Oregon cheapest state to own a car

Hey, Buster, fill 'er up

To once again debunk the claim by Big Oil that forcing self-serve gas stations in Oregon would make it less expensive to fill up your car, here's another Bankrate.com study that shows the Beaver State is already the cheapest state in the land to own a car.

Our neighbors to the south and north, our second and 18th respectively.

Also, to further debunk the claim that Oregonians are taxed to death, Oregon's annual average cost for taxes and fees per vehicle is just $157, about 85 percent lower than the national average of $1,058, according to Bankrate.

So, to reiterate once again, we don't need self-serve gas stations in Oregon.

We're doing just fine, thank you.

Developer still on hook for roundabout funds

The Bridges' subdivision has done little to mitigate its impact on Bend

When the city of Bend passed its $30 million road bond last year, it was assumed that developer Dennis Pahlisch wouldn't have to pay anything toward the construction of the roundabout at 15th and Reed Market Road.

But, shockingly, the city said yes, Pahlisch still has to pay something.

Pahlisch is building a subdivision called The Bridges, which is located about a mile south of 15th/Reed Market, one of the busiest intersections in Bend.

In 2006, he agreed to pay $675,000 toward the construction of the roundabout that his subdivision would impact in a big way. Of course, he wouldn't have to pay anything until the 101st home was built.

Right now, he's built 79 homes, but wants to plat 47 more homes, which puts him over the 101-home threshold.

Pahlisch assumed that when he helped finance the campaign to pass the bond, he was off the hook for that $675,000.

The city, though, in a rare instance of asking a developer to pay something for the impact his development has on the city's infrastructure, wants Pahlisch to pay about $318,000.

City staff and the developer will bring this proposal to the city council next month.

Pahlisch claims he would rather pay for improvements to the city infrastructure rather than pay lawyers to fight the city. In other words, he likely would have lost in court.

That $318,000 would be paid over the next five to seven years, depending on how many homes get built.

In the agreement, the city must set aside this money for improvements to the 15th Street corridor between Reed Market and Knott Road, which is about a mile south of the Pahlisch subdivision.

Sounds reasonable, except that the city has no plans, and of course no money, to make any improvements to that segment of the road for at least 20 years.

In fact, the city recently chip-sealed the section of 15th from Reed Market to Pahlisch's subdivision even though this section of the road didn't really need it.

This work was completed just before the annual Tour of Homes, which featured homes in The Bridges.

Unfortunately, 15th St., from The Bridges to Knott Road, is crumbling to pieces, but the city can't say when, if ever, they'll repave that section.

A wag suggested that one way to control the speed in this 50 mph zone, which is faster than the Parkway in the center of town, is to let the roadway degrade to the point that it becomes a mile-long speed bump.

The point is that Pahlisch will pay nothing to improve the infrastructure of Bend that is outside his subdivision.

Pahlisch is planning on city residents to pass another road bond in five years that will completely free him of any financial obligation to the city in which he's amassed a fortune.

The Bridges' subdivision is in the southeast area of town where about 2,000 more homes are planned.

The developers, though, have learned their lesson from what happened on Bend's west side when developers there planned the 4,500-home NorthWest Crossing.

A hearings officer rejected the initial plan in west Bend because the roads there couldn't handle all the new traffic. (Naturally, the hearings officer lived on the west side when making that decision.)

The westside developers, though, formed a consortium to pay the upfront costs for a series of roundabouts and the southern-river crossing so that they could build their massive, mixed-use subdivision. Of course, the westside developers were reimbursed their investment with each new house built.

On the southeast side, though, no consortium was formed because developers there did not propose such a single, huge development.

No, they decided to build smaller subdivisions in phases so that a hearings officer couldn't reject their proposals because they were too small to trigger any dire infrastructure warnings.

Meanwhile, the roads in southeast Bend are crumbling to pieces, the sewer system is overflowing in other parts of the city and there is no storm-drainage system to handle the new high-density developments.

City staffers could enact a "public facilities strategy" for southeast Bend, but they are too fearful of developers to ever do such a thing.

So, what will happen is that Bend, which sells itself on its "livability," will become so unlivable that property taxpayers will be forced to pay for huge new sewer and road bonds.

The developers won't have to pay anything.

Afterall, developers don't really care about Bend, but rather how much they can profit from this city.

Newspaper fire sales

Extra! Extra! Wanna buy a paper for nuttin?

