King of the mountain
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Butch Kovach has 6.2 million vertical feet this season at Bachelor • SPORTS, D1
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Isolated morning showers, mostly cloudy High 57, Low 30 Page C6
• May 11, 2010 50¢
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A beach in Bend? Yep, it’s for volleyball By Kate Ramsayer The Bulletin
It might be 180 miles from Bend to the ocean, but a group of residents is working to bring the beach — or at least beach volleyball — to Central Oregon. With truckloads of sand from Florence, volunteer labor and some donated space at the Old Mill District, members of the Bend Volleyball Association are working to build courts just south of the Les Schwab Amphitheater. “Bend is the greatest place in the world, but we don’t have a beach,” said Eric Staley, a Bend Volleyball Association board member. “We’re going to try to bring that here.” The goal is to build four courts near the river, where members of the volleyball association as well as the general public can use them. But for now, the group is focusing on building two of the courts before summer, and raising money for the project, which could cost about $15,000. The beach volleyball effort got started about three years ago, Staley said. People were playing at the Mountain View High courts, but the courts were fenced and shut off for most of the public. The beach volleyball players wanted to get more people interested in their sport — and one good way to do that, Staley said, is to have courts in a visible location. See Volleyball / A5
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY
Beside his daughter’s grave, father finds peace Keith Chu / The Bulletin
Steve Ellis sets this bracelet atop his daughter Jessica’s headstone whenever he visits her grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
By Keith Chu • The Bulletin WASHINGTON —
S
teve Ellis was in Washington, D.C., when terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. At the time,
Jessica Ellis was attending COCC and living in Bend before she joined the Army.
Ellis didn’t know how personally that day would impact him.
“I couldn’t have imagined I’d have a child buried here, and a daughter no
less,” Ellis said on Monday, as he walked through Arlington National Cemetery, where his daughter, U.S. Army Cpl. Jessica Ellis, was buried two years ago.
Beach volleyball courts currently under construction Les Schwab Amphitheater OLD MILL DISTRICT
r ive Deschutes R
Bo nd S
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Columb ia St.
Reed Mkt Rd. Andy Zeigert / The Bulletin
TOP NEWS INSIDE OIL: Seeking answers to the spill and dispersant safety, Page A3
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Steve Ellis kneels by the grave of his daughter, Cpl. Jessica Ellis, Monday at Arlington National Cemetery. Jessica Ellis died two years ago in a roadside bomb attack in Baghdad.
By Hillary Borrud The Bulletin
The recession is technically over, but it could take two years for Deschutes County’s government — one of the largest employers in the county with about 850 full-time employees — to feel the effects of economic recovery. That’s the message in next year’s proposed county budget, which was released Monday and covers the fiscal year starting in July. County officials are scheduled to meet next week to hash out financial priorities, before sending the budget on to the county commission for approval in June. A large portion of the budget will remain a question mark until after the May 18 election, for which residents have already begun voting by mail on whether to approve a $44 million bond to expand the county jail. The budget will be about $310 million if voters pass the bond, and $266 million if they do not, according to the county’s proposed budget. The current county budget is about $287 million. Regardless of whether the bond passes, the county’s payroll next year will include about 10 fewer employees than this year. Some open jobs will not be filled, and the county is also laying off two Department of Solid Waste employees and five employees who work with youths at the county’s juvenile detention center. See Budget / A4
LOOK AT THAT!
Pete Erickson / The Bulletin
Ensworth Elementary School first-graders, from left, Kaylee Jackson, Anthony Diaz and Evan Swanson, all 7, react to a crayfish using its claws to grab a pencil during a class visit to the Bend Science Station on Monday. The visit was part of a program to enhance science education for Bend-La Pine students. See story, Page C1.
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For a quarter of a century, two archaeologists and their team slogged through wild tropical vegetation to investigate and map the remains of one of the largest Maya cities, in Central America. Slow, sweaty hacking with machetes seemed to be the only way to discover the breadth of an ancient urban landscape now hidden beneath a dense forest canopy. Even the new remote-sensing technologies, so effective in recent decades at surveying other archaeological sites, were no help. Imaging radar by air and from space could not “see” through the trees. Then, in the dry spring season a year ago, the husband-and-wife team of Arlen and Diane Chase tried a new approach using airborne laser signals. See Mapping / A4
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Local
Keith Chu / The Bulletin
Ellis was 24 and serving as a combat medic when she died in a 2008 roadside bomb attack in Baghdad. Jessica Ellis lived in Bend, where she was attending Central Oregon Community College, before she joined the U.S. Army. Steve Ellis is forest supervisor for the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest in Baker City. Steve Ellis made a pilgrimage to his daughter’s grave this weekend, as he did last year on the anniversary of her death. He had hoped to see an exhibit honoring Jessica that was scheduled to open at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, inside of Arlington, but its opening was delayed. Instead, Steve Ellis spent May 9, Mother’s Day sitting by Jessica’s grave. It’s one of the thousands of white headstones, lined up in perfect, endless rows. She’s in Section 60, on the edge of a cluster of trees. On Monday, two bouquets of fresh flowers flanked the headstone, and a stuffed brown bear and pictures of Jessica in uniform made her grave the most decorated in sight. “When I sit there, I’m very much at peace,” Steve said on Monday, when he returned to the cemetery to meet one of her commanding officers, Lt. Col. Miguel Hobbs. Steve said he and his wife, Linda, considered having her buried in Oregon, but her Army friends told them Jessica wanted to be buried at Arlington. “They said this is where she wanted to be,” Ellis said. “That settled that.” In the past two years, Steve Ellis said his family have been overwhelmed by support and good wishes from the soldiers Jessica served with, and military members they’ve met since. See Ellis / A4
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New York Times News Service
Kagan nomination leaves some longing on left By Peter Baker New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON — The selection Monday of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be the nation’s 112th justice extends a quarter-century pattern in which Republican presidents generally install strong conservatives on the Supreme Court while Democratic presidents pick moder-
A N A LY S I S ate candidates who often disappoint their liberal base. Kagan is certainly too liberal for conservative activists, who quickly criticized her nomination on Monday as a radical threat. But much like every other Democratic nominee since
the 1960s, she does not fit the profile sought by the left, which hungers for a full-throated counterweight to the court’s conservative leader, Justice Antonin Scalia. In many ways, this reflects how much the nation’s long war over the judiciary has evolved since Kagan was a child. See Kagan / A5