Image provided by: Friends of the Sandy Public Library; Sandy, OR
About Sandy post. (Sandy, Oregon) 1938-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 21, 1978)
Editorial and Opinion From other editors: Welcome Signs Needed at Outskirts of Sandy Dealing with big government at times can be frustrating. The Jaycees here who spent 100 man hours to put up “Welcome to Sandy’’ signs three years ago would testify to that. On prior approval from the Oregon Highway Division, the Jaycees built two rustic signs for both ends of town and worked with city and state officials for proper placem en t. M aterials w ere donated by area merchants, and Portland General Electric installed the poles to hold the signs. The sign that welcomed visitors from the west stayed up two m onths before the Highway Division rescinded its approval and ordered it down. The sign on the east end of town never got up. The large poles that held the sign near the Ford garage east of town stand as rem inder of the Jaycees’ in tention. With 10,000-18,000 cars passing through Sandy daily, we think that another effort should be made to work within the state’s narrow guidelines for installation of community identification signs on state highways — in this case, Highway 26. Signs that identify Sandy and the city’s population would be permissible at either end of town within city limits, ac cording to one Highway Division, Perm its Department spokesman. The signs might even note something like “ Home of the Sandy Mountain Festival,’’ he said. Also, directional signs that note location of things like the library, city hall, city park and community pool might be allowed at some in tersections, he suggested. And if the City of Sandy allows room in the new community center for the Chamber of Commerce, a sign might be approved for guiding visitors to the Chamber office for more information. The key to such efforts, said Dick would be a willingness of a civic building inspector, local highway engineer and Highway Division Perm its Departm ent, for prior approval and tfien turn over sign ownership to the City of Sandy. This would be a worthwhile project again for the Jaycees or Chamber of Commerce. (VB) A Field of Six for the Mayor’s Job Recent entry of theater owner John W. Kent into the six-candidate m a y o ra l ra c e causes Mel Haneberg to chuckle over new interest in his job. Incumbent Mayor Haneberg, who retires from office this year, said that his big problem as a candidate was in finding someone to run against him. Perhaps he’s brought new status to the position. F irst Councilman Bruce Cook, an in su ra n ce a g en t, announced candidacy. Then Councilman Jim Duff, grade school teacher, filed for the job. Next cam e high school counselor Dick Harrison, Sandy police sergeant Dennis Wolf and retired city recorder Ruth Loun- dree. Only three of the candidates have turned in their petitions, however. In any event, a six-candidate race increases the prospects that no one will win a clear plurality Nov. 7. A simple plurality will win the election, but what of a tie? Should two or more candidates draw an equal number of votes, city charter directs that they would draw lots publicly in a manner prescribed by the Council. With Sandy’s small number of registered voters and recent low voter turnout in levy elections, it appears that the first candidate to make 50 good friends could become mayor. (VB) Enforcement Needed with Striking Teachers It should be no surprise that respect for law and order seems to be plummeting in this country. Certainly not after listening to a judge in Snohomish County, Wash., explain why he had decided not to send striking teachers back to work. The judge affirmed their strike was illegal but said he wouldn’t order them back since it “ doesn’t do any good. They just ignore the orders.” In other words, this particular ju d g e feels the courts a re powerless if teachers decide not to obey the law. At least he wouldn’t do anything about it. Wonder if he applies the same rules to a burglar, an arsonist, someone guilty of car theft? Their actions might break the law, but if they decide not to obey his edicts, he’d have to let them go home free. What kind of nonsensical justice this? If a law is broken, penalties should be paid Laws should apply equally to everyone. High Schoolers Improving Scholastically We were delighted to read last weekend that 1978 Oregon high school graduates improved their Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores over the previous year. This was the first such im p ro v em en t since 1972 when statew ide comparisons first were m ade. V erne D uncan, s ta te su p erin ten d e n t of public in struction, said Oregon students did better in both the verbal and math portions of the tests. Schools have taken a lot of heat lately because of falling SAT scores. Hopefully, the trend has been reversed. Von Braschler General Manager John Kline, Editor Caroline DuH, Office Manager Mark Floyd, Staff Reporter Kaye Barton, »toff reporter Published weekly Thursday» by The Outlook Publishing Co Bow 68 Sondy Oregon 970 5 5 Second do»* postage poid o ' Sandy Oregon 668 5548 SUBSCRIPTION RATES In M ultnom oh ond Clockomos Counties per year »7 0C Servicemen ony address $7 00 In Oregon outside Multnom oh ond >arkorno^Ountie^per^eo^^^t^0^ In Northwest ond Pontic Coast States outside Oregon per year »9 00 Outside Northwest and Pocific Coost stores per year »11.00 û’—)! - m Newspaper Publishers Association ’ oga 2 Sondy Po«t Sandy Oregon 97055 * ‘ •epresented Notionolly by U S SUBURBAN PPCSS INC No 38 Sept. 31. 