Johnm Burt News Today

Oregon Revises School Reopening Guidelines March 16, 2021 As  schools prepare to reopen across the state, responding to Governor Kate Brown’s executive order that elementary schools open by March 29, and all other schools no later than April 29, they will have more flexibility in how students interact with one another and with adults at school. Under new guidelines released by the Oregon Department of Education. officials had insisted that an earlier rule limiting each student to...

New Timber Taxes Proposed, Industry Says They Can’t Afford Them March 10, 2021 In 1991, the Oregon state legislature passed a measure reducing what was known as the “severance tax,” which collected revenue from logging companies for trees cut on privately owned land. This was intended to reduce the hardship which companies said they were suffering from the reduction in the amount of logging they were able to do on land owned by the state and federal governments as a result of measures tak...

A Brief History of Corvallis’s Hotel Julian February 23, 2021 A four-story Hotel Julian at 105 SW 2nd St. began life in 1892 as the three-story Corvallis Hotel, decorated in the Queen Anne style. Back then, its exterior had some highly decorative Victorian details, the most dramatic being a turret at the corner which added an extra story to its height – though not any usable space. In 1911, it was radically remodeled in the Georgian style, which gave it a usable fourth floor but, alas, remo...

Tag! You’re a Queer Film Festival Audience February 16, 2021 The current outbreak isn’t stopping the Tag! Queer Shorts Film Festival from taking place, even though, like so many things, it’s had to go online. It’s still a collection of short films by queer filmmakers from the Pacific Northwest, still sponsored by Portland’s Hollywood Theatre.  The films are shown in four blocks, each devoted to a different theme.  The first is Isolation, which begins on Thursday, the Feb. 18, at 6:0...

Brown Changes Policy on OHA Reporting, Gelser Agrees February 3, 2021   This week, the Oregon Health Authority changed its policy, announcing it would no longer provide as much demographic information about each person who had died from COVID-19 – information such as date of death, age, county of residence, location at time of death, and how long ago they had tested positive for the virus. Instead, the public would only be informed of an aggregate description of people who had died in a wee...

Local Artist Sale to Help American Cancer Society January 19, 2021 Corvallis painter Rosana Berdichevsky is leaving town. She is relocating to Portland to help look after her husband while he undergoes cancer treatment. In a rush to set herself up in Portland, Berdichevsky asked Katie Gonzalez, her apartment’s building manager, to clear out her storage locker and donate its contents to a thrift shop.    In the lockers, Gonzalez found more than two dozen of Berdichevsky’s paintings. Upon ...

Corvallis-Albany Bike Path Moves Closer to Reality December 29, 2020 People have wanted a safe bicycle path between Corvallis and Albany for a long time. Right now, though, the best bike path from downtown Corvallis dead-ends near Cheldelin Middle School. Ten years ago, things looked promising for a path paid for in part by state funds, but by 2015, plans for a path alongside Highway 20 broke down, and Benton County had to return the money.   They started over from scratch, and ten different ...

OSU Research Tale: Icebound Amid COVID December 27, 2020 Dr. Jennifer Hutchings of OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences has made the behavior of sea ice her special area of study. Late last year, she got the chance to spend more time than ever before getting up close and personal with the ice.   The Polarstern, a research ship carrying an international crew of scientists, went into the Arctic Ocean to do something many other ships have tried hard to avoid: get stuck in t...

Driving on Ice December 27, 2020 ‘Tis the season for roads that make a car spin in circles and slam into trees. Here are a few tips to keep safe while driving in icy weather.  Steer into it. That’s the very first thing that anyone trying to explain how to drive on ice will tell you. It’s harder to do than it sounds, though, if what’s waiting straight ahead is oncoming traffic, or the ditch. But it’s true: if you yank the wheel to the side trying to avoid skidding into danger, you wil...

OSU Trains Beekeepers December 24, 2020 In 2018, Oregon State University invited “citizen scientists” to help them collect wild bees for study. Hundreds have answered the call since then. This year, OSU is upping their game by offering those lay people a chance to take an Extension Service course which can certify them as Master Melittologists – like a master gardener, only for beekeepers.   It’s the first program of its kind in the country, and its organizers hope it will inspire sim...