Our Bend City Council needs to adopt a zero tolerance policy towards graffiti. Recently, I was walking through our downtown area towards the Post Office and saw sprayed graffiti on one of our large downtown maps. After finishing my business at the post office, I strolled along Tin Pan Alley and saw even more.

If this is tolerated, Bend will decline by degrees. Graffiti leads to more graffiti. Graffiti makes any area appear to be rundown and unsafe. People start to go elsewhere.

In this era of surveillance cameras, Bend needs to place more of them in these areas and step up our surveillance. If our law enforcement is stretched too thin, then we as citizens need to use our smartphones to record and report any such activity.

— James Quattlebaum, Bend

The City of Bend keeps telling us that we need more housing at all price levels. I suppose that’s why they gave the Jackstraw developer a $10.6 million post facto tax break to build 313 luxury apartments. To be fair, they say that two ground floor units will be affordable and large enough to accommodate childcare facilities. Then, the city just granted a large tax break to another apartment developer where a one-bedroom apartment will rent starting at $2,100 per month. That doesn’t sound very affordable to me.

Did they ever think that the developers with this pricing power may not need these tax breaks? What about the other end of the spectrum, our workforce? You know, the teachers, firefighters, grocery clerks, restaurant cooks and servers. Many of these people need lower rents to be able to live here. But now that almost a quarter of our houses are selling for over a million dollars, maybe we don’t need these people.

— Tom Hall, Bend

If Dean Harris wants to virtue signal in his recent guest column then he is more than welcome to dig into his “top 15% of households in wealth” and pay reparations. But leave the rest of us out of it.

— David Jankowski, Bend

In the guest column on April 10, a Bend resident wrote a rather lengthy letter supporting paying reparations to Black Americans.

On its face value, it sounds rather disingenuous. … Why should people who’ve never owned a slave pay others, who’ve never been a slave?

If reparations seem to touch a nerve with some, let me make this suggestion: Registered Democrats should be the people paying reparations. After all, they are the political descendants of the slave owners, slave traders, segregationists and KKK members. Why should the Republicans pay, when they were the party of Lincoln, which fought and died to free the slaves. To my way of thinking, it’s the only equitable solution to this idea.

A simple way for this to be initiated would be to impose maybe a 10% tax collected by the IRS at tax time … when Democrats file their taxes. A simple solution with all parties satisfied, don’t ya think?

— Burt James, Bend

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