Bulletin Daily Paper 03/02/12

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KIDS: Reviving two to a room • E1 MARCH 2, 2012

Dark, dark comedy • GO!

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Serving Central Oregon since 1903 www.bendbulletin.com

CHAMPIONSHIPS, DAY 1 Measure to guard concealed gun carrier IDs passes

Bachelor hosts prep alpine event • D1

SNOW, MAN

By Lauren Dake The Bulletin

SALEM — Sen. Fred Girod told his colleagues Thursday the fact that he has a concealed weapons permit is “nobody’s business.” The majority of his fellow lawmakers agreed with the Republican senator from Stayton and passed a measure 24 to 5 IN that guards the SALEM identity of Oregonians who have concealed weapons permits. Two gun measures sparked passionate debate on the Senate floor on Thursday, with lawmakers voting down a bill, Senate Bill 1594, that would have banned weapons on school or university grounds, and approving House Bill 4045, protecting the identity of concealed permit license-holders. Sen. Ginny Burdick, D-Portland, a former reporter, pointed out that concealed weapon records have long been public and there hasn’t been an instance, she said, where someone has been harmed because the records were made available. Rather, she continued, reporters have crosschecked concealed weapon carriers’ information against criminal records and found “a handful of alarming circumstances.” “I know I’ve lost this fight,” she said. “It’s unfortunate we’re closing the potential to improve our public safety simply to address a problem that does not exist.” Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, said he believes the bill will protect Oregonians from identity theft. He said the records will still be open to public scrutiny, but the “threshold will be higher than what it is today” to gain access to the records. See Guns / A5

Photos by Rob Kerr / The Bulletin

AT TOP: Snowmen in Bend’s NorthWest Crossing neighborhood. ABOVE: Megan Strait, 11, pulls her brother Zane, 6, in a sled while going to a friend’s house Thursday morning along Northwest Vicksburg Avenue in Bend. BELOW: Amy Divita Lomsky, 37, and her son Enzo, 4, sled Thursday morning on Northwest John Fremont Street. A Bend-La Pine Schools bus makes a stop. An overnight snowfall meant a late start for Central

Oregon Community College and Oregon State University-Cascades Campus, as well as schools in Bend, La Pine and Redmond on Thursday morning. The two-hour delays gave kids plenty of time to build snowmen and play outdoors before heading to school. Skies are expected to be clear and sunny this weekend. For a full forecast, see Page C6. For a look back at the weather for February, see Page C1.

Bend may trim water plans • The city says it’s to help ratepayers, but opponents scoff By Nick Grube The Bulletin

To give a reprieve to ratepayers and lessen the sting of ongoing political backlash, the city of Bend is trying to pare down its $68.2 million Bridge Creek water project by about $30 million. Bend city councilors still need to approve the plan, but it esInside sentially would involve delaying • What it may mean construction of a to you, A4 $25.4 million water filtration system until 2020 and abandoning a $3.7 million hydropower facility designed to generate green energy. In the meantime, the city will spend $26.9 million to build a 10-mile-long conduit underneath Skyliners Road that will replace the two aging pipelines that currently deliver Bridge Creek water to the city’s Outback treatment facility. This will also include reconstructing the intake facility located near the Tumalo Falls parking lot. But while these cost-saving measures would seem to mollify opponents of the project — which they say is too expensive and detrimental to Tumalo Creek water flows — it appears to have done the opposite. “It’s an attempt to hoodwink the public and continue on,” said Bend resident Peter Schneider, who is involved with the opposition. “I have no idea why they are so committed to it, especially when there’s so much saying that maybe they’re wrong.” See Water / A4

SMARTPHONES

Revising the limits for unlimited By Brian X. Chen New York Times News Service

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TODAY’S WEATHER

The first Americans: Ancient knife revives a radical theory By Brian Vastag The Washington Post

Partly cloudy High 45, Low 28 Page C6 The Bulletin An Independent Newspaper

Vol. 109, No. 62, 62 pages, 7 sections

When the crew of the Virginia scallop trawler Cinmar hauled a mastodon tusk onto the deck in 1970, another oddity dropped out of the net: A dark, tapered stone blade, nearly eight inches long and still sharp. Forty-two years later, this rediscovered prehistoric slasher has reopened debate on a radical theory about who the first Americans were and when they got here.

Archaeologists have long held that North America remained unpopulated until about 15,000 years ago, when Siberian people walked or boated into Alaska and down the West Coast. But the mastodon relic turned out to be 22,000 years old, suggesting the blade was just as ancient. Whoever fashioned that blade was not supposed to be here. Its makers likely paddled from Europe and arrived in America thousands of years ahead of the

western migration, argues Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Dennis Stanford. “I think it’s feasible,” said Tom Dillehay, a prominent archaeologist at Vanderbilt University. “The evidence is building up, and it certainly warrants discussion.” At the height of the last Ice Age, Stanford says, mysterious stoneage European people known as the Solutreans paddled along an ice cap jutting into the North Atlantic. See Stone age / A4

Sometimes, all-you-can-eat does not mean all you can eat. Smartphone users who try to get the most out of their devices are learning exactly that. Some of the nation’s largest wireless phone companies set limits on their unlimited data plans by deciding when they can slow down a smartphone’s Internet transfer speeds. AT&T on Thursday clarified the limits of its unlimited data plan. It published a Web page describing what kind of data use might lead to customers being throttled. Previously, AT&T said customers with unlimited plans who were in the top 5 percent of users in a given area could be subject to throttling, but it did not give any specific limits. See Data limits / A5


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