Brookings City Councilor Kelly McClain didn’t like the numbers at which Curry County Commissioner David Brock Smith arrived in determining what tax levies should be presented to voters on May 21.

GRANTS PASS (AP) — Crime is up and prosecutions are down in Josephine County and the city of Grants Pass since deep cuts to the jail and the district attorney’s office were forced by voters who refused to raise their taxes to make up for the expiration of a federal timber subsidy.  

Carl Rovainen and his banjo were often found at various Brookings events.

Usually seen with a banjo in his hands, Brookings’ Carl Rovainen helped bring the community together through music for more than a decade. 

The tall, slender, bespectacled, talented multi-instrumentalist always had a smile and a song to share with others. And when he wasn’t singing and playing his “old-time” music at public events and care facilities, he was delighting audiences with his acting on community theater stages.

Carl died March 1 after being diagnosed with incurable cancer in January. He was 73.

The Army Corps of Engineers is asking the public to comment about the city of Brookings’ request to fill in the deep pothole between the end of the boat ramp and Social Security Bar.

The city has asked for a permit to take up to 50 cubic yards of river gravel each year over a five-year period from the lower third of the gravel bar to fill in the pothole that has developed at the ramp. The city would use a front-end loader and dump truck to do the work and compact and grade the area during the dry season.

Bills introduced this week at the state legislature have Curry County commissioners a tad concerned.

State officials realize the federal government isn’t going to bail out timber revenue-dependent counties in Oregon any longer, and are trying to figure out what to do to protect the counties that are falling toward fiscal insolvency, said Commissioner David Brock Smith.

Brookings’ Bill Hamilton with a plaque awarded by the Boy Scouts of America.

Bill Hamilton has one more award to add to the stack of patches, medals and pendants he’s accrued over 35 years in the Boy Scouts of America.

And this one — the Silver Beaver — has some prestige.

The heavy silver pendant is the highest achievement an adult can be awarded in the organization, and is the equivalent of the renowned Eagle Scout Award to which teen boys aspire.

Volunteers at the Brookings Presbyterian Church Thursday serve free, delicious, nutritionally-balanced meals to a variety of people in the community. Six local Community Kitchens served more than 18,500 meals in 2012.

It’s noon and people start lining up for a free meal inside the Brookings Presbyterian Church — one of five Community Kitchens in town.

Smiling, talkative church volunteers dish out a delicious, nutritionally-balanced meals and say hello as the lunchroom fills with 40-plus people. Three or four people eat alone, but many eat and talk in groups of three and four. 

At one table a homeless, bearded man, dressed in a grungy rain jacket and stained jeans, shovels spoonfuls of a chicken casserole into his mouth.

A Harbor resident is without his home but alive after a fire gutted the inside of his motorhome early Sunday morning at Harbor RV Park on Benham Lane.

Philip Hayes, a relatively new resident to the park, had just turned on the propane in his motorhome to supply a water heater when the gas ignited and started a fire, said Harbor Fire Department Chief John Brazil.

Runway safety and passenger terminal improvements at Del Norte County Airport got a small boost this week as projects funded through grants administered by the City of Brookings neared completion.

Brookings received $40,032 in grant funding through the Connect Oregon program, which has been used to fund a variety of studies at the airport in Crescent City, including an environmental assessment for the proposed new terminal, preliminary design work for a runway safety project and a wildlife hazard assessment study.