1878 School busing no answer Welcome Back, Carter... group that they, too, embark on forced busing to redress the imbalance among white and black children in a few Commentary FTC: Whose side is it on? In the name of consumer protection, the Federal Trade Commission properly pursues deceptive trade practices, including ad vertising. However, the agency is now on a campaign of trying to police the way pictures are used in television commercials. The problem here is how to find agreement on the meaning or message communicated by a visual image. When word The Federal Trade Commission is another of our g o v e rn m e n t re g u la to ry agencies whose work of tentimes causes us to wonder whose side it is on. copy is short, how many of these picture themes are legally deceptive? In whose eyes? The public’s or the Federal Trade Com mission's? A more basic concern regarding this regulatory overkill must include con siderations of the F irs t Amendment to the United S ta te s C o n s t i t u t i o n . Advertising, no less than other forms of written, oral and visual expression, is a freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment. Will the Federal Trade Commission next be con cerned with the pretty girls in billboard advertising? The handsome men in newspaper layouts? Or perhaps the sweeping scenery used in magazine ads to create mood, no matter what the product? In this campaign the Federal Trade Commission seems less concerned with freedom of expression than in jou sting im aginary “ visual w in d m ills .’ ’ The Federal Trade Commission needs more legal foundation than suspicions to deprive Am erican consumers of honest service and a con stitutional right. - KATU, Channel 2 Portland Letters to The Editor Thanks To the Editor: I wish to take this op p o rtu n ity to thank the citizens of Sandy for the affirm ative vote for the 1978- 79 budget which allows the city to operate through the next year. I wish to especially thank those members of the Kiw anis, Chamber of Commerce, and the fire department who worked so diligently in urging the people to cast their votes. However I am far from happy at the meager per centage of the registered voters who took the time to go to the polls I cannot recall ever having talked to a citizen of Sandy who didn't express an in terest it. how city govern ment operates, yet those supposedly re sp o n sib le persons do not take the trouble to spend a few minutes of their time on election day to make their wishes known Until such time as it becomes a matter of pride or shame whether a person exercises his responsibility in using his voting privilege, your representatives in city government w ill never know if the w ill of all the people is being expressed Very truly yours, Melvin Haneberg Government To the Editor: In form er years, a representative of the Oregon The insanity of mandatory schools. There is no conclusive school busing for reasons of that yanking race is making headway on evidence the West Coast. It is insane children from their neigh because it doesn’t help borhood schools in the name children learn better but of racial balance improves imposes on them the in the quality of education. convenience of sometimes There is not even any long bus trips in the morning compelling evidence that doing so contributes to and afternoon. greater harmony and un In Los Angeles, the derstanding between dif Supreme Court has refused ferent races. to get involved in that city’s But there is a clear in mandatory busing program, dication that at least one apparently with the result aspect of busing — the long that the wholesale shifting of bus trips — is harmful to children w ill get under way children and their families. as scheduled. In the Los Angeles scheme, some children w ill be forced The Seattle schools have adopted a mandatory two- to make 45-minute, one-way way busing scheme without a bus trips. That means they’ll court order. The Portland spend an hour and a half schools now face a recom each day traveling on the mendation from a citizens’ city streets. Liquor Control Commission has come to our door to ask our opinion on the granting of a liquor license. Now they just paste up a notice on the window of a vacant eatery and hope no one w ill see it. That constitutes less service but still we pay more taxes. Measure 6, here I come! Greed, not consideration for people, the quality of a neighborhood or families seems to be the name of the game. In the last depression, people refused to pay taxes in Chicago and yet education still went on — in quonset huts People hit them in their pocketbooks, where it hurts Despite the same threat of no schools or police protection (and that was in the gangster era) we still had them Time seems to have gone full circle. Mrs. P.J. Bernard 42055 SE Lauzon Lane Sandy That’s an hour and a half they can’t spend studying in school. Or it’s an hour and a half they can’t spend at home with their families That can’t possibly be useful to children, especially those in prim ary and elementary grades. ( I t also can’ t possibly be useful to those children to be in the middle of automobile exhaust fumes for 90 minutes each day. ' There would be no drastic racial imbalance in big-city schools if there were no racial imbalance in housing patterns. So the only sen sible, long-range approach to o b lite ra tin g ra c ia l im balance is to make sure that there's no ille g a l discrimination in housing and that people, regardless of