Bulletin Daily Paper 07/21/11

Page 1

Dodging a doggy disaster

Adaptive athletes

Poisonous mushrooms can be fatal to our four-legged friends • LOCAL, C1

HEALTH, F1

Wheelchair sports abound

WEATHER TODAY

THURSDAY

Cloudy, cool and breezy High 77, Low 43 Page C6

• July 21, 2011 75¢

Serving Central Oregon since 1903 www.bendbulletin.com

Drawing too few, JROTC at Mountain View to end By Scott Hammers The Bulletin

The Mountain View High School Junior ROTC unit is set to be eliminated next June, the Navy announced Monday. Mountain View is one of 29 high schools around the country where Naval JROTC will be shutting down because of a failure to meet standards or minimum enrollment requirements. Lt. Cmdr. Niels Farner, the Mountain View adviser, said the unit has struggled to keep its enrollment up since before he started in 2005. By congressional mandate, schools with more than 1,000 students — such as Mountain View — are required to enroll at least 100 students in their JROTC programs, while smaller schools are required to maintain an enrollment equal to 10 percent of the student body. Farner said during his first year on the job, enrollment was at 104, but dropped into the mid-70s the following year when Bend-La Pine Schools reduced students’ opportunities to take elective classes by boosting core requirements. A freshman typically has only one opening in his or her schedule per semester for an elective class, Farner said, forcing such a student to choose between the JROTC introductory naval science class and more exciting but less challenging offerings. “If I were a kid looking down the list of electives looking at the things being offered, and I see naval science, that’s probably not really going to jump out at me as something really worth taking,” Farner said. Two years after Farner took over the program, the school district cut back on cross-enrollment — the practice of letting students enrolled at one high school take classes offered at another — further cutting into the JROTC unit’s numbers. While the Mountain View unit once had more than 20 students from Summit and Bend High schools, Farner said that number was down to six this year, all older students who are able to provide their own transportation. See ROTC / A4

HEAT WAVE: South and East expect triple-digit temperatures, Page A3

INDEX E2

Local

C1-6

Business

B1-6

Calendar

E3

Classified

G1-6

Oregon

Comics

E4-5

Outing

E1-6

Crosswords E5, G2

Sports

D1-6

Editorial

C4

Stocks

B4-5

A2

TV listings

E2

Weather

C6

Education Health

F1-6

Movies

E3

Obituaries

C5 C3

We use recycled newsprint The Bulletin An Independent Newspaper

Vol. 108, No. 202, 40 pages, 7 sections

MON-SAT

Online outdoor gear seller to open Bend store By Tim Doran The Bulletin

Altrec, the online outdoor gear retailer based in Redmond, plans to announce today that it will open a brick-and-mortar store in the former Blockbuster site near Safeway on Bend’s west side. CEO and founder Mike Morford said Altrec plans to open the store, which will be

called Greatoutdoors by altrec.com, in the fall, before the winter season. The store will be open seven days a week, he said, and the number of employees will vary by season. Altrec sees the expansion into real-world retail as a way to serve customers in the region, some of whom sometimes show up at the Redmond warehouse looking to buy gear.

“(We wanted) the opportunity to reach our existing Bend customers and provide them with an even higher level of service,” Morford said Wednesday. Altrec, a privately held company that Internet Retailer magazine ranked 408th this year on its Top 500 list of retail websites, raised more than $6 million in financing in 2010, according to reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. See Altrec / A6

PEDALING PAST PETALS

Ryan Brennecke / The Bulletin

Cyclists zoom down McKenzie Pass toward Sisters shortly after reaching the summit while competing in Stage 1 of the 2011 Bend Memorial Clinic Cascade Cycling Classic on Wednesday. Cesar Grajales won the pro men’s race with a time of 2 hours, 45 minutes, 56 seconds, and Kristin McGrath won the pro women’s race in 3:24:44. Today’s Stage 2 is the 14-mile Skyliners Time Trial, in which competitors depart from and finish at Bend’s Summit High School. Pro men start at 10 a.m., with pro women starting about 11:45 a.m. For more on Stage 1 and complete coverage of the CCC, including

race results, see Sports, Page D1.

