Still the hearing this week stretched on for five more hours and included excruciating details of what he did to 5-year-old Sahara Dwight. However, her name was never mentioned.

The hearing began with a meaningless, symbolic instruction from parole board member Kara Brooks: “Use her initials rather than her name to protect her privacy.”

Sahara’s name has been all over the news. Her privacy was violated by Wallace. If Brooks was suggesting that there was shame attached to the crime, it belonged to only him.

Wallace raped and killed the child in 2010 while she was sleeping in her Roseburg home. He was 16 and visiting his father, who lived with Sahara’s mother.

Later at his trial, his former baby sitter would say she wasn’t surprised he had killed someone, that he liked to pick on his baby sister and abuse animals.

It would also turn out that two years before he killed Sahara, Wallace attempted to sexually assault an 11-year-old friend of his sister’s. He apparently was never prosecuted for that crime, although he spoke about it in detail at the parole hearing, describing how he used a pocket knife to cut off her underwear.

When Wallace was convicted in 2012, Douglas County Judge Randy Garrison said he posed such a significant public safety risk he should never be released. The judge sentenced him to two life sentences without parole. How is it then, that Wallace was now eligible for parole?

Politics.

In her last term in office, then-Gov. Kate Brown commuted Wallace’s sentence, positioning him for parole. He was one of about 1,000 prison inmates who received her blessing.

Throughout her political career, Brown was a long-time opponent of Ballot Measure 11, which required minimum-mandatory sentences for 16 violent crimes.

It passed overwhelmingly in 1994 by voters who wanted honest prison sentences at a time when violent crimes by adults and juveniles were increasing. Voters reiterated their support in 2000.

But legislators found ways to weaken Measure 11. In 2019, Democrats in the legislature had the necessary supermajority to pass Senate Bill 1008, which removed violent juveniles from Measure 11. A juvenile could commit aggravated murder and be free by age 25.

Wallace missed out on that advantage because he committed his crimes nine years earlier. But Brown used her commutation loophole to reduce his sentence and qualify him for a parole hearing.

His shot at freedom enraged Sahara’s family and supporters, who packed the parole board hearing this week at Oregon State Penitentiary.

At the conclusion of Wallace’s lengthy hearing, the panel of three parole board members— Brooks, Donald Rees and Vice Chair Ronnee Kliewer — deliberated about 15 minutes to deliver their decision: Wallace would have to wait 10 years before seeking parole again.

Typically, the board takes days or weeks to arrive at a decision. When even the inmate petitioning for parole says he isn’t ready, it would seem to be a slam-dunk. But the hearing went on anyway.

“While Mr. Wallace’s statement that he is not ready for parole is very compelling, the board must still be able to articulate, given all of the factors delineated in the statue and rule, why they made the decision to deny parole,” said Dylan Arthur, executive director of the Parole Board.

State law (OAR 255-062-0016) outlines specific factors the board must consider when setting a deferral period longer than two years.

Had the board ended the hearing once Wallace admitted he was not ready for parole, Dylan said the board would not have had the additional information to legally justify their decision. They also would not have had the information to determine his appropriate deferral period.

While Sahara’s family got what they wanted — no parole for 10 years — how will the state of Oregon rehabilitate Wallace into a productive citizen?

Parole Hearing as Therapy

At times, the lengthy parole hearing resembled a therapy session. Board member Brooks led the questioning. Wallace often mumbled his replies and rambled. Occasionally members of the audience couldn’t hear him, and Brooks reminded him repeatedly to speak up.

Wallace is now 32 years old.

Brooks: “What are you doing to make yourself a better person?”

Wallace: “When I was in court I didn’t know or understand what was exactly wrong with me. … Working to control my anger, working to control my emotions… .”

Brooks: “What have you done to make yourself a better person? … Have you completed any anger management programs?”

Wallace: “No. … I have received word that I have a mentor, a former incarcerated person. … A former AIC (adult in custody, what the state of Oregon now officially calls prison inmates). … He is now free and has become successful. … He will be my mentor upon release.”

Brooks: “Did you rape S.D.?”

“No ma’am.”

“You did not rape S.D.?”

“No, ma’am. … I maybe…”

Wallace’s voice drifted off into a long silence.

“What does the word ‘rape’ mean to you?” Brooks asked.

Wallace said something about “sexual means of release.”

Brooks referred to the evaluation with a psychologist and told Wallace what stood out to her: “You didn’t seem to know what rape was.”

Wallace: “I understand it now … I did not understand the full severity of what rape was at the time of my crime.”

Brooks: “But you knew it was wrong to force yourself sexually on a 5-year-old, right?”

Long silence.

“I don’t really know how to answer that … I did not fully comprehend… (Since his incarceration) I acknowledge that I was absolutely wrong, and I cannot take it back.”

Wallace initially told police he was sleep walking when he attacked Sahara.

Brooks: “You lied repeatedly about what you did …. Made up stories, blamed it on another intruder who obviously did not exist… You knew it was wrong to rape and kill a 5-year-old.”

Wallace: “I was afraid … I didn’t want to get in trouble…I didn’t understand the intensity and severity …I understand on a surface level…I didn’t really comprehend.”

Brooks said she was having trouble understanding how, at age 16, Wallace didn’t realize that what he did was fundamentally wrong.

Wallace: “I can’t defend what I did… There is no explanation for what I did … I have to live with that every single day…I can work on it. I can’t change it.”

Brooks: “Forcing sexual intercourse on someone unwilling — why can’t you admit that is what you did to S.D.?”

Long silence.

Brooks: “OK, so after 15 years of incarceration you were still unable to … admit you raped S.D. and murdered S.D. Is that what you’re saying? Did you rape and murder S.D.?”

Long silence.

Wallace: “I did that … absolutely.”

Brooks: “How do you think it felt for the family of S.D. … to hear you equivocate about whether you raped and murdered their loved one?”

Wallace: “The same way I feel about myself — furious, absolute hatred.”

Brooks pointed out that he had not engaged in institutional programs and asked him why he didn’t think he needed sex offender treatment.

Wallace: “I don’t feel like I’m a threat to anyone anymore. … That is just my opinion of me. …Coming to this hearing, I am viewed as a threat.”

Brooks: “What have you learned about why you engaged in a sexual attack?”

Wallace: “I struggle with many things when it comes to social interactions. … Taking meds contributed. … There is no excuse for what I did.”

Brooks: “How often do you think about sex now?”

Wallace mumbled something about “under control.”

Brooks: “In the past did you think you could not control your sexual impulses?”

Wallace: “Absolutely.”

Brooks quoted from a psych evaluation that Wallace “‘doesn’t see anyone as sexual anymore.’ …Is that something you did in the past? … Do you think that might change if you were no longer in a correctional setting?”

Wallace: “No.”

Board member Donald Rees also referred to one of Wallace’s’ psych evaluations that found he was “far from ready” to safely re-enter the community. Wallace basically agreed with him.

“How many years do you think it will take you to work on things?” Rees asked.

Wallace: “I think I’m going to be …for the rest of my life. … (I will) stick with it for as long as I can.”

The conversation turn to triggers and Wallace’s use of porn. He was using porn at the time he tried to rape a friend of his younger sister. He agreed that pornography could be a trigger for reoffending. So would being in an “over-sexualized” environment. He characterized the porn he liked as standard — not violent.

Wallace: “Any sexual area … I stay away from …. That doesn’t exclude the fact that I still want to one day find a partner… .”

More silence.

Wallace: “I forgot what we were talking about.”

Brooks: “What would you look for in finding a partner?”

Wallace: “Be honest with each other … best way to make a relationship last.”

Brooks: “What does the word ‘consent’ mean to you in a sexual relationship?”

Wallace: “Both parties have to be (available) to intercourse.”

The topic shifted to his escape attempt while at the Oregon Youth Authority and his lack of prison employment. He briefly worked as a shower orderly when he was at Snake River Correctional Institution. He acknowledged a three-year period where he had no job, in part because he was in quarantine.

“No matter how much I tried I could not get hired for any job I applied for,” he said.

He found out later that one prison official said that as long as he was able to deny Wallace a job he would do so.

“It was a personal grudge. I never met him.”

Board members wanted to know about his health, his medications for mental health and depression, the quality of his sleep.

“To be honest … calling my family helps pull me out of depression,” Wallace said.

About his sexual history, he said he felt more comfortable talking to children and elders — not women.

About the attack on his sister’s friend: She was over at his house, and the girls were sleeping.

Wallace: “I was in my bedroom watching inappropriate materials … ended up going by the bathroom. … I ended up going into my sister’s bedroom.”

According to a report provided to the board, Wallace said his sister’s friend was lying on the bed and never responded to anything he did.

“That is my assumption, my thought process … my personal gratification side.”

Brooks wanted to know why he cut off the girl’s underwear with a knife.

“I always had a pocketknife on me. … When I have an impulsive thought I act on it.”

Brooks noted there was a degree of premeditation — watching porn, walking out of his room, waiting for the girls to fall asleep. She asked him a series of questions.

“What did you do when she woke up? Were you ever confronted that this happened? … Was she aware of what you were trying to do? Why was this never prosecuted?”

Wallace offered a rambling reply that came down to: “I have no idea.”

Brooks: “You did not think anything you did that night was wrong. Is that your understanding?”

Wallace: “My thought process … I don’t want to get in trouble. I did’t think any deeper than that.”

According to a psych evaluation, Wallace didn’t view it as wrong because there was no penetration.

Now sitting in front of the parole board, Wallace said, “I think it matters that it still happened. I should be held accountable for that action. … I didn’t think about her.”

Before the board moved into the specific night he raped and murdered Sahara Dwight, Brooks told the audience that anyone who wanted to leave could so. Then she asked, “Are you doing OK, Mr. Wallace?”

The night of her death, Sahara was asleep in her home.

Brooks: “You went into her bedroom … stuck your fingers in her vagina, in your words … Exactly what happened to her physically?”

Wallace: “It makes me angry, and also I feel disappointed in myself…”

Brooks: “You were on top of her …. Her head bashed against the headboard … She stopped struggling…”

Wallace mumbled something.

Brooks: “I know this is tough. Just keep reminding yourself, it’s OK..”

Wallace: “I put my hand over her mouth… .”

Brooks: “You muffled what you’re saying…. Keep your hands on the table so people can hear what you are actually saying.”

Wallace rambled: “At some point … I lost feeling in my right arm… fell on top of her. During the struggle our heads collided on a few occasions… .”

Brooks told him to stop lowering his voice.

“Please speak up, and make sure your voice is audible. You said she lifted whose body up? I’m confused, and I hope you can clarify … You are 6-foot-3. How was it that this … child, 5 years old, was able to lift you up?”

Wallace was inaudible.

Brooks: “Keep your voice up … Did you punch her in the stomach?”

Wallace: “I don’t recall… I don’t know if I did.”

Brooks: “If your plan from the start was not to murder S.D., what did you think was going to happen? …. Did you asphyxiate her? Did you cause her to stop breathing?

Wallace: “I was thinking she was merely unconscious.”

Brooks: “You stopped penetrating S.D. … because it hurt your penis. … I do want to ask you, who do you think has been impacted by what you did and how?”

From there, the hearing veered into Wallace’s future plans. Initially he wanted to get a degree in zoology, and he started researching colleges. Then realized he couldn’t pursue zoology and work with animals because of his criminal history — but maybe botany or geology.

He made reference to some possible job through what sounded like a prison re-entry program.

Finally Brooks offered a summing-up.

“All of your behaviors (that are) criminal in nature were impulsive,” she said.

Brooks suggested Wallace ask about the “Road to Freedom” and “do the deeper work.”

The Road to Freedom is a widely used cognitive-behavioral workbook for inmates who are participating in sex offender treatment programs. It is regularly used in Oregon Department of Corrections facilities as a part of therapeutic rehabilitation. It is also available through organizations such as Oregon CURE, which stands for Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants. (Calling a criminal an “errant” sounds so much nicer, doesn’t it?)

Who’s in Dustin Wallace’s Corner?

The last hour of Wallace’s parole hearing was given over to Sahara’s family and their supporters so they could have their say.

The only person who spoke on Wallace’s behalf was Andy Simrin, his attorney who suggested that someday Wallace could join the roll call of success stories among his own former clients who are now free — including cop killer Sydney Dean Porter (See “Keep the Dean and his Size 13”); deadly carjacker Trevor Walraven (See “Shredding the Public Safety Net” ) and Mark J. Wilson.

Wilson and his high school friend in Bend, murdered the uncle and aunt of a young woman, who had spurned one of them. Nine years ago when Wilson was still incarcerated, I saw him assisting as a jailhouse lawyer at the parole hearing for murderer/rapist George Nulph. (See “A Sexual Sadist Makes His Plans”)

Nulph’s case is a good example of why Oregonians voted for Measure 11. He was convicted in 1976 of kidnapping and murdering Frances Christians, a grocery store clerk in Cannon Beach. Only 10 years later, he was released on parole and later raped and tortured a Portland neighbor at gunpoint.

Nulph didn’t win his freedom at his 2017 parole hearing (where he claimed he was almost blind, yet a parole board member noted he made eye contact with each of them). Nulph was quietly freed last year.

The question that is not asked and answered at parole hearings or among politicians is: How much is it worth to salvage some of these men so they can be free? A lot of time, money and effort are devoted to them. Is the sky the limit?

One of the reasons the Oregon legislature weakened Measure 11 was to save money. Then-Gov. John Kitzhaber created a special Public Safety Commission to successfully remove three violent crimes from Measure 11. It was considered politically doable at the time because crime was dropping and, as one of his advisors noted, violent crime mostly impacts the poor.

The governor and legislature wanted to save money on prison costs. They needed to find a way to keep more offenders out of prison while rehabilitating inmates so they could be released and not come back. They never seemed to ask what it would cost — in public safety and morality — to flip society’s sympathies towards criminals.

It’s a victory of sorts to turn a killer into a “productive citizen.” How do you keep it from becoming a reward for the worst kind of behavior?

Four years ago, the night Gov. Tina Kotek (D) was first elected governor, among the speakers at her victory celebration was convicted murderer and kidnapper Sterling Cunio, who killed a young Salem couple and robbed them. (See “Dodging a Bullet.”)

Cunio spoke to the Democratic faithful about the success of Ballot Measure 112, which prohibited “slavery” and “involuntary servitude” in prison as punishment.

Early in Wallace’s parole hearing he mentioned that he had been offered a mentor — someone previously incarcerated who was now successful.

These mentors can be someone like Cunio or Wilson or Walraven — they all advocate now for the incarcerated. Wilson and Walraven work for the Oregon Justice Resource Center. It sounds neutral, but the Portland-based nonprofit advocates for inmates. Its motto is: “We seek to frustrate and dismantle mass incarceration in Oregon.”

On Friday, The Oregonian reported that the Oregon Justice Resource Center was given thousands of confidential internal files from a former library worker at Snake River Correctional Institution. The former worker has since been indicted on felony computer crime charges. She is also accused of having sexual contact with a prisoner, who is serving time at Snake River for more than a dozen sex crime convictions.

The Oregon Justice Resource Center’s approach to incarceration is that it’s the state Department of Corrections responsibility to repair all the adults in their custody. If someone can’t be fixed, it’s the state’s fault. Bring on the lawsuits. No wonder the organization could be interested in seeing confidential prison files.

With mentors like that in his corner, Dustin Wallace is destined for parole — someday.

There is now a much enlarged constituency for liberal views: the legions of helpers and carers, social workers and therapists, whose incomes and careers depend crucially on the supposed incapacity of large numbers of people to fend for themselves or behave reasonably. Without the supposed powerlessness of drug addicts, burglars, and others in the face of their own undesirable inclinations, there would be nothing for the professional redeemers to do.

—Theodore Dalrymple, British author and retired physician who practiced in a British inner-city hospital and prison for decades.

Where’s Portland’s Spencer Pratt When We Need Him?

As we write this, Los Angeles voters will go to the polls tomorrow to decide who will be that screwy, corrupt, overstuffed, creepy, hedonistic, self-deluded city’s next mayor.

When campaigning began, it was widely assumed that the Democratic machine would re-elect a non-entity named Karen Bass, who makes the worst Portland progressive/socialist/commie look like Winston Churchill. Ms. Bass is a true-blue latte revolutionary, notable for kanoodling, back when, with Fidel Castro and other Red Gods.

Her usual quiet sojourn on the public payroll was interrupted by one of LA’s predictable brushfires that quickly got out of hand and burned down several neighborhoods, including tony Pacific Palisades. A reality TV star named Spencer Pratt, whose 15 minutes of Warholesque fame was “The Hills,” a tacky MTV show that ran from 2006-2010, lived there with his wife, semi-star Heidi Montag, and their two kids. At the time of the fire, Pratt was running a “healing crystals” business, Pratt Daddy.

The fire burned down their house. In its wake, the city did its best to (1) shift blame, and (2) fob off the property owners and drown them in a miasma of regulations. Pratt seethed. And then, improbably, he ran for LA mayor.

As of this writing, he is neck-and-neck in the polls with Bass. Win or lose, he and his supporters will have rewritten the rules for political campaigning, even beyond the bounds of La-La Land. His attack ads, many provided by (LOL) “non-affiliated” folks, have been savage and, worst of all for Ms. Bass, drop-your-false-teeth funny. Millions of people, many far beyond LA, have made them viral hits on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Every web pundit has stolen clips of Pratt’s videos, most from an outfit called The United Spot, which has turned AI into what every pol fears most (ridicule), and a reason to ban new data centers. Here’s a compendium…

Pratt started his campaign as a cri de coeur about the city’s indifference to the devastation…

…but soon ran wild, including the obligatory picture of the candidate and his wife that probably set new standards for that hoary campaign cliche…

After a knock-down, drag-out TV debate, in which Pratt bare-knuckled Bass, the candidate shifted focus to a topic dear to Portland’s heart: the “homeless.” To the shock of progressives, Pratt said things that are true, which simply cannot be allowed…

The entire clip runs seven minutes, and you could argue endlessly—as Portland pols do—about the fine details. Pratt uses verbotin words, such as “vagrants,” but he’s dead right that the homeless issue is, at heart, a drug addiction problem, and that too many NGOs are making big bucks from keeping it going.

Exploring the Pratt phenom left me with a feeling that Portland Polite has contributed a fair share in getting us into the damn Doom Loop. And wouldn’t it be interesting if someone like Spencer Pratt shook things up around here? He or she wouldn’t get any ink in the august corridors of the O, WillyWeek or even the NW Examiner—but, jeepers! This town needs someone to blow off the self-satisfaction dust.

Speaking of local political habits…

…none of the Machine’s creatures would dream of putting out propaganda without an attachment of logos from, mostly, tax-exempt NGOs. This one, from Socialist Sameer Kanal, was a kiss on the cheek for the various pressure groups that helped him round up votes for the absurd waste of time called “The Right to Know Who’s Policing You.”

…as if Portland cops don’t have badges and uniforms—but, of course, it was really designed as a whimper (since federal officials can tell mopes like Kanal to go pound sand) about our favorite whipping boys at ICE.

You could be forgiven for observing that these are “Some of the People Who Have Made Portland What It Is,”™ —but perhaps we just need a different bunch of logos…and NGOs.

Here are a few of our favorite possible future “We Don’ Pay No Steenking Taxes” folks…

Send us any logos out there in the wild…

How Now for the Oregonian?

