There’s a curious situation playing out along Brownlee Reservoir and we’re trying — and in the main failing — to make sense of it.

Perhaps this is because the federal government instigated the whole episode.

At issue are 31 privately owned structures, 28 of them on the Oregon side and in Baker County. In most cases the structure owner also owns the land.

Each of those structures, or a portion thereof, encroaches on property that belongs to Idaho Power Co.

By way of brief background, the company, before it built Brownlee Dam in the late 1950s and so created the 58-mile-long reservoir, bought the strip of land that starts at the reservoir’s high water line and extends eight vertical feet up the bank. That means Idaho Power owns the reservoir shore below an elevation of 2,085 feet above sea level (the high water line being 2,077 feet).

With a few exceptions where Idaho Power’s property extends considerably farther above the water, much of the land above the 2,085-foot mark belongs to other private landowners.

Unfortunately, even Idaho Power admits that the 2,085-foot line is not marked on the ground.

Let’s say you own a business and you’re looking to hire somebody to keep your books.

Do you care more about applicants’ credit scores, or their arrest record?

We’d wager that most employers would rather know whether their prospective accountant has been convicted of embezzlement than find out that the person sent a mortgage payment late.

Which partially explains why we applaud the Oregon Legislature for passing Senate Bill 1045 during the recent month-long special session.

The bill, which takes effect July 1, prevents most employers from perusing the credit history of job applicants.

The biggest benefit of the bill is that it should get Oregonians off the unemployment rolls sooner.

There are plenty of people in the state now whose credit score has plunged since they joined the list of more than 125,000 Oregonians who have lost their job during the recession.

Not another Baker City Council recall.

Please.

We don’t need it.

A recall is far more likely to hurt this city than to help it.

We hope, then, that former Councilor Dick Haynes, who is running ads in this newspaper seeking help with a campaign to recall Councilor Milo Pope, gets so few responses that he decides not to take the next steps of filing a recall petition and gathering the approximately 605 signatures needed to force a recall election.

Haynes is upset because Pope has expressed several times over the past nine months his belief that four of his colleagues botched things when they voted, on June 9, 2009, to fire City Manager Steve Brocato.

We understand Haynes’ complaint.

We, too, find Pope’s predilection for criticizing his fellow councilors over Brocato’s firing occasionally tiresome.

A majority of city voters, after all, made it clear last fall that they don’t share Pope’s dissatisfaction.

We all know we save money by using less electricity.

What some of us might not know is just how much we stand to save.

We had an interesting conversation about that subject recently with Werner Buehler, the general manager of Oregon Trail Electric Cooperative.

OTEC supplies power to most of Baker County, and to parts of Union, Grant and Harney counties as well.

OTEC, unlike private companies such as Idaho Power, doesn’t actually generate electricity.

Rather, OTEC buys electricity from the federal Bonneville Power Administration, then sells those kilowatt-hours to us.

And BPA, as it has been for decades, is the best deal going, Buehler said.

OTEC pays BPA about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour.

But here’s the rub: BPA will sell only a certain amount of electricity to OTEC at that dirt-cheap rate, known as “Tier 1,” Buehler said.

The U.S. Forest Service seems to care more about the private companies that run many of the agency’s campgrounds than it does about disabled and older people who sleep there.

Funny, we thought the Forest Service’s motto was “caring for the land and serving people.”

Apparently what the agency really means is “serving people so long as it doesn’t mess up the campground operators’ bottom line.”

Fortunately, this troubling situation has not gone unnoticed in Congress.

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, for instance, doesn’t think much of the Forest Service’s proposal to slash the 50 percent discount on camping fees to 10 percent for senior (age 62 and over) and disabled visitors who have bought lifetime passes that were supposed to entitle them to the full discount.

That proposal, interestingly, would apply to only those Forest Service campgrounds — public property, in other words — that are operated by private concessionaires.

Which is about 80 percent of them, including Union Creek Campground at Phillips Lake, and the three campgrounds in the Anthony Lakes basin.

The public, which is to say all of us, gained certain legal rights when Oregon became a state on Feb. 14, 1859.

But we sort of forgot about one of those rights.

Certainly the state government, which has the authority to uphold this particular right on the public’s behalf, has done relatively little in that regard in 151 years.

That right entitles the public to travel between the “ordinary” high water line (the normal seasonal line, not the water line during the 100-year flood) along streams and lakes that are deemed “navigable.”

Navigable is a pretty low hurdle, legally speaking.

A waterway qualifies as navigable if, in 1859, it was used, or even if it could have been used, for travel or commerce.

Subsequent court rulings made it clear that a waterway needn’t accommodate the Queen Mary to rank as navigable, either.

Passage by a canoe or rubber raft is sufficient.

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.