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Forum on tax measures set for Jan. 5 Comments

The Gazette-Times’ editorial board is sponsoring a forum on Measures 66 and 67, the two tax issues on the January ballot.

The forum — really, it will be a public meeting of the G-T’s editorial board — is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 5, beginning at 7 p.m. at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library, 645 N.W. Madison Ave. (Earlier, in the throes of a brain cramp, I wrote in the paper that the forum would be Thursday, Jan. 5. There’s no such animal: The forum is on Tuesday, Jan. 5.)

We’ve invited Sen. Frank Morse and Rep. Sara Gelser to the session, to hold a civil dialogue about the measures. As you might imagine, they have different views on the measures, and we expect them to make spirited but principled arguments to back their positions.

The G-T editorial board frequently holds sessions with newsmakers. They are all on the record, and we often report on what’s said in them in our news columns and in our editorials. We typically don’t go to the expense and trouble of scheduling these sessions away from the newspaper’s offices. In this case, because of the high level of public interest in the measures, we decided to move this forum to the library and invite the public.

We’ve got some questions for the legislators, but we’ll reserve time for questions from the audience.

And now, a bit of background: The G-T’s editorial board is a group of three people who meet weekly to try to hash out the paper’s editorial stances on various issues. I’m on it, and so is Theresa Novak, the G-T’s city and editorial page editor. (Theresa and I take turns writing the editorials, but the opinions expressed are supposedly the positions of the paper, and not of any one individual. With that said, I think it’s probably fairly apparent which editorials Theresa writes and which ones I do.) The third member of the board is Larry Thomas, the G-T’s press and packaging manager; we added him to give us a perspective on issues that we thought was missing.

We’re looking forward to next Tuesday, and we hope to see you at the forum.

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