It was only a routine story in the Oregonian (and many other publications as well), but the obit for Donald Newhouse…

…who died May 26, at the age of 96, may have local implications. That’s because he was the last of the two heirs of Samuel I. Newhouse, the wily up-from-a-tenement publisher who created Advance Publications, which is now a “sprawling media company” that owns the Oregonian.

Advance is privately held, which means they operate inside a black box, immune from pesky stockholders and corporate raiders. Advance is, by any measure, big—as a glance at their own collection of logos implies…

…with the Oregonian buried deep inside a subsidiary, Advance Local. But a cursory glance at the portfolio hints that the Advance brass sees the future in events, internet sites, and investments in Hollywood.

Newhouse’s various obits agreed: Don was a newspaper guy (his legendary brother, Si, ran the glossy side, with titles such as the New Yorker and Vogue). “Newspapers were in his DNA, and it showed,” said Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of The Oregonian from 1993 to 2010, in the company’s obit.

Newhouse bent with the times, going into web journalism early—but, here in Portland, the company created a clumsy separate entity, OregonLive, to handle the internet presence. Which, to our eye, has always looked like ink-on-paper types faking it. Remarkably, the Oregonian sends out a daily facsimile of the paper—as if it had actually been printed. Which for three days it isn’t.

In the last four years, Advance killed the Jersey Journal, killed print editions of the Newark Star-Ledger, the Trenton Times, and South Jersey Times, moving content to the web; and put the weekly Hunterdon County Democrat out of its misery. There have been layoffs, and a glance at the Oregonian’s staff roster indicates most of the veterans have dropped by the wayside and been replaced by… well, the usual suspects.

That leaves the Oregonian’s survivinng print editions. The O doesn’t say much, if anything, about their circulation, but if it’s not declining relentlessly, that would be major breaking media news.

And now, the print folks have lost their champion. They’ve never quite gotten over the smell of ink, the clatter of the composing room, the bustle of the copy desk, the big-cheese editor. For a guy like Don Newhouse, inside the security of the black box, such things might be seen as a very rich man’s ultimate hobby. Sort of like keeping a small, endangered species.

That was then. This is now. Fearless prediction: the days of the Oregonian on paper are over. How long Advance will soldier on with a publication that’s never going to grow (in a city with bad numbers)…well, it’s private. But numbers always win in the end.

Part of that number was attributable to the biggest fact of life in the county: Incumbents are in like Flynn, especially in the legislative seats, where creatures such as Rob Nosse, Kayse Jama, and Andrea Valderrama won’t face a Republican challenger; and an uber-creature such as Lamar (“I’ll live anywhere if you’ll elect me”) Wise was unopposed and still got 2,236 mouth-breather votes.

This may be one of the few rays of hope, since the GOP selected Andrew Morrison to oppose the wandering Mr. Wise. Morrison got 981 votes; Wise, compared to other shoo-ins such as Valderrama, underperformed. PDX.Real did a devastating takedown of Wise in “The Politics Oregon Can No Longer Afford,” but it was filed on election deadline. So maybe there’s some hope for a Republican to break through. Anyone thinking of putting Wise in charge of anything should read the article.

The other thing that amused me is the fact that thousands of people voted for single candidates on the Democratic side of the ledger…unopposed and semi-permanent Sen. Jeff Merkley got 111,878 votes in the county to run yet again. Why bother? He was unopposed.

Then again, there was one local Congressional slot—the wishy-washy 5th district, essentially Happy Valley—where Mean Girl Janelle Bynum had only token opposition, but got only 7,247 votes; by contrast, her next-door Congressional neighbor, Suzanne Bonamici, got 24,670 unopposed votes. Since Congressional districts are roughly equal in population, this one’s a head-scratcher…but there’s a lack of enthusiasm down there for the McDonalds franchise lady.

How did the numbers look to you?

PAMELA: It’s true I did receive two ballots instead of one. In late April I changed my voter registration from Democrat to Republican so I could vote in the gubernatorial primary.

According to the Multnomah County Elections Division, my party change is why I received two ballots:

“The first ballots that go out are prepared weeks in advance, so voters who change party affiliation near the registration deadline often receive two ballots, one for the previous party and one for the new party. The old ballot is now inactive. Please vote the second ballot with the new party affiliation.”

OK, so I just voted once. I ended up voting for Ed Diehl for governor. I particularly liked his straight-forward answer at the Republican Party debate when he was asked about public safety.

“I’m a broken windows kind of guy,” he said.

We’ve got a lot of broken windows — literally and figuratively — in this state, particularly in its largest city.

Diehl didn’t win the governor’s primary, but he could help Drazan see the possibilities of a lively jousting with Kotek. It could be fun!

Look at the energy he brought to help rouse Oregonians — Democrat, Republican, unaffiliated — in opposing $4.3 billion in new taxes that the legislature approved. Measure 120 went down to overwhelming defeat — even in Multnomah County.

No wonder Kotek didn’t want to share the November ballot with Measure 120 and finagled to move it to the May primary.

For the general election, she is turning the governor’s race into a referendum on President Trump — not a judgment on her performance of the past four years.

The New York Times called Drazan, “a social conservative” and noted she was the Republican Party’s nominee four years ago.

“The political environment for Republicans this year is also far more difficult than it was four years ago when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president,” wrote reporter Anna Griffin (formerly of OPB).

So Kotek will cast Drazan as Trump. Somebody on Bluesky has already adopted the handle “Christine Drazan = Donald Trump.”

RICHARD: …with the usual tincture of abortion now, forever, and whenever.

PAMELA: Oh, yes. In a television ad released Thursday by Friends of Tina Kotek, it sounds like Drazan and Trump are joined at the hip. A voice over declares: “In state after state, Donald Trump grabs power and punishes enemies … .”

But as House Speaker, Kotek had her own reputation for grabbing power and punishing enemies. (Just ask former state Rep. Diego Hernandez.)

So the governor’s race is likely to get nasty. Will Drazan be up for it? During her previous race for governor, she complained that former state Sen. Betsy Johnson (D-Scappoose), running as an unaffiliated candidate, yelled at her. Anybody who can’t handle being yelled at shouldn’t be in politics (or journalism). Drazan could be in for a rough ride, which is why Diehl could come in handy.

Will Portland voters (who will have an outsized voice in the governor’s race) buy Kotek’s attempt to shift all blame for the state’s troubles to Trump? On Thursday I happened to have an appointment with my hairdresser. He voted, but not in the Republican primary.

He knows that Kotek is unpopular, and the state has many problems. But he liked that she stood up to Trump. Of Drazan, he asked the kind of question that many voters (who are not political junkies) might ask: “Is she good people?”

RICHARD: Over in Goose Hollow and the millennial dorms in Slabtown, there was a peculiar last-minute race. The NW Examiner Substack — an outgrowth of perennial scold Allan Classen’s monthly print Northwest Examiner — talked up an insurgent candidate, Northwest district resident Autumn Sharp, who took on the machine’s state Sen. Lisa Reynolds, who (long story short)…

… Reynolds is blaming neighborhood activists for refusing to compromise on a bill they supported to regulate pop-up needle and drug paraphernalia handouts plaguing the Northwest 19th and Burnside area for years. Reynolds killed the bill in her committee, blaming supporters for refusing to compromise on its terms.

Sharp and others in Friends of Couch Park and Stadiumhood neighbors called that a lie: They were never given the opportunity to compromise on the terms, which they would have been willing to do had they been asked.

It was a bill banning “Harm Reduction” giveaways of drug paraphernalia to junkies within a few feet of schools; the idea, we suppose, is that the kiddies will be…

shocked!!!

…to see the druggies lined up and getting their crackpipes and tin foil. Adults, of course, who watch the feral foraging for the freebies throughout the city—the dopers seeming to materialize out of whatever dimension they occupy—are thought immune to the visual insult.

The Examiner penned the insurgency’s obituary…

Hearts, maybe…but there were 6,296 more voters who showed they could care less. And that’s why the machine just keeps rollin’ along.

PAMELA: There were some late-breaking surprises in a couple of the primary races. Democrats seldom face challengers in the primary and let alone lose. By Thursday night, it was official that state Rep. Janeen Sollman (D-Hillsboro) had been defeated by Forest Grove educator Myrna Muñoz. Major issues were education funding, labor power — and data centers.

This is the unpredictable nature of politics. It wasn’t that long ago that Sollman and then-state Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-Happy Valley) swung their hips and bragged on Twitter (now X):“This is how the pretty girls walk when the pretty girls get their way…”

What had the pretty girls done? They had passed the $210 million Oregon CHIPS Act, a semiconductor funding bill that Bynum (now a member of Congress) and Sollman considered a once-in-a-generation opportunity to secure Oregon’s future in the tech industry.

As Willamette Week reported, after Muñoz declared victory Thursday she said, “Tonight, this community reminded our representatives who calls the shots around here. We organized, we came together, and we took our power back. Together, we win.”

OK, but Muñoz will be standing for re-election in two years. Maybe she will get a challenger. Perhaps Democrats will have to get used to being primaried in this one-party state.

Willamette Week noted that to political observers, the race between Sollman and Muñoz was a test of the Democratic Party’s ascendant left flank against its establishment.

Can you blame the Democrat’s left flank from getting ascendant and cocky after the Democrats have continually moved to the left in the past decade, while shutting out the Republicans? There is barely a center left in this state. Sollman dared to vote against giving striking teachers unemployment benefits, and the union went after her.

In another race in Washington County, this one for an open seat in House District 27, Democratic Socialist and Beaverton School Board member Tammy Carpenter defeated Beaverton City Council member Ashley Hartmeier-Prigg.

That pleased Portland City Councilor Angelita Morillo, Democratic Socialist and member of the Peacocks, the council’s nickname for its progressive caucus. On Election Night, Morillo was already gloating about attending Carpenter’s victory celebration.

There was a third legislative race that pitted state Rep. Daniel Nguyen (D-Lake Oswego) against challenger and middle school teacher John Wasielewski, who was supported by the unions for House District 38. Nguyen quickly defeated him on Election Night.

As Willamette Week summed it up, that means “of three races seen as tests of the Democratic Party’s leftists against its centrists, the left has won two.”

Will the state legislature end up with its own caucus of Peacocks?

RICHARD: The Democratic Socialists (oxymoron, anyone?) are moving, crab-like, into the ‘burbs. Portlanders may bail for economic reasons (or maybe they just like wide streets and no PBOT screwing things up), but they certainly retain their political fantasies. You can take the idiot out of Portland, but you can’t take the idiocy out of…and so on.

Meanwhile, no one was surprised by Measure 120; a massive yelp from the folks who pay the bills for the machine’s high school study hall antics. It took 131,876 “no, by God” votes in the county, but the county doesn’t break down the different votes by party. The other measure on the ballot—the five-year renewal of a property tax for the Oregon History Museum and Library got almost as many “yes” votes. So there was no leakage of voter ire — which probably means that Measure 120 ain’t got legs. At least not in the town where only dollars for the cops get turned down. To paraphrase an old Chicago pol: Portland ain’t ready for reform.

One last thought: One of the big losers wasn’t on the ballot — Phil Knight, busy spending his fortune. Millions for cancer research — God bless him. But he’s now two-for-two on losing political contributions (Betsy Johnson and Chris Dudley). There’s a moral in there somewhere…

PAMELA: Well, he also gave $1.5 million to Drazan the first time she ran (and lost). Maybe he ought to hang onto his money this time around, and see what happens. And Kotek should be praying for Trump’s health and well-being for the next six months. She needs him.

“None of us have unlimited or guaranteed resources. That is the nature of the human condition. There is no reason that the government and its agencies should be exempt from this fact of life.”

—Patrick Barron, Mises Institute

Moda Mania

Brian Owendoff, who we have cross-posted here on PD, wrote an impassioned recent defense of cutting a deal—any damn deal—with the Blazers to somehow save the Moda Center. Along with Bill Oram, The Oregonian sports columnist, the governor,1 and our capon-mayor, the idea is to fix up the old barn and prevent the Blazers from being shopped to a more congenial town. Owendoff thinks that’s a great idea…

The danger for Portland is not that elected officials negotiate hard. The danger is that ideological posturing and performative delays convince the NBA and Blazers’ ownership that another city would provide greater stability, stronger political alignment and a clearer economic future.

If that happens, Portland will not just lose a basketball team. It will lose thousands of jobs, hundreds of millions in annual economic activity, major concerts and events, national visibility, and one of the few remaining institutions that consistently brings the city together.

Of course, these are the people who will “negotiate hard…”

…so not to worry.

Owendoff is a deep thinker…but I beg to differ.

First, the city owns Moda—not the Blazers. The city bought it during the last administration (which socialists now busily blame for everything) for $1. So we’re stuck with the place…a legacy of the bad old days of Portland insiders’ self-dealing. Fixing it to the team’s specs is the real question—and our socialist pals are fond of saying it’s to make the boxes more comfy for the (drum-roll) ”rich people.” Catnip to the socialists, who are running an insolvent city—no fun for the type of pols who want what you’ve got. All of it.

Second: The buyer isn’t a Portland-person. He’s a guy who is probably sweating his core business: subprime auto loans…which are imploding in a weird re-run of 2008’s subprime mortgage crisis. It’s doubtful he has the money to make the team a champ—and the Blazers don’t have much hope in the draft, so he’ll have to pay established stars.

Ain’t gonna happen.

Third, be wary of all these ”thousands of jobs” data and spin-off bucks…these numbers are notoriously slushy-mushy. Remember those 30K houses GuvTina was going to build every year…a number that has no actual relation to reality.2

Finally, Moda is a wasting asset: two new 3,000-seat venues are going up, which will make the stupid “stadium-seating” configurations at Moda for touring Golden Oldie bands obsolete. One is owned by the Live Nation monopoly, which will book Big Acts into its own venue.

Personally, the best way out is to say bye-bye to a team that will never be any more than mediocre, let Bill Oram retire, give the Moda dump to Albina Vision Trust to wreck and replace with housing for the officially poor, and be done with it.

Speaking of Ms. Morillo…

I did my civic duty and attended the monthly meeting of my neighborhood (Montavilla—the place where bums go to retire) association. Guest of honor: the councilor herself, seen decamping from a big, gas-guzzling car at the church where the meeting was held.3 Morillo is famous for saying she rides a bus—brave girl!—just about everywhere. We should note that the Route 20 bus runs, somewhat reliably, down Stark Street, two blocks away.

After the association’s president read out a very long (and turgid) set of directions for safely addressing the elected official (elected, we hope you’ll remember, with 25-percent of the algorithm vote), Morillo was asked a few questions. The Moda center came up; she waffled. Talked her way around cuts to the city budget, didn’t rant about the cops, which is a good sign. She let everyone know that she hates (make that HATES!!!) AI and those damn data centers, which supposedly are driving up electricity rates.

It was standard retail politics, which she’s pretty good at. But one item in passing caught my eye. She and her socialist friends—presiding over a broke city and deciding which cuts to make in the budget—think the housing crisis will be solved if the city buys apartment houses, pays off the owners’ loans (assuming they don’t own them outright, which gets us into Albina-type issues), and then moves in tenants at rental rates that will never go up.

Socialist paradise!

And no one asked: Where’s that money coming from? Who gets to decide which private apartments—under pricing pressure from the big public-housing (tax free) developments—will get rescued. Who will ever leave the never-higher rent apartments once they’ve made friends with the folks who dole out the goodies?

Asking that would for sure violate the “be nice to our guest” policy. So I didn’t. Such is discourse in Portland.

Meanwhile, the headlines pile up…just one day’s worth in the local Business Journal…

…that might indicate that the city is in no position to start big, open-ended, results-in-30-years projects. Just sayin’…

More PBOT utter madness

The city is broke, and the socialists just passed yet another fee to pay for something PBOT seems to have no interest whatsoever in actually doing—fixing the damn streets.4

The bureau has a strange set of priorities, which I’ve seen displayed in my neighborhood several times: Take a perfectly adequate and little-used street and repave it! The latest happened this month; NE 87th Avenue, a dogleg through a neighborhood confined between the craziness on 82d Avenue, and the I-84 freeway.

I’ve driven that street often and—I’m no certified traffic engineer—87th looked rather smooth, compared with streets in the neighborhoods adjacent. (My street is gravel, but it doesn’t count; Steve Novick’s LTIC fee will get it paved—after the “historically neglected” folks get theirs, sometime next century).

The neighborhood’s Boswell, Jacob Loeb, snapped a picture of the street before…

…if you can find an actual pothole, you’d get a year’s free subscription to PortlandDissent.

Loeb didn’t report what it cost, although he noted it came out of yet another of PBOT’s bail-out fees, which are never-ending. And he noted this weird footnote…

This project creates an opportunity for a near-continuously paved north-south pedestrian path between NE Hassalo Street and NE Glisan Street. However, missing paved sidewalks on the northern edges of 8631 and 8636 NE Holladay Street will require pedestrians to walk across the lawns of these homes to reach the new ADA curb ramps and the existing paved sidewalks. Future redevelopment of those properties could require installing new sidewalks to complete the pedestrian connection.

Won’t the next owners of those properties be surprised!

Meanwhile, here’s a tour of a street one block away…

…it’s probably “pirate pavement,” and it’s about 1.5 lanes wide, and it’s a mess. But look on the bright side: no one has to cross anyone’s lawn.

How government really works, chapter XXXVI:

We’re on the city auditor’s email list, which often deals in arcana that defies easy translation into street-English. But they recently unloaded an interesting graphic…

…that says more than a month’s front pages from WillyWeek and The Oregonian about how Portland government really works. There’s Waymo, which wants to run its driverless cabs on Portland’s shoddy streets—what a vote of confidence!

Then there’s the 1803 Fund, that’s got its nonprofit beak deep into the Albina real estate, “cap the freeway” play. Its city form (even less informative than their IRS form 990, if that’s possible), lists a whole bunch of people you’ve never heard of, unless you’re greasing some skids with the planning bureaucracy. What did they discuss? Your guess is as good as mine.

There’s a super-busy entity called the Portland Psychedelic Society Action Fund, which—in the last two months of 2025 (the Auditor is a little slow in posting current dollar-amounts), showered socialist counselor Mitch Green’s policy director, Christian Aguinaga, with $18,000 worth of lobbying. All of the lobbying on the form was for calls to the policy guy…which makes one wonder: Were they calling from a payphone in Outer Mongolia?

They’ve kept at it in ‘26; their goal is a psychedelic mushroom inside every head anywhere, anytime—just what the city needs. Almost as much as a new pavement on 87th Avenue.

DEI marches on…and on…and…

As the city grapples with whacking funds for fire and cops and who-knows-what else, you will no doubt be excited to learn that the city has finally hired…well, let’s let the city’s website spell it out…

Diversity champion Latricia Tillman will serve as the City of Portland's first Chief Equity Officer, leading the Office of Equity and Human Rights and directing the City's work to make equity and inclusion a fundamental part of decisions, operations, policies, and service to the community.

The legacy press rewrote the press release, and that was that. She’ll be paid somewhere between “$160,784 to $233,729.60,” according to the help-wanted ad. Go figure.

