Oregon
This Is The Friendliest Small Town in Oregon
James Denny named Sublimity in 1852 after one look at the scenery, and the view still earns it. Green farmland meets the foothills of the Cascades and the streets stay short enough that the local baker knows you by the second visit. Saint Boniface Catholic Church anchors the town with a Carpenter Gothic steeple from 1889. Silver Falls State Park sits 10 miles east and is Oregon’s largest state park, with ten waterfalls along a single loop trail and old-growth Douglas firs over 300 feet tall. Together those four things explain why Sublimity earns the friendliest-small-town title in Oregon.
Sublimity’s History In A Nutshell
Native American trails and mountain streams crisscrossed what would become Sublimity well before settler arrival. The area worked as a small trading post and then a pioneer gathering place by 1852, when a post office opened and James Denny named the town after the surrounding scenery. The first school went up in 1856, followed by Sublimity College in 1857. The town was larger then than it is now. The Civil War triggered a sharp population decline as settlers returned east to fight and many farms were abandoned. New residents brought the farms back to life by 1874. Four years later a grid was laid out across twenty blocks, and Sublimity officially incorporated in 1903.
Downtown Sublimity
Downtown holds plenty for an afternoon stroll. On South Center Street, K’s Coffee runs deep couches and good coffee for sitting and chatting. PanezaNellie Breadstick Shoppe on NE Starr Street covers baked goods including pizza slices. The Wooden Nickel on North Center Street sells homemade bread and fresh produce from local farms.
After meeting a few of the regulars in the shops, walk over to 375 SE Church Street for Saint Boniface Catholic Church. The church was built in 1889 in the Carpenter Gothic style with a 110-foot steeple, and the grounds include the historic St. Boniface cemetery on one side.
Outdoor Activities
Silver Falls State Park is the area’s outdoor answer. The park sits 10 miles east of Sublimity and is Oregon’s largest state park at around 9,200 acres. It sits in the state’s temperate rainforest zone with waterfalls and old-growth trees. A $10 day-use parking fee covers hiking trails, picnic sites, biking paths, and camping access. The Trail of Ten Falls is the headliner, a 7.2-mile loop that passes ten waterfalls. The trail stays open year-round, runs at its fullest in spring, and pulls fall foliage crowds in October.
Beyond the falls, the 6-mile Catamount Trail handles mountain biking through dense forest. Tree Climbing at Silver Falls offers guided climbs up the park’s Douglas firs, some of which top 300 feet. The campground along South Fork Silver Creek has 43 tent sites, 14 cabins, and 48 electrical sites, with ice and firewood for sale plus restrooms and showers on site. Smith Creek Village offers another stay option with cottages, cabins, and lodges plus amenities like TVs and kitchenettes.
Sublimity Events
Back in town, the calendar carries several events that double as introductions to Sublimity residents. National Night Out is one of the town’s signatures, held in partnership with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. Vendors, food, and live music fill Church Park, with the event also raising awareness for community-police ties.
The other anchor event is the Night of Twinkling Lights and Tree Lighting on the first Saturday in December. The Light Parade is the headliner, with locals decorating their floats or vehicles and parading through town to City Hall, where Santa lights the town Christmas tree. The parade then moves to the fire department for photos with Santa. The next morning, people return to the fire department for the annual Candy Cane Breakfast with biscuits and gravy. The Sublimity Harvest Festival in September is the other big event, with monster trucks, pull events, an entertainment tent, and a row of vendors.
Where To Stay In Sublimity
Sublimity has a way of stretching a quick visit into a two-day stay. The Bridgeway Inn and Suites offers continental breakfast and free Wi-Fi for the overnight crowd. The Rodeway Inn and Suites is the other option, with free breakfast, Wi-Fi, a pool, and a fitness center.
