I am on the hunt.

I carefully guide myself through the woods beyond my backyard on this rainy May morning, stepping over the underbrush and dead tree trunks searching for springtime's woodland gem: the morel mushroom.

For the past two years, Scott County's mental-health and developmental-disability advisory committee has outlined proposed cuts to services. For Fiscal Year 2008 (which ends June 30), the budget reductions totaled $1.7 million. For Fiscal Year 2009, the proposal is just under $1 million.

Peter Kivisto offers this observation about Augustana College President Steven C. Bahls.

"Somebody'd have a new book, and the next thing you know, you'd have a little letter from him congratulating you," said Kivisto, the Richard Swanson Professor of Social Thought at Augustana and the past chair of the faculty senate. "That's on the cheap, but it meant a lot to us."

It's an admittedly minor thing, but it speaks to Bahls' style, and style counts for a lot in leadership. The Rock Island liberal-arts college is not an autocracy, and the power of its president to create change largely rests with his ability to inspire and guide, particularly the faculty and the board of trustees.

Sean O'Harrow, the Figge Art Museum's executive director for the past seven months, sounds diplomatic. He says all the right, polite things about collaboration and about serving the community.

"I'm very keen on building bridges," he said last week.

There are eight dressing areas in the Capitol Theatre in downtown Davenport, on eight different levels, accessible from the stage by an elevator. One of them has a toilet at the end of a long room too narrow for anything except walking to said toilet. It's evident that they were an afterthought, put wherever there was room when the facility, opened in 1920 as a movie house, began hosting vaudeville.