Ms. Tillman has been working the DEI patch for 16 years, bouncing from one government bureaucracy to a consulting business, and now into Doom Loop city. We may be crashing, but we’ll do it with our DEI flag flying high…

Ms. Tillman last worked for an outfit called Espousal Strategies LLP; she was in the middle of the rather large staff of diversity warriors…

…all doing something or other, although even the LLP had trouble connecting their goals with, well…anything concrete (even worth a $-quarter-million a year)…

From transportation and economic development to climate and civil rights to education and public health, we work at the intersection of policy and lived experience. Our approach is rooted in trust, curiosity, and a commitment to delivering creative, winning outcomes that reflect the needs and aspirations of real people.

One wonders: Who are the “unreal people?”

To paraphrase the socialists, “When I hear the words, ‘lived experience,’ I reach for my Pepcid.” If you dig around the city release, here’s her record…

Tillman has demonstrated leadership across these roles, overseeing budgets up to $54 million and leading divisions of up to 275 employees. Her work has produced durable, system-level outcomes, including increasing state investment in health equity by 400% over five years, embedding equity into legislation that transforms health systems, and establishing Medicaid reimbursement for doulas, community health workers, peer support specialists, and interpreters.

Good for the doulas; they’re now on the public teat in a program that’s infamous for gaming and bogus payouts. And the encomium enthuses that Ms. Tillman managed to spend 400-percent more on, well…her equity programs. Which remain undefined.

Seems like this would produce a ton of “equity”—a word whose definition is carefully omitted from her blurb. We’re left to wonder: If the needle hasn’t managed to move after 16 years of effort and those 400-percent gains and the doulas and the “lived experience”…maybe it’s time to retire.

Nuts will be served hot

Mark your calendars…

We wonder: How many of the comrades are actually on the FBI, Southern Poverty Law Center, NSA, military intelligence, state police, Portland police, etc. pad as “informants?”5

It scares the natives — especially Police Chief Bob Day and Mayor Keith Wilson.

Early Saturday morning, Whitman crashed his rental vehicle — packed with improvised explosive devices including pipe bombs and propane tanks — through the glass front doors of the exclusive Multnomah Athletic Club.

Inside, his vehicle lumbered through an area where he once worked, and he detonated some of his incendiaries. The explosions caused extensive damage to one side of the ground floor and set off political tremors in Portland — a city that seems forever on the edge of violent social unrest.

Given the early hour — 3 a.m. — Whitman was the only one present and the only one killed. But this was the Multnomah Athletic Club, regarded as one of Portland’s finest private clubs with a history dating back to 1891.

The initial reports from police and MAC administrators were that a “disgruntled” former employee was responsible.

Portland Police Bureau issued a quick press release: “Out of an abundance of caution, and due to this happening hours after May Day and the location’s proximity to Providence Park, additional public safety resources to include local and federal agencies were activated to ensure there was no ongoing threat to the community.”

Later at a press conference Chief Day would offer additional reassurance: “With the best of information we have right now, this was an isolated event and not related to domestic terrorism.”

Whitman’s remains hadn’t even been recovered when Chief Day and Mayor Wilson were offering their condolences for his loss of life.

“I want to recognize the sanctity of life and the tragedy and loss of life that occurred here… ,” Day said. “At the end of the day, we know an individual lost their life this morning … I consider loss of life through acts of violence to be a failure for us as a community.”

Wilson also offered a “note of sadness for the individual who lost his life here. … We will look back at this person’s past and will determine what we can do to try and improve.”

By Sunday, MAC administrators were joining in the condolences and made the incident sound like a car crash:

“As you know, early Saturday morning a vehicle crashed into the clubhouse, causing damage to a portion of the facility. We are deeply saddened by the loss of life associated with this incident. We are also incredibly grateful that no members, employees, or guests were injured.”

So who was Bruce Valentine Whitman, 48, and why is being cast as a victim? What was he disgruntled about?

He was fired from MAC in 2019 where he worked as a bartender. Among his accomplishments there, according to what he posted on LinkedIn, was building “a working and robust union within the 600 employees of the Multnomah Athletic Club (MAC). … I am proud to be responsible for filing for the first union vote under teamsters 206…”

MAC has remained nonunion.

At some point after his employment ended, Whitman became obsessed with MAC and was causing trouble for members and staff to such an extent that on May 6, 2022, administrators notified members:

“Please be aware that MAC has received reports about a former employee, Bruce Whitman, who has been verbally harassing members and staff near our facilities. Recently, Mr. Whitman also has harassed members at locations around Portland, including at their homes. He states he is a representative of MAC, which is not accurate. Mr. Whitman has not been an employee of MAC since September of 2019. Portland Police and MAC security have been notified and are aware of the situation. The club is and will remain in close contact with the police about this matter. The safety of MAC members and staff is a top priority. If you encounter Mr. Whitman, or any other individual exhibiting concerning behavior … Call 911 immediately.”

Norm Frink, a longtime MAC member, recalled encountering Whitman about four years ago.

“I was walking from the parking lot to the club. He came down in a car with a bullhorn, yelling obscenities about MAC members.”

Enough members had similar experiences that they leaned on MAC administration to pursue legal remedies, particularly when some of them learned that Whitman had guns. Administrators may not have wanted to press the issue, perhaps out of fear that it would only anger Whitman more.

But Frink, now retired, was former Chief Deputy District Attorney under Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schrunk. Frink understood how the law could intervene.

At the time, Mike Schmidt was the Multnomah County District Attorney and was regarded as a progressive prosecutor unwilling to aggressively pursue nonviolent crimes.

Frink contacted someone inside Schmidt’s office.

“We were able to accomplish some things around the edges,” Frink said. “The system is run by mental health advocates who don’t believe in incarcerating the mentally ill, even it there is significant evidence they are dangerous. They are impervious to any change.”

Whitman did lose access to his guns in 2022 and again this year, about three months ago.

But ultimately, MAC administrators, staff and members were restricted by a type of political paralysis in Oregon that has plagued efforts to deal with the mentally ill. (See “A Pandemic of Mental Illness”)

“The real problem is the law — the fact that it is so difficult to incarcerate dangerously mentally ill people, and then they act like it’s a tragedy when he died,” said Frink.

The public is not fooled by reassurances like those offered by Chief Day or Mayor Wilson.

Look at some of the reactions on social media. One GIF in particular was popular on both X.com (formerly Twitter) and its liberal counterpoint Bluesky:

Strangely quiet was the Portland City Council — especially its progressive caucus, aka, the Peacocks. Only Councilor Olivia Clark seemed to take note of what happened at MAC and offered to share updates from police and fire.

Her progressive colleagues didn’t mention the explosion at MAC on their usual office-related platforms. They were talking about the proposed Right To Know Who is Policing You law, which would prevent cops from covering their faces, and they were still acknowledging May Day celebrations in honor of organized labor.

“That fight is still happening” cheered Councilor Candace Avalos.

In some respects, Whitman’s politics meshed nicely with the City Council’s progressive caucus.

He was a passionate supporter of Bernie Sanders for president. Whitman made international news with a pre-Easter prank in 2015 when he dyed his chickens pink with food coloring, beet juice and Kool-Aid and released them on the city’s waterfront. He told reporters he wanted to make people smile.

He kept a small refrigerator in his front yard — what he called a “Food Library” — with free food for anyone who was hungry.

Did Whitman see a reflection of his feud with MAC in the efforts by Portland’s Peacocks to stoke class warfare? Neither Portland nor Oregon are known for its billionaires or millionaires. The drug-addled homeless take center stage here. We’re a city where people can get disgruntled over pronouns. A city that likes to keep tally on who has what, and is it equitable?

While the Multnomah Athletic Club is perhaps the largest private athletic and social clubs in the United States, with more than 21,000 members, it is exclusive only by Portland standards — family dues are about $422 a month, and roughly $280 for an individual, not including initiation fees. Many people can’t afford that, but for those who can — are they America’s enemy?

If members at one of Portland’s most exclusive clubs had to push to get police attention, what has it been like for nonmembers seeking more public safety?

In 2019, the year Whitman was fired from MAC, the Goose Hollow Neighborhood Association was allowed to meet at the club after neighbors had experienced increasing trouble. They were being robbed and assaulted, and their homes burglarized. Worse, they were made to feel as if something was wrong with them when they complained.

One young mother had “campers” breaking into her home. On one occasion, she called 9-1-1, and the dispatcher asked her, “Has he assaulted you?”

“Not yet,” she said.

The dispatcher transferred her to the non-emergency line.

Other residents had similar stories. They would call police to report someone on their porch or in their yard – only to have officers do nothing. They experienced feeling terrorized by local strangers.

So how can Chief Day dismiss “domestic terrorists?”

Portland has been laying the groundwork for this kind of domestic terrorism for years.

How many other Whitmans are out there, and what is Portland going to do about them besides issue condolences.

—Design of Cities by Edmund N. Bacon.

Bacon is the reigning guru of modern city planning, and the noxious breed of bureaucrats who feel it’s their duty, and right, to “plan” the bejabbers out of the spontaneity, animal spirits, and unpredictability of just about every town on the planet. Portland, most of all.

I was reminded of this when a friend and I decided to spend a warm summer evening over at Tubman Middle School to join a “conversation” about the future of the Albina neighborhood.

It was sponsored by a melange of the Usual Suspects: PBOT, Prosper Portland, the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, and the Albina Vision Trust…

…the graphic continuing the, “it’s racist…but let’s keep it between us” motif that is central to the city’s patronage of a nonprofit that, as we’ll find out, is making one of the biggest real estate plays since the Pearl, one that’s far more audacious because it will pay no taxes on whatever it builds, 1 and will be the sole owner of whatever results. Sorta like an old Deep South company town.

Such a deal.

There are other dreary, hodge-podge neighborhoods in Portland—outer Powell springs to mind—but Albina is special. That’s because 70 years ago, it was a mixed and rather run-down neighborhood, a “ghetto,” where many of the city’s vanishingly small minority of black people lived.

Depending on which history you’re reading, it was either a mob-run enclave (Google “Tom Johnson”2) in a notoriously corrupt city, where the local boss—behind the scenes— was engineering the condemnation of black-owned properties for the benefit of the highway and arena builders. Or it was…

…a creative, affordable and safe neighborhood that birthed citywide tree-planting programs to gesture tenderness to our Japanese neighbors after their internment during World War II, created world-class public education models established for and by Black Portlanders, and was nationally recognized as a hotspot for jazz and soul music on the West Coast.

That last is from the Albina Vision Trust, which we have written about here, here, here, and here, and which has taken as its tax-free mission the recreation of that old neighborhood, long after civil rights laws and a general cultural shift did away with ghettos for any race or reason.

But rather than rebuild the old Albina’s modest, single-family houses, the Vision Trust says it’s engaged in “restorative redevelopment,” which to our ears is both a cue for white guilt, and a hint of real estate hyperbole—nothing looks as good as it does on architects’ drawings—and, boy, does the Trust have drawings!

And so, here we are at Tubman, our tickets in hand, going through the check-in process: the obligatory, “Hello! name tags (curiously, there are little stickers to attach if you don’t want your photo taken) and a log that asks for your name, URL, and phone number—off to someone’s database. The event didn’t draw in any of the top political types3, and I didn’t spot any of the Trust’s top honchos. But John Russell, the reclusive developer of Big Stuff downtown (he’s now in a nasty fight over the future of the “Black Cube” on Market St.), was spotted chatting before disappearing.

Inside the Tubman space, a glance around the stuffy hall hinted that bureaucrats from all of the city agencies and the Trust probably outnumbered actual drop-ins…

…and while I didn’t do a head count, attendance by self-selected conversers seemed a little light. It was, however, better than a Vision Trust “conversation” out on the east side last year which drew, finally, four participants including me and a pal.

The bureaucrats—hope they weren’t all on overtime—were easy to pick out. As a veteran of other listening/conversing exercises, the tells are: youth, smiles verging on insane, and eager eyes. When they mix with locals, their unctuousness (with a hint of condescension) gives you the willies. Which makes sense, because the evening’s first order of business was a full page of “community-centered agreements”—think of the “agreements” you have to tick or be tossed from a website. Key command: “… let’s stay grounded in the discussion...”

Which meant that this meeting would be “facilitated,” which meant that the “facilitators” would hold the whip-hand, which meant (as we soon found out) that there would be no questions about the size and shape of the project, such as: who’s going to pay for all this stuff? Who’s going to own it when the dust finally settles? What about the money!

Instead…it was imagination time!

As it happened, the facilitator at our picnic table (where we labored through three topic-areas under rigorous time controls), was none other than Carly Harrison, the Trust’s senior vice president of real estate. We quickly got her facilitator powers sorted when I asked about a green spot on the map where the PPS’s Prophet Center now stands.

Before we get her response, some back-story :

The Center’s 340,000 square feet on 10.5-acres appeared under various guises (“passive open space,” or “close knit housing,” or “creating black heritage”), on the table-cloth-sized map on our table …

Back in 2024, the Portland Public Schools board did a deal with the Trust to swap the Center for another space elsewhere in the city, with the Vision Trust paying for the new center and the move. The Vision Trust said it had 14 sites ready to roll. The board would get the list by May—of last year.

Since then…omerta. I’ve regularly written Candice Grose (she/her), the PPS’s Chief of Communications, for updates. Her latest response (in March): “I’ve checked with our Chief of Staff. She informed me that this is still in the works, but nothing solidified yet. Best, Cg.”

I wrote her a day or so ago, knowing I’d be attending the Trust/city dog-n-pony show…but no response to my query. The new norm for emails to city staff.

Back to the meeting. Ms. Harrison’s response was diplomatic but firm: you’re not…

…imagining.

And she gave me a look I can only guess was: I know what you know and I ain’t playing that game.

Ditto any discussion about another green smudge, unlabeled, in the middle of the map. It was, Ms. Harrison admitted, after some prodding, the cap.

Another disappearing act. Another back-story.

Back when Gov. Kotek was ramrodding—or so she thought—a massive bail-out of ODOT (and its union) through the legislature by blowing out gas taxes, buried in the bill was $250-million for a concrete “cap” over the I-5 crush. This was a consolation prize for a $450-million federal pork barrel fund for the cap, which, for complicated political reasons, evaporated between DC and here. In the final, hectic power play over the ODOT bailout—surely you’ve voted against the gas tax on the primary ballot?—the cap disappeared.

That’s probably because the best ODOT estimate was that it would cost over $2-billion to construct the thing. And we all know what happens to ODOT cost-estimates. Lost in the fine print was that the structure could only support buildings up to three stories. Bye-bye high-rises. (Which, one might add, seems to be plunked down on the cap in Trust drawings.)

Thus Ms. Harrison’s observation: “That’s a long way off.” Of course, any follow-up questions wouldn’t fit the “imagination” template, but here goes:

Who says a government-funded cap is ticketed—no questions asked—for the Vision Trust? What will they do with it? Will they own it, lease it, sell to deep-pocketed guys like Mr. Russell to develop?

Who knows? If they do, they ain’t talking. That’s the nice thing about running a real estate development play as a nonprofit.

Then the conversation moved to Broadway and Weidler streets—surely some of the most treacherous in the city. The Albina project territory’s tail end protrudes down both of the two thoroughfares; anyone who’s taken those exits off the I-5 knows about their meandering lanes, the occasional trolly playing bumper-tag, and the profusion of drive-ins, fast food places, and a busy car wash along with some forlorn apartments.

This was not to be mentioned; instead the conversation centered on, “What would make NE Weidler feel more comfortable, liveable, and welcoming.” The imagining part got derailed when one of the bureaucrats muttered that Weidler, in particular, would be “quieted.” It will lose a lane.

PBOT’s latest, most persistent war on the automobile. “Quieted” (ie, jammed) traffic. Which will be (a) diverted into the bosky new housing blocks or (b) full of swearing, gridlocked drivers who will glare at the Millennials casually sitting in sidewalk cafes sipping lattes. (On property owned by those drug stores and eateries, who may not want to surrender their parking lots.) I actually braved the “agreements” to ask what would happen if there was resistance to giving up their frontages; the facilitator muttered, “zoning,” darkly.

Well, look at it philosophically: maybe Weidler will lose one of PBOT’s new “cram two lanes into one and let the dumb drivers figure out who goes first” intersections. Note: PBOT just repainted and “calmed” one of my neighborhood intersections with soon-to-be-calmed 82d St., and I have missed being sideswiped a couple of times by typical Portland drivers who solve every traffic issue by…

flooring it…

…through this kamakazi bit of traffic engineering.

There were a few moans about the calming—not enough to trigger any “community-centered agreements”—but just about every Portland citizen knows that PBOT is beyond appeal to reason, or any law, and thus remonstrance is useless.

So, it left the picnic table’s five walk-ins, plus three attending bureaucrats, to use their imagination!!! on the third topic: the Rose Quarter, home of the Blazers (until the Dallas auto loan magnate gets a better offer)4. Having been through a few of these “conversations,” I was not surprised that imaginations soon veered out of control.

One panelist said we should look like Sienna, Italy, or Montreal or maybe like Paley Plaza in New York; while another boomed on about how the railroad’s main freight line smack-dab through the waterfront park should be buried and food carts could be installed in the Moda parking lot, and…and…and…while another mused that she’d like to be able to watch the sunset from the promised riverfront park, mindless that a mountain and city skyscrapers might interrupt the show.

My final act of imagination was to suggest making the park into a Grand Prix racetrack. The facilitator gave me a look, and ordered the silent note-taker to write that down. I also suggested that it would be really nice to put a really tall statue in the middle of the cap, since it’s a bona fide “gateway opportunity.” I knew Abe Lincoln would be a loser, but I couldn’t think of what would fly.

It was only later, over a mug of Ayinger Celebrator Doppelbock at Stammtisch, that I realized who should be memorialized.

Tom Johnson.

The Community Board for Police Accountability voted to hire a clerk, a communications specialist and an analyst — plus authorized a contract for a facilitator to run the board’s twice-monthly meetings.

Whatever final budget Wilson and the City Council decide on, the Community Board for Police Accountability is guaranteed 5 percent of the Portland Police Bureau budget.

That was a stipulation of Ballot Measure 26-217, passed in 2020 by 82 percent of Portland voters following the summer of George Floyd.

Right now, the proposed police budget is $319,575,767. So the community board that investigates complaints against police would receive $16,132,779. If the police budget changes, the 5 percent changes.

After the approval of Ballot Measure 26-217, it took five years of preparation for the Board to reach fruition and hold its first meeting Feb. 11. (See “Cop Watchers, Inc.”) Now board members are going through their budget process.

“I’ve seen the mayor’s budget,” said board member Justice Brooks. “Do we have the funds allocated enough to support these positions?”

“You do,” replied Deputy City Administrator Tracy Warren.

As it is, the board didn’t approve all the positions city staff had lined up for its consideration. It rejected hiring its own budget analyst — would there be enough work to justify the position? And it rejected hiring a Deputy City Attorney after criticism that an attorney aligned with the city could be biased in favor of the city’s Police Bureau. In earlier meetings, the board has discussed in closed session whether to contract with a private attorney.

Currently, Chief Deputy City Attorney Heidi Brown fills in, usually via Zoom if legal questions come up during meetings.

During the public comment portions of the latest meeting, members of Portland Copwatch, a private citizens group that has been critical of Portland police for three decades, were concerned that the Community Board for Police Accountability was already losing its independence before it has even heard a single complaint against the cops.

The support staff the board was considering — as well as two investigators and a complaint navigator that will be hired later — will work under the executive director of the Office of Police Accountability. But the director hasn’t been hired yet, so to get the support staff up and running, Deputy City Administrator Warren has been authorized to hire them.

