The Baker City Council is preparing to make one of its more important decisions: hiring a city manager.

But the Council doesn’t seem especially interested in what its constituents think about the matter.

The fire didn’t do what the experts thought it would.

Fires often don’t.

But the unexpectedly rapid growth of the Big Sheep Ridge fire in the Wallowa Mountains on Sept. 28 should not discourage the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest from continuing its policy of letting certain lightning-caused fires burn.

On Good Friday morning three generations of Jacobses got to experience firsthand the havoc two wolves could wreak. Just a two-minute jaunt from our sleeping households, four of the five documented wolf attacks occurred on what we call the “Home Ranch,” a 640-acre chunk of farm and pastureland, just a part of what we make a living on in this high desert country.

From that day in April until today, Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife and Animal Damage Control confirmed 29 lambs, a pet goat and one calf killed on two ranches. This act stirred and spread the hotbed of debate in our small ranching community of Keating Valley to the Legislature in Salem and beyond.

We’re glad there’s a group called Baker Loves Bikes, because not everybody in Baker does.

Love bikes, that is.

Baker County has a chance to be a leader in an economic and environmental sense.

Now we just have to take advantage of that chance.