The Baker City Council had a tough choice to make last week regarding parking on Resort Street.

We agree with the four councilors — the slimmest majority possible on the seven-member Council — who opted for parallel parking on both sides of Resort between Auburn Avenue and Campbell Street.

The new parking set up, which will take effect in either 2012 or 2013 when the street is rebuilt, represents a change from the current situation.

BY JAYSON JACOBY

BAKER CITY HERALD

I’d like to publicly thank Oregon's Access & Habitat Program (AHP) for greatly expanding the geographic range in which I can embarrass myself as a hunter.

Used to be I had to flaunt my failures mainly on public land.

Oregon’s largest hunters group is kicking around the idea of asking voters to overturn the ban on using dogs to hunt cougars.

We share the Oregon Hunters Association’s (OHA) curiosity on the matter, and we hope voters get that chance.

Three problems: jobs, economic growth, protection of our safety nets.

These problems are closely united, and solving the first two should lead to protecting the third. However, conservatives (largely Republicans) thwart passage of a jobs bill that would create 400,000 jobs.

We messed up.

Several times during the past 18 months we have reported, in news stories, editorials and columns, that tests of Baker City’s drinking water were negative for cryptosporidium, a parasite that can cause diarrhea and vomiting.

We were wrong.

In fact, three of the 24 water samples taken from April 2010 through March 2011 did contain crypto.

The concentrations, fortunately, were too low to pose a health risk to people.

I went out walking Sunday afternoon and although the day came off bright and balmy, I felt a trifle melancholy.

The reason, I told myself, is that I sensed this was likely the last such day to grace our valley for a long while.

Not till March — or perhaps May if next spring is as tardy as the previous one was — will I be able to stroll around in short sleeves, as comfortable as a cat curled on a patch of rug beside a furnace grate.

Yet after a few more minutes of ruminating it occurred to me that my initial thought on this matter was not merely misguided.

It was pure balderdash.

The birth of the baby that brought the human population to 7 billion made the news in a big way this week.

It may be an arbitrary milestone, but it’s certainly a thought-provoking one.

It’s not often, after all, that our species reaches another billion.

But over the past century or so we’ve been climbing to the next threshold a whole lot faster than before.

The Baker School District has returned to solid legal ground in its effort to restrict who can bring guns and other weapons on school grounds or to school-sponsored events.

Last month the school board was considering a policy written by the Oregon School Boards Association (OSBA).

That policy runs afoul of both state and federal laws because it would prohibit anyone, save for police, from bringing a licensed, concealed handgun to a school.

The man in the wheelchair had a problem.

He beckoned us as we walked west on the sidewalk. My wife, Lisa, and I were on the north side of Broadway, just across from the Middle School.

The man was also on the sidewalk, rolling east.

It was just past noon on a quintessential Indian summer October day. The sky was rich blue, the air calm, and the sunshine warmed exposed skin in that way peculiar to mid autumn — none of the unpleasant prickliness of summer heat, yet the warmth was somehow insubstantial, as things are which cannot last much longer.