To Portland Copwatch that looks as if the support staff is working for the city — not the board. Some board members were also concerned.

“We are supposed to be independent and not integrated into other systems,” said board member Tim Pitts.

Will the board’s staff be embedded with other city employees, asked board member Jesse Neilson.

“What kind of control will there be?” he added.

Board member Tim O’Donnell wanted to know what recourse they would have if someone turned out to be subpar.

“You bring your concerns forward to me, and I work through those challenges with the program managers,” said Deputy City Administrator Warren. “It’s not something where the board can say ‘Fire that person,’ and they would be gone. We have to work together. … Coach them up, or help them to find another place where they can work.”

Replied O’Donnell: “If, at end of the day, we disagree?”

Warren said the board controls the budget. If they terminated funding for a position, it would be a lay-off.

“I will try to channel Dan Handelman,” Philip Chachka of Portland Copwatch told the board, referring to the long-time leader of the organization who died last year.

Chachka reminded board members that the Police Accountability Commission, a citizen group that designed the new board and included Handelman, wanted to make sure they were independent from the city and other departments.

“It feels like the city is trying to rush you to make a decision…,” Chachka said. “You are being asked to trade your independence for expedience. … This is a way for this city to maybe — not now but later — undermine your independence if you don’t have authority over these staff members.”

Currently the board has one coordinator assigned to do all its clerical, communications and outreach work. There is often a lack of backup materials available to the public before the meetings. The web page is not updated. Several members thought it was critical to hire at least a clerk, general analyst and communications specialist. That’s what they settled on.

Board member Trish Garner reminded them that eventually the board’s staff will all be city employees, receiving pay and benefits from the city. Even the director who has yet to be hired will be a city employee. (Portland-based search firm Motus, which found new Portland City Administrator Raymond Lee, is expected to seek candidates for the director post.)

The board’s conversation about hiring and independence was a luxury compared to what’s going on elsewhere in city government. Some employees will lose their jobs to budget cuts. Some layoffs at Prosper Portland have already started.

At a news conference the day after the Community Board on Police Accountability met, Portland Police Chief Bob Day warned that budget cuts to police will cause “detrimental impacts.”

No sworn officers are expected to be laid off, but a $20 million cut to the Police Bureau’s budget could be felt by the public. For example, 911 response times could be slower. That’s not surprising if there will be fewer 911 call takers. The loss of Public Safety Support Specialists, who answer non-emergency calls and assist officers in handling stolen or recovered property and similar duties, could add to the workload and overtime of sworn officers.

Four years ago, then-Mayor Ted Wheeler pushed to hire more Public Safety Support Specialists so sworn police officers could be freed up to handle higher priority calls. The specialists are trained to handle more than 30 types of calls and also help police with traffic detours and searches for missing persons. And they are unarmed — a big concern back when the news was filled with stories of violent cops.

Were Portland voters who embraced the new police accountability system five years ago anticipating a George Floyd moment in their city?

The late Dan Handelman made a career out of advocating against use of force by police. He might have been surprised by a verdict last week out of West Linn when a federal jury sided with West Linn police, who were sued for $18 million for failing to enter the home of a man hallucinating on mushrooms, who suffered serious burns.

The man was naked, acting crazy and told his roommate “I am God!” The roommate called police and fled.

Officers arrived at the home, called the man on his cell phone and from a loudspeaker outside. They went up a ladder to look for him inside the house without success. They had no idea he was having a dire emergency. Eventually officers left, choosing not to enter the home to avoid using excessive force.

The man’s roommate testified that police told her they didn’t want to go into the house and have to use excessive force “in light of current police riots and all of that.” The incident occurred in 2020.

When the Community Board for Police Accountability starts hearing citizen complaints about police, it could be there will be more complaints of what police didn’t do — not what they did do — especially if officers are worn down by hypercriticism of how they do their jobs.

So far, the board meetings are poorly attended in person, although a sign on the door to the meeting room in the downtown Portland Building is hardly welcoming: “STOP No Public Entry. This is a private space for a non-public event.”

There were less than 12 people in the audience at the budget meeting, but there were at least 178 views on YouTube a couple of days after the meeting. Of the 21 board members, only 15 attended.

Police oversight in Portland has a long history with many layers. When former City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty authored the ballot measure that voters approved, she wanted to get tough on police because of injustices dating back three decades.

Under the previous oversight system, the city’s Independent Police Review Division — which was not part of the police bureau — handled complaints from members of the public who believed an officer violated police bureau policies, such as using profanity or unjustified use of force. If an investigator with Independent Police Review found the officer in violation, it would be referred to the police chief to determine if discipline was warranted. If the police union appealed, the discipline could be overturned by an arbitrator. If an investigator dismissed the complaint as unfounded, the complainant could appeal to the Citizen Review Committee — a citizen oversight board. The CRC couldn’t compel officers to testify or attend hearings and had to rely on limited, second-hand information.

Hardesty, Handelman and other critics objected that this system rarely led to discipline or termination of officers.

The new board can subpoena officers and can make disciplinary recommendations, including termination, which will bypass the chief and go to the city council for approval.

Based on the CRC hearings I attended, there was often frustration because the cases were not cut and dried. Sometimes the complainants were not very sympathetic. They had a run-in with the cops and didn’t like how it turned out. Here’s an example of one where the CRC found against an officer for not taking a stolen car report: “Pawns in Criminal Justice Reform.”

Even City Councilor Candace Avalos, former chair of the CRC, acknowledged in an interview with OPB in 2023 that many of the complaints involved miscommunication between the officer and the complainant that could have been cleared up with a conversation between the two.

Avalos is not the only city councilor to use police oversight as a springboard into elected office. City Councilor Sameer Kanal was project manager for the Police Accountability Commission, which designed the Community Board for Police Accountability.

So much time, energy, money and political weight are resting on police oversight.

Will there be disappointment if Portland doesn’t have a defining moment where it can prove it can get tough on police?

RICHARD: As you know, I am deeply convinced that politicians on the hunt for votes are to be deeply distrusted as narcissists and/or sociopaths—but I came away from the evening (which was a good show) kinda liking these people. I have no idea who I’ll finally vote for, but all of them said stuff that needs to be said, and they all looked like possible winners.

Of course, Tina and her pals at the state’s legacy media—we’ll get to that—haven’t started with the nasty bits, so who knows?

PAMELA: For me, any of the four would be a worthy alternative to Gov. Tina Kotek (D) who will sail through her party’s Democratic primary. Since I’m not a registered Republican, I will briefly change my registration so I can vote in the May 19th primary. Oregon hasn’t had a Republican governor in four decades. Which of the candidates you saw should Kotek be most worried about facing in the general election? Or, given Oregonians sorry knee-jerk voting record in favor of Democrats, does Kotek even have anything to worry about?

RICHARD: If anyone looks at Tina’s record and her taking the knee (and other parts of the anatomy) to special interests, and can separate a voting decision from the abortion shibboleth, then she might be in trouble. Don’t forget, it was Sen. Ron Wyden’s brokering a big contribution from a corrupt cryptocurrency manipulator that’s credited with putting her over the top.

PAMELA: One of the surprises of Thursday night’s debate for me was Marion County Commissioner Danielle Bethell. She’s a fighter. She could probably take Kotek in one round.

Bethell owns a plumbing company, and when state Rep. Ed Diehl, of Scio, said he was the only candidate on stage to “build a business from scratch,” she quickly retorted that she was on the stage “right next to you.”

As Marion County commissioner, Bethell has dealt first-hand with the drug-addled and mentally ill that congregate in Salem because of the proximity of Oregon State Hospital and various correctional facilities. She understands the problems with the civil commitment laws, and how Democratic lawmakers like to talk about community safety but are afraid to enforce it.

Unfortunately, Bethell isn’t well-known outside Marion County. As she quipped, she didn’t receive a check from Phil Knight. She also took a well-deserved potshot at the school district she previously lived in, calling it “one of the wokest” in the state. She probably won’t win the primary, but whoever does should borrow some of her directness and spirit. And let’s hope Bethell sticks around and runs again.

RICHARD: I agree that I came away impressed by Mrs. Plumber. The morning line seems to be: she’s really smart, really tough, but not quite ready for prime time. Which is a standard political party trope: put in your time, get in line, respect your betters, and wait your turn. But she’s a slugger, and you get the feeling that she’s willing to use an elbow jab or two to get to the head of the line—fast. She might be the surprise of this election. Especially if marginal zombie-Democrats can be ready to assert a little independence from the labor union thugs and nonprofiteers.

PAMELA: Something that stood out about this debate before it even started: State Sen. Christine Drazan declined an invitation to participate in an earlier debate planned by KGW and The Oregonian. Then former NBA player and 2002 gubernatorial candidate Chris Dudley declined. It was a slap in the face to old, legacy media.

Last night in Hillsboro the top four candidates were all there, and it was sold out. The moderators were PDX.Real’s Angela Todd and former TV meteorologist Bruce Sussman. Of course, The Oregonian played sore loser and called Todd “a conservative citizen journalist.”

This state’s legacy media — particularly Portland’s leftist, status quo journalism — are a major part of Oregon’s decline. The media have far more influence on nurturing the state’s culture than politicians do.

RICHARD: Pam…couldn’t agree with you more. Here was the Oregonian’s snotty headline…

…and Carlos Fuentes’s snotty take…

The candidates barely addressed each other and the moderators did not ask questions on contentious issues that might have revealed notable differences between them, such as whether they would change Oregon’s vote-by-mail system or challenge federal immigration enforcement efforts.

…which are, of course, the only issues that seem to matter to The Oregonian these days. Carlos also engaged in the kind of amateurish editorial comment that would probably get him an F in journalism school (except that they’re now woke, and he’d get an A). Golly, they’re letting their envy show a bit. Along with the O’s typical arrogance.

As for the candidates: To be honest, I’m not a big fan of “debates,” in which gnarly issues of governance are reduced to short statements and talking points that, even this early in the campaign, sound over-rehearsed and repeated. But ten-minute orations are better than nothing…and, actually, each candidate (Dudley, not so much) managed to make some telling points.

Mr. “No Tax,” Diehl (a self-designation that tends to rub the grunts who worked the petitions the wrong way) had a good rap—but I’ve always associated him with the nagging question, “Would you buy a used car from this guy?” I’ve always been surprised that no one has pointed out that he made his considerable fortune by figuring out how to automate factories…and thus put humans out of work. Maybe Mrs. Plumber will get around to that if the contest gets heated.

Drazan, likewise, seems like she’s pretty tightly wound; there were flashes of occasional irritation visible even five rows back. She made it pretty clear that she thinks she really should get the nomination by default, but the other contestants were too polite to note, “Christine, you had your shot and blew it.” Which could also be said of Dudley, when you think about it.

OMG—I’m starting to sound like Fuentes.

Speaking of which, I’ve actually had a chance to sit around for a few minutes and just talk with Dudley, and he seems like an actual human, nice guy. If he suffers from the standard candidate’s terminal narcissism, he really keeps it under wraps.

The early money (mostly Phil Knight’s, although the guy has a lousy record on backing candidates and causes) is on the B-Ball guy; everyone, himself included, talks about how close he came to winning his first run for governor. But that was 16 years ago, and Oregon voters—many who didn’t even live in the state back then—have lousy memories.

Last night, he didn’t, as they say, show well; while the other hard-core candidates spewed detailed recitations of bills, and agencies, and regulations, and laws, Dudley flew at a thirty-thousand-foot height of generalities and homilies. Might work. Might not. Tina’s waiting to chew him up, and you’ve got to wonder how he’d do under fire.

PAMELA: We can expect the state’s legacy media to carry water for Kotek by trying to associate Trump with the Republicans in Oregon. Has Trump ever been to this state? Do we have a golf course that would even meet with his approval?

The idea that state Rep. Ed Diehl, state Sen. Christine Drazan, Marion County Commissioner Danielle Bethel, and former Trail Blazer Chris Dudley have any influence over Trump is ludicrous. They are real people, who have experienced the kind of ordinary life concerns that Trump has never had.

But in Portland, which ultimately decides most statewide races, there is a raging epidemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Just last week, Lewis & Clark law professor and blogger Jack Bogdanski demanded: “You must never vote for a Republican, for anything, ever again.”

One issue that might trip up a couple of the Republican candidates in facing Kotek is abortion. Drazan and Diehl have been endorsed by Oregon Right to Life. That shouldn’t matter since abortion access in Oregon is solid. If the Democrats get desperate, they could still use it.

A federal judge on Tuesday sided with Oregon Right to Life, finding that a 2017 state law violated the organization’s constitutional First Amendment rights by requiring it to provide health benefit plans covering abortion and contraception.

The judge in question — U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai — was appointed by President Biden in 2024 and was the first Muslim-American to serve on the federal court. So, the Democrats can’t blame Trump.

That may not stop them. In Drazan’s 2020 race for governor, among her videos and ads was one of her acknowledging, “I’m a pro-life woman.”

Immediately after the debate, I went up to her while she was posing for selfies and asked her if she thought her endorsement by Right to Life would be used against her. Stan, her deputy campaign chief, pulled her away.

“She’s not taking questions,” he said.

I asked Dudley if he thought he was at some advantage because he hadn’t been endorsed by Oregon Right to Life.

“It’s not an issue they (the Democrats) can use against me.”

Richard, you’ve said that you knew intelligent women who didn’t like Kotek but voted for her last time around simply because of the abortion issue. Will they still support her this time just because of abortion?

RICHARD: I don’t know, but this is one of those issues that is really deeply embedded with some people who don’t like dealing with nuance or who ignore the messiness of life to preserve absolute, iron-clad dictates. Frankly, I’ve never been comfortable with the creepy enthusiasm of some advocates who go for the anytime, no-limits rule of ending a potential human life. Or the total exclusion of men in making the decision.

But rest assured, Tina will do anything—including embarrassing herself— to keep her coalition in power. Political machines have only one real goal: keep the gears well lubricated and turning out clones.

Only 18 “community members” turned out at the Matt Dishman Community Center in Northeast Portland to meet city staff and have a conversation about cops and their contract.

Portland is a city with several police oversight groups, and one of them — the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing — invited the public to have its say on officer discipline, accountability, use of force, community safety and other issues that will come up during ongoing negotiations.

The community’s comments would be documented and carried forward to help inform the process, according to PCCEP’s invitation.

A young man wearing the name tag “Angelo” took advantage of the invitation.

“We don’t need to shoot every person. We don’t need to engage in high-speed pursuits,” he said.

The facilitator asked him: “What does meaningful accountability look like?”

“I would like to see some personal accountability,” Angelo said.

In particular, he referred to part of the Portland police contract that says if the city has reason to reprimand or discipline a member, “it shall be done in a manner that is least likely to embarrass the member before other bargaining unit members or the public.”

The “embarrassment clause” has been a long-running complaint of Portland Copwatch, a volunteer organization formed in 1992 as part of Peace and Justice Works. The group regularly sends speakers to all public hearings pertaining to Portland police, and the news media frequently quotes Portland Copwatch on issues related to policing.

Willamette Week, OPB, The Portland Mercury and The Oregonian have all made reference over the years to the “embarrassment clause” in the Portland police contract.

During the last police contract negotiations in 2022, then-Mayor Ted Wheeler boasted: “We achieved greater transparency by including new language in the embarrassment clause that gives council more flexibility in commenting on a matter while an investigation is ongoing.”

It wasn’t surprising, then, that the embarrassment clause came up during the Saturday conversation. A question was raised about the genesis of the embarrassment clause — is it unique to Portland? Is it something used in other police departments?

Turns out the embarrassment clause appears in all public employee contracts in Portland. It’s not unique to the police union.

Here’s the city’s Professional Workers Union, labor agreement 6/18/25 to 12/312/27: “If the City has cause to discipline an employee, it shall be done in a manner that will not embarrass the employee before other employees or the public.”

Or Article 36.3 of the AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) collective bargaining agreement 2025-2027: “If the City has reason to reprimand an employee, it shall be done in a manner that will not embarrass the employee before other employees or the public.”

Or Article 35.3 of District Council of Trade Unions 2025-2027 contract: “If the City has reason to reprimand an employee, it shall be done in a manner that will not embarrass the employee before other employees or the public.”

And so on.

Why has the embarrassment clause in the police union’s contract become such an issue?

Probably for the same reason that the city doesn’t hold community conversations on the contract for the District Council of Trade Unions.

Nobody cares as much about the other contracts, but everybody has opinions on police work. In addition, police oversight is becoming a growth industry in Portland. It’s a way for progressives to try and reinvent the cops.

One guy at Saturday’s conversation wore a T-shirt that said, “The tear gas tasted like fascism.”

Marc Poris was there from Portland Copwatch. He suggested that all officers should have bio boxes posted on the city’s website where they could explain why they wanted to be police.

An older white woman whose name tag identified her as “Annie” said she was concerned about how police treat the homeless, the mentally ill and people of color “who are disproportionately abused by police.”

The facilitator asked, “What does community safety mean in practice?”

Annie replied: “Where people are well cared for and have enough resources that crime is reduced. … Not more police — more services. More education, higher minimum wage, mental health services, child care, give people a stable life and reduce crime. …police don’t reduce crime.”

Jacob, who looked to be in his 30s, wanted to know: “When an officer makes a judgment, what is going through their head? … Is it outlined in the (Portland Police Association) contract what the rules are?”

He suspects that some police officers feel the same way that Portlanders do about the homeless — they all roll their eyes. Jacob described a situation he observed at a local business where people were blocking the door, and the owners called police rather than go out and talk to the trespassers.

“Is that how we really have to treat everyone? Call the people with firearms to get people removed?” he said.

A young woman sitting near him spoke tentatively about dealing with people having apparent mental health crises outside her building and in the apartment above her. On one occasion, she tried to call Portland Street Response, but at that time they were still not allowed to go inside dwellings and could not help.

Alan Comnes, an energy consultant who volunteers on the Training Advisory Council that provides advice to the police chief and Training Division, said people want to know that if there is a problem they can get help.

“Response time is a problem…,” he said. “Policing is important, training is important … Where is the staffing?”

He and several other people were curious about the latest police oversight group — the Community Board for Police Accountability (CBPA). Following the George Floyd riots, then-City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty authored a ballot measure that created this new oversight group that could discipline and even terminate officers.

The measure passed by 82 percent of Portland voters, which the city interpreted as overwhelming support. But as Portland Dissent has previously reported, how many voters read the ballot measure? How many have since followed its evolution? The new group has been in development for a couple of years and is now starting to meet. (See “Cop Watchers, Inc.” , “Lies and Apologies” “Police Oversight: What’s Next”, “The Dream of a Ridiculous City,” “Chaos Within, Chaos Without”)

What effect will the new accountability board have on the police contract now being negotiated? After voters approved Hardesty’s ballot measure, the Portland Police Association filed a union grievance with the city, arguing that state law prevented the city from making any changes to discipline practices without first negotiating the changes with its union.

The state legislature stepped in and changed the law. The new oversight board can proceed in spite of collective bargaining laws.

So will the embarrassment clause disappear in the police contract?

For sure, there are members of the community who would like to embarrass the police for all kinds of reasons. In fact, it’s not that hard.

