Oregon is finally trying to quell the deplorable practice known as “passing the trash.”

That’s the process by which school employees who are suspected of sexual misconduct with students move from job to job because officials, rather than report the accusations or fire the worker, agree to conceal the charges from prospective employers if the worker resigns.

In 2008 the Legislature, by unanimous votes in the House and Senate, passed House Bill 2062, which outlaws the practice in public and private schools.

The law, unfortunately, didn’t take effect until July 1 of this year.

One thing, though, annoyed us about what should have been, without exception, a cause for celebration.

The Mail Tribune newspaper in Medford quoted an official from the public school district in that city who, although he lauded the new law, also complained about the paperwork involved in complying with it.

Despite evidence to the contrary, in the form of dead sheep in Baker County last year and dead cattle this year in Wallowa County, we believe wolves and livestock can both thrive in Northeastern Oregon.

But achieving that goal will require compromise.

And not between wolves and their domestic prey.

We’re talking about the relationship between the state and federal agencies responsible for managing wolves, and the coalition of groups that celebrate the return of wolves to Oregon after an absence of more than half a century.

What happened last year in Baker County, when a pair of wolves killed more than two dozen livestock in Keating Valley, proves that that relationship can work.

Although we’ll concede that that situation was more straightforward than what’s taken place this year in Wallowa County.

In Baker County there was ample evidence, including photographs, linking the two wolves to the livestock kills.

Gary Dielman posed the question, in a recent e-mail, why it is that the Herald allows anonymous comments to be posted on the paper’s Web site even though that practice is prohibited in the paper edition.

His question is a good one.

Timely, too, since barely more than a month has passed since we added the comment feature to our site.

My answer, in its simplest form, is that the Web page, though it shares the “Baker City Herald” moniker, is an altogether different animal.

If you’ll forgive my straining the limits of the analogy, I liken the newspaper to a lion in the zoo, and the Web site to a lion on the Serengeti.

The newspaper is a controlled environment, with its own versions of stout fences and padlocked gates.

We invite readers to tell us what they think, but we won’t publish their opinions unless they tell us who they are. And like a caged lion, their diet is limited: 350 words every 15 days.

The Baker City Council needs to hire a city manager.

Fortunately, councilors have had quite a lot of practice at this task over the past year.

Which is why they ought to be able to finish this important job before the current manager, Steve Bogart, resigns on Sept. 23.

Last year, after the Council fired Steve Brocato on June 9, 6fi months elapsed before councilors offered the job to Tim Johnson.

Johnson eventually declined that offer, citing the need to care for his ailing mother. The Council then hired Bogart.

After Bogart announced his resignation, Mayor Dennis Dorrah said he “had the thought that we could give Tim Johnson a call.”

That’s a good idea.

(Dorrah said Tuesday that he hadn’t yet made the call.)

The recent discovery that employees at two Western Oregon school districts had tossed usable classroom supplies and textbooks into Dumpsters is no great scandal.

What it is is awfully stupid.

The sort of ill-conceived stunt that leads reasonable people to wonder whether all government workers treat all tax dollars as badly as they did those bottles of glue and books.

The answer, of course, is no.

More than half of those dollars, after all, go directly to the workers as wages, retirement, health insurance and other benefits. We can safely presume those dollars are not discarded.

Nonetheless, publicity about the two school incidents has prompted the predictable complaint that school officials have no legitimate reason to whine about budget shortfalls.

The Baker City Council has handed the Baker County Board of Commissioners an opportunity.

And $136,000.

What the three commissioners choose to do with that money, which is collected from people who stay in local motels, RV parks and bed-and-breakfasts, will largely determine whether the City Council’s recent decision to disband the city’s community and economic development department was wise or foolhardy.

The county used to send that money to City Hall.

The city used the dollars to run the now-defunct department. Its two employees, Jennifer Watkins and Gene Stackle, both lost their jobs when the Council last month approved the budget for the fiscal year that started Thursday.

With that decision, the city’s $136,000 share of lodging taxes reverted to the county’s coffers.

The loss of Watkins’ position is potentially troublesome because she was instrumental in the city’s success over the past decade or so at obtaining state and federal grants for projects such as the extension of the Leo Adler Memorial Parkway.

But the county commissioners can alleviate that concern by using some of the $136,000 to create a job that’s very much like Watkins’ former post as community development director.

You can tell a great deal about a town, I think, by having a look at its schools and its churches.

This exercise — literally, if you take a walking tour — shows Baker City to be a place of substance.

For a city which has never, during its 146 years, boasted an official population of as much as 10,000, Baker seems to me graced with an inordinate share of noteworthy houses of learning and of worship.

These are solid structures, constructed of stone and brick, heavy materials largely immune to the harsh climate of a mountain valley.

It is as if the people who designed and who assembled these buildings understood that this city, so unlike the mining boom camps that surrounded it, had real staying power, and that its constructions should reflect that persistence and prominence.

I like to believe that these craftsmen, were they ever of a philosophical bent, imagined while they were hard at their labors that a century on the quick footsteps of pupils would yet echo in the halls, that the preacher’s devotions would still wash over the penitent in their pews every Sunday.

Anyway I hope they did.