The generosity of Baker City’s people has proved to be recession-proof.

The past 18 months have been challenging here.

Gas prices have stayed high.

So have unemployment rates.

Ted Kulongoski sometimes has exceptionally poor timing.

Take, for instance, the Oregon governor’s proposal earlier this year to make things even tougher for the state’s beleaguered private forest owners.

Fortunately, the landowners who testified before the Legislature, including some from Baker County, were more persuasive than the governor.

Kulongoski, faced with an overextended state budget, wanted to require landowners to pay 55 percent of the annual fire protection budget of the Oregon Department of Forestry.

Now, property owners and the state each pay 50 percent of the bill.

Now, 5 percent is a relatively minor amount.

Some people seem to think police officers should be capable of feats that would amaze David Copperfield and Doug Henning.

I just want cops to arrest, as quickly and painlessly as possible, anybody who poses a threat to innocent people.

People like me, for instance.

Not everyone is satisfied with that simple standard, though.

They expect police to not merely apprehend suspected lawbreakers, but to always do so in a way that doesn’t look, you know, violent when you see it on a grainy black-and-white videotape.

That is a pleasant thought.

Tens of thousands of Oregonians make less money now than they did before the recession.

But it seems that very few of them work for state government.

Like their counterparts in the private sector, many state workers have had to cut back on their hours this year.

Friday, in fact, is the second of the 10 “furlough Fridays” in which most state workers (not including essential employees such as State Police) must take the day off without pay.

The purpose of the furloughs, according state officials, is to ease the burden on the already beleaguered state budget.

The felons who grow marijuana on public land don’t just break the law.

In some cases they also pollute our water.

And we’re not talking about unimportant little creeks that go dry every summer.

Earlier this year police in Grant County, while harvesting illegal marijuana plants, found that the growers had dammed streams to divert water to irrigate their illicit crops.

Worse, the growers had poured fertilizer into the streams, some of which are tributaries to the John Day River, which supports some of Oregon’s most robust runs of salmon and steelhead.

It turns out that Baker City’s pristine tap water is not only good for you, it’s good for the environment.

Better than bottled water, anyway.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality released this week a study comparing the “greenness” of tap water and bottled water.