The embarrassment clause didn’t prevent a Portland police officer from being forced to apologize for assaulting a protester in the 2020 riots. (See “Portland’s Reckoning.”)

Considering the animus that some community members at the Matt Dishman Community Center directed towards the police, would it have bothered them to know they were meeting in a place named for a law enforcement officer?

Matthew “Matt” Dishman (1913–1969) was a pioneering black Multnomah County Deputy Sheriff. He came to Portland from Mississippi and became a respected community figure.

April is, indeed, the cruelest month…

…as Portland wakes up from its sullen, gray, naked-trees winter and that peculiar damp cold tinged with a certain hopelessness. Then come the daffodils. And once again, Portland is beautiful, which is a fatal delusion: being pretty can make up for the deepening idea that the city is lurching into something both chaotic and rigid.

A tree canopy can cover many sins. The beauty seduces some people (your correspondent among them) into using the town’s appearance and its boasts about beauty (please—try to find it on 82d Ave) as an excuse to only look out of the window with the best view. And pull the blinds on the others. Which brings us to…

The elk that finally came home…

…back on its plinth and it only took six years and $2.2-million. It was a photo-op for various pols…

…who might, in some small way, have been responsible for allowing mobs to rule Portland’s streets back in the Golden Years of riots.

The unanswered (because it wasn’t asked) question among just about everyone who bothers remembering that bit ‘o’ anarchy is: How soon will the elk be attacked again? Knowing that the same impulse that trashed the elk is in full operation, 24/7, down at the ICE HQ. Gonna be a big ask to keep the frog-people in their lane; the leakage is already evident right in front of the mayor’s home (see below).

Another question, never mentioned in any of the happy-face stories in legacy media: what about Abe Lincoln? Or Teddy Roosevelt? Or the Pioneer Family—just as trashed, but still languishing in a secret warehouse. As we noted here one year ago.

Why the delay for Honest Abe—who certainly accomplished more in his lifetime than, well…an animal? Perhaps it’s because the city has paralyzed itself with an ongoing project (which will be appropriately expensive and “inclusive”) to fashion politically appropriate signage that will “explain” Lincoln’, using today’s DEI/equity/socialism/ lenses. Which have a nasty habit of clouding up almost by the minute.

Our bet: Lincoln’s gone for good.

Socialists hate the “rich” unless…

• They’re the owner of a basketball team blackmailing taxpayers…

• Billionaires (calling George Soros!!) who bankroll the DSA…

• Coaches of the state’s two university football teams1…

• …our new city administrator, Raymond Lee2…

• …Rukaiyah Adams3, CEO of the politically powerful 1803 Fund…

• …and any other CEOs of nonprofits and public employee unions or benefactors of the revolution.

• Anyone else above the county’s magic and arbitrary $120,000 limit is fair game.

Why is Oregon going deeper into the dumper…

…as more women take public office?

If the Orange Man is really a “king”…

…how come he's been sued at least 60 times4 by state Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who hasn’t been incarcerated—or lost his head?

Mitch has good news about our taxes…

Councilor Green, one of our non-partisan partisans on council, would like us to know that taxes ain’t that bad in Portland, duly parroted by the Oregonian…

“We’re only 13^th (highest) on those making $25,000 or less per year. We’re only 13^th on those making $50,000 or less per year. We’re ninth on $75,000 less per year,” he said. “When we talk about our tax burden as if everyone’s paying the same thing and it’s the highest burden, we’re engaging in very misleading analysis here.”

This all came from a study by Washington DC’s government, run by Democrats since approximately forever, which was keen on justifying its high tax rates to fleeing taxpayers. Like all such studies, it was a matter of selection—in this case, the biggest cities in each of the nation’s 51 states. Apples for apples? Nope: The study is weighted heavily, as Green, (a PhD in economics) would know, with high-tax cities such as New York, LA, Chicago…you get the idea. It was based on 2022/2023 numbers; a lot has happened tax-wise since then. Plus: one man’s taxes are another man’s “fees”—especially if you’re on the Portland City Council. As they say, there are fibs, and there are lies, and then there’s statistics.

There’s always another view…

Instead of a stable and growing stream of revenue extracted from the rich, you get a slow but steady erosion of the tax base as wealth, income, and taxpayers relocate to friendlier jurisdictions. That loss does not show up all at once, which makes it easy for policymakers to ignore in the short term while they celebrate the initial revenue bump. Over time, though, the math stops cooperating, and the response is almost always the same. If the rich are not paying enough, the definition of rich quietly expands until it includes whoever is still around.

That’s from Chris Irons, the author of the contrarian podcast and Substack, Quoth the Raven.

Not to worry; socialism will fix it, or so we’re told…

Consumption is the only purpose of all production, but the socialist dictators can never know whether production is successfully satisfying consumers. They cannot detect error. They are like a captain lost at sea with no means of navigation. Therefore, production under socialism is arbitrary, chaotic, and wasteful. Rather than organizing economic activity, the violent method of socialism leads to widespread economic disorganization.

—Murray Rothbard.

The mayor learns about his allies the hard way…

Wilson’s home was visited by people who have trouble with the “no one is above the law” stuff when it comes to immigrants. They graffitied the sidewalk and put stuff on his porch, and one (amazingly!) managed to get arrested, hauled off, and (of course!) released.

Not everyone thinks ‘sanctuary’ is such a great idea…

Once sanctuary states, cities, and counties had established the precedent that, with impunity, they could nullify federal immigration law, then what followed was a logical and mounting descent into the current open defiance of the federal government. How odd that self-described progressives are now acting out the visions of prior kindred nullificationists and neo-Confederates from John C. Calhoun to George Wallace.

—Victor Davis Hanson, “Slouching Toward Fort Sumter?”

PBOT explained in one graphic …

…anyone notice which mode of transportation favored by the vast majority of Portlanders is missing?

Meanwhile, how about those bikers?

Hand’s down, the most effective lobby in Portland is the bike riders’ pressure group, even though, as PBOT’s most recent bike survey put it (in fine print)…

Relative to 2016, the number of people biking in 2024 is down by roughly 40%, based on data from 119 sites.

…and in ‘25 that number remained steady, despite PBOT’s fascination, under considerable prodding, with building bike lanes.

Maybe the idea is to speed socialists on their appointed rounds…

Meanwhile, after a main route in my Montavilla neighborhood got “quieted” (as an excuse to install a bike lane behind tire-blowing curbs), I can report that I have finally seen a bicyclist using the taxpayer-provided strip. Once.

Meanwhile, to build the lane (and grease a private lane for a single bus route), the street’s traffic has become a nose-to-tail procession that is almost impossible to intrude upon from a side-street. Progress!

I have dropped a line to the PBOT folks, asking how many bikes use these new lanes—no reply. But PBOT certainly has two-wheelers front-of-mind, if its official (taxpayer supported) Instagram feed proves, with bikes spotlighted in six of its eight most recent posts…

…not that we have anything against bikes, although their riders (legally empowered to disregard traffic stop signs) are a different matter. Since the local bike lobby runs PBOT (or so it seems), we have a modest request: apply the same rules that govern cars to bikes and make it compulsory to register the vehicles (which now often go faster than “quieted” traffic); and charge them a registration fee. Let’s say a modest $100 a year (since it costs around $120-$140 a year for auto owners to pay off various governments, not including gas taxes)to help with the paint, asphalt and concrete lavished on the lanes.

Only seems fair. Will Jonathan Maus be the first to write a check?

Meanwhile, another multimodal fatality…

Funny that PBOT didn’t put this out, instead of the cops…

…by my count, the fifth fatality in a year for the suicidal-scooters. PBOT, and its political allies, think the crazy vehicles are just great!!! Mostly because they’re not those hated automobiles—but any motorist who has navigated the east side’s cramped streets has probably had, or witnessed, a near-miss as one of these buzz-bombs rockets merrily along, riders without any protective gear or helmet. But, what the hell, they’re making money for the city, so the risk kinda averages out.

Doesn’t it?

More AI fun…

It’s spooky: tell an AI bot what you think (or fear) in a few clumsy words, and an amazing image—like a waking dream just before the alarm goes off—appears as if by alchemy. In truth, it’s a procession of electrons through circuits in one of those windowless behemoths down in Hillsboro, but still…it’s kinda addictive.

So, as promised a few drops ago, here’s AI’s view of yet another of our city councilors’ fantasy-bedrooms…this one for kinda-sorta city council president Jamie Dunphy…

… complete with beds ready for the polyamorous, wallpaper with the council’s fixation du jour, and a fired-up tattoo machine ready to add skin-art to the councilor’s epidermis, who famously wrote (on city letterhead) “Mind your own business,” to a 95-year old constituent who thought his ink wasn’t statesmanlike. The picture on the wall may look like Lenin, but it’s really Mitch Green in disguise.

By Randal O’Toole

Bus rapid transit was originally supposed to provide light-rail-like services for a lot less money than the cost of building a new rail line. Yet TriMet has figured out a way to make bus rapid transit both expensive and painful.

The agency wants to dedicate two lanes of 82^d Avenue for seven miles—from Cully Boulevard to Clackamas Town Center—to buses. Cars will be allowed to use those lanes only to turn right at the next intersection.

At heart, bus rapid transit consists of buses running more frequently and stopping less frequently than conventional bus service. Frequent buses mean that potential riders don’t need to consult schedules; they can just go to a transit stop knowing that a vehicle will pick them up in a few minutes. Stopping only once per mile instead of five or six times a mile increases average speeds, making buses more competitive with driving.

This kind of bus rapid transit, sometimes called BRT 1, has been known to attract significantly more riders than conventional buses. But this isn’t enough for many transit advocates, who demand that buses be given their own dedicated lanes, usually by taking existing lanes away from cars and other traffic. This is sometimes called BRT 2.

Dedicating lanes to buses makes sense when there are enough buses to fill those lanes. TriMet has scheduled as many as 160 buses per hour in the downtown bus mall. Istanbul has a busway that moves around 240 buses per hour. An exclusive bus lane through the Lincoln tunnel connecting New York City with New Jersey moves as many as 650 buses per hour.

TriMet’s use of 82^nd Avenue won’t come close to those numbers. Instead, it expects to run just six buses an hour during peak periods, and as few as two buses an hour on weekends. That will leave the bus lanes about 95 percent empty. Yes, right-turning cars will be allowed to use those lanes, but only a tiny fraction of cars on 82^nd turn right at any given intersection.

Why would TriMet demand half of the through-traffic lanes on 82^nd for its buses? One possible answer was provided by the CEO of Los Angeles’ transit agency when it was trying to do the same thing on major streets throughout that city.

“It’s too easy to drive in this city,” said Los Angeles Metro chief executive Phillip Washington. Attracting new bus riders means “actually making driving harder.” Los Angeles is usually regarded as the most congested city in America, but LA Metro’s goal is to make it even more painful to drive in the region in order to get a few more bus riders.

To make matters worse, TriMet’s plan to close two lanes on 82^nd Avenue to through auto traffic will cost at least $320 million. Even while TriMet was facing a $300 million gap in its budget, it felt flush enough to plan to spend more than that redesigning 82^nd to favor its buses.

BRT 1 costs practically nothing except, perhaps, the cost of a few new buses. But TriMet’s version of BRT 2 will cost more than $45 million per mile.

All of this shows just how much TriMet and other Portland transportation agencies are detached from reality. U.S. Department of Transportation data show that transit carried less than 1.3 percent of passenger-miles in the Portland urban area in 2024, down from 1.9 percent in 2019.

Despite transit’s declining significance, TriMet acts as if it is the most important form of travel in the region and therefore deserves more dollars and nearly as much roadway space as automobiles that carry more than 95 percent of passenger travel.

TriMet should implement BRT 1 on 82^nd Avenue just to see if it can attract any new riders. But the city should not allow TriMet to claim any lanes for its buses unless there is enough transit demand to run at least 100 or more buses per hour down those lanes.

Randal O’Toole is a transportation and land-use policy analyst and adjunct scholar for the Cascade Policy Institute. His most recent book is Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need.

—Psychopath-villain Anton Chigurh, from one of America’s greatest movies, No Country for Old Men

Well, here we are.

Unless you’re a helicopter journalist descending from the New York Times…

…you know there’s trouble in Weirdtown. The town used to be fun; now it’s not even funny. Even Steve Novick has forgotten how to tell a joke—we’re doomed!

Like Lucifer in the frozen Lake Cocytus in Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXXIV)…

…at the heart of the city’s decline sits the City Council. Peacocks and show-offs…

…and the intimidated Nice People doing almost nothing…

…while the amateur Leninists run rampant in a kind of high school cafeteria food-fight, only it’s not empty calories they’re tossing around…

…but…

Our money…

…and they keep finding more of it!

Oddly, no one suggested using the dough to reduce any of the city’s extortionate fees. For example, it could have fully-funded the city’s odious “arts” poll-tax for almost five years—and might have given the councilors time to figure out why the tax is a mess…

Nope: the government’s middle name is, “Gimme!”

I won’t insult your intelligence by listing the weird, wacky, wasteful stuff going down in the $8-million city council chambers; it’s being covered wisely and well by Stadiumhood, Brian Owendoff, Kevin Dahlgren, Ben Roche, PDX.Real, Bojack, Eric Fruits, and sometimes—by the minute—by Max Steele1. Their coverage treats the council’s immaturity and silly socialism as a people-problem. True…up to a point.

Maybe it’s time to stop sniping at the weirdos, narcissists, and mopes plugged into the system and widen the focus to the system itself. And our radical “new” City Charter.

If you were here in 2022—a very interesting year—you had a chance to vote for the charter rewrite (it passed with 58.1-percent of the vote, but then the infamous Measure 110, legalizing hard drugs, got 58.5-percent approval, which says all that needs to be said about voters). Not many really knew about the time-bombs buried in that document.

That’s because the city’s legacy media wrote almost nothing about the charter commission, which started meeting in 2019, and which—somehow—came up with the weirdly radical stuff that the voters bought. (If you’d like to read our thoughts at the time, the short version is here; the full corpus2 will keep you awake long into the night.)

No one bothered noting that the “bad” charter had…

• …saved the city from mob rule and cleaned out openly corrupt cops…

• …led to vibrant new or rescued neighborhoods such as The Pearl and Mt. Tabor…

• …embraced happy weirdness, arts, music, restaurants, starting a boom in construction and in-migration…

• …a TV series built around the city’s lovable eccentricity...

• …and, of course, the woebegone Blazers.

One glance at the people on the commmission, would immediately disabuse you that any of these folks—almost all from the world of nonprofits, unions, gay pride, consultants, bureaucrats—would somehow come up with the charter’s highly radical features…

• Four huge districts, each with three (count ‘em) councilors…

• …resulting in a council easily deadlocked…

• …no mayoral veto, to keep the council from going off the tracks…

• ..and something exotic called rank-choice voting, which no one without a PhD in math understands…

• …elections that are (ha-ha-ha) “nonpartisan”…

• … four-year terms to solidify incumbency…

• …and, best of all, a guiding principle that should be on a neon sign over city hall…

Naive voters probably thought, “Throw the blacks a bone,” even though the “bad charter” council had blacks, in progressivism’s favorite word, “disproportionate” to their numbers. But this was 2022, and the city had gone all-in on white guilt.3

No one paid any attention to three little words, “political minority groups,” although one minority clique, the Democratic Socialists of Portland, figured out how to game the rank-choice election, “non-partisan” be damned.4

The sociopaths/socialists got elected…and the rest of the political disaster is on the record. For those slightly to the right of Trotsky5 who wonder: “Why are these people so damned dysfunctional?” our response is: It was engineered that way.

And it can be repaired.

It’s not—by design, no doubt—easy. The city auditor runs the show, and any effort to take repairs to the voters would require, as of today, 40,437 signatures on petitions.

Powerful people in town, who hope to turn the Doom Loop to their own ends and make Portland a socialist “proof of concept” will fight like caged rats to do away with their in-built advantages. The dark money “rank-choice” forces will dive-bomb with money; legacy media will either ignore, or smear, any reform. They got what they wanted.

Which isn’t a reason for someone with bucks and courage to start the debate.

Any takers?

No tear gas — even though at one point, some protesters shook the gate leading into the ICE and damaged it. Later, another protester climbed up underneath one of the landings of the building, then jumped down.

At times it seemed as if some protesters were testing what they could get away with. Two federal judges earlier this month limited what federal agents guarding the ICE facility could do. But on Wednesday, a 9th Circuit Court panel placed a temporary hold on those judges’ orders.

Before the night was over, a couple of protesters had been detained by federal agents, and Portland police declared the protest an unlawful assembly.

Protests have had a significant impact on the neighborhood around ICE. (For previous coverage see “Tear Gas Ahead.”)

A sign at Moody and Thomas streets warns: This stop may close when there is activity at the ICE facility. Check Trimet.org…”

The driveway of a neighboring business is scarred with graffiti: “Cuck crossing,” “Jerks Only,” “Chud corner,” “Violent dumbass bullies only.”

Last summer, a disabled resident at the Gray’s Landing apartment complex adjacent to the ICE facility unsuccessfully sued the city of Portland to get the police to enforce the city’s noise ordinance, which kicks it at 10 p.m. (See “A Win for Protesters.”)

The scene Saturday was a grab bag of political causes.

One of the few black protesters in the crowd of about 300 took a turn at the microphone: “I’m only three or four generations removed from slavery,” he said, eventually making his way to the subject of reparations.

“When you see a black body, whether man or woman. show them some love… If you can’t empty your pockets, empty your hearts.”

A man handed out cans of soup, along with a flier: “Fascists absolutely hate it! And it’s better than a brick! The next time you go ‘protesting,’ just remember this! … I try to always leave several cans of soup on the ground, and the anarchists take them and start throwing them at our cops, at our police.”

A woman carrying a sign about the Green River rapist handed out photocopies of page from Ann Rule’s “Green River, Running Red,” which she said is related to an ongoing cult sacrifice of women.

As usual, a DJ added to the festivities, this time with electronic beats like “Million Dollar Baby” by Tommy Richman and “Arrest the President” by Ice Cube.

A man with white hair and wearing a gas mask stood nearby, keeping beat with a battlefield drum.

Protesters announced where Portland police were lurking.

“Keep your head on a swivel. They’re trying to kettle us,” a man yelled through a bullhorn as bicycle police gathered on a side street, and patrol units lined Macadam Avenue.

That brought loud shouts: “The police don’t protect us — we protect us!”

“How many ICE agents does it take to murder an innocent citizen?”

Among the familiar faces in the crowd was Jack Dickinson, known as the Portland chicken for his costume: a yellow chicken jumpsuit and a U.S. flag around his shoulders. He is a key plaintiff in Dickinson v. Trump, a lawsuit filed with help from the ACLU of Oregon, protesting the use of tear gas, pepper balls and excessive force against protesters. Dickinson has posed in photos with the Portland City Council.

A few blocks away stood Reggie. He has been arrested three times and said he is awaiting trial for assault.

“My attorney says stay away from there. This is as far as it is safe for me to go,” he said. “Tonight it seems more like a dance party.”

Occasionally a police sound truck would break in: “We are here to ensure this event remains a safe and lawful gathering. Any observed criminal behavior may lead to arrests. Do not start fires. Any fires will result in a response from Police and could lead to arrests or citations … .”

About a half hour after that warning, protesters congregated at the intersection of Bancroft and Moody streets, adjacent to ICE, for what they called an artistic display. A large American flag — “certified” to have been flown at Trump’s second inauguration — and a large Nazi flag were placed on the ground, drenched in lighter fluid and set afire.