race, have the economic opportunity to live wherever they want. That’s a tall or der, to be sure, but busing children to and fro doesn’t get society any closer to the goal. —Albany Democrat-Herald From other editors^ NW recycling saving fuel Anyone who thinks recycling is a waste of time should know that an estim ated 8.3 m illio n pounds of alum inum collected by a metals firm in the Northwest during the first six months of 1978 has resulted in the saving of 66 m illion kilowatt hours of electricity. Now that’s not a king’s ransom as far as electricity goes, but 66 m illio n kilowatt hours of elec tric ity would have taken care of the needs of all the customers of Springfield U tility Board for a little over 37 days during the 1977-78 fiscal year. In other words, it ’s not exactly a piddling amount. A record 70 m illio n pounds of aluminum were collected nation wide during the first half of the year by Reynolds Aluminum Recycling Co., a subsidiary of Reynolds Metals Co. That represents 1.5 billion aluminum cans, which up until a few years ago would have found their way to a la n d fill somewhere or would have cluttered up a roadside d itch u n til someone bothered to conduct a roadside cleanup. On a nationwide basis, the amount of electricity saved by remelting the cans for use instead of making new aluminum from raw materials would have kept the customers of SUB energized for almost 45 weeks during the past fiscal year. Assuming the percentage of people recycling cans nationwide is the same as the level of participation in the Lane County SORT home recycling effort (and that's a wild assumption since SORT provided the easiest possible way to carry out recycling), that means the number of cans turned in represents only about 16 or 17 percent of the number sold. In reality, since few other states are as recycle-conscious as Oregon, the percentage is undoubtedly much lower. Also. the figqres represent only aluminum, which is only a small part of the total recycling effort. Glass, tin cans and paper can also be re manufactured with less energy than it takes to make them from raw m a te ria ls, and other wastes can be turned into fuel pellets that can be burned to produce elec tricity, thus saving fossil fuels. The possible savings of a good nationwide recycling program are endless. We hope that people w ill start waking up that fact. —Springfield News From other editors: $66 million in GSA fraud no small matter As the General Services Administration scandal slowly unfolds, we are reminded of someone’s com ment that even what falls through the cracks from a $500 billion budget can’t be called chicken feed. GSA spends $5 billion, or i percent of the federal budget, and investigator Vincent Alto thinks some $66 million a year has been falling through the cracks as a result of fraud and corruption. That piddling amount is enough to make it the “ Biggest money scandal in the history of the U S government,’ ’ according to Mr. Alto We wonder how big it would look if someone could guess how much the federal government loses through the cracks altogether. We can’t guess, of course. It can be hoped that other government departments have better control over cash boxes than the managers of the GSA have had. But that hope is not much reinforced by any casual tour of the Greater Washington area. Seldom in all history has there been such a boom town, with so many evidences of new-found wealth. Apartment buildings and town-house developments sprawl over the once- pastoral Virginia countryside. The most expensive hotels and restaurants are always heavily booked. Expensive shops proliferate. The sleepy town of two decades ago throbs with life. And why not? When a government building manager can make an extra $300,000 a year through kickbacks (we assume tax free) that’s enough to fuel any economy. GSA Adm inistrator Jay Solomon has promised 50 indictments within weeks, and perhaps as many as 500 over time. But no one yet knows how big the GSA scandal may become. President Carter has urged investigators to go after the “ bigger fish,’’ without detailing just how big the fish might become. Washington is tittering with speculation over whether some Congressmen might eventually fall into the net. There is a sense of high stakes maneuvering behind the scenes Whatever the outcome, it w ill not enhance the respect of hard-working, taxDavina citizens for the quality of their federal government and the steward ship of Congress. Word of all the high living in Washington has filtered into the remotest regions of the country with tales of $200 million senatorial palaces and the like. Of course, there are the usual apologists. One of the most surprising is Deputy Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, who is running the GSA investigation for the Justice Department. Mr. Civilette seems to think that the sort of thing that’s been going on at GSA is not much different from what happens in private business. Maybe not in kind, but all our instincts tell us that it w ill prove to be a great deal different in degree and scope We would urge Mr. Civiletti to forget about the private sector for a while and get on with the in vestigation. The flow through the cracks has become a bit too obvious. —Wall Street Journal the SOVEREIGN STATE of AFFAIRS W H O ’S SIDE DID THE ARBITRATOR REPRESENT IN THE POSTAL WORKERS DISPUTE? BOYD & WOOD YEAH LABOR A N D GOVER NM EN T \ W H O REPRESENTED THE BOTH SIDES I BOTH SIDES? ’ THEY D ID N ’T HAVE ONE / I COULD TELL... TAXPAYERS SIDE? \
