Salem

Actions speak louder than words. Tomorrow night, Monday, July 14, the Salem City Council will make a decision about Howard Hall -- a historic building that is the last structure remaining of the School for the Blind. Salem's Mayor, Anna Peterson, is fond of saying that she and the eight city councilors are dedicated to making fair and transparent decisions that reflect the broad community interest.  Well, talk is cheap. What counts are values expressed in actions. So what the City Council does at tomorrow's meeting will tell us much more about what counts at City Hall than the platitudes…

After watching the Salem (Oregon) City Council, Mayor, and City Manager make a series of really bad decisions, I'm worried that the council meeting next Monday, July 14, will result in another screwed-up vote. This time, to overturn the unanimous HIstoric Landmarks Commission decision to deny Salem Hospital's request to demolish Howard Hall, a Salem Historic Landmark that was part of the Oregon School for the Blind before it closed. Salem Community Vision is calling on people to come to the meeting and tell the councilors, Save Howard Hall.  Please mark your calendar and plan to attend the Salem City…

Ever since I moved to Salem in 1977, Enchanted Forest has been a regular must-visit for my family. Notably my daughter Celeste, born in 1972, and now my granddaughter Evelyn, age 7. Visiting us this week from their home in southern California along with husband/father Patrick, they were as shocked and saddened as I was to hear of the death last Saturday of Humpty Dumpty -- a beloved feature of the park for as long as I can remember. Download Humpty Dumpty has great fall at Enchanted Forest Reportedly two men climbing on the wall were responsible for Dumpty's demise.…

Woof! Meow! Yay!  Both humans and animals are excited about the Willamette Humane Society's annual benefit night of comedy, Applause for Paws.  Wednesday, July 16- 7:30 pmHistoric Grand TheatreTickets: $25 2014 features the comedy talents of voice impersonator and sound-effects king Michael Winslow (Spaceballs, Police Academy) and musical funny-man Michael Jenkins. My wife is a volunteer dog walker for the Humane Society. She knows how much good they do for animals in need.  Support them -- and have some laughs -- by attending the Michael Winslow event.  General Admission SeatingDoors open at 6:30 p.m.; show starts at 7:30 p.m.The Historic Grand Theatre191 High St.…

Remember when we trusted reporters to search out the truth without regard for who might be responsible for nefarious goings-on found at the end of the trail? I do.  Now I readily admit that my view of investigative reporting in this country may be through rose-colored glasses. Maybe journalistics never were as dogged in their pursuit of wrongdoing by government functionaries, business executives, elected officials, and others as I imagined they were. Still, it is unarguable that print and television media have gone downhill in this regard. There are good reasons why. For example, financial pressures caused by declining readership…

I'm looking forward to completion of a bicycle and pedestrian bridge from Salem's Riverfront Park to Minto-Brown Park. Three times a week I head to Minto-Brown to do my Streetstriding thing on an outdoor elliptical bike. It'll be great to have additional trails to ride and a bridge that connects Minto-Brown Park with downtown. But completion of the bridge likely has been delayed for a year, until 2016, due to a delay in getting approval from the Coast Guard to build a structure over a navigable waterway.  Download Minto Island bridge delayed as permits await approval So this may allow…

[* Note: "exciting" is used in a special sense in this blog post title. I am comparing watching my videos to, say, spending several hours in a doctor's waiting room with no cellular or wi-fi service, ten year old copies of Parent's Magazine being the only reading options.] Now that I've gotten past the above disclaimer, I'll share my EXCITING videos. Be careful not to watch them close to bedtime. I'm worried you will be too energized to sleep. However, I suppose there is a counter-argument for watching them when you want some sleep. Last Wednesday Ken Adams and I…

Salem (Oregon) is fortunate that some creative folks organized Stories from the Dark Side -- which is akin to a local version of The Moth Radio Hour: true stories told live. Tomorrow -- Thursday, June 26, 7:15 pm at the Grand Theatre in downtown Salem -- is the last of three Stories from the Dark Side monthly events. Tickets can be bought at the door. Info here. $15 gets you in; money well spent I told a story in May about the one hour I spent with my father. Total.  Audio of my ten minute talk is now available. Click…

Some email messages to public officials are more satisfying to send than others. This one felt great when I sent it off a few minutes ago to Salem City Councilor Laura Tesler, with a cc to other top City officials. Laura, you, along with some [other] councilors, keep referring to “lies” (or synonymous words) that people have been spreading about the City of Salem. I assume that, as a blogger, writer, and citizen activist, I am one of those people.   Please share with me specific examples of those lies you have found in my blog posts. Let’s fact-check them…

