We’re gratified that the Oregon Legislature finally recognizes that Education Service Districts, agencies ostensibly created to help public school students, are actually exacerbating school officials’ struggles to balance their budgets.

It’s too bad it took a $3.5 billion shortfall to highlight the problem.

Government agencies have a reputation for being plodding, unimaginative bureaucracies rather than inventive risk-takers.

In the main we consider this a fair characterization.

Which is why we have a special appreciation for those rare instances when an agency tries to think its way around the flanks of a problem, rather than bludgeon it head-on with reams of reports that are more likely to hide the dilemma than to solve it.

And so we credit the Oregon Department of Wildlife (ODFW) for its creativity in dealing with the long-standing mess at Phillips Reservoir.

Government officials, both elected and appointed, should be reminded occasionally about the purpose of Oregon’s public meetings law.

We quote here from ORS 192.620: “The Oregon form of government requires an informed public aware of the deliberations and decisions of governing bodies and the information upon which such decisions were made. It is the intent of (the statute) that decisions of governing bodies be arrived at openly.”

It’s better still when the reminder about the law comes from a judge.

We knew trouble was coming when we learned there exists within the Oregon Legislature an entity known as the Joint Interim Committee on State Justice System Revenues.

You can be reasonably confident that any committee with “revenue” in its name has an unhealthy interest in your wallet.

And sure enough, one of the bills the committee introduced this year would both punish people for doing the right thing, and reward people for doing the wrong thing.

It’s House Bill 2712.

Neil Goldschmidt will never repair the damage to his reputation caused by the revelation, in 2004, that he sexually abused a teenage girl in the 1970s.

Yet Goldschmidt, the former Oregon governor, Portland mayor and head of the state’s Board of Higher Education, seems determined to burn even the tattered remnants of his dignity.

Sumpter boasts one of the larger structures in Baker County — the 2 1/2-million-pound gold-mining dredge — but the city’s skyline is marred by a conspicuous gap.

The dredge, retired since 1954, makes a fine centerpiece, and namesake, for the state park on the south side of Sumpter.

They proved the other night that they can sit together nicely for a couple of hours

Now comes the real test for members of Congress.

Can they also work together?

More particularly, can our lawmakers suppress their ideological differences long enough to devise legislative compromises that benefit the nation, even at the risk of a painful blow to their partisan credentials?

Who knows?

We don’t.

Oregon’s public records law has long seemed to us to have a curious lack of emphasis on the rights of the public.

We say curious because, after all, the public — which is to say, all of us — is mentioned pretty frequently in the law. We’re right there in the title, even.

The concept of the law is admirable — that each of us is entitled to look at and listen to and basically to scrutinize, to whatever degree we please, the records that our public agencies produce.

These are, after all, public records. We paid for them, they were produced ostensibly on our behalf, hence we own them.

Republicans in the Oregon Legislature are feeling frisky.

Which is no surprise, considering the gains the GOP made at the state Capitol in the November election.

GOP candidates took six seats in the House to even the slate at 30 Democrats, 30 Republicans.

And Republicans gained two seats in the Senate, although the Democrats still hold a 16-14 majority there.

Among the more interesting of the proposals put forward by the newly empowered GOP leadership in Salem is a call to ban state agencies from enacting new rules for two years.

(Although the Legislature makes laws, state agency officials often pass administrative rules needed to carry out those laws.)

The business district along 10th Street in Baker City has fared better than commercial zones in some other cities where, as happened here, a new freeway bypassed what was the main drag through town.

Despite having most through traffic shunted onto Interstate 84, and the development of the typical retail strip next to the freeway (East Campbell Street), the 10th Street business district has retained much of the flavor that it had when the interstate was built 40 years ago.