The Baker City Council was wise to get around to appointing a parks and recreation advisory board.

The Council’s decision to set up the seven-member volunteer board (councilors will appoint the members later this year) wasn’t belated.

But it was getting close.

After all, in just the past decade the city has built the Leo Adler Memorial Parkway and acquired the two-acre property along the Powder River where the new Central Park is under construction.

We don’t object to Baker City charging a reasonable fee to people who want to burn yard debris, as officials have proposed doing.

But $25 for an annual permit isn’t reasonable by the standards of the city’s own fee schedule.

The annual cost for a dog license, for instance, is less than half as much — $10.50 for dogs that aren’t spayed or neutered, and $8 for ones that are.

Yet city employees spend considerably more time dealing with dog-related issues than with complaints regarding backyard burning.

The burgeoning population of wolves in Wallowa County presents a problem, and potentially a serious one, for cattle ranchers there and in adjacent counties, including Baker.

But randomly killing a couple of wolves because wolves killed a calf east of Joseph last week will neither prevent that problem, nor soften its effects.

Yet killing two wolves is precisely what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) have proposed to do in response to the calf kill.

The pamphlet the Baker School District mailed to patrons last week regarding the local option tax levy on the May 17 ballot tries to simplify the task of figuring out how the levy, if approved, would affect property tax bills.

Trouble is, that task does not lend itself to simplifications.

We don’t as a rule applaud lawmakers from overturning the will of the voters.

But we endorse a bill that passed the Oregon House last week even though the legislation, at first glance, might seem to do just that.

House Bill 2337, which passed by a 45-14 vote and now moves to the Senate, would allow hunters, under specific guidelines, to use dogs to track cougars.

Oregon voters decided in 1994 to outlaw that practice. Two years later they rejected a measure that would have reversed the 1994 decision.

HB 2337 is hardly a blatant dismissal of Oregonians’ desires, though.

The way we pay for our public schools is a complex issue, in large part because it’s not only a local issue.

The state supplies a bit more than half of the money to operate the Baker School District. That means the budget for our local schools is affected by what happens inside the Capitol in Salem as well as decisions made in the district office on Fourth Street in Baker City.

But the matter before voters in the Baker School District in the May 17 election is not only decidedly local, it’s also comparatively simple.

A couple generations ago the adage that the surest path to a prosperous career is to earn a college degree was, by and large, an accurate one.

Today the situation is rather more complicated.

We had reservations about Baker County accepting ownership of the Anthony Lakes ski area last summer.

After one ski season under public control, a season that was by all accounts an excellent one, with skier visits about double that of the previous year, our concerns have been eased.

Eased, but not eliminated.

Baker City, through no fault of its own, is confronted with an estimated $4.8 million bill within the next several yeras.

That’s the projected cost to revamp the disposal system for wastewater treated at the city’s sewage lagoons.

For more than three decades the city has diverted wastewater into the Powder River.

But both the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency seem intent on ending that practice.

The Baker County library is not one of Baker City’s noteworthy buildings, architecturally speaking.

But in a host of other ways it’s one of our more important structures.

It’s where toddlers first feel the joy and wonder of strolling between rows of books stacked far higher than they can reach.