Why Sublimity Earns The Name
Sublimity walks the walk on friendliness. The local baker treats you like family before pointing you to the next shop for whatever else you need. A sidewalk hello can turn into the best conversation of the week. Whether you are cheering at a monster truck event or watching Santa light the town tree, the unpretentious warmth this place runs on gets harder to find anywhere else.
By: Mia Maldonado
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek has appointed her chief of staff to temporarily lead the state’s transportation agency.
Chris Warner, who has worked with Kotek since 2023, will serve as the Oregon Department of Transportation’s interim director until the agency finds its next director.
He is taking over Lisa Sumption’s interim position so she can return to role as the director of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department as it undergoes long-planned changes to improve the state park system. Sumption has led the agency since January, when former ODOT director Kris Strickler left the state government. Strickler now works as a senior vice president at a national engineering firm.
Before joining Kotek’s team, Warner held leadership roles at the Portland Bureau of Transportation for six years — including three as the local agency’s director. He previously worked as a legislative aide to former U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, who spent years as the chair or ranking member on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and a transportation adviser for former Gov. Ted Kulongoski.
Warner will be leading a state agency that doesn’t know how it will fund basic road maintenance and operations at its current levels beyond the 2025-27 budget cycle. Last month, Oregonians overwhelmingly voted against hikes to the gas tax and other transportation fees that would have covered the agency’s budget shortfalls for the next decade.
Kotek has tasked transportation and business experts to find and propose a solution by the end of the year for lawmakers to consider during the 2027 legislative session. That’s when lawmakers, like in 2025, will once again have six months to compromise on a transportation package.
Warner joined Kotek’s office as deputy chief of staff at the start of her term, and the governor promoted him to chief of staff after her initial chief of staff, Andrea Cooper, and several other top employees abruptly left the office over concerns about the increasingly influential role of Kotek’s wife, Aimee Kotek Wilson. Kotek walked back plans to create an office of the first spouse amid scrutiny of those plans.
“I’m grateful to Lisa and Chris for being willing to step in and serve the people of Oregon who depend on a safe and reliable transportation system,” Kotek said in a statement. “Their efforts allow the state to take the steps needed to find the best director for Oregon’s transportation future. Chris has the experience needed to keep the organization moving at this truly critical juncture. He has my full confidence.”
Emerald Bogue, who joined the governor’s office in early spring as a special adviser under a temporary agreement with the Port of Portland, will fill the chief of staff role. The changes will take effect at the end of June.
The Oregon Department of Administrative Services is still conducting a nationwide search to hire a new transportation director to lead the more than 4,500 employees that maintain the state’s transportation system.
What to know about Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon
The Oregon State Hospital treats three types of patients who need hospital-level care in Salem and Junction City.
The Oregon State Hospital remains in contempt of court as defendants continue to sit in jail past the seven-day deadline for them to be admitted and has racked up nearly $4.5 million in fines since a federal court order in June 2025.
A new order is expected to bring the state back into compliance by the end of 2026.
For Emily Cooper, the legal director for Disability Rights Oregon, the organization that sued the state more than two decades ago, every additional day of waiting means another day a person with mental illness “could be irreparably harmed.”
At least two people have died waiting to receive treatment for mental health issues a judge has deemed severe enough to prevent them from aiding and assisting in their own legal defense.
Since 2002, the state psychiatric hospital has been ordered to admit people who have been found unable to aid in their own legal defense for competency restoration within seven days.
The state has been out of compliance with that requirement for most of the last eight or so years.
Oregon has been fined nearly $4.5 million for late admissions
Disability Rights Oregon asked U.S. District Court Judge Adrienne Nelson to hold the Oregon Health Authority, which oversees the state hospital, in contempt of court for failing to meet that standard in January 2025.
On June 6, 2025, Nelson did just that, finding Oregon in contempt and ordering fines of $500 per-person for every day an aid and assist patient was waiting longer than a week to be admitted to OSH.
From June 7, 2025, to May 14, 2026, defendants cumulatively waited more than 9,000 days in jail beyond the seven day allowance, averaging about eight additional days each.
