Oregon Secretary of State website breach cost taxpayers $177,000!!

The February breach of the Oregon Secretary of State's website cost taxpayers about $176,662, including about $4,500 for meals and lodging to allow employees to work through a snowstorm. The breach was detected Feb. 4 and knocked the agency's elections and business registry databases offline for nearly three weeks.
www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/04/oreg...rpt-1

Portland State University will spend $6.4 million on faculty raises, hopes to net good will

Under a new contract tentatively agreed to Sunday, Portland State University will give its faculty $6.4 million worth of raises over the next year and a half, officials said Monday. That is $2.8 million more than the university had said it could afford in its March 7 "final offer," so the university will have to spend more from savings than it planned and "continue to sharpen our pencils" to look for efficiencies or other savings, President Wim Wiewel said Monday. The new contract, which still must be voted on by the faculty union's roughly 900 members, will largely give the union what is sought during 11 months of negotiations, including more multi-year contracts for non-tenure-track instructors, an end to faculty pay below $40,000 and no change in the union's say over procedural rules for tenure decisions. Raises will not be nearly as large as the union had requested but about three times as large as the administration's initial offer. Must be Nice Everyone I know has Not had a Pay Increase in Over SEVEN Years!! Think I need to join a Union! www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2014/04/por...rpt-1

Oregon Legislature's high-speed annual session draws fire!!

SALEM – Maybe it’s the influence of the recent Winter Olympics, but listening to the hallway chatter about Oregon’s annual legislative sessions is like channeling Nancy Kerrigan after her 1994 knee-whacking. Complaints about the additional even-year meeting have increased as the session winds down, with the overriding concern that the hurry-up schedule could cause bad legislation to slip through. "We've had entirely new policy concepts introduced," said Alan Tresidder, a veteran lobbyist with State Street Solutions. "If you look at the Voters’ Pamphlet statement and what was said about annual sessions, it wasn't any of this stuff. We're dealing with stuff all over the map." Tresidder isn’t the only one who has soured on what was supposed to be the Legislature’s big move toward greater relevance. Other lobbyists talk about the session as though it’s one big political rally for the upcoming election season. A Republican leader described it as "a political free-for-all" and said the compact timeline shortchanges Oregonians, especially those outside the Portland-Eugene corridor, on meaningful participation.
www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/03/oreg...rpt-1