Shortly before 10 p.m. a curious thing happened that didn’t happen during last summer’s nightly protests: The DJ obeyed the city’s noise ordinance. “We are going to close it off for the night … The last song for the evening — “Burn It to the Ground.”

Oh, one last announcement: “Did anybody lose a phone in a doggy case?”

While the music was over, the party wasn’t.

A protester climbed underneath one of the lower roofs of the ICE building, apparently to target the security cameras, and then jumped down.

More protesters approached the ICE gate again, which is beyond the blue line where they are allowed. They shook the gate repeatedly. Did they want ICE agents to make an appearance? Did they want a whiff a tear gas? (See “Crossing the Thin Blue Line.”)

Maybe they did, but some protesters didn’t. A large man wearing a Fuck Trump T-shirt called out to them “Be easy with that gate!”

A man on roller-skates noted an ICE employee on a lower roof of the facility and yelled, “Go back inside and drink your Red Bull. Maybe get a joint. You’ll feel a lot better.”

Another protester shouted: “Jump! You’ve been inside all day.”

The ICE agent fired pepper balls, and the man with the roller skates called out: “Your aim sucks.”

Finally, Portland police declared the protest an illegal assembly. Police officers headed from Macadam Avenue down Bancroft and lined up, face to face with protesters, who screamed insults:

“Go back and jerk each other off. …Stop looking at my dick.”

“Where do you think your paycheck comes from, asshole?”

“You know you’re in America? Don’t you know these people have rights?”

“We don’t recognize the authority of oppressors.”

One protester, identifying himself as Toad, directed his megaphone directly at officers’ faces.

“Only good cop is a fucking dead cop.”

This went on for a while. A standoff with one side screaming at the other, while the silent side looked on and showed no reaction.

And, then, police officers stepped back. They stepped back more and more. They retreated back up to Macadam and left.

The protesters followed them:

“Get the fuck out of here!”

“Whose streets? Our streets!”

“Back to your pigpen!”

“All cops are bastards!”

Eventually, there was no one left to insult.

A group of protesters decked out in black, head to toe, started back to their cars, but one of them paused to note that two Portland police officers had cleaned up the ICE driveway where the gate had been damaged.

“You can’t be more of a housemaid,” he sneered.

About a dozen bicycle officers were still gathered on a side street off of Moody.

Toad, the protester who had used a megaphone to scream into the face of patrol officers, stood across the street from the bike police and yelled: “I hope every one of you gets shot with a fucking bullet and dies. … Kill yourselves…right now.”

The No Kings movement began in February 2025 on Presidents’ Day. Another followed on Trump’s birthday in June. On Saturday, The New York Times published a story examining what impact the protests were having.

“These large-scale protest events make people feel like they’re not alone — it’s like collective therapy,” Dana R. Fisher, a professor at American University who studies civic engagement, told the Times.

But, she said, collective catharsis and reaching a “a magical number” of participants is not enough to sustain an effective political movement.

“What we really need to do is the work of defending democracy in our communities,” she said. “It’s not about inflatable costumes. It’s not about clever signs.”

And it’s probably not about insults.

It’s as contagious as drug addiction. (If you don’t think drug addiction is contagious, move a couple of drug addicts/dealers into your neighborhood, and watch what happens.)

Drug addiction can morph into mental illness. That can be convenient if you’re a drug addict who commits crime and wants to avoid prison.

In this regard, Oregon — especially its largest city — could be a national model for how to grow the mentally ill.

The recently concluded legislative session is still drawing praise from Democratic legislators for their achievements. (If you want to read it, here’s a link to House Speaker Julie Fahey’s boastful rundown she sent out last week.)

Neither Fahey nor any of the other legislators sharing their memories of the 2026 legislative session wasted any time on House Bill 4106. It didn’t make it out of the House Judiciary Committee, although it had a lively public hearing of supporters and opponents there, and it attracted an extensive outpouring of written opposition.

HB 4106 confronted an issue that political leaders and civil rights groups don’t want to deal with: What do you do if someone who has been diagnosed with a mental illness and has been civilly committed for treatment doesn’t want to go? Who do you call — the cops?

If the police arrive, and the person still doesn’t want to co-operate, then what? Suppose the person puts up a fight — even at a risk of harm to others?

HB 4106 would have allowed officers to use restraints or physical force without threat of being held criminally or civilly liable when they have to transport a person under civil commitment laws.

It’s a concept that will have to wait until the 2027 legislative session even though the need is now.

But it’s not just the civilly committed who may require police intervention. So does the growing number of drug-addicted mentally ill, who are accused of crimes and demand mental health care so they can stand trial.

Last year the legislature passed House Bill 2005, which was supposed to make it easier to civilly commit someone who has a serious diagnosis and needs treatment. For example, someone who has schizophrenia, refuses to take medication and is a danger to himself and others. Among the unanswered questions in HB 2005 was: Who will intervene if this person doesn’t want to go to involuntary treatment?

“Law enforcement is not the right answer for this situation, but law enforcement is currently filling a gap where an answer does not exist,” said Marion County Sheriff Nick Hunter, testifying on behalf of the Oregon State Sheriffs Association.

When there is an element of danger, Sheriff Hunter said law enforcement is naturally the default. But not all difficult transports can be de-escalated with words. The proposed legislation could have given law enforcement some protection from civil and criminal liability if they needed to use restraints.

Earlier this year, a southeast Portland mother’s adult daughter, who has been diagnosed in the past with schizophrenia, had another major psychotic episode.

The daughter, holding her newborn baby, ran out into a busy street with fast-moving traffic and started pounding on car windows, trying to get people’s attention, saying there was a stalker after her.

There was a man following her — it was her husband trying to help her.

Drivers called 3-1-1 and the police. So did her mother, who was also out looking for her.

When an officer found her daughter, she resisted, putting her face up to his body camera, grabbing his radio and calling for backup.

“I was talking to the sheriff’s office,” the mother said. “Even though she did this thing, acting inappropriate toward the police … I was told, that once they secured her, if she calmly sat down and was no longer exhibiting behavior that would endanger herself or put her little baby in possible harm’s way, there would be nothing they could do.”

As it is, her daughter broke away and ran into a stranger’s apartment, said she was being stalked and hid in a closet. The woman in the apartment called 9-1-1 and let the police in. Officers convinced the daughter to come out of the closet, took the baby from her and put her in an ambulance and sent her to the hospital.

“You can’t do it (involuntary commitments) without involving the police,” said the woman’s mother. “Being involuntarily committed means taking medication against your will. They will lash out. They don’t know they are sick. … It makes sense they would hurt people.”

Her daughter was given a 5-day hold at Providence Hospital and then another 5-day hold and then released. She was out a couple of days, then went to Unity Center for Behavioral Health.

“She was released without a treatment plan. Nothing enforced. … You have to keep on a treatment program for about a month, but the bar is so high to get someone committed,” said the mother. “They just let them out and make it really difficult for families to help someone in crisis.”

The portion of House Bill 2005 related to making civil commitments easier was supposed to help families like this mother. But politics intervened. What had originally been 16-page House Bill 2467, focused on civil commitments, was shoved into the 68-page HB 2005, shifting attention to criminal offenders in jail who say they are mentally ill and need “aid and assistance” before they can stand trial.

The aid-and-assist populations take priority because a federal court order has been fining the State of Oregon $500 a day for every criminal defendant who waits more than seven days in jail for admission to Oregon State Hospital. That’s where they receive treatment to achieve competency to stand trial.

Disability Rights Oregon, a nonprofit law firm that lobbies on behalf of the constitutional rights of the mentally ill, and Metropolitan Public Defenders, which represents indigent criminal defendants, have a history of suing the state hospital.

One of their successful suits resulted in what’s referred to as the Mink/Bowman decision, which is frequently cited in law and psychiatric journals that make reference to “insanity acquittees” and their constitutional rights.

The 2021 case involved Joshawn Douglas-Simpson and Jarod Bowman, who were both found “Guilty Except for Insanity” by Multnomah County Judge Nan Waller. Douglas-Simpson had been booked for sex abuse, and Bowman was charged with attacking a woman and forcing her into the trunk of his car.

Waller ordered the men be moved to the state hospital for treatment of their mental health disorders. She requested Douglas-Simpson be immediately transported to the hospital, and that Bowman be transferred without unreasonable delay. Instead Douglas-Simpson waited in jail almost six months and Bowman almost eight months.

Oregon State Hospital cited complications from Covid-19 restrictions and a lack of bed space for the holdups.

As recently as last week, hospital officials were back in court for a status report on how often it is meeting the seven-day deadline to move criminal defendants to the hospital. So far the state has been fined more than $3.7 million. The money is going into a court fund while the case is on appeal.

It is generally accepted that Oregon’s mental health system is overwhelmed. At one time the state had multiple institutions to handle the mentally ill — Fairview, Eastern Oregon, Dammasch and Oregon State Hospital. Now it’s just Oregon State Hospital in Salem and its campus in Junction City.

The decommissioning of America’s mental institutions and insane asylums dates back to the administration of President John F. Kennedy. In 1963, he signed the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act.

Kennedy’s sister, Rosemary, had a mental disability — appearing to be what some people at the time called “slow.” The family could afford the best in medical care, and Kennedy’s father, Joseph, sought the advice of the most highly regarded experts of the day — Drs. Walter Freeman and James Watts at George Washington University Medical School. Rosemary’s father ordered a prefrontal lobotomy for his 23-year-old daughter. The results were disastrous. She could barely communicate and needed 24-hour care. The Kennedy family eventually moved her to a private cottage on the grounds of a Catholic facility in Wisconsin.

Kennedy envisioned replacing the country’s warehouse-like mental institutions with smaller community facilities. After his assassination, Lyndon Johnson vowed to continue the efforts but was distracted by the Vietnam War.

Attempts to fix Oregon’s mental health system have been going on for years. Why no improvement? The most common excuses are lack of foresight and lack of funds. Oregon needs to build a variety of residential treatment facilities across the state. Towards the end of House Bill 2005 is a section entitled “Facility Siting.” It allows local governments to have residential treatment facilities or homes within an urban growth boundary without requiring zone changes, conditional use permits, etc.

At the same time, the legislature passed House Bill 2015 to help speed such development — by calling for a study to be completed by Sept. 15, 2026.

Oregon legislators are finally seeing the connection between drug abuse, crime and the kind of mental illness claims that have grown unabated. While Oregon State Hospital at one time cared mainly for voluntary and civilly committed patients, for more than two decades now, it has only admitted involuntary patients committed from Oregon’s civil or criminal courts — primarily the latter.

According to The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, the population of “insanity acquittees” increased dramatically in Oregon after the establishment of the Psychiatric Security Review Board in 1977. This 10-member board of presumed experts is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate. It has jurisdiction over persons found guilty except for insanity and can commit them to the state hospital and regulate their stay.

Based on one study, the journal noted the dramatic decline of civil commitments in Oregon went from 53.2/100,000 in 1972 to 9.2/100,000 in 2020.

An indication of how the Psychiatric Security Review Board was doing came in 2009 when legislation was passed requiring the board to provide information to the Oregon State Police on all persons who had been under their jurisdiction for the past 20 years.

In this political environment, self-declared “stakeholders” like Disability Rights Oregon and criminal defense attorneys have seen opportunities to develop “decarceration strategies.” A way to keep offenders out of jail and prison.

Nobody connects the dots — not even the legacy news media, which has the resources to educate the public.

One of the most glaring examples came in The Oregonian three months ago in a story that blamed Portland police for failing to arrest Jonathan Grall, a severely mentally ill man who later killed a total stranger named Jonathan Bennett.

The newspaper flatly declared that Bennett would still be alive had police not failed to do basic due diligence.

Grall, 28, was well-known to police as someone who was mentally ill. His parents said he refused to take antipsychotic medication for his schizophrenia and didn’t get long-term treatment.

According to The Oregonian, in 2022 Grall called 911 and said he had stabbed a motorcyclist outside his downtown Portland apartment building. When police arrived they chatted with Grall, but there was no motorcyclist or knife. Officers closed out the call.

Three days later, the motorcyclist went to police, showed them a knife wound under her eye, described her assailant, where he lived and showed them the knife he used. She wanted to press charges. Police filed a new report, but nothing came of it. Two months later, Grall stabbed Bennett to death outside the Portland Art Museum.

Had police pursued Grall with due diligence, would then-Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt have pressed charges? He was a progressive prosecutor, loath to file charges except in the most serious cases, and the victim in this case moved out of state.

Had police pursued Grall with due diligence, would there have been room for him at Oregon State Hospital? Would there have been treatment guaranteed to help him? Even The Oregonian acknowledged that Grall had almost two dozen contacts with hospitals and police over the years, including an involuntary psychiatric hold.

Had police pursued Grall with due diligence, how quickly would he have been released and back in Portland — a city where the mentally ill may enjoy a level of freedom courtesy of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

In 2012, the DOJ found that Portland police had used excessive force on people suffering from mental illness. That led to a settlement agreement that called for significant changes in how Portland police handled the mentally ill. The city was on track to meet all requirements, but the riots of 2020 led to hundreds of protesters claiming excessive force by the police. The settlement agreement has become a long-running issue. (See “Life Out of Balance.”)

Just as Oregon State Hospital is under federal court order to accommodate the mentally ill in criminal cases, Portland police are under federal court order to be more accommodating to the mentally ill.

All of this is taking place in a culture where increasingly all kinds of people blame their troubles on mental illness or disability.

Last week alone there were two curious examples: Multnomah County Judge Adrian Brown blamed her failure to meet a deadline for the Voters’ Pamphlet and asked for special accommodations for her “disability” — ADHD, which has given her an “executive dysfunction” in processing and executing tasks.

Then there was Washington County Commissioner Kathryn Harrington. After The Oregonian detailed a string of complaints about Harrington regarding her treatment of employees dating back more than a decade, she told her fellow board members that she has “been living with mental health disease my entire life.”

Where does this leave the southeast Portland mother who’s trying to help her adult schizophrenic daughter?

“I’m tired of hearing people blame Ronald Reagan. He’s been gone for how long?” the mother said. Her daughter is making recovery, but it’s tenuous.

“She is very noncompliant. No treatment is required of her. … When you eliminate mandatory treatment, you leave that person alone with their illness. … As a society, America has become absorbed with self-care. People’s rights and HIPPA and all that took over mental illness. If I break my arm, I will get a cast on it … The mentally ill don’t know they are mentally ill. They aren’t going to choose treatment. They don’t think they are sick.”

The state is focused on helping people who willingly go to treatment so they can fight criminal charges — not sick people like her daughter.

She was never helped by Disability Rights Oregon or legal services for the mentally ill.

“All they care about are the exceptions and people who are able to rally for class- action lawsuits and getting lots of public attention,” the mother said.

One of Disability Rights Oregon’s lawsuits hurt her daughter. In Lane v. Brown, Disability Rights Oregon dismantled the sheltered workshops for individuals with developmental disabilities that offered sub-minimum wages. The settlement demanded higher salaries.

“My daughter worked in one near Lloyd Center — not for the money but to be part of a community program. DRO came in and advocated for the rights of individuals to be treated like everyone else,” the mother said. “But they are not like everyone else.”

…a question we first asked back in May 2024, as the president of Portland State University, Ann Cudd, was applying PR bandaids to the sack of the Branford Price Millar Library by rioters…

Cudd, the school’s president, dilly-dallied, tried to cut deals with the kids (who were under the tutelage of professional “protesters”), and finally called in Portland cops to tromp around in the top floors of the library to enable the whack-jobs to flee with their gas masks and garbage-can shields.

Does anyone remember the cause du jour of the mini-riot?

Her failed attempt to negotiate with the unmentionable resulted in a final bill of $1.23-million for repairs to the library, including $63,000 in “administrative/permit costs.”

You would think that this bit of history would have been mentioned in one of the stories in the local legacy press…

…in Willy Week, but—of course—you would be wrong. Ms. Cudd is one of the Big Girls, and thus untouchable.

Willy’s Joanna Hou tap-danced around the bad news…

The university faces a $35 million deficit over the next two years. Cudd proposes to close that gap by cutting $17 million in fiscal year 2027 and $18 million in fiscal year 2028, while growing a $1.9 million strategic investment fund.

…but never quite got around to mentioning that PSU’s enrollment has plunged by 23-percent since 2019. Enrollment declined by 2-percent in just the last year.

In just about any other business, the CEO would walk the plank with numbers like that—but, as we say, the ladies who run the state tend to stick together.

So various courses will get the chop: University Studies, Conflict Resolution, and Portland Center were on the first tranche of cuts.

The university has 285 programs in all, and Cudd gave fair warning that some additional areas would be trimmed…

…which got the usual nervous response from the union representing the various academics. Drop a few bucks on your local future-bets website, and guess when the faculty will go on strike. The Portland Community College faculty is currently on strike—it’s all the rage these days as the departure of taxpayers we’re told by our socialist masters aren’t leaving starts to bite.

So there will be academic blood on the floor. Which makes one wonder: What programs weren’t lined up in front of Cudd’s firing squad?

It will not surprise you that any of the dozens of courses in the university’s compulsory Race and Ethnic Studies Requirement won’t be shelved…

…since, as the university says…

The new requirement, approved by Faculty Senate in Spring 2021, ensures students are equipped with an understanding of how historically rooted and ongoing racism affects institutions in Oregon, the U.S. and the world.

Ahhh, yes; the salad days of ‘21, when the city was losing its marbles over the death of…surely you remember?

There are other courses that aren’t on the chopping block, although you might wonder why they eluded the axe. You’ll be happy, in these days of declining literacy and video screens rotting adolescent minds, that Book Publishing is still offered. The graduate program in Collaborative Governance survived—although Portland’s pols show scant evidence of collaboration, unless you’re a socialist (and even then…).

There’s an entire undergraduate program called Climate Change and Adaptation, although we doubt that many current skeptics will be included in the syllabus, since…

A working understanding of climate change and climate change adaptation can open doors to a variety of job opportunities, including city and county bureaus that are involved with implementing climate action plans; public utilities; and state government, especially in a state like Oregon that is considering carbon cap and trade legislation and a carbon tax.

Comics Studies survived, since there are a number of comics publishers in town (think of it as a sort of NFL-prep type course); as did Art and Social Practice (the market for Lenin statues is bound to grow in Portland), as did Transformative Messaging, which…

…meets the civic and cultural demands of today's society, where messaging is key to advancing community organizing, policy advocacy, cross-cultural dialogue, coalition building, and social change efforts…

…which one hopes a few Portland pols will one day attend.

Urban and Regional Planning survived the snipper, although some among us might have wanted a respite from those “planners” in city hall who have—as they say—made Portland What It Is Today…

…gentrification and displacement, urban heat islands, bicycling, urban agriculture, food justice, homelessness, the maker movement, tiny homes (aka accessory dwelling units), carbon taxes, equity planning, autonomous vehicles, disaster recovery, food trucks and carts…

We can guarantee that Sexuality, Gender, and Queer Studies will survinve…

Our students have close connections with their professors and department faculty. Our faculty are active scholars, thus, their classes are relevant and applicable to the professional world.

…and Social Justice and the Arts…

…taps into Portland’s rich culture of creativity, artists, and activists, and invites students to explore the powerful connection between artistic expression and civic engagement.

