I've always had a grudging admiration for anyone who would volunteer to be either a school board member or a city councilor. The jobs seem very thankless to me, in some ways. There isn't any pay, and a huge amount of work and responsibility. I can't even imagine taking on the task of overseeing huge budgets and administrations, and at the same time trying to maintain my every day life.

Even if they have ulterior motives; even if it's a stepping board to higher office, or ego, or self-promotion; they are doing something that I would never, ever do. Bless them.

John Hummel seems like one of the more progressive members, and I'm willing to take at face value his altruistic motives.

I think Bend has grown so fast, that we are -- all of us --- on a steep learning curve. We are a small town growing into a mid-sized city overnight, and there are people who are going to try to take advantage of our newness.

I can't see how the councilors can be completely blamed for the transportation fiasco; it is the staff's job to work out the details. Someone failed there, and ought to be made accountable.

I've been wondering since the first interview of the transportation director. She pretty much said, "Hey, this is easy to do. All we have to do is a bit of nip here, a tuck there. Simple!"

That sent off all kinds of red flags to me. So everyone in the city administration before you was just too stupid to see how easy it was? I think the city was bamboozled by someone who had good intentions, but probably was way over their head in the reality of how hard it is to fund and support an entire transportation district from scratch.

We do seem to fall into that trap often. The Tower Theater? Never mind that no commercial entity had found a way to make it work. We just need to hold a fundraiser or two, transform the theater and it will turn from a white elephant into a money making proposition (or at the least, a self-supporting institution.)

It's still a white elephant, as gussied up and nice as they made it. I've always wondered if the people behind the Tower knew in their hearts that it would never support itself, or whether they were so focused on the need for 'art' that they pushed through anyway. There will be the inevitable "but it's self-supporting now, or will be soon," but there has been a huge amount of money invested in the place, and it will probably never pay for itself completely. If it was always meant to be a public arena, then they should have said so. Many of us would've supported it anyway, just for the sake of art.

When they first start raising money for it, they came in and asked me if I wanted to contribute.

"I'm sorry, I can't afford to."

"Oh, don't worry. We're just asking for a future contribution so that we can get matching funds."

"Is it legally binding?"

"No. We just want to show the bigger funders that there is local interest..... blah, blah."

That seemed rather strange to me at the time; it may be the way these things work. So I have to wonder, for instance, when the city bails out the Tower by agreeing to hold meetings there, and then immediately found out that most of the time it didn't work well; I have to wonder that was just a fig leaf to keep the Tower going.

In other words, Trojan Horses, that are meant to reassure the public that everything is on the up and up; and knowing that once they are in place, it is very unlikely we'll go back. We'll just keep throwing money at the Tower, because we've already thrown so much money at it. We'll just keep throwing money at the transportation program because we've already thrown so much money at it.

For our own good, of course.