Bladine: Attention now turns to downtown trees
Trees, particularly downtown trees, are important to McMinnville, and public angst erupts when talk turns to removal of existing downtown trees as part of future redevelopment. With an expanding timeline ...
Bladine: No harm from a little bit of public scrutiny
Private agencies, even if spending millions of public dollars, can fly under the radar with closed meetings and private records. Sometimes, lacking experience being fully in the public eye, they can respond ...
Bladine: Warning issued about consequences of PERS bill
Rick Metsger of PAC/WEST Lobby Group blew the whistle in his recent commentary about a potential PERS boondoggle in the making. But in the rush of a short legislative session, few are paying attention ...
Bladine: You take your chances when applying political labels
Political labels are overused, misunderstood and often the bane of productive political debate. Related conversations quickly get complicated.BYU-Idaho Professor Hyrum Lewis wrote in 2022: “Our society ...
Bladine: An unsettling decline in letters to the editor
January produced an abundance of comments from newspaper readers to us — no surprise given the change in newspaper size, delivery schedule and methods of publication. In that same month, however, ...
Bladine: Gentle waves of technology can turn into tsunami
American households with television sets: From 9 percent in 1950 to 86 percent in 1959 (Britannica.com). Number of fax machines: From 25,000 to 250,000 in the 1970s, with 500,000 installed in 1985 and ...
Whatchamacolumn: Nostalgia can generate restorative power
Merriam-Webster defines “nostalgia” as “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.” One thesaurus compares ...
Bladine: A tale of two readers and new N-R e-editions
Some will embrace our “big change”; others will cancel their subscriptions. Some will accept one weekly printed issue and shun e-editions; others will begrudgingly join the world of digital ...
Whatchamacolumn: For Linfield, a time of transformation
It’s transformation time at Linfield University, where prolonged years of turmoil are evolving into a series of institutional and operational changes. But turbulence continues to bubble beneath the ...
Whatchamacolumn: It does, after all, take a community
Some have urged us to keep reminding readers about changes shaping up for the News-Register — they include variations in space, time, frequency, dimension and, arguably, “state of matter.” Beginning ...
Whatchamacolumn: County carpetbags into Mac tax politics
Yamhill County commissioners have formally accused McMinnville of “bait-and-switch” taxation tactics related to formation of the new McMinnville First District. Individually, commission Chair ...
Bladine: Medicare redux: with clarifications
Here’s a correction paragraph originally planned for display elsewhere on today’s page: “Correction: The deadline to change Medicare Advantage plan coverages, discussed in ...
Whatchamacolumn: Head-scratching Medicare choices
**Editor’s Note: Dec. 15 is an application deadline to enroll for new Medicare services under the Affordable Care Act. However, the deadline to change below-described plans for MedAdvantage coverage ...
Whatchamacolumn: Car crash boosts development plans
Belated thanks to the 80-year-old driver who, in June, accidentally slammed through a back wall of the county Planning Department building at Fourth and Ford streets. You were unidentified in the news, ...
Whatchamacolumn: Understanding the taxation 'black box'
Break out the checkbooks, it’s property tax time! The basics: Taxes are limited to $5 per $1,000 valuation for education, $10 per $1,000 for general government, plus added levies for voter-approved ...
