The legislature has funded the Oregon State Police at a level that will allow the agency to hire 100 new troopers this biennium! Yahoo!

If history is any guide, Lane County should get 10 or 12 of the new troopers to divide between Florence, Eugene and Oakridge. That will bring us up from 26 troopers to as many as 38 or 40 in Lane County. If that actually happens it would put us up over one-half the number of troopers we had 26 years ago -- before the state of California moved up here and swelled our county population by an additional 70,000 citizens.

By the end of the biennium, if all the new troopers are in place, we should be up over our one-half of the average per-capita trooper density in the western Unived States!

Meanwhile, the legislature increased the state's education budget a full 18%, and the Department of Human Services (welfare) budget swelled like a fat hog on steroids. To put it in perspective, if the Oregon education budget had been increased "only" 15%, the money saved would have been enough to DOUBLE the funding for the OSP (Oregon State Police), and THAT would have been enough to bring the State Police all the way up to western states averages!

(For those of you who don't know what OSP does... OSP does 95% of the state-wide crime lab work, all of the DNA work, all of the state criminal records database maintenance, including sex offender location and registration, the Governor's security, State-wide SWAT and riot-control, all fish and wildlife protection/enforcement, the Oregon lottery protection/enforcement, indian gaming protection/enforcement, arson investigation, official corruption investigation, and 90% of the highway patrol and first-responder capability outside of the Willamette Valley.)

In Lane County, which has lost 90% of the criminal investigator positions in the DA's office and 90% of the detectives in the Sheriff's office, the State Police also has to assist with all the rural murder and sex abuse investigations, and that amounts to dozens of cases pere year in Lane County, so it would be nice if we could work our way up from absolute LAST in the USA for staffing levels.)

What a system...