Our deep commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice is at the core of who we are, and what we do — and it extends into our academic programs as well.

Of course, there are scads of meat’n’ potato courses in quotidian stuff such as Engineering and Statistics and Chemistry…but what can you do with a school that is liberally salted with cause-classes that are beginning to seem a little long in the tooth. Or are captives to…well, this…

By the way, the Sack of the Library finally left some footprints in the legal world. Two of the invaders faced judgment over a year later.

Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Ryan convicted 30-year-old Danielle Alisha Monk of Criminal Trespass in the Second Degree as a result of her actions during a protest at Portland State University in May 2024.

She was sentenced to six months of bench probation, ordered not to violate any laws, and ordered to complete 16 hours of community service by 8/1/25.

Samira Claire Jensen, 40-years-old, was found guilty of Criminal Trespass in the Second Degree by a jury in January 2025 for similar conduct during the same event.

Maybe a tougher judge might have required the two barbarians to at least pay for those fees.

Who Says the Peacocks Don’t Read Pirate Media?

Our recent AI fantasy—Bedrooms of Local Pols—got a reaction from, well…local pols. You’ll recall that we enlisted Elon Musk’s Grok to create bedrooms after peacockista Candace Avalos revealed hers online. We conjured one for Angelita Morillo1…

…all in good, clean fun. It prompted an online textfest (a specialty of the Red faction)…

…which I would have happily joined—except Morello has banned me.

Even so, who could resist this display of gravitas…

…we continue our weird fascination.

One Peacock’s Hirsute Transformation

Interesting to watch her hair through the years, from a virtually unknown member of the charter commission to…whatever she might be today.

We’d guess that Councilor Candace Avalos’s budget for those new hair-whatchamacallits might heal the city’s fiscal woes.

Further Proof There’s Hope for Portland…

Pete Krebs is playing regular gigs…

…if there’s a local musician you can call “beloved,” it’s him. Catch him, if you’re lucky, at Havalina and 45th Parallel in St. Johns. Our humble request: revive the Portland Playboys.

Then Again…

… this fellow Portlander is brought to you courtesy of Andy Ngo, who likes to keep up with the folks who drove him out of town, his penalty for telling the truth about our crop of anarchists, subversives, and tinpot revolutionaries. The bad boy pictured is, according to Ngo…

Isabel Rosa Araujo — born Philip Haskins-Delici and known by several aliases — was convicted in August 2025 of attempted assault and unlawful use of mace for attacking a female anti-Islam activist in 2024.

…another of the busybodies attached like limpets to the ICE craziness.

But Gov. Tina Kotek was quick to sign it on Thursday and for good reason.

She doesn’t need the kind of publicity that broke last summer, when it was discovered that the state Department of Corrections was slicing years off of prison sentences and releasing inmates who hadn’t completed their sentences — including those who had committed murder and rape. Many of them don’t want to go back, and others are now demanding early release.

HB 4041 was pitched as a “public safety omnibus bill” — meaning many separate issues gathered under one umbrella. It was filed by state Rep. Jason Kropf (D-Bend), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, at the request of the Oregon District Attorneys Association and Oregon Criminal Lawyers Association. Prosecutors and defense attorneys getting together on a legislative bill.

In order to try and get certain violent criminals back in prison and keep others in, the bill had to have something for everyone. Among the items:

• Inflation relief to property criminals by increasing the dollar amounts for what constitutes certain property crimes. Instead of less than $100, theft in third degree must now involve property less than $150; theft in the second degree has gone from more than $100 and less than $1,000 to at least $150 and less than $1,500; theft in the first degree has gone from $1,000 to $1,500 or more. Other adjustments were made for different degrees of criminal mischief.

• Increases punishment for eluding police. (This could be meaningless in Portland, where police are often urged not to give pursuit.)

• Decreases punishment for driving while suspended.

• Establishes a final time period for any felon to file a petition for “post-conviction relief” if they received a non-unanimous jury verdict.

• Requires the Department of Corrections to grant an additional 120 days of short-term transitional leave to certain persons released from custody due to a material error in sentence computation.

Sentence computation is the heart and soul of HB 4041, which was prompted by something called the “Torres-Lopez fix.”

“(It) is fraught with confusion, chaos and instability for everyone involved — crime victims, offenders, and every organization charged with maintaining our public safety system,” Larry Bennett, assistant director at the Department of Corrections, told legislators.

Last summer the Oregon Supreme Court ruled on a case involving a fellow named Abraham Torres-Lopez, an inmate with a long history of property and other crimes, who thought he had been cheated out of credit for time served.

Here he is:

Torres-Lopez was 19 when he was first placed on Salem Police Department’s Top 10 Most Wanted list. He was charged with nine felonies, including first-degree burglary and two counts of first-degree attempted burglary. Later, he racked up more charges for failure to appear and, in Clackamas County — DUI, giving false information to a peace officer, reckless driving and recklessly endangering another person.

Still later, there was another DUI, resisting arrest and two counts of harassment and eventually identity theft.

After years of committing crimes, Torres-Lopez finally earned a spot in prison. He was sentenced to five years, with credit for time served.

He had spent 125 days in Clackamas and Marion County jails before going to prison and believed he had not been given full credit for the two different stays in jail. The Department of Corrections gave him credit for 82 days.

Despite Oregon’s well-publicized “indigent defense crisis,” Torres-Lopez had no trouble finding a publicly-funded attorney to pursue his case.

A circuit court agreed with him, but the Court of Appeals reversed the lower court. Torres-Lopez’s attorney with Equal Justice Law in Portland appealed to the Oregon Supreme Court, which found in his favor.

The Oregon Supreme Court resolved two questions: Whether a trial court may grant pre-sentence incarceration credit for time served for unrelated conduct, even when the person has not yet been convicted or sentenced for that conduct. And, whether a person held in custody in a local jail awaiting resolution of a pending probation violation matter while serving an unrelated prison sentence is in “jail” for the purposes of pre-sentencing.

The Supreme Court held that a trial court may grant pre-sentence incarceration credit in both circumstances. In addition, the court found the legislature expressly authorized trial courts to order pre-sentence credit for time spent in jail awaiting resolution of a probation violation matter, even if the person was also serving a prison sentence for an unrelated crime.

The case was specific to Torres-Lopez, with its particular characteristics.

It was not announced as a precedent-setting case. But Matthew Lysne, a senior deputy attorney general in the Oregon Department of Justice made it one and ordered the Department of Corrections to go through and recalculate the sentences of most of Oregon’s 11,000 inmates.

Sentence calculations in Oregon are so complex that even attorneys and judges can find the subject confusing. Inmates, with a lot of time on their hands, can contemplate loopholes. Even though a judge can deliver what sounds like a straightforward sentence, it is later massaged with various guidelines, departures, categories and formulas by interested parties and attorneys.

Officials at the Department of Corrections did as they were told and recalculated the sentences of most Oregon inmates. They found errors in about 400 cases and started letting inmates out of prison — in some cases years before their sentences were completed. Nobody told the District Attorneys who prosecuted these inmates or the judges who sentenced them or the victims.

Karen Garrison of Jackson County, had been abducted, strangled and sexually abused as a teenager and had listened in court when Joaquin Cowart, 47, was sentenced in 2021 to 12 years for child sex abuse as part of a plea bargain he agreed to. His projected release date was in 2029.

This past summer she saw him “less than a mile from my house,” she told the Senate Judiciary Committee at a public hearing on HB 4041.

Cowart had been sentenced to four consecutive three-year sentences, or 12 years altogether. In the recalculation, the 3 and a half years he spent in jail before sentencing was applied to each count, instead of the overall total sentence, thus moving up his official release date. The difference between consecutive sentences and concurrent sentences can be significant.

Jackson County District Attorney Patrick Green successfully challenged that miscalculation, and Cowart is back in prison.

At the same legislative hearing was Natalia Hernandez, 25, who had been in prison for delivering meth and heroin, as well as unlawful use of a firearm. (She didn’t volunteer her crimes to legislators, and they didn’t ask.)

Her sentence was recalculated, and she was released on Aug. 12, 2025.

“I was so scared to be released without support that I actually begged to stay and complete AIP (Alternative Incarceration Program). I was told I had already served past my lawful time and that I had to leave,” Hernandez said.

She reunited with family, entered sober living in Milwaukie, got a full-time job manufacturing joint and bone replacements and attended NA and AA meetings every week.

Hernandez set about changing her life for good — marrying her boyfriend, getting pregnant and planning to move to Alabama.

In November, she received a call saying there was a warrant for her arrest. Unbeknownst to her, the DOC was now trying to correct some of the recalculations the Oregon DOJ had ordered them to make.

“I did not understand how this could be happening, but I knew I could not run. So, I turned myself in,” she said.

Hernandez filed an appeal and was released again by order of the Supreme Court. She is working and still in sober living but fears she will land back in prison so she asked Senate Judiciary Committee not to pass HB 4041.

Senate Judiciary did, in fact, pass it and recommended it to the full Senate. Because the short legislative session was winding down, and the committee had a long agenda, deliberation among committee members was not extensive.

The House Judiciary Committee heard similar testimony from the public two weeks earlier and had more time for discussion.

“How does it affect the victims of these crimes?” asked Rep. Thuy Tran (D-NE/SE Portland). Then, as if thinking out loud, she praised the changes addressing inflation theft.

“From that perspective … the bill overall will decrease suffering from folks who because of circumstances, lack of housing, lack of job … wealth disparity … go steal stuff vs. victim of heinous crime where people have to pay for these crimes in prison.”

Tran complained that the paperwork was arriving so close to the start of the meeting that there was inadequate time to study all the amendments (at least eight).

Rep. Kevin Mannix (R-North Salem/Keizer) explained: “We have a mess that was created years ago in terms of how to deal with earned time.”

HB 4041 was a fair way to deal with it today, he said.

Rep. Willy Chotzen, (D-SE Portland) works as a public defender and was opposed. The legislative branch and state should not have the power to put somebody back in prison after they have been released from custody, he said. It’s like imprisoning somebody for conduct in the past.

Mannix replied, “Someone has been sent to jail for a particular crime, but the jailer unlocks the jail and lets them out early by mistake … they have already been found guilty. … The sentence was already there.”

Under HB 4041, the cases involving inmates who were released without serving their full sentences would be returned to the sentencing court to determine whether the person is lawfully subjected to further incarceration. There are at least 20 or so freed felons that are considered serious safety risks.

Rep. Tom Andersen (D-South Salem) said there were “Good people on all sides,” but he agreed with Chotzen.

Tran noted that both sides — the guilty people released and their victims — can all seek legal recourse.

“I support my colleagues and will be a no also,” she said.

Committee Chair Kropf called for a quick recess.

Back in session, Tran said on reflection that while she agreed with her colleagues, “the state needs to own up to its mistake.”

She was also looking at other parts of HB 4041, particularly those that decrease penalties for certain property crimes. Why shouldn’t thieves have some relief from inflation? How much is $100 worth now?

“I put faith in judicial system to right the wrong that our state has done with regards to all these AICs (adults in custody) being released and captured … I think that is a requirement for us to proceed.”

Then Kropf weighed in.

“I can’t imagine what it is like to be brought back and forced into prison. I can’t imagine being a victim and testifying at their offender’s sentencing, hear the court impose a sentence … then hear that sentence significantly changed…,” he said.

“It’s the DOC’s responsibility to carry out that sentence — not modify it. … We are simply creating a process that needs to exist that does not exist.”

HB 4041 passed out of the House Judiciary Committee on a 5-3 vote. State Rep. Farrah Chaichi (D/Beaverton-Aloha) joined Chotzen and Andersen in opposition. Had Thuy not changed her mind, HB 4041 would have died on a tie vote.

The sentencing chaos — unleashed by an attorney in the Oregon Department of Justice — would have been allowed to continue.

So who runs the DOJ? Attorney General Dan Rayfield, whose office is supposed to defend criminal convictions.

Rayfield has been busy burnishing his national reputation suing President Trump.

Given the backdrop of this particular legislative session, HB 4041 disappeared in the stampede to pass several legislative bills protecting illegal immigrants and fighting perceived federal overreach. It didn’t even merit a press release.

In this legislative session, Democrats were more distraught about a 7-year-old girl and her immigrant parents being detained at Adventist Health Portland than violent felons being released by mistake from prison.

It’s been like this for more than two decades as Oregon’s increasingly progressive state legislature has tried to dismantle its own criminal justice system. And now politicians, social justice activists and media all collectively shrug and say “the system is broken,” as if it had a mind of its own.

Rep. Chotzen speaks for this tribe.

At the same Judiciary Committee meeting where he voted no on HB 4041, he also opposed House Bill 4096, which would have created the crime of aggravated felon in possession of a firearm when a person who has been convicted of a felony possesses three or more firearms or has certain prior convictions. The bill is intended to go after gun traffickers and was requested by Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez.

Rep. Rick Lewis (R-Silverton) noted: “In the 10 years I’ve been in this building and the number of gun bills, this is the first one I can remember that actually went after criminals than law-abiding citizens.”

Chotzen wasn’t impressed.

“All this does is add more prison beds … longer prison sentences…,” he said. “Every dollar we spend on prison beds is not spent on education.” (Chotzen’s wife is a teacher.)

He even mentioned the public defense crisis.

The gun trafficking bill died on a 5-3 vote.

One legislator who has played a historic role in sentencing is Rep. Mannix. In his first legislative career, he authored Measure 11, passed overwhelmingly by voters in 1994. It established minimum mandatory sentences for certain violent crimes. The goal of Measure 11 was truth in sentencing and equal punishment of offenders.

While Measure 11 was popular with voters, legislators didn’t like being told what to do. They sought ways to tamper with it, even though they needed a two-thirds vote to make changes. In 2010, voters followed up by approving Measure 73 requiring minimum sentences for repeat sex offenders and drunk drivers.

In 2011, then-Gov. John Kitzhaber formed a special Commission on Public Safety tasked with finding ways to spend less money on corrections. The group initially didn’t even include a prosecutor. The chair was then-Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul DeMuniz.

The most revealing moment came in the first meeting when Craig Prins, then executive director of the Criminal Justice Commission, was reviewing data on the effects of Measure 11 and noted there had been a drop in crime after its passage. But he also commented that most crime victims are poor.

“The poor and destitute … have received the benefit of this drop in crime,” Prins said.

In other words, the legislative class didn’t benefit. Legislators lost revenue punishing offenders that they could have spent elsewhere.

Kitzhaber’s special commission eventually led to House Bill 3194 and something called the Oregon Public Safety Package. It overturned portions of Measure 11. See how the system works?

Could it be the DOJ and DOC weren’t initially that concerned over the sentence recalculations because it helped reduce the prison population?

It’s not as if legislators aren’t concerned about threatening behavior from criminals. One bill that passed the Senate, but didn’t make it to the House by the end of the session, was Senate Bill 1530. It would have expanded the crime of aggravated harassment to include threats against public officials in specified circumstances.

It passed the Senate 18-11, mostly along party lines with Democrats voting yes and Republicans, no.

Perhaps it will return next year in the longer session, if the Democrats are still feeling threatened.

…we’ve been fascinated—obsessed, really—by councilor (and prime peacock) Candace Avalos’s recent post1 of her very own boudoir. We cannot recall this curious, revelatory disclosure taking place with any other politician2 in the city or state…or anywhere else for that matter. Here ‘tis…

…a bedroom that looks as austere as a monk’s cell—if said monk worshipped glow-lites. (The room with a sinister-looking couch we won’t guess at.) It aroused our curiosity: what would other pols’ chambres à coucher look like?

Since we lack the power of search warrants (and since, unlike our British colleagues, we don’t take pictures through windows), we used the power of Grok—and prompts based on each pol’s accomplishments, predilections, records, and characteristics—to offer a plausible guess.

For example, we’ve long been fascinated by councilor Angelita Morello…

…who went from being a gofer (for Jo Ann Hardesty, no less) to primo-peacock and most glamorous member of the socialist high school cafeteria clique running the city council. Here’s her bedroom…

…with a side table in the form of the city buses she always (she says) rides, plus a map to remind her—and us—of her origins…somewhere down south.3 The bedspread is a reminder of her dreams of a new socialist world, history be damned. Snuggle up!

Let’s keep going with the commies, and primo peacock Mitch Green…

…he’s the guy with the microphone, his favorite accessory, amid the malcontents, doing what he loves to do when he’s not voting the peacock party line. Here’s Mitch’s bedroom…

…where his bed honors his quixotic crusade for “hotdog urbanism,” while grateful geese take refuge from the evildoers who would convert them into that stuff called “foie gras.” (Better known as Spam for the Rich.) They’re hiding in there because Mitch couldn’t get his urban menu past the council—but as Lenin (whom he admires, despite all the bad press) said, “Just give us more useful idiots and we’re over the top.”

Then there’s mild-mannered Dan Ryan…

…reigning king of the grip-n-grin, and a moderate’s-moderate on the hotly ideological council…

…with his bedroom commemorating one of his few vote-winners: a big city crusade to spruce up local business storefronts. His measure passed—unanimously!—back in October, then went through the usual bureaucratic grinder, which produced a typical word-clot: “…undertake immediate Fields of Action through the existing workflows and processes of PEMO to capitalize on existing program infrastructure and human capital…: which may be voted on by council by the time you read this.

Dan stubbornly resisted the “compromise” that put a peacock in the council president’s chair after 13 rounds of voting, sticking until the bitter end by voting for fellow-councilor Steve Novick…

…who is trapped in the 3d district with Morillo, and “Teacher Tiffany” Koyama Lane. This is the “Tiny Terror’s” second tour of duty on city council…which explains the many historic items crowding his miniature bedroom…

…which is heavy on Novickian whimsy. The “Tiny Terror” is famed for an odd sense of humor, quipping at one point that the lessons of revolutionary France might work in America today (gold-plated guillotines? no thanks!). The weird traffic sign is a leftover from his first term, on the old five-member council, during which he was supposed to be running PBOT, the transportation bureaucracy which now runs hog-wild with “road diets” and street candy. Novick posted the whimsical “heartbreak” sign on Burnside St. in front of Music Millennium Records for no apparent reason. It didn’t prevent him from being defeated by the even more regrettable Chloe Eudaly. The sign inexplicably disappeared.4

As for the gravel rug and the LTIC—(Local Transportation Infrastructure Charge)—it’s one of those “fees” that never goes away, although it imposes a charge of $750 per foot of frontage on new housing construction along the city’s 50-miles of unpaved, unloved streets. Novick said it would get those miles paved, final evidence that Novick jokes may come and go—but gravel is forever.

Another pol who’s been around, it seems, forever: Loretta Smith…

…whose latest job5 on the public payroll is representing district 1 (the long-neglected far east side), along with members she rarely appears with, councilors Avalos and Dunphy. She got ink last month after rioters invaded the sacred space before the city council dias and she responded with an ordinance to allow councilors to pack firearms…

…thus her bedroom’s lined with heavy-calibre weapons, since, as she pointed out, councilors are covered by the 2d amendment—which, last we checked, progressives think should be trashed. (She backtracked 24-hours later.)