A just-released staff report for next Monday's City Council meeting thankfully throws a lot of cold water on the crazy notion that the Salem Public Library should be converted to a police facility, with the library moving to some other undisclosed location -- maybe the Marion Parkade parking garage. Download Council Item 7a (6_23_14) City Manager Linda Norris says in the informational memo: According to the City's Chief Building Official, the challenges in taking an existing building, constructed earlier than the 1990's when building codes were updated to account for seismic risk, may make it cost prohibitive to reconstruct the…

I don't want Salem's library to be moved into the ground floor of the Marion Parkade parking garage. But the City Council might give the go-ahead to plan for this at its next meeting on Monday, June 23.Crazy? Yeah, of course it is. Mayor Anna Peterson and City Manager Linda Norris have the hots for a vastly overpriced police facility taj mahal at the Civic Center, a monument to... something or other. Wasteful government spending and bureaucratic egotism, I guess.   Read on for a Call to Action from Salem Community Vision. Our Salem Public Library is on the chopping block.…

I disagreed with a lot of what was said in a Salem Breakfast on Bikes post, "How much worse would a Marion Parkade Library actually be?" The post refers to a proposal by City officials to seriously consider making the current library into a police facility, and moving the library to some other location. What rubbed me the most the wrong was a repeated Breakfast on Bikes mention of the library being a "charmless concrete bunker." Well, for comparision here's a genuine charmless concrete bunker -- the Marion Parkade parking structure that City officials have said could be the new…

Nicely said, Jim Scheppke. I agree with your cogent Facebook critique of how the Salem Statesman Journal, which aspires to be our town's "paper of record," has gone downhill a lot journalistically. Here's Jim's post: I can't believe how lame our local newspaper has become. I mean LAME! Today there were two articles on the front page. The headline grabber had to do with a Portland-based accordion club that is having a meeting at Silver Falls State Park. The second was about the Silverton Hills Strawberry Festival. This is the front page! Great editors from the past like Charles Sprague…

It's easy to show why the Salem Chamber of Commerce's poll about a proposed third bridge across the Willamette River is as crappy as the whole idea of this unneeded, unwanted, and unpaid-for boondoggle. Here's a quick question for you: "Would you like to have a new car?" Mentally press "1" for yes, "2" for no, "3" for no opinion. I answered yes. Most people would. Why the heck not?  Of course I'd like to have a new car. I'd also like to have a new house, a new television, a new computer, and lots of other new things. I just don't want…

Previously I've blogged about the Children's Room at the Salem library being held hostage to an ill-advised notion of converting the entire building into a police facility. (See here and here.)  Today I attended a two hour meeting of the Library Advisory Committee where this issue was discussed. A dozen or so people watched the proceedings, testimony to how much the library means to Salemians. (The committee chair said they usually only have one or two observers in attendance.) City Manager Linda Norris was delayed getting back from Eugene. So most of the library into a police facility discussion occurred…

What's not to like about next Wednesday's rally against the unneeded, unwanted, and unpaid for $400 million Third Bridge that special interests want to foist on Salemians? Us ordinary people, of course, would be expected to pay for it. Somehow or other. Bridge proponents haven't figured that out yet. Along with not-so-little details like why the bridge is needed in the first place. The rally will feature nice weather, almost certainly. Soapbox for ranting provided. Plenty of sidewalk standing room. Opportunity to ask pointed embarassing questions of politicians and bureaucrats immediately after the rally.  Love it!  So I plan to…

A week ago a humble local blogger -- ME! ME! -- revealed that City of Salem officials were holding a much-needed remodeling of the library's Children's Room hostage... to a possible conversion of the Salem Public Library into a police facility. Since, I've come across interesting snippets of information related to this. They've come from here and there, which is all I'll say about my sources. Hey, this isn't the New York Times. I'm just a blogger. I'm not wearing pajamas at the moment, but pretty close: shorts and sandals while sitting on a deck. Anonymous snippets is what you get…

When you read the title of this blog post, what do you think "giddily" meant? Probably something like happy, right? Joyful, maybe. This indeed is one definition of "giddy." As in, he was giddy with delight. Almost certainly you weren't thinking of another definition: dizzy, causing dizziness. As in, a giddy climb to the topmast. Therein lies my newest gripe about the Salem Statesman Journal's editorial page editor, Dick Hughes. Dick and I have a history of journalistic disagreements. It's sort of a fun game between us, and sort of not. (The first "sort of" made my use of giddily…