slanted story, saying that the Bulletin’s story was more accurate. Needless to say, Barney’s replied to that accusation. It’s a big ol’ mess (even though some local politicians, in an attempt to get some more publicity and win an elected office, have supported Stiles).

Why are you so afraid of the word “Quota”, Les? Having them is one thing, denying that they’re quotas (which they obviously are) just makes you look bad. I’m sure every other police organization has a quota. I talked to a state trooper that said they have a 1 person/day ticket quota, but said if he didn’t get more than that, he wasn’t doing his job. Quotas exist, which we all probably already know, but not calling them quotas and hiding behind the business-term “Performance Standards” is crap. If you’re going to use business terms, maybe you guys should run yourselves like a business, keeping better tabs on your money, your assets, and your employees — and not raising our frickin’ taxes (raising the price to your “clients”) when you can’t.

And like Barney said, I’m sure the Bulletin article is no more accurate than Barney’s, and hiding behind the “taken out of context” line is cowardly.

Just call them what they are, Les. They’re quotas, plain and simple. Quit treating the taxpayers that pay your paychecks like they’re children.

(Update: Glad to hear that Simone feels the same way, and we’ll both get pulled over on our way around the county now.)

About a week ago I mentioned that Kasey had linked to another local blogger. I made a note to myself to check the Blogger.com’s profile area to see if there were any more local blogger’s using their service that I could add to the list.

After a bit of digging, and removing the folks who had not posted in the last 30 days, I’ve added several more sites to my blogroll (on the right column of the site — the layout’s slightly screwed up, but I have an e-mail into blogrolling.com about it). I have several more from Bend on there, and even a couple from Prineville, Madras, and Redmond on there (the Madras one thanks to Roger).

On that note, once I get a few bucks (read: later rather than sooner — anybody have a few bucks to donate?), I’m going to setup a Central Oregon Blogger’s page that will link to our mailing list, and possible an automated news feed sort of like ORBlogs (Jon/Jesse, you guys want something to do?). I’m going to, at some point, dig up e-mail addresses for some of these folks, and see if I can get them onto our meager list in the meanwhile.

And since ORBlogs is listing them, I’m also going to be going through some of the Live Journal sites I linked to a while back to see any of them are still active (and aren’t absolute crap), see if I can dig up any more, and get them on the blogroll as well.