As for the bed, Smith’s all-in on recreating the old Albina ghetto, while the currency strewn about is a memorial to the $8.5-million giveaway she engineered for the benefit of 26 people of a certain color who were vaguely related to people whose homes had been bought—fair and square—for an ill-fated Emanuel Hospital expansion 55 years ago. The city had agreed to give the litigants $1-million to get lost, but Smith dragged the council into a closed-door session; after a white guilt whuppin’, it coughed up the new number. God only knows how many other “survivors” of urban renewal will line up for more free dough.

Fellow councilor Sameer Kanal thought that would be great for the city (after all, it’s not his money)…

…but that was then; this is now, when every local pol wants to brag—as did Sameer—that he’s had a whiff of tear gas down at the permanent ICE outpost anarchy. Thus, his bedroom reflects his rite of passage…

…with a gas mask ready for action, while the side table is a reminder that Sameer is a hard-core peacock and will—no questions asked—jump when the party squawks. The wallpaper is a testament to his reputation as a man of many, many (often obscure) words, although he did manage to sum up his philosophy in a BlueSky post: “…we could tax the rich and solve our problems at their roots.” The rug? That’s the vote—for 13 interminable rounds—for Sameer as council president. (Another tie that our mayor failed to break.)

He got a consolation prize from the “compromise” candidate (a fellow follower of the avian clique) as chair of the new “committee of the whole,” where most of the council’s heavy-lifting will be done.

Sweet dreams!

Coming soon: more bedrooms! Let us know what our remaining councilors’ inner sanctums should contain. (Extra points for imagining Olivia Clarks’s.)

People Who Have Made Oregon What It Is…

Joke’s on us.

…Why the Hell Did We Let ‘Em In?

…and how can we make ‘em go back home?

On These Shoulders Rests the Fate of a City in Crisis (Part 1)

…will someone tuck her in?

On These Shoulders Rests the Fate of a City in Crisis (Part 2)

…no pol in town thinks about regurgitating taxes.

The Stranger From New York Tells Us What to Do…

…and lets us know the fix is in: we’ll pay for better boxes for rich people in a place most of us will never go to watch an inept team.

Meanwhile, the graphic below only adds to the puzzle of local socialists caving to the subprime auto-loan zillionaire who’ll benefit from the Moda “remodel”…

In the Matter of the Never-Ending ICEcapades…

Every hack pol is still mining the mopes for votes…wonder what the next hysteria will be.

PBOT’s Greatest Accomplishment…

….while the well-paid bureaucrats continue slathering paint on streets to make drivers take “intermodal transit” in despair. (PS: Remember when 45-year-old Randy Phelps was killed when a scooter he was riding hit a pothole? )

Marching Orders to Go Nowhere

…the teeny-tiny type down there says, “Low or no occupancy vehicles.” Do they hate even parked cars?

More Fun With AI…

…which somehow looks better than reality.

Not Wanting to be Left Out, We Gave It a Shot

We asked Chat GPT: “In 250 words or less, discuss how a city with an infestation of ‘peacocks’ could rid itself of this noxious invasion.”

It answered:

When a city is overrun by peacocks—nature’s way of installing malfunctioning car alarms with feathers—it must respond with resolve, dignity, and a hose.

First, cut off the gravy train. Ban feeding them. Confiscate the bread bags of citizens who whisper “pretty bird” like they’re in a Disney remake. Secure trash cans, compost bins, and fruit trees so the peacocks learn the harsh lesson all urban freeloaders eventually face: no snacks, no staycation.

Next, make their nightlife less glamorous. Trim the roost trees, especially those above cars and bedroom windows. Install motion-activated sprinklers so the birds experience the indignity of surprise showers. Nothing discourages territorial pride like being publicly misted.

For long-term peace, control reproduction. Egg addling—essentially turning future peacocks into very decorative omelets—is humane and far quieter than a thousand hormonal males screaming about their feelings each spring.

Then comes relocation: trap and transport small groups to rural areas where their screaming blends naturally with tractors and existential despair. Do this consistently and quietly, like a witness protection program for obnoxious birds.

Finally, public education is key. Post signs: “Do Not Feed the Peacock.” Add subtext: “He Is Not Your Friend. He Is A Loud, Feathered Menace.”

In short: remove the food, ruin the comfort, prevent baby boomers (the avian kind), and export the drama. Eventually, the peacocks will take their opera act elsewhere—and the city can sleep again, unmocked by nature’s most arrogant pigeon.

(Let’s hand over government to AI, after which the socialists will pay everyone not to work. They’ve never bothered to ask,’Who pays for all this,’ so why start now?) )

But there’s a different reality behind the government folly. Read on…

By Randal O’Toole

High housing prices in the Portland area led to a legislative mandate for Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, and city governments to develop a strategy to make housing affordable again. Metro’s solution, however, is simply going to make housing even more expensive, according to comments on Metro’s housing strategy that the Cascade Policy Institute recently submitted to the Department of Land Conservation and Development.

Metro’s plan for improving housing affordability calls for building more subsidized high-density developments such as this one known as the M. Carter Commons. This is costing $34.5 million and contains 63 apartments that average 591 square feet for a cost of $548,000 per apartment and $942 per livable square foot. Portland housing authority photo.

Prices are high in the first place due to Metro’s top-down planning process that prioritizes increasing urban densities over individual preferences for single-family housing. Metro’s housing strategy combines more top-down planning with increased spending on subsidized housing for low-income households.

Neither more top-down planning nor low-income housing subsidies will make housing more affordable, says Cascade Policy’s comments (which were written by Oregon land-use and transportation policy analyst Randal O’Toole). The top-down planning actions proposed by Metro remain hostile to single-family homes, the kind that most people prefer and that are more affordable than most other kinds of housing. Instead, Metro wants to emphasize tiny homes in people’s backyards and cramped apartments in mid-rise buildings.

Metro has known that density is not the solution to high housing costs at least since 1997 when a study of Portland housing co-authored by a staff member of the Portland Bureau of Housing found that “housing development costs rise dramatically as building height and housing density increase.” Those high costs can be seen in the mid-rise developments now being built with the region’s “affordable” housing funds, such as the M. Carter Commons.

Considering that the median price per square foot on homes in Portland is currently about $300, spending $942 per square foot on “affordable” housing is a terrible misuse of taxpayer resources. Worse, the taxes used to subsidize this housing are on new and existing homes, making the region’s housing even less affordable.

In the 1970s, when Oregon’s Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) required all major Oregon cities to draw urban growth boundaries, the commission also required cities to regularly expand the boundaries to meet the demand for new housing. However, in the 1990s, Metro decided that, instead of expanding the boundaries, it would meet new housing demands mainly by building higher density housing.

Not only is higher-density housing more expensive than single-family homes, Americans overwhelmingly prefer single-family housing over apartments even if prices were the same. But they aren’t, and almost everyone would rather live in a 2,200-square-foot single-family home vs. a 1,000-square-foot apartment that costs more than the home.

The housing strategy’s focus on low-income housing subsidies is an example of the “Do-Something Syndrome,” in which bureaucrats and politicians take the wrong actions in response to a problem, possibly because the right actions may be politically less popular. In this case, most of the groups that Metro consulted about its housing strategy benefit from low-income housing subsidies, including the developers of such housing, so actions that could really make housing more affordable weren’t even considered.

Metro’s original justification for its density policies was the need to save farms, forests, and open space. Yet Oregon only uses 25 percent of its agricultural lands for growing crops, its forests are growing 50 percent faster than they are being cut, and more than half the state is federal lands that are permanently managed as open space and recreation areas.

In addition, a 2001 consulting report funded by 1000 Friends of Oregon and its allies found that, by 2050, only an additional 1 percent of the Willamette Valley would be developed if LCDC’s and Metro’s planning rules were eliminated. The study predicted that development would increase from the current 5.9 percent of the valley to 6.6 percent under existing rules and 7.6 percent if the urban growth boundary and other restrictions were abolished.

More recently, Metro justified its anti-single-family home policies based on the need to reduce driving and greenhouse gas emissions. While people living in denser areas do drive a little less, they also drive in more congested conditions. This uses more energy and produces more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than in lower-density areas.

Metro also relied on predictions that American tastes were changing away from single-family homes and towards denser, more “vibrant” housing. One 2006 study claimed that the United States would have 22 million “surplus” single-family homes in 2025. It turns out these projections were entirely fabricated and, if anything, the demand for low-density housing has increased.

There is a strong negative correlation between density and housing affordability so Metro’s plans to increase densities are making Portland housing more expensive. Source: 2020 Census (for densities) and 2021 American Community Survey (for 2020 housing affordabilities).

Thanks to Metro’s densification policies, the density of the Oregon portion of the Portland urban area has grown from about 3,100 people per square mile in 1990, when median homes cost 2.0 times median family incomes, to 4,200 people per square mile in 2020, when median homes cost 4.7 times median family incomes. It’s hard to get a loan on a house that costs more than four times a family’s income without a huge down payment, so housing is unaffordable when median prices are more than four times median incomes. By that definition, almost no urban areas with more than 4,000 people per square mile are affordable, while most urban areas with fewer than 3,500 people per square mile are affordable.

Portland-area housing will become more affordable only when Metro admits these failures and mistakes and adopts a housing policy that allows people to live in the kind of homes they prefer. For most, this means single-family homes, which are also the most affordable per square foot.

To make the region affordable again, the Cascade Policy Institute urges Metro to expand the urban growth boundary by at least 30 percent, reducing the region’s population density to 3,200 people per square mile. This would allow developers to meet the demand for single-family homes, apartments, or whatever kind of housing people prefer by building large-scale master-planned communities and provide additional room for several years of population growth before more expansions would be needed.

See Randal O’Toole’s full 15-page report: “Comments on Metro’s Regional Housing Coordination Strategy.”

Randal O’Toole is an Adjunct Scholar at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization. He is a transportation and land-use policy analyst and the author of several books, including American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership and Romance of the Rails: Why the Passenger Trains We Love Are Not the Transportation We Need. He writes from Central Oregon.

READ THE FULL REPORT HERE

Very few of those voters turned out when the Community Board for Police Accountability came to life and met Feb. 11 for the first time. These are the people — 21 members and six alternates — who are going to sit in judgment on Portland police.

The board members are volunteers, but the city will provide them with an executive director and a paid staff including “complaint navigators” who can help guide members of the public that want to file grievances against an officer.

Board members will have the power to subpoena cops and can mete out discipline — including termination.

“Use your power,” former City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty told them.

She is a longtime police critic who authored Ballot Measure 26-217 in the November 2020 election. Back then, Hardesty took note of the political winds blowing over progressive Portland in the wake of George Floyd’s death and saw opportunity.

Wednesday night she sat in an audience of 19 that included several of her close supporters. Online another 200 viewers tuned in and out during the 2-plus hour meeting held in the Portland Building. While Hardesty and her friends acted like they had something to celebrate, it was a strangely muted occasion.

With so many board members, plus various city employees, seated around a long, curved dais in a large conference room, and with an empty expanse between the board members and the audience, there was a feeling of distance — not one of meeting together.

At one point, somebody in the audience called out: “Speak into the mic please!”

Many in the audience scrolled their phones, waiting to speak under public comment, which came towards the end of the meeting. At least five security guards roamed outside in the lobby.

Coordinator Kristen Thorp invited board members to introduce themselves and say a few words. They included educators, social workers, a real estate agent, several attorneys (civil, criminal defense and prosecution), a paralegal, a small business owner who lives near Lloyd Center.

Tida Lane-Howe, who works in the District Attorney’s Office, said, “It’s an interesting time to be a Mexican, interesting time to be a woman … I can’t voice my opinions at work, hope I can speak my mind here.”

Natisha Pratt lives in Vancouver but was born and raised in North Portland. She is Director of Asset Management for a Portland nonprofit concerned with housing solutions. She moved to Vancouver in 2017 “because of police harassment.”

Dina Ross, a Goose Hollow resident, is a master’s level social worker, who wants to use her skills to approach her work with “a trauma-informed lens.”

Bendikt Springer admitted he didn’t know what city council district he lives in. He has a Ph.D. in political science and described himself as “a pretty analytical person” who works for Oregon’s Public Utilities Commission.

Kyle Ashby, who lives in the Irvington neighborhood, said he has witnessed the best and worst of policing in Portland. In his bio posted online, he elaborated: “I relied on dedicated officers when a mentally ill man stalked our home for two years — and their work helped ensure our safety. But I’ve also seen the deep harm that comes when power is misused: I physically shielded state employees from tear gas during the 2020 protests, after PPB fired a canister at a woman who was already downed and unarmed.”

One member who almost got booted off the board before the first meeting was Shuyler Halsey.

Although the members were appointed to the board in the summer by a nominating committee, before their names went before the City Council for final approval, they had to undergo background checks into evidence of bias for or against the police.

In Halsey’s case, city staff noted posts he had made on social media using the well-known acronym ACAB — All Cops Are Bastards. It is frequently found as graffiti in Portland, particularly at protest sites. Halsey said he was using ACAB in another context — All Capybaras Are Beautiful, an internet meme.

City officials also found that Halsey reposted to Facebook a statement that said “Do you guys ever think ‘undercover cops’ are no different from Nazi secret police?”

Plus, he had posts in support of defunding police.

In his bio box on the Community Board for Police Accountability website, Halsey said he wants to be a street chaplain and believes it’s “all of our responsibility to engage” in the community and to oversight the police.

Another initial member who was also challenged for bias, but later resigned, was Charlie Michelle-Westley. At public meetings, she has spoken of cops as brutal, white supremacists and referred frequently to her indigenous background; she has accused white people of trying to steal her indigenous secrets.

Portland has multiple groups dedicated to police oversight, and they often overlap. In Westley’s case she had already served as a member of the Police Accountability Commission (PAC) — the group that designed the Community Board for Police Accountability. In her role on the PAC, Westley would casually toss off derogatory comments about “white, cis males.”

A couple of years ago at a community forum in Lents, Westley urged people with criminal records to apply to the new board.

“Those are the very people … that they need on this new board,” she said. (See “Dreams of a Ridiculous City.”)

At least one member of the new board has served time in prison for attempted murder. Terrence Hayes has already been a member of the police bureau’s Focused Intervention Team Community Oversight Group (FITCOG) — another police oversight organization, this one offering advice to officers on how to respond to street and gang violence. (See “Wiping Away the Truth” and “Portland’s Law-and-Order Candidate.”)

To read bios on all the members, follow this City of Portland link, however, there are errors. Westley’s name is still on the list, for example, and her first name is different.

At the meeting, coordinator Thorp introduced a discussion about leadership. Members decided to hold off electing a chair and vice-chair until they got to know one another better.

There were two major decisions to be made. Who should they hire for facilitator? Which executive search firm should they hire to help find an executive director?

For facilitator, someone liked Tory Campbell of the Facultus Group. He had done some of the earlier training with the members. Somebody else liked Martha Pellegrino of Brava Point. The cost of these facilitators runs $2,700 to $3,500 for each three-hour, in-person session. Board members voted to reach out to both and see if they wanted to come in so the group could better evaluate them.

As for executive director, although the city has had a hiring freeze since October, it will not impact the Community Board for Police Accountability. An executive director will be hired with a salary range of $160,784 to $197,267l. With benefits factored in, the position will cost the city $233,729 annually. It could take eight to 12 weeks to hire someone.

Thorp said the city recommends hiring the executive search group Motus, a BIPOC-owned local firm. (This is the same firm that was used to find new City Administrator Raymond C. Lee.)

While the board didn’t discuss the other hired staff, there are three positions to be filled for what were originally called “complaint navigators” when the board was being designed. These navigators would help citizens file complaints and steer them through the city’s bureaucracy.

Currently the City of Portland has three job openings within the Office of Community-based Police Accountability: Oversight Navigators ($58,968–$79,539/year), Investigator I ($71,136–$100,068/year), and Investigator II ($92,310–$117,270/year).

These roles, according to the posting, “offer opportunities to influence police policy.”

It is estimated that 22 city employees will be supporting the Community Board of Police Accountability. They will not have to fight for money. The ballot measure that voters approved in 2020 guarantees the board a budget proportionate to 5 percent of the Portland Police Bureau’s budget.

Thorp told board members the current fiscal year underspent, and that money is being held for future spending. As now projected for July, the budget is $3.39 million for facilities and $4.7 million for employees, materials and services — with an anticipated total budget of $8,133, 931.

Meanwhile, two days after this meeting, The Oregonian reported on a court case centered around the issue of trying to fund more police by diverting money from the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund.

While some Portlanders want more police officers, the city has made a fetish of police oversight — almost to the point of absurdity. Some of the people on the new Community Board for Police Accountability didn’t want to go on ride-alongs with police as part of the training. At one point, U.S. District Court Judge Michael H. Simon offered to accompany anyone who was afraid to go on a ride-along.

More absurdity: When the Police Accountability Commission was considering what to name the new board, some members didn’t want it to include the word “police” for fear it would be too traumatic for some people.

Should anyone that fearful of police be allowed to sit in judgment on them?

In addition to the three oversight groups mentioned in this story, there is the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing (PCCEP), the now defunct Community Oversight Advisory Board (COAB) that shut down after two years and the Citizen Review Committee, the longest-running citizen oversight group, which the new board will replace.

To get a feel for what a police oversight meeting was like in Portland, look back on a few of them.

Until the Citizen Review Committee started to be phased out and replaced with the new Community Board for Police Accountability, the in-person meetings were held in the Lovejoy Room at City Hall. They were a small, more personal affair with committee members seated on one side of a long table, police or their representatives on the other side, and a small audience looking on from the side of the room. Here are a couple of links to sample what the CRC did:

“Pawns in Criminal Justice Reform,”in which a Portland woman was dissatisfied with how police handled a stolen car report.

“Oh Darn, Please Drop the Gun,” in which CRC members ponder the police use of profanity and the routine practice of officers running license plates.

To see a worst-case scenario of Portland police oversight, revisit the Community Oversight Advisory Board, which was declared a national model by then-Mayor Charlie Hales when it began. It lasted two years. Members of the public claiming to be mentally ill continually disrupted the meetings. See “Held Hostage by the Mentally Ill” and “The Tail Wagging the Police Dog.”

None of that history appeared to matter to most of the speakers at the end of the new board meeting.

“What a big day!” said Portland City Councilor Candace Avalos, who was serving as chair of the Citizen Review Committee when she began work on Hardesty’s ballot measure creating the new board.

“She (Hardesty) showed what was possible… ,” Avalos told board members. “I will be a resource for you.”

Councilor Sameer Kanal told board members he had been project coordinator for the Police Accountability Commission that designed their board.

“Reach out to us. … Do not listen if anybody tells you you cannot talk to council.”

At the close of the meeting, Avalos, Kanal and Hardesty posed together for photos.

The public comment that will likely resonate the longest came from Yume Delegato, current chair of the Citizen Review Committee that is being replaced by the new board.

He advised the new members that the work “is extremely technical. It is extremely political.”

Delegato told them it would be “six to 24 months from when you staff OCPA (Office of Community-based Police Accountability) to when you hear your first case.”

Think about that: It could be up to two years before some of them hear their first case.

“I cannot guarantee that you will have a police oversight system to inherit. … You are being asked to reinvent the wheel,” he said.

He suggested they take community testimony before every vote and that they start meeting more regularly — possibly twice a month.

“Sorry to give you a grim welcome,” Delegato concluded.

Another bit of history forgotten in the celebratory meeting was that two years after Hardesty’s ballot measure passed with 82 percent of the vote, she lost re-election.