Showing you the road to getting along.

[September 7th, 2005] Motorists and cyclists will soon have a new traffic symbol to decipher on selected streets in Northwest Portland: a bicycle topped with what looks like the double chevron from an Army corporal's uniform stenciled to the asphalt. They're called "sharrows" (short for "shared-road arrows''), and they're meant to hammer home the fact that bikes enjoy equal road rights with automobiles. "As the law reads, a cyclist is expected to be in the road, behaving like other vehicles,'' says Tom Miller, chief of staff for Sam Adams, the city commissioner in charge of the Transportation Bureau. The sharrows will make a limited debut in the next few weeks; the city will use before-and-after video footage to see if they actually work.

The halls of Multnomah County are abuzz over an angry note from District Attorney Michael Schrunk to County Chair Diane Linn about an invite list that excluded him, the sheriff and the county auditor. Schrunk's Aug. 25 letter to Linn, about the list for a practice budget exercise, called it a "troubling" exclusion that left him "disappointed.'' Only county department heads participated in the session on "priority-based budgeting," a concept that riled tempers when it debuted during budget negotiations last spring. Although Linn says she didn't mean to give Schrunk the brushoff, the DA thinks the chair should make a greater effort to include all players in future rehearsals. Hoping not to sound too Rodney King-ish, Schrunk says, "I want everyone to get together."

Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto filed for reelection last week without a party, press release or fanfare-probably a wise approach given his recent adventures ("The Long Arm of the Law," July 20, 2005) that have caused some wags to dub him a "serial lothario." But little birds say Giusto has a plan for dealing with his agency's financial problems if he gets a second term. The idea: dumping the law-enforcement side of his office, roughly 80 deputies, off on some combination of Portland, Gresham and other eastern burbs in the county. The concept has been around for a while, but this time it has the interest of the unions as well as Portland Mayor Tom Potter .

The ruckus over water quality in Lake Oswego (see "Lake O-be-gone," WW, April 27, 2005) continues. While the Lake Oswego Corp. , the privately held company that manages Oswego Lake, continues aggressive steps to clear the waters, dissident shareholders complain of a large algal bloom covering the lake's western end. More alarmingly, the dissidents wonder whether a 6-foot sturgeon recently found dead in the lake succumbed to the hundreds of thousands of pounds of aluminum sulfate the Lake Corp. is dumping in the water. While the Lake Corp. insists the chemical is good for the lake, enviro groups have blamed it for endangering fish and their habitats.

As the Portland Timbers face their final do-or-die games of the regular season, all is not well in the Timbers Army, the team's most vociferous group of supporters. Since an Aug. 23 story by Oregonian soccer-beat writer Abby Haight detailed other fans' complaints and management concerns about the Army's often off-color chants and songs , some Army forces have agreed to watch the Atlanta game from the fence on PGE's east side instead of entering the park. Others have planned to abandon the Army's usual post in stadium section 107. There's even talk of a beer boycott -so you know this is getting serious. Meanwhile, with its final regular-season games Thursday and Saturday at PGE, the Timbers are scrambling to hold on to the sixth and final playoff spot in the United Soccer League's First Division.

WEB EXTRAS

Looks like some mediation talks are foundering between the Archdiocese of Portland and the sexual-abuse victims suing the church. Several claimants are asking U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Elizabeth Perris to "relieve" them from participating, saying that the archdiocese has made "no good-faith offers of settlement." The claimants' attorney, Erin Olson, wrote in a Sept. 1 motion that the mediation talks have been "harmful and futile" to the six men who say they were molested by the Rev. Remy Rudin while they were at the MacLaren School for Boys. The archdiocese and the Franciscan Friars dispute that take on the negotiations and say that Olson's motion violates confidentiality protocols.

After years of battles over state loggers overcutting Oregon's state forests ("The Coast Is Clearcut," March 6, 2002), including a fierce fight in 2004 over an ill-fated forest protection ballot measure, Gov. Ted Kulongoski is taking action. He's told state forester Marvin Brown in a letter to disregard an instruction from the state Legislature to log those forests like tree farms, at unsustainable levels. "I must instruct you not to comply," Kulongoski wrote in his Aug. 23 letter. The only problem? Brown reports to the Board of Forestry, not Kulongoski; furthermore, Kulongoski has left that board's makeup tilting heavily pro-logging. The real test of Kulongoski's rhetoric will be in April when he names a new slate of members to the forestry board.

Kulongoski stuck the veto pen Friday into one of the legislative session's more curious bills. House Bill 2588 would have diverted $1 million from a state-administered injured-worker fund to study whether to let chiropractors handle workers'-comp cases (Kulongoski helped boot chiros out of the system in 1989). The bill languished in committees all session and was opposed by key labor and business groups. Then, House Majority Leader Wayne Scott (R-Canby), whose son-in-law is a chiropractor, made it part of the "go-home" package at session's end. Scott did not respond to WW's questions about the bill.

Multnomah County Chairwoman Diane Linn is cranking up her re-election campaign with the hiring of longtime political activist Alisa Simmons as her campaign coordinator. Simmons, a Basic Rights of Oregon board member and chair of that gay-rights group's political action committee, is a former director of the Oregon Student Association.