OSH reports four weeks of data on the first of each month.
The nearly $4.5 million the state has been fined will be spent in some way on helping people struggling with mental illness, Cooper said.
Those fines are paid from the budgets for the hospital and OHA’s behavioral health division.
The fines have lowered in recent months after spiking in the winter but continue to add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the total bill.
Oregon is expected to be back in compliance this year
Aid and assist patients are admitted to OSH for short stays – 90 days, six months, or a year – depending on the charges. The purpose is to stabilize someone enough that they can, on a basic level, understand what they are being charged with and help their attorney.
Nelson eliminated most extensions to those stays on June 1 by granting a remedial order. People who have committed Measure 11 felonies, serious violent crimes, are now the only aid and assist patients eligible for an extension on their stay at OSH.
The elimination of most extensions, along with limiting what charges can make defendants eligible to be sent to OSH, are designed to open beds for new patients more quickly.
After reviewing data on the prior extensions, Dr. Debra Pinals, who has served as a neutral expert and is now a court monitor on the case, found that in many cases they did not result in the person being restored to competency.
Metropolitan Public Defense and Disability Rights Oregon asked Nelson to issue the order back in March. The request is based on recommendations from Pinals, who has provided a series of reports on the hospital.
Beyond changing the time someone can be in restoration treatment at OSH, the order changes who can be admitted.
People charged with low-level, non-violent felonies and misdemeanors, like resisting arrest or disorderly conduct, will no longer be admitted to the hospital for competency restoration.
The courts will decide where those defendants are directed. Some options include community restoration, civil commitment or dismissing the charges, OSH spokesperson Marsha Sills said.
“The subtext of this is stop charging these people for crimes, when these are really manifestations of mental illness,” Cooper said.
Pinals had found diminishing clinical returns and high costs of treatment for people who “if they’d been convicted, they would have spent a long weekend in jail,” Cooper said.
“The duration of hospitalization may exceed the time an individual would have served if convicted, particularly when sentences are less than 90 days, with the average length of stay for restoration reaching 116.5 days,” Pinals wrote in a March 16 report.
Pinals estimated in March that with the changes to extensions and admissions the state could likely comply with the seven-day admission requirement within two and a half months.
The order is projected to bring the state into compliance by the end of the year.
“It’s forcing the system to think about an alternative rather than forced institutionalization on the state’s dime,” Cooper said of the order.
Remedial order draws criticism
Not everyone is in support of Nelson’s decision.
“The Board of Commissioners is very opposed to the new request from Disability Rights Oregon because they are only considering the interest of the individual who has committed the crime,” Marion County Commissioner Danielle Bethell told the Statesman Journal a few days before the order. “They are not considering the harm or challenge in the community.”
Counties have been stuck and frustrated because the responsibility to provide community-based care falls on them, Bethell said.
“Nobody wants anybody with a mental illness to be stuck in jail and not be able to move through the process of the criminal justice system. Nobody wants that on either side of the ideological divide,” Bethell said.
She highlighted Salem’s REACH, Rapid Engagement, Assessment and Community Health team as one way the community is working to relieve pressure on emergency services that have been responding to mental health crises, “but it’s still inadequate because we don’t have all the stairs of that escalator for that system.”
State leadership, staffing issues challenge Oregon State Hospital
Both Cooper and Bethell pointed to the state’s top leaders and the hospital’s staffing challenges as major issues plaguing progress at OSH.
The hospital’s changing patient population and the pandemic have meant more patients with higher needs, fewer programming options and more pressure on staff, Cooper said.
Four of the eight top OSH executives are interims, including the superintendent and medical and nursing officers.
“I think at the end of the day, what we’ve been concerned about is less about OHA, less about the state hospital, and from a leadership top down,” Cooper said. “Like, from the governor’s office, from the legislature – are you really funding the hospital and the Oregon Health Authority in a way that really allows them to do their jobs?”