Now that the Boston Globe and Washington Post have sold for bargain basement prices, is the New York Times far behind?

Or, is The (Bend) Bulletin up for grabs at a rock-bottom rate?

Grim days for the newspaper world.

The New York Times bought the Boston Globe 20 years ago for $1.1 billion. The NYT, apparently, was thrilled to get rid of the Globe for $70 million. Can't say that the Times' owners are financial wizards. More like fools.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, sold for a comparatively robust $250 million to Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos. Twenty years ago, though, the WaPo was worth about a billion or more.

At least the buyer of the Globe, who also happens to own the Boston Red Sox, will likely keep things as they are since he paid so little for the paper.

The same can't be said for the WaPo.

Legendary WaPo investigative journalist Bob Woodward said, "Every news organization, collectively, is inefficient. Whether he (Bezos) has a plan, I don't know. I expect he will shake things up."

 Uh, yeah.

Amazon is known for operating with as few humans as possible.

Perhaps, Bezos will show Woodward the door. The Watergate journalist is way past his prime.

I would imagine Bezos will try to do to the newspaper business what he did to the retail business.

In essence, he'll get rid of people (in this case, reporters, editors and photographers) and replace them with "content providers" who will likely work as contract employees.

No health insurance. No benefits. No nothing.

Bezos, like many corporate honchos, just wants to expose government corruption and ineptitude, while turning a blind eye to all the ways corporations are destroying this country.

There has long been this myth that the media is some sort of liberal cabal.

The opposite is true. The media is controlled by corporations who only want to maximize their profits.

They do not care at all about serving communities and protecting them from corporate control.

Meanwhile, The Oregonian, Oregon's pre-eminent daily newspaper, is scaling back the number of days it publishes an actual newspaper.  The Bulletin offers a feather-light Monday edition.

Newspapers have only themselves to blame. They resisted change and now must watch how they've been turned into "throwaways."

Bend's Tour de Homes unimpresses

The eternal phrase of real estate agents

Central Oregon's annual Tour of Homes has been lackluster for the past few years during the Great Recession.

This year is no different.

Most of the new homes have lousy layouts, dull colors and all the warmth you'd expect from a doctor's modern office building.

Naturally, many of these costly cribs, particularly in NorthWest Crossing, are sold.

Not sure if flippers are buying them because $500,000 is still a lot of money in a place with double-digit unemployment.

Consistent with recent trends, the lots are small, leaving little or no yard, which translates into less yardwork but a general lack of privacy when your neighbor can peer into your bedroom from 10 feet away.

When we bought our first house in Bend in 1984, the 6,000-square-foot lot (60 by 100 feet) was considered a "small" city lot.

Today, Realtors tout that same-size lot as "large."

Lot sizes have shrunk to as low as 3,000 square feet.

We check out the tour each year because we want to see what the current trends are in terms of kitchen counters, for example, so we can get ideas when we upgrade our current home.

The best that can be said for some of the homes on the tour is that they are more eco-friendly in terms of materials used and energy saved.

Some homes are deemed "Net Zero" because their solar panels offset electricity from the grid.

It would be great if the city of Bend, which claims abundant, year-round sunshine, would mandate that all new homes be "Net Zero."

But, that is asking a lot from a city that has trouble with basic infrastructure like water, sewer and roads.

Until the city can manage what it has, there is no reason whatsoever to extend the urban growth boundary.

Plus, there are still hundreds of acres in the city limits with nothing on them.

Prices may be high for new homes in Bend, but it has nothing to do with what's available.

Developers/builders set the high prices based on what they perceive the market will bear. No other reason.

Nevermind that Bend had the most inflated housing prices in the nation during the boom and the greatest housing price decline during the bust. Now is always the time to buy.

All in all, I'm grateful for my home when compared to what's out there for such unreasonable prices.

Tax breaks for rich companies bring few jobs

The daily newspaper had a rather unremarkable story the other day titled "Data centers remake Crook County."

There was no news in the article, just a regurgitation of information reported many times before.

Facebook, and then Apple, extracted huge long-term tax exemptions from the state and Crook County for the building of gigantic data centers near Prineville.

Facebook employs a couple of dozen employees, most of whom were hired from out of the area. No word on how many of these employees are janitors.

Apple, after getting such a gift from Oregonians, said it wouldn't hire anyone at the data center but rather do all the work via remote technicians, no doubt in India or China.