In Washington, unlikely coalition helps river adapt

TOP NEWS INSIDE

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Altrec scaling new retail peak

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By Leslie Kaufman

Tribal leaders, government agencies and private partners are preparing for the changes that climate scientists anticipate for Washington’s Nisqually River.

New York Times News Service

NISQUALLY NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Wash. — For 10,000 years the Nisqually Indians have relied on chinook salmon for their very existence, but soon those roles are expected to reverse. Based on current warming trends, climate scientists anticipate that in the next 100 years the Nisqually River will become shallower and much warmer. Annual snowpack will decline on average by half. The glacier that feeds the river, already shrunken considerably, will continue to recede. Play the scene forward and picture a natural system run amok as retreating ice loosens rock that will clog the river, worsening flooding in winter, and a decline in snow and ice drastically diminishes the summer runoff that helps keep the river under a salmon-friendly 60 degrees. To prepare for these and other potentially devastating changes, an unusual coalition of tribal government leaders, private partners and federal and local agencies are working to help the watershed and its inhabitants adapt. They are reserving land farther in from wetlands so that when the sea rises, the marsh will have room to move as well;

Matthew Ryan Williams New York Times News Service

they are promoting hundreds of rain gardens to absorb artificially warmed runoff from paved spaces and keep it away from the river; and they are installing logjams intended to cause the river to hollow out its own bottom and create cooler pools for fish. Jeanette Dorner, the director of the salmon recovery program for the Nisqually Tribe Natural Resources Department, grew up wading along a creek that feeds the river, hunting freshwater mussels. Even though protecting the rivershed requires herculean feats of coordination among various authorities and has cost roughly

$35 million over the last decade, she said, “it is urgent we do not just walk away.” Many scientists and policy analysts believe the best course of action is to do what conservationists have long tried to do — return ecosystems to their strongest natural health and then stay out of the way. This approach is known as resiliency. But as humans come to be adversely affected by the stepped-up pace of ecological change, they also increasingly look to help Mother Nature out in more active ways. See River / A4

Bus stops now meet accessibility standards By Nick Grube The Bulletin

It took a federal lawsuit and nearly five years of work, but the city of Bend now has bus routes that are considered accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. That wasn’t the case when the city created Bend Area Transit in 2006. Several local residents with disabilities sued the city a few months after BAT operations began,demand- “It’s a ing that the wonderful agency fix the feeling of problem and bring the pub- accomplishlic transporta- ment and tion system into relief. ... compliance. Eventually, I’m jubilant.” the city reached — Shelley a settlement Palmer, a with Disability Rights Oregon, quadriplegic a Portland- who helped based nonprof- bring the it that was rep- BAT into resenting the compliance plaintiffs, under which the activist organization will drop its lawsuit in exchange for BAT coming up to ADA standards by 2012. “It’s a wonderful feeling of accomplishment and relief and almost disbelief that it’s really happening,” said Shelley Palmer, a quadriplegic who was on a city committee that helped guide the settlement work. “I’m jubilant. I have to tell you, everybody I describe the experience to thinks the same thing: ‘Who would have thought?’ ” When BAT started its fixed-route service, only a handful of its 170 or so bus stops met ADA standards. For someone in a wheelchair or with other mobility constraints, such as using a walker, this meant much of the transit system was unusable. In some places the sidewalks were uneven or nonexistent, and someone in a wheelchair would have been dropped off into bushes, grass, gravel or other precarious surfaces. See Accessibility / A4

DEBT TALKS

Wall Street firms devise fallback plans for default By Louise Story and Julie Creswell New York Times News Service

Lawmakers in Washington are racing to reach a deal to save the country from defaulting on its debt, but on Wall Street, financial players are devising doomsday plans in case the clock runs out. These companies are taking steps to reduce the risk of holding Treasury bonds or an- Inside gling for ways to make profits • Obama open from any possible upheaval. to short-term And even if a deal is reached debt deal, in Washington, some in the Page A3 industry fear that the dickering has already harmed the country’s market credibility. On Wall Street, Treasuries function like a currency, and investors often use these bonds, which are supposed to be virtually fail-proof, as security deposits in their trading in the markets. Now, banks are sifting through their holdings and their customers’ holdings to determine if these security deposits will retain their value. See Wall Street / A4


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