Subduction Zone

Northwest Dealings

Category: Oregon

Oregon

Oregon House Dems Have a Blog

The new blog started by the Oregon house democrats is an interesting idea. On the main page you get a normal blog format with the usual sequential entry listing. Alternately, each member is a category and you can click a link on the left sidebar to get all the entries from a specific politician. Yep, they are politicians and it will be interesting to see if all we get is politician speak or if these folks are ready to open themselves up as real people. I’d be happily shocked if it is not the former. It would be a treat...

Oregon / Taxation

Oregon’s Proposed Mileage Tax

As some of you may remember Oregon is planning to evaluate a proposal to replace their gasoline sales tax with a per mile assessment. For residents they contemplate equipping each vehicle with a GPS system and have special readers at gas stations that will add your mileage assesment to your refill bill. Out of staters would continue to pay a gas tax at the pump as they do today. The privacy issues and the cost to implement and administer should stop this dead in its tracks. But governments are driven to maximize their revenue so unless plenty of folks step...

British Columbia / California / Ecology / Idaho / Montana / Oregon / Washington / Wyoming

Short on Water?

The Oregon State University Extension Service has put up a new site called Drought in Oregon with a bunch of informative links In this new website, the OSU Extension Service has compiled publications and information to help Oregonians cope with water shortages at home, in the garden and on the farm. This is targeted at Oregon residents but there is information that will be useful throughout the region this summer. For those of you who want state specific material here are a few more links: Washington State University Drought Alert Washington Department of Ecology: 2005 Drought University of Idaho: Drought...

Economics / Oregon

Free Market and Gasoline Distribution

Over at Blue Oregon Kari Chisholm attempts to misplace blame in telling the unsurprising story of a Salem service station operator, Brent DeHart, who appears to be getting screwed by Shell Oil which is both his supplier and the owner of an adjacent corporate station which underprices Dehart. At first glance I’ll accept that DeHart is getting screwed and I suspect is in the company of many others in the Northwest who have had the same thing happen at the hands of one or another of the big oil vendors right along with a lot of drivers who are hammered...

Oregon / Taxation

Coburg Citizens: Pay Your Own Way

Perhaps the folks in Coburg will step up to the plate and start paying for their own services, including their police overemployment plan, by rejecting their operating levy. Enforcement of appropriate traffic laws on their main streets, all two of them, is certainly reasonable and it may be reasonable that such an effort generates a bit more than enough revenue to cover the required monitors and the supporting legal infrastructure. Coburg has, though, become notorious, if not a laughing stock, throughout the northwest and beyond for their effort to fill their coffer through ticketing on I-5 adjacent to town (the...