The governor and legislature should “walk and chew gum at the same time” by hiring more staff for the hospital while working with local leaders on prevention, Bethell told the Statesman Journal.
“There’s no state law that says they cannot increase capacity and provide better care for individuals that come into the state hospital and a better environment for employees who work in the state hospital,” she said.
Problems with Oregon’s behavioral health system ‘are not fixable overnight,’ court monitor says
Gov. Tina Kotek’s office did not respond to a question about future funding for the hospital, instead pointing to increases in community treatment beds during Kotek’s term.
“I am committed to ensuring Oregonians can access the health care they need, when they need it,” Kotek said in a provided statement. “Together, we are building a system with the capacity to meet the behavioral health needs of Oregonians in the timely fashion they deserve.”
Her administration has helped facilitate the development of 930 new and in-progress residential treatment beds, increasing the state’s capacity by over 30%, spokesperson Hanna Seay Thomas said.
“The Governor has been clear that increased treatment and workforce capacity are essential to having a complete continuum of behavioral healthcare across the state that will serve people better and help to relieve pressure on OSH,” she said.
The most straightforward way to address the intake delays is by adding treatment capacity to help divert people from being admitted to the hospital and provide a place for patients leaving to be discharged, Sills said.
Those projects take time, two to four years on average. The hospital and OHA’s behavioral health division, she said, are working with community programs to make the discharge process better.
Leaders at OHA and OSH were not made available for comment.
While Cooper pointed to the slowly decreasing wait list as a positive sign, Bethell believes things have only gotten “more volatile and negative” since the contempt finding last year.
Hospital leadership and OHA’s behavioral health division meet with Pinals each week, Sills said.
“Despite the lack of compliance with the 7-day admission requirement, in my opinion, at this time OHA is working reasonably and appropriately to address the needs that this Court has required,” Pinals wrote in a March report. “The problems that the behavioral health system is facing are not fixable overnight, but there are many steps that have been taken to help.”
Anastasia Mason covers state government for the Statesman Journal. Reach her at acmason@statesmanjournal.com or 971-208-5615.
SALEM, Ore. — A new K-9 is joining the Oregon State Police ranks, and troopers are asking for help in naming their newest recruit.
The one-year-old red Labrador Retriever is training to join their other K-9s Scout and Drake on the OSP Fish and Wildlife Conservation K-9 program. Together the team will help protect Oregon’s natural resources.
While they say they’ll still call him “Good Dog,” they say he’s ready for an official name.
They are asking youths between the ages of 9 and 17 years old to help name the new dog.
They are suggesting the names involve the outdoors or fish and wildlife, considering his assignment.
Entries will close on June 14, and are limited to one entry per youth.
Finalists will move on to a round of statewide voting. The youth who submitted the winning name will get to meet the K-9 and get some items of recognition from Oregon State Police.
MORE FROM OREGON STATE POLICE:
OSP’s conservation K-9 program began in 2018 with K-9 Buck, who recently retired from active service. Fish and Wildlife K-9s receive specialized training in wildlife detection, human tracking, and area searches to support investigations into the illegal take of birds, wildlife, and fish around the state. Dogs are trained to detect deer, elk, bear, turkey, waterfowl, salmon, and sturgeon, as well as firearms, shell casings, and other items containing gunpowder residue. Conservation K-9 teams have been instrumental during investigations into poaching, missing persons, and other criminal activity.
The new conservation K-9 team will be stationed at OSP’s La Grande patrol office, joining teams currently based in Bend and Springfield.
The Conservation K-9 program is a collaboration between the Oregon State Police and the Oregon Wildlife Foundation. The Oregon Wildlife Foundation maintains the Wildlife Conservation K-9 Fund to help cover expenses associated with the canine members of the Conservation K-9 teams. Donations to the fund support the costs of veterinary care, training equipment, and other essential supplies.
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