The Sept. 29 article about Children's Farm Home layoffs left an incomplete impression about what drove the decision to eliminate some mental health services for children and to lay off some of our workforce. The article stated that much of our "loss is being blamed on (our) inability to react to changes in the way the state pays for providers of children's mental health services."

Although we have had difficulty reacting to a more complex billing environment brought on by the state's more complex public Mental Health Organization system, the primary reason we are exiting the outpatient and other community-based services is because the children's mental health system has been, and remains, chronically under-funded. The under-funding stems from the absence of state cost studies since 1992, numerous unfunded state mandates over the past decade, no cost-of-living adjustments to contracts for four of the past six years and state and MHO contracts that fund service provider salaries that are 30 to 35 percent below the Oregon wage index paid to public employees doing similar jobs.

Additionally, the Children's System Change Initiative brought a more complex billing system environment, did not provide standardized rates or billing protocols across MHO payers or provide adequate funding for a comprehensive systems change.

In the new biennium budget with tax revenues at an all-time high, there was no significant funding directed towards children's mental health by the Oregon legislature while Oregon administrators will receive pay increases of 12- to 24 percent.

These are the primary reasons for the layoffs at Trillium, and why we provided about

$5 million worth of uncompensated mental health services during this past fiscal year.

Rich Blum

Chief Operations Officer

Trillium Family Services

Letter doubting climate info erred

John D. Jones suggests that climate change scientists have been misleading the public ("'Optimists' over climate admit error," letters, Sept. 28).

Consider just two of his claims: Last year, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reviewed the "hockey stick" graph first produced by Michael Mann in 1998.

The four-page review is available at http://dels.nas.

edu/dels/rpt_briefs/Surface_

Temps_final.pdf. While the report faulted some technical details of Mann's analysis it did not, as Mr. Jones claims, disprove the "hockey stick."

In fact, the report concluded that "with a high level of confidence … global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during … the preceding four centuries."

Furthermore, the NAS panel found that all studies of global temperature back to A.D. 900 showed the key feature of Mann's graph, the unprecedented, rapid rise in temperature starting near 1850 (the hockey stick blade).

As the IPCC reports released this year show, this rapid rise cannot be explained by natural variability alone: the primary contribution is the Earth's response to the measured rise in greenhouse gas levels, which is unequivocally linked to well-documented fossil fuel use.

Mr. Jones also phrases the discovery of a small error in data processing as a deliberate act by NASA's James Hansen to inflate reported modern temperatures.

In fact, Hansen was not "forced" to restate his numbers. He was made aware of an error and corrected it. The error amounts to about 0.15 degrees C, and applies only to U.S. data measured since the year 2000. The error has essentially no impact on global temperature because the United States is only about 2 percent of the global area, including oceans.

Laurence Padman

Corvallis

PBS documenatary on WWII evocative

After watching the PBS documentary, "Oregon at War," I was reminded of a wonderful book that chronicles the little-known history of Camp Adair, which was located north of Corvallis.

"Camp Adair, the Story of a World War II Cantonment: Today, Oregon's Largest Ghost Town (5th edition)" by John Baker, chronicles the selection of the site, the incredible sacrifices owners and renters made as the government forced them to sell and/or leave the land for the camp, the building of the camp, the training of several army divisions there, its use as a POW camp and finally the camp's postscript.

It is a great read, and gives one the opportunity to learn in-depth about a project that had a tremendous social and economic impact on Corvallis and the surrounding area.

For a short time, Camp Adair was Oregon's second-largest city.

Many of the images and historic film used in the documentary are from the Camp Adair Collection at the Benton County Historical Museum.

As Corvallis celebrates its 150th anniversary, this is an easy way to learn more about our community and its rich history.

Judy Rycraft Juntunen

Corvallis

Fight for our right to read as we please

As silly as it might sound, one of the most-challenged books of 2006 was "And Tango Make Three," a story about two male penguins parenting an egg! Among so many other things, reading takes us on so many mind journeys and is a wonderful tool to help a person sort out life.

Apparently one person in four doesn't even read one book a year. What a pity it is that some biased groups want to restrict individuals further!

As the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once said, "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It's the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

Read and celebrate!

Ellen O. Hall

Corvallis