With the feeling that the League of Oregon Cities packs more bang for the buck when it comes to dealing with the Oregon Legislature, Pendleton’s city council has forwarded their list of issues to the league that they feel need to be addressed in Salem. It includes a request to be more proactive when dealing with our legislators. Perhaps it’s time to try that same approach at home.

A major shortcoming of our local city government is the uncanny ability to “kick the can down the road,” allowing a problem to reach crisis levels before any substantive action is taken. Both the condition of our city streets and the lack of low-income housing (the Pendleton Heights project will not provide any) have yet to be adequately addressed.

A rewrite of the parade ordinance to address concerns of inadequate funding for the ever-increasing costs incurred by the Pendleton Police Department was initiated, discussed, and then tabled with no further action. Likewise, a rewrite of the ordinance giving the police department the required tools to deal with homeless camping within the city was tabled, while residents continued to demand some action by the department.

Inaction or the inability to say no to special interest groups has left us with an industrial park with no utilities along the road to nowhere and a housing project, Pendleton Heights, years behind schedule and bound to cost taxpayers a bundle. Then there’s the support for a program that brought more homeless and associated drug and larceny problems to the downtown area, and financial support for the organization whose ill-advised program to bring “social gatherings” to Main Street during a pandemic made absolutely no sense. How about the Edwards Apartments issue? No resolution there either.

We can always find money to pay an East Coast laboratory to analyze our urine and feces at $2,400 a month, or start a drone training school for $250,000 rather than seek enhancements of current programs at Pendleton High School and Blue Mountain Community College. Why is it that we can’t find funding to fix our streets without significant increases in fees, taxes and water bills? Why is it up to us to tighten our belts another notch to pay a $11,000 DEQ fine for an infraction during construction of the new fire station because some manager simply wasn’t doing his job, yet who is routinely awarded those annual pay raises?

Rick Rohde

Pendleton