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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 contact with no more than 100 persons would have made it almost impossible for high schools to reop...

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 taken to protect wildlife. Timber companies warned that if they were not given this tax relief, they we...

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, removed the turret and most of its other attractive features, leaving it the less fanciful, more utilita...

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 6:00 p.pm Isolation is a part of everyone’s life right now, and it’s unfortunately been a part of L...

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 week, listing the range of ages within which people had died, for instance.   At first, Governor Kate...