Apple now claims they will hire about 35 people at the first of its two 338,000-square-foot data centers. Again, these could be janitors or other part-time workers.

And, what about Crook County? How has it benefited from all these "wonderful" new data centers?

Well, so much money has been generated by the data centers that the county can now bring a part-time building inspector up to full-time, according to the story.

Yep, that's it.

For giving away the farm, Crook County got one-half of one job.

It's no wonder that the richest companies in the world can extract massive concessions from such rubes. Supposedly, Crook County officials are ready to bend over for another tech company's data center.

But, the other property taxpayers in the county have to pay more so that Apple, Facebook and the unnamed tech company can pay less.

To say this whole system is ass-backwards is merely stating the obvious.

What it really means is that the problem with this country is that the rich evade paying taxes at the expense of our budget deficit, education, health care, infrastructure, etc.

It would help if the handful of journalist left in this country would read some books by award-winning journalist David Cay Johnston.

His latest, "The Fine Print," plus his previous work, "Free Lunch," show definitely that giving tax breaks to the wealthiest companies in the world does little, if anything long-term, for the local economy.

But, hey, one-half of one job in Crook County is better than no job at all.

Post-racial America?

Amid the nationwide heat wave, while most Americans were busy trying to keep cool or be cool, President Obama apparently gave a speech on the Trayvon Martin travesty.

Like most citizens, I didn't know anything about it, but the media quickly pounced on Obama's "controversial" comments.

Really? How controversial? Well, here it is:

It seems like a heartfelt rumination on where we are as a country in terms of race relations and gun violence.

But, to the extreme commenters on the WSJ and Fox News websites, it is President Obama who is a racist and is guilty of fomenting racial tensions.

Really.

The comments are clearly a sign that we do not live in a "post-racial" America.

Far from it.

Here are some samples from the comment section after the WSJ story:

1) "Obama: Trayvon Martin 'Could Have Been Me'
(too bad, it wasn't)

2) One would expect the President to be the President of all Americans not just the black race's President. Then again his position is of no surprise.

3) Is Obama beginning a new war on whites, women, and Hispanics?

4) Nahhhh...Sorry Mr. President.....Not buying your race batting. ....he did not have your opportunities to scam the system...he was one of millions of disenfranchised black young men failed by the black community because you and other will not invest in the young black youth....yes Mr. President you are a racist and an opportunist you like thousands like you never waist a horrible tragedy to further your self serving addenda...I pray this destroys your fake facade with the Hispanic community


Or, these comments after the Fox News essay by Juan Williams:

1) Sorry Juan - the only people who are obsessed with skin color in this country, are black people.

Who brought up racism into the confrontation between Zimmerman and Treyvon? . . . Treyvon did by calling Zimmerman a "cracker". 

Black people are the ones that need to get over their skin color - everyone else already has.

2) Obama is admitting that he would call white people "Cracker" and he would jump a guy on the sidewalk of a neighborhood and Assault him.   Ok Obama.

3) Arrest all liberals, put them behind razor wire and then deport them.

4) Obama, the second Adolph.

Freedom.

Off the rails and in the ditch

Here's a link to an essay that gets at the heart of what's the matter with the Grand Old Party.

The piece also points out why our country can't seem to advance progressive causes that most Americans believe in.

That said, the GOP continues to have a powerful hold on the levers of power.

Consider the recent brouhaha over the "nuclear option" of busting the filibuster that the GOP has used so effectively to thwart President Obama's agenda.

Naturally, since the GOP Senate leadership budged ever so slightly, the purists on "hate radio" claimed that Republicans were taken the woodshed and beaten senseless.

In reality, the GOP continues to show how powerful it is by getting the Democrats to cave.

The most important fact is this: "Before President Obama took office, 20 executive-branch nominees were filibustered. Under the Obama administration, 16 have been filibustered."

Or how about this fact: "Former Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson faced one filibuster. Sen Harry Reid has faced more than 400."

In essence, the GOP has earned its racist stripes.

While both parties serve at the beck and call of major corporations, the GOP caters to southern whites and fundamentalists who hate gays, immigrants and women who want control over their bodies.

You would think that the GOP's "big tent" is now a mere lean-to, but gerrymandering has given Republicans enormous clout considering how its base is diminishing.

While the Democrats still try to work with Republicans, the GOP pounces.

Until the Democratic Party is willing to play hardball and bean the heads of the GOP, we won't see much change in this country.