Let’s say a business offers a group of customers a discount.

Then, several years later, the business admits that it fouled up and didn’t give those customers the full discount to which they had agreed.

What would you expect that business to do?

The word “refund” springs to mind, right?

Not to the Bonneville Power Administration, it doesn’t.

The BPA, the regional agency that sells much of the electricity in the Northwest, admitted recently that from 2002 to 2009 it overcharged, by $2 million, utilities including Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative.

The best way to rate teachers, we’ve always figured, is to watch them teach.

What teachers wear while they’re going about their work is not so much a secondary matter as it is irrelevant.

To mention another profession, we don’t much care whether bridge engineers don white hardhats or yellow ones.

We just want them to build bridges that don’t crumble into the river.

Curiously, Oregon has been concerned enough about public school teachers’ attire that the matter has been enshrined in state law for almost 90 years.

In 1923 the Legislature passed a law prohibiting public school teachers from wearing religious clothing.

Which is a long tenure for a law promoted by the Ku Klux Klan.

(Oregon is also, by the way, one of just three states with such a law on the books. The others are Nebraska and Pennsylvania.)

We’re wondering whether a majority of Oregon lawmakers has heard the adage about “keeping all your options open.”

The reason for our curiosity is that the House of Representatives voted 38-21 last week to close an option that matters to anybody who uses electricity.

Which covers pretty much everybody we can think of.

The House voted to extend Oregon’s ban on offshore drilling for oil and natural gas within three miles of the coastline.

(Baker County’s representative, Cliff Bentz of Ontario, voted against the bill.)

But it’s not the continuation of the drilling ban, per se, that bothers us.

It’s the duration: ten years.

We hope the Senate, which now takes up the legislation, House Bill 3613, will trim the moratorium to a more reasonable span, say three years.

We agree with Bogart; they don’t.

And so we endorse Bogart’s suggestion that the City Council approve what could be called the “no surprises” policy.

Councilors tabled the proposal during their Tuesday meeting, at which Bogart unveiled the idea.

Bogart and Councilor Milo Pope, who said he likes the concept, will draft a policy for the Council to consider during its Feb. 23 meeting.

The basic idea is straightforward: The Council will vote on only those matters that were listed on the agenda for the meeting during which the vote occurs.

In other words, if the agenda for a meeting lists four topics, councilors won’t make any decisions regarding a fifth topic at that meeting.

Here’s the bad news: Even some doctors, whose title confers automatic legitimacy to their opinions, went in for the conspiracy theories linking child vaccinations to autism and other ailments.

Here’s the good news: Hardly any parents in the United States paid attention.

And there’s more news of the good variety: The 1998 research that spawned the specious connection between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism has been not merely discredited.

It has at last been disowned, as it were, by the medical journal that published the shamefully shoddy work in 1998.

The Lancet, which is basically the British equivalent of America’s New England Journal of Medicine, last week retracted the 1998 paper by Dr. Andrew Wakefield.

A panel of British doctors concluded that Wakefield showed “callous disregard” for the children he studied.

Wakefield was guilty of a couple other ethical lapses besides.

For one, among those who bankrolled his research were lawyers representing families that intended to sue vaccine makers.

For another, the year before he published his findings, Wakefield patented a measles vaccine that could have replaced the measles-mumps-rubella inoculation which he linked to autism.

The Oregon Trail Interpretive Center seems to be enjoying a minor revival of sorts.

We hope this is the case.

The BLM center on Flagstaff Hill, about five miles east of Baker City, immediately joined the region’s roster of top visitor attractions upon its opening, May 23, 1992.

Deservedly so.

The Interpretive Center expertly blends entertainment and education. If you don’t own oxen and a prairie schooner, spending a few hours strolling through the Interpretive Center will give you as vivid a view of life on the Oregon Trail as you’re likely to get.

During its first 4fi months of operation, the Center attracted 201,000 visitors.

In its second full year (BLM visitor counts are by federal fiscal year, Oct. 1-Sept. 30, not by calendar year), the Center lured 348,000 people to Baker County.

The increase is not surprising: The Center was still almost new in 1993, and that year was the 150th anniversary of the first great migration along the Oregon Trail.

Whether Oregon voters will agree to tinker with the state’s nearly sacred income tax “kicker” in the November election depends largely on whether they trust the Legislature.

Their recent passage of two tax increases suggests voters have a certain level of faith in their lawmakers.

But we’re withholding judgment, and here’s why:

We don’t yet have all the information we need to answer the fundamental question: Can the Legislature be trusted to keep even more tax dollars, even when the state is not mired in one of its periodic budget crises?

Unfortunately, we don’t know whether this most recent crisis, which precipitated Measures 66 and 67, was as dire as the measures’ proponents claimed.

Worse still, the Legislature doesn’t know either.

At the heart of this uncertainty are the “ending fund balances” scattered about the state’s $50 billion budget.

The Baker City Council can take a collective breath and relax.

That, at least, is something we hope they can agree about.

The Council has dealt with the most pressing matter on its agenda by hiring Steve Bogart as city manager for at least the next year.

This was a wise decision.

It’s budget-planning season for the city, and overseeing that process is one of the manager’s main duties.

Bogart knows how to do that. He worked on the city budget during his 2004-05 stint as manager while Jerry Gillham was serving with the National Guard in Iraq.

In any case the Council had to get a commitment from somebody.

The American Indian tribes of the Northwest gave up a lot when their leaders signed treaties with the U.S. government in the mid 19th century.

They gave up a lot of land, in particular.

But one thing the tribes, among them the Nez Perce and Umatilla, refused to surrender was a vital part of their culture and history: the right to hunt and fish and gather roots and berries, just as they ancestors had for millennia.

In exchange for their comparatively small reservations, the tribes sold, or ceded, millions of acres of their traditional homelands to the government.

The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, for instance, accepted in their 1855 treaty a 172,000-acre reservation, but ceded more than 6 million acres in Northeastern Oregon and Southeastern Washington.

But that treaty, in common with those that most other tribes in the region signed, also guarantees tribal members the right to hunt and fish.

If you’ve paid much attention to reactions to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling regarding campaign spending on federal elections, you’d be forgiven for believing that the high court had decided that your vote counts for less than it used to.

Also that corporations and unions now get to vote too.

We don’t think the effects of the ruling will be nearly so dire, or so undemocratic.

Firstly, we can’t see how a ruling that frees groups as different as corporations and labor unions to lavish even more of their millions on political campaigns is likely to tilt the odds steeply in either direction.

Critics of the 5-4 opinion, among them President Obama, argue that overturning provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law sullies the sanctity of the electoral process.

Obama: The ruling will result in a “stampede of special interest money in our politics.”

Does the president believe the vast fortunes already spent on campaigns (including his own successful one in 2008) are for something other than a “special interest?”

Every dollar that goes into a campaign is for a special interest — to elect a “special” candidate or to pass a “special” piece of legislation or ballot measure.