Month: December 2014

Salem Weekly, our alternative paper, is a treasure for our community. Without it, we'd never know about important news, events, and cultural happenings that the Statesman Journal doesn't cover.     Ruth Hudgens sent out an email with a great idea. Donate to Salem Weekly!   There are two ways to do this: (1) A direct donation to Salem Weekly that isn't tax-deductible, or (2) A donation to one of two non-profit organizations that's earmarked for buying ads in Salem Weekly, which is tax-deductible (so far as I know).   Both ways are described below. Here's what Ruth said:   Dear…

Ugh! Depressing end-of-year news for Salem tree and nature lovers. But depressingly familiar in a town whose current City leaders seem to always choose short-term special interest profit over long-term community livability and sustainability. Over on Bonnie Hull's On the Way blog, she reports in words and photos on "Another Hospital Disaster... Urban Logging." As long as we’ve lived in Salem the darned hospital has been destroying, burning, and now logging land for more buildings, more parking.  The original hospital was in a residential neighborhood, near the university…a neighborhood we aspired to live in BUT, by the time we could…

More and more, the Salem Statesman Journal is becoming a caricature of a genuine community newspaper. Journalistic integrity and competence is sinking day by day, while frothy, shallow content expands in our local Gannett Corporation USA Today clone. Today's irritation is the deleting of all of the comments on Sunday's opinion piece by Dick Hughes, "Public Project Genetics: Failure Starts at Birth." I'm pretty sure there were five comments on the piece when I went to bed last night. This morning they were all gone, replaced by two new ones. One deleted comment was Susann Kaltwasser's, which was critical of…

"Why the heck are you doing this?" I asked myself this question as I drove to last night's downtown neighborhood association (CAN-DO) meeting, which featured a presentation by Jim Vu on developing long-term solutions for Salem's downtown parking problems. Since I didn't hear an answer from myself (perhaps because "I" am the same person as "me"), I guess the reason is why anybody does anything: enjoyment, happiness.  Downtown parking is a never-ending soap opera in this town. Following the twists and turns of this drama is entertaining in much the same way watching dysfunction unfold on stage or screen is.…

After walking for the first time into the recently opened Archive Coffee & Bar today, it only took me about three seconds to decide: This place is a winner! The vibe was immediately obvious. Youthful, hip, cool, ironic, laid back in a sophisticated fashion. A premonition of this was evident over a year ago, as noted in my "Archive -- cool addition to Salem's downtown scene." I walked up to the coffee side of the serving area and ordered my usual expresso drink: nonfat vanilla latte. It was beautifully presented. Tasted good too. I felt an extra dose of caffeine-stimulated chi/qi after I…

Today the Salem City Club had an interesting meeting topic, Finding Community in Salem: Great Good Places. Six panelists talked about their favorite gathering places, which were billed as those that: Give us a sense of belonging to a greater community, of being connected to a community  – hangouts, coffee houses, public spaces, cafes, bars, parks, community centers, libraries, promenades, neighborhood stores – places that bring people together and make their lives richer. The City Club bulletin points out a book by that name, "Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart…

After attending today's meeting of the Salem River Crossing Oversight Team, I'm pretty much convinced that its members have jumped the gun on Oregon's upcoming legalization of recreational marijuana. And maybe dived into psychedelics as well. Nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying that while it's great to be high and enjoy an altered state of consciousness, it isn't a good idea to be off in your dream world while you're playing around with decisions that could cost Salem-area residents a billion dollars or so while buying them nothing, zilch, nada. A week ago I blogged about Salem's Third Bridge…

About a month ago I started to hear rumors about layoffs of long-time staff at the Statesman Journal newspaper here in Salem, Oregon. Now it's happening -- after 15 years at the paper, business and City Hall reporter Michael Rose has been fired. Yesterday he tweeted: A little update: My 15-yr career with the SJ ended Dec 5. I was downsized. New twitter handle: mrose_nw. Thanks for following. Last Saturday night I talked with Michael at a fundraising event. He said that everybody at the Statesman Journal had to submit letters of resignation, with some people not being rehired.  I…

Laughter. Great mostly vegetarian food. Interesting people. A gay-themed wedding cake. Republican fund-raising events might have some of these, but almost surely not the latter. And not as much of the former, I bet. My wife, Laurel, and I thoroughly enjoyed a benefit last Saturday night for Carl Wolfson, he of "Carl in the Morning" on Portland's XRAY FM station.  The low-wattage signal isn't audible over the air here in Salem, but podcasts are available. And Salem's KMUZ community radio broadcasts excerpts from Carl's show every Monday from 9-11 am. My favorite part of the evening was listening to Carl's…

Today I got an email from someone who disagreed with the contention that nothing was happening in downtown Salem last Wednesday, December 3.  Something certainly was: Something Red 2014, an event sponsored by Artists in Action. The nothing was happening notion came from a letter to the editor in the Statesman Journal that I talked about in yesterday's "Who killed Salem's First Wednesday? Clueless city officials" post. The letter started off with: Every year we look forward to First Wednesday in December. All the brightly lit and crowded stores, carolers in Dickensian costumes, food offerings and treats; everything for the…

Scam: a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation. Yes, thats what we've got right here in Salem, Oregon. This town has a reputation for sleepiness, but Salemians need to freaking WAKE UP to the Third Bridge scam city officials are trying to get them to pay for. Last night I spent two hours at a Salem River Crossing Funding Workshop, which would have been more accurately called How to Fool Local Citizens Into Paying a Billion Dollars for an Unneeded Boondoggle.  If you think my language is over the top, believe me, it isn't. The Love Salem blog speaks even…

Sadly, planning for an unneeded, unwanted, and unpaid-for Willamette River third bridge continues on in Salem. This half billion dollar boondoggle is like a zombie that's half alive, half dead, and keeps on staggering along to no particular purpose other than enriching the consultants working on the unnecessary project. A No 3rd Bridge Facebook link tells the wasteful tale: at least $62,088 has been spent every month for almost nine years on bridge planning. The CH2M Hill consulting firm must love that fact; taxpayers should hate it. So far about $7 million has been wasted in total. On this coming…