The latest Dundee sign has caused much consternation for the local Denny Smith organ. 
The Newberg Graphic has written two articles about the sign and this website, and two more editorials...four pieces in two issues!
The attempts to interpret the meaning are as if a couple Van Gogh's suddenly sprouted at a psychedelic intersection of a traffic-funneling vortex.
And suddenly, you're in the twilight zone of Dundee.
The stabs at discrediting the signage (pictured below - scroll down) have contained the usual “deflect criticism” obfuscation routine.
What has not been mentioned in the tortured interpretations by the Graphic is the real meaning of the sign.
It is actually a takeoff on one of the most famous headlines ever written. President Ford was said to acknowledge that one single headline cost him the New York State vote in his 1976 election loss to Jimmy Carter.
For the Graphic not to be able to discern this in four tries, it provides significant evidence that some key employees need to consider taking a J-101 journalism refresher.
It was a much different time in 1975 New York City.
City government was facing bankruptcy due to gross mismanagement. The mayor went to D.C. begging then-President Gerald Ford for a handout.
The answer was no...
The Daily News in its newpaper-selling ways, highlighted its tabloid cover with the headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead"
Is twelve years long enough to string motorists along on false hopes?
The Graphic has more generally failed to explain why the state transportation agency, with over a $4 billion biennial budget, has "no money" to build extra lane capacity around the state.
The paper gets a failing grade for its lack of will to adequately critique why the currently proposed bypass route (the studies and studies of that study) has been going on for over twelve years now.
It is the third major pretense of ODOT in over sixty years that something would be accomplished. ODOT has made itself the equivalent of the old Soviet government regime here. In this case, a twist on an old Russian joke, ODOT pretends to build and newspapers pretend to believe them. [The government pretends to pay so the workers pretended to work.]
Is it incompetence if no one is there to report it?
The paper has failed to adequately do its job to relentlessly ask additional tough questions, such as:
- How many decades do you continue to plan?
- How many studies are you going to study?
- How many traffic lights will be eliminated on my trip from McMinnville to Portland (or Portland to Lincoln City) under your never ending plan?
- What do these core samples of swampy terrain on your route mean to the feasibility of this route, and what additional costs and difficulties do you have to face with picking this particular route.
- Why is the state allowing cities to veto a statewide transportation plan? How would I-5 ever have been built with such regulations as exist today?
- Why is bureaucracy making people suffer wall to wall traffic to the coasts on summer weekends in Oregon?
- Break down and justify for us your $4-plus billion biennial budget.
- In discrediting the regional route, who came up with the false premise that a new bridge can't be built over the Willamette, which is sometimes reported as if fact?
- Why did Leslie Lewis push for additional tax revenues for the flailing project at a 2007 legislative hearing?
- Even worse, why does her opponent for Commissioner, Kris Bledsoe, apparently believe in traffic jams as a way to avoid urban sprawl by chocking people out of suburbia?
There's a hundred more questions like these to pose, particularly to our state government, over time. At least we'll be asking some of those questions and attempting to get answers in the “ParkingLot.”.
But without significant competition in the case of the Graphic, it has always been akin to the Latin phrase: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard the guards themselves?
With all that said, to his credit, David Sale apparently took our criticism of his original story of last Thursday's transportation meeting coverage to heart.
In Wednesday's edition, he effectively re-wrote his original story with a "new" angle that mirrored what we wrote in a previous piece here as to the real headliner from the meeting he attended.
ODOT only has the federal $23+ million pork dollar to buy a little land for the project. The estimated $800 million necessary to fund its planned boondoggle is not forthcoming and never has been.
Congratulations David on finally getting closer to getting the story right, even if it took two takes. Glad you're paying attention.
Now, in future news stories and while attending events, if you can check your bluster at the door, maybe you can play a better newsman and your paper's chairman Smith can have a better pretense to continue to remain MIA.