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TUESDAY March 5,2013
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bendbulletin.com TODAY'S READERBOARD Choosing a pope —with the cardinals gathering, how does itall work?A3
By Lauren Dake The Bulletin
K-9 forceBend's new police dogs are making an impact.B1
SALEM — The Legislature's top budget writers unveiled a budget proposal Monday that boosts spending for K-12 schools but would likely mean tough votes for lawmakers on
both sides of the aisle. The 2013-15 proposed budget funnels $6.55 billion to K-12 schools, with an additional $200 million factored in with assumed savings from cutting public employees retirement, for a total of $6.75 billion. It
also includes $275 million reached by ending tax breaks. The proposed $16.5 billion budget serves as a framework to guide lawmakers until the final budget is passed. "We're trying to give the Legislature pathways to ac-
complish things we all want to accomplish, and they aren't extreme," said Rep. Peter Buckley, D-Ashland, who helped craft the budget. "I know
people who are going to say the tax pathways are extreme, and the PERS cut is extreme.
We're trying to say, we can do this without extreme steps if we choose to do it together. Democrats will have to vote on moderate PERs cuts, and Republicans will have to vote on moderate tax expenditures." See Budget/A5
Ivorlf —Despite efforts to the contrary, conservationists say trade in illicit tusks is thriving in China.A6
Internet
StoW Otl —The investment
TVshows jockey for
is time; the reward is flavor.D3
eyeballs World's richest man
By Brian Stelter
— It's still Carlos Slim, but
New York Times News Service
someotherbignamesmoved around on the list.C6
Crime —Many theories try
In the television pilot that Cheyenne Jackson taped recently, he played an
to explain the decline in violent
aggressive young
deaths, but nothing seemsto
news anchor whose ascendancythreatened an older colleague. It was a fitting metaphor for the industry itself, because while Jackson had taped pilots for ABC, NBC and USA before, this was his first time doing one for a new challenger to those alphabet networks: Amazon. com. When Amazon sizes up the television marketplace, it sees opportunity, and it is far from alone. Internet-delivered TV, which until recently was unready for prime time, is the new front in the war for Americans' attention spans. Netflix is following up on the $100 million drama "House of Cards" with four more series thisyear. Microsoft is produc-
capture the whole picture.A4
And in national newsThe GOPaims to ease acrunch in Pentagon readiness.A2
EDITOR'SCHOICE
Stealth tax subsidy faces new scrutiny
a .2'
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By Mary Williams Walsh
and Louise Story
Ryan Brennecke/The Bulletin
Tumalo Falls from a helicopter late last week. The local snowpack was at 91 percent of normal on Monday.
New York Times News Service
The last time the nation's tax code was overhauled, in 1986, Congress tried to end a big corporate giveaway. But this valuable perk — the ability to finance a variety of business projects cheaply with bonds that are exempt from federal taxes — has not only endured, it has grown, in what amounts to a stealth subsidy for private enterprise. A winery in North Carolina, a golf resort in Puerto Rico and a Corvette museum in Kentucky, as well as the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and the offices of both the Goldman Sachs Group and Bank of America Tower in New York — all of these projects, and many more, have been built using the tax-exempt bonds that are more conventionally used by cities and states to pay for construction such as roads, bridges and schools. In all, more than $65 billion of these bonds have been issued by state and local governments on behalf of corporations since 2003, according to an analysis of Bloomberg bond data by The New York Times. During that period, the
single biggest beneficiary of such securities was the Chevron Corp., which last year reported a profit of $26 billion. SeeSubsidy/A5
By Dylan J. Darling The Bulletin
The Central Oregon snowpack is below normal for this time of year, but a boost is likely in store as snow is expected to fall this week. Overall, the snowpack in the Deschutes/Crooked River Basin was 91 percent of normal as of Monday, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service. At the end of January the snowpack had been at 103 percent. "We just had a real dry January and a pretty dry February, and that's what caused us to have the lower than average snowpack," said Peter McManus, an NRCS technician in Redmond. McManus last week measured snow levels at three sites the agency maintains on
the Cascade Lakes Highway. The NRCS tabulates snow data around the West, rely-
Snowpackfor water year2013 The Upper Deschutes and Crooked River basin snowpack is at 91
ing on daily readings from automated sites and monthly manual surveys. McManus found below-normal snowpack for this time of year. There was no snow at a site at Hungry Flat, about five miles from Bend, 82 percent of normal at a site near Wanoga Sno-park and 90 percent of normal at a site at Dutchman Flat Sno-park. At each survey site, McManus and other NRCS workers plunge a metal pipe into the snow to measure the snow depth at a series of predeterm ined spots. There are five locations at the sites at Hungry Flat and near Wanoga and 10 at Dutchman Flat. SeeSnow/A6
ing programming
percent of median andabout 96 percent of peak. Snowpack is at 113 percent of 2012 levels.
KEY 2013 — 2012 2011 — 2010 — Median 1981 to 2010
March4
30 inches
for the Xbox video game console with the help of a former CBS president. Other companies, from AOL to Sony to Twitter, are likely to follow. The companies are, in effect, creating new networks for television through broadband pipes and also giving rise to new rivalries — among one another, as between Amazon and Netflix, and with the big but vulnerable broadcast networks as well. See TV/A5
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Note: Water years begin in October Source. Natural Resources Conservation Service Andy Zeigert/The Bulletin
Questions raised onnatural gas leaks' climate impact By Juliet Eilperin The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Two guys in a black Pontiac Vibe cruise the streets of Washington's residential neighborhoods. The only sign of what
TODAY'S WEATHER Showers possible High 46, Low 27
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they are up to is a gray plastic tube hanging out of the trunk. And the fact that they get out of the car frequently to place a black box on manhole covers and study its readings. Measuring how much meth-
ane gas is leaking from pipes under the District of Columbia could help answer a key policy question. As natural gas production expands in the United States, do its benefits for the climate far outweigh its dangers?
Methane,the main component of natural gas, is about 25 times more powerful as a heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide, the largest human contributor to climate change; the atmospheric concentration of
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methane has doubled since the start of the Industrial Revolution. While it largely dissipates in a few decades and there is far less of it than CO„ it continues to drive global warming. See Leaks/A4
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