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WINNERS 1. As the new congressman from Oregon's 1st Congressional District, David Wu went east hoping to work on education and high-tech issues. The Democrat's committee assignments couldn't be any better: He's on the Education and Workforce Committee, which guides federal spending on elementary and secondary schools; and he's got a post on the Committee on Science, which will be dealing with technology issues crucial to Washington County's Silicon Forest. 2. Things just got easier for salmon huggers. On Friday the governor and the National Marine Fisheries Service dropped their appeal of the federal-court decision that ultimately forced the listing of coastal coho. Without the suit to muddy the waters, salmon savers can use both the Endangered Species Act and the guv's own Oregon Salmon Plan to get down to real work. 3. Parents and students can breathe more easily now that the Facilities Utilization Task Force has issued its report. The report essentially rebuts auditors' recommendations that up to 13 city schools be closed. Instead, the committee concluded, all the schools should remain open if they are used efficiently. |
LOSERS 1. Poor Washington County--literally. One day The Oregonian reports that leading chip makers are begging for property-tax reductions because nobody wants their product. The following day Intel announces it might invest another $12.5 billion in the area but only if it gets its own tax holiday. With landowners like these, new County Chair Tom Brian may have to start holding bake sales to build new roads. 2. Todd Seymour got hammered this week with a 7-and-a-half year sentence for his part in a string of armed robberies that made Grant High School nationally famous--or, rather, infamous. Although Seymour, a student-body vice president, participated in only two robberies, his sentence was just a year shorter than that of ringleader Ethan Thrower, who committed 19 crimes. 3. Bad news for suburban tailgaters. No sooner does a Gresham policeman's wife get cornered by an angry motorist than the City Council passes an ordinance outlawing "road rage," the first of its kind in the state.
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Willamette Week | originally
published January 27,
1999