>Baker City Herald | Baker County Oregon's News Leader

I used to think, as I suspect most people do, that a chain saw posed a greater threat to eyesight than a contact lens does.

Recent events have forced me to reconsider the comparative danger of the two items.

The thing is, it’s easier nowadays to procure a chain saw — or for that matter pretty much any powered implement with sharp metal pieces that spin really fast — than it is to replace the contact lens you washed down the drain.

Or snapped in half, as I did last Saturday.

I was cleaning the lens, too, which amplified my frustration.

Few things annoy me as completely as preventive maintenance that backfires.

It’s like changing the oil in your car and then blowing a piston because you forget to tighten the drain plug.

The Wallowa-Whitman National Forest has been nibbling for close to two decades now at the problem of overcrowded timber stands that are abnormally susceptible to wildfires.

But now Wallowa-Whitman officials want to take a big bite.

They’re proposing a series of five timber sales on the southern flanks of the Wallowa Mountains that would constitute the largest logging job on the forest since the early 1990s.

The Snow Basin project, which is near Eagle Creek north of Richland, could start in 2010 and result in as much as 70 million board-feet of timber being sold over five years.

The Wallowa-Whitman hasn’t sold more than 30 million board-feet, with all timber sales combined, in any single fiscal year since 2001.

For a guy who frets frequently, and publicly, about climate change, pollution and America’s thirst for petroleum, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski has a funny way of showing his concern.

Kulongoski’s latest idea might actually discourage Oregonians from driving fuel-efficient cars.

If you’re partial to full-size pickup trucks and similarly hefty rigs, however, you’ll probably second the governor’s motion.

Kulongoski announced this week that he’ll lobby the Legislature, which convenes next month, to jumpstart his plan to replace Oregon’s gas tax of 24 cents per gallon with a mileage tax.

The governor hasn’t suggested an amount. A 10-month experiment last year that involved 300 drivers in the Portland area used a tax of 1.2 cents per mile driven.

If your car gets more than 20 mpg, a mileage tax at that level probably would cost you more than the gas tax does now.

So much for that Prius purchase penciling out.

To be fair to the governor, we’re not suggesting that he’s a hypocrite.

We don’t care whether the Baker City Council calls its get-togethers “meetings” or “work sessions.”

We care a great deal, though, about whether councilors get answers to all their questions before they vote on matters such as how they’ll spend our money.

Or how much of our money the Council thinks the city needs.

And so we endorse City Manager Steve Brocato’s proposal to change one of the Council’s two monthly gatherings from a “meeting” to a “work session.”

The idea, which the Council probably will discuss during its annual goal-setting session in early 2009, is that councilors would benefit if, once a month, they scheduled a work session to talk over topics but agreed beforehand that they wouldn’t actually cast any votes during the session.

Work sessions would be public meetings, of course, so long as at least four of the seven councilors attended.

During work sessions councilors could not only debate issues, but also query Brocato and other city officials about the purposes and potential effects of items on the Council’s agenda.

For most people an old, obsolete TV or computer monitor is trash, albeit heavy, space-occupying trash.

Trouble is, tossing such stuff into a landfill can cause problems more serious than clogging your closet capacity.

Polluting groundwater with poisonous heavy metals, for instance.

Televisions, computer and computer monitors contain toxins such as mercury and lead.

Americans threw away about 232 million of these devices in 2007, but just 18 percent were recycled rather than landfilled, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The agency estimates that 235 million more are taking up the aforementioned closet space.