David Goldberger would be appalled to see how the ACLU of Oregon has gone astray.
In 1977, he argued one of ACLU’s most controversial cases, defending the free speech rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors.
I thought of him when I came across this Tweet from ACLU of Oregon last night:
📨We were back at it again today, dropping off pink slips to absentee senators. Hundreds of you have completed the form and told your legislators to get back to work! 💥We’ll keep making more pink slip deliveries. Visit bit.ly/42C5rtf to send one! pic.twitter.com/SoOasQB4UB5/18/23, 3:05 PM
In 2021, the New York Times reported on a luncheon celebrating Goldberger’s career . Goldberger was dismayed to hear a law professor argue that the free speech rights of the far right were not worthy of defense by the ACLU. He was also disturbed by an ACLU official’s argument that it was legitimate for the organization’s lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.
Goldberger, a Jew who defended the free speech of those whose views he found repugnant, felt profoundly discouraged. “I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” Goldberger told the NY Times.
I have the same concern about the ACLU of Oregon, which has gone astray in furtherance of a progressive political agenda and become, like the Oregon League of Conservation Voters, a wing of the Democratic Party..
The ACLU of Oregon was a key player in securing voter approval of Measure 113 that proposed disqualifying legislators from re-election following the end of their term if they are absent from 10 legislative floor sessions without permission or excuse.
Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, often refuse to hear a case if they find an issue is so politically charged that federal courts, which are typically viewed as the apolitical branch of government, should not hear the issue.
Cornell Law School cites Oetjen v. Central Leather Co. (1918) as one of the earliest examples of the Supreme Court applying the political question doctrine,. In that case, the Court found that the conduct of foreign relations is the sole responsibility of the Executive Branch. As such, the Court found that cases which challenge the way in which the Executive uses that power present political questions. Thus, the Court held that it cannot preside over these issues.
The Court broadened this ruling in Baker v Carr (1962), when it held that federal courts should not hear cases which deal directly with issues that the Constitution makes the sole responsibility of the Executive and/or the Legislative branch.
In the same context, the ACLU of Oregon is out of order inserting itself so aggressively in the political maelstrom of a Democratic effort to prevent legislative walkouts by Republicans from interfering with the Democrats’ agenda.
Trying to justify its support for Ballot Measure 113 before its approval by voters, the ACLU of Oregon argued: “Democracy is diminished when our political system does not address repeated gamesmanship and the continued manipulation of technical rules such quorum requirements, or repeated threats of this type, for the purpose of gaining a political advantage.”
The ACLU of Oregon thinks it should get involved in a ballot measure because it is concerned about “gamesmanship” and “manipulations of technical rules”. Talk about a political issue.
So now perfectly legal maneuvering by a political party to thwart proposals by another party diminishes democracy so severely that it’s acceptable to prohibit the re-election of sitting legislators?
And it’s OK for the ACLU of Oregon to blatantly encourage Oregonians to harass legislators who go against the Democrats’ agenda with “pink slips”?
Oregon seems determined to undermine academic success in its public schools.
With Oregon’s public school students already suffering from abysmal scores on national reading and mathematics tests, earning declining scores in civics and history tests, and with one in five students failing to graduate from high school in four years, Oregon seems determined to shortchange its young people even further as an increasing number of the state’s school districts are adopting 4-day school weeks (4dsw).
In the 1975-1976 school year, just one Oregon school district operated on a 4dsw, according to the Oregon Department of Education. By the 1986-87 school year, the number of 4dsw districts had grown to 7.
Oregon now has the fourth-highest number of schools on a 4dsw in the country, with 137 schools across 80 districts opting for the shorter school week, according to EdSource. That’s roughly 11% of the more than 1,200 K-12 schools in the state. The majority of these schools are in rural areas, particularly in Eastern Oregon.[i]
The newest addition to the 4dsw in Oregon is the Imbler School District in Union County near the Blue Mountains. It recently announced it will be moving to a 4dsw in the 2023-24 school year. It will start with a two-year pilot program, after which the program will be evaluated. The Imbler School Board voted that “it was in the best interest of students and staff to move forward with the four-day school week.”
Imbler High School graduation, 2022
According to the Rand Corporation, an American non-partisan nonprofit global policy think tank and research institute, qualitative data supports the view that the 4dsw model helps attract and retain teachers. Families and students reported highly valuing the extra time that the schedule allowed them to spend together, and the data showed that, overall, stakeholders experienced high levels of satisfaction with the shortened week.
BUT, Is a 4dsw really “in the best interest” of students?
While a 4dsw is gaining adherents, research is showing that meaningful learning losses result. Less classroom time correlates directly with progressively lower test scores and academic achievement.
Data gathered by RAND researchers shows that even though student achievement at 4dsw districts was generally trending upward over time, this growth was not as large as what the 4dsw districts would have attained with a 5dsw schedule. In other words, there is mounting evidence that children in 4dsw programs fall behind their peer a little every year.
A comparison of English language arts and math test scores showed that students on the 4-day week have meaningfully lower scores, over time, when compared with peers on a five-day schedule. Students in elementary school and middle school that switched to a 4dsw schedule were the most negatively impacted by the change academically.
A six-state analysis, published in 2022 by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, found lower student achievement in four-day schools, with larger negative effects among Hispanic students, as well as in those in towns and the suburbs, as compared to rural areas.
A 4dsw “unambiguously hurts student achievement over time,” Christopher Doss, a RAND policy researcher, told the news site, Axios.
Rand also concluded, “Debates about 4dsw adoption should acknowledge that there is only weak support for the three main reasons that districts typically adopt the 4dsw: saving money, reducing student absences, and attracting and retaining teachers.”
The desire to save money, for example, is often a big motivator for choosing a 4dsw, a common assumption being that one less school day will translate into 20% of savings. RAND’s research concluded that most school costs—salaries and benefits—don’t vary by the length of the school week and that switching to a 4dsw would be more likely to save less than 5%.
A 4dsw doesn’t reduce absenteeism either. Kids who don’t show up consistently on a 5dsw don’t become more responsible on a 4dsw. A time series analysis by RAND found no statistical difference between the absenteeism rates of students in 4dsw districts and 5dsw districts.
So much for 4dsw.
[i] The shift to 4-day weeks has been occurring nationally, too. At the beginning of 2020 there were 650 U.S. school districts on a four-day schedule. Now there are 850, according to Paul Thompson, an associate professor of economics at Oregon State University who has done extensive research on the topic. The schedule is most popular in small, rural districts. In Colorado, which has the largest percentage, 124 of the state’s 178 districts (70%) follow a four-day schedule.
Political parties “…are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government…” said George Washington.
Washington may have preferred that the United States go forward with no parties, but since we’ve got them, the next best thing is to prevent one-party rule that strangles wise and fearless public policy and emboldens the perpetual winners.
That’s where Oregon has failed over a long time and all at once.
The Shemia Fagan scandal is just the latest illustration of rot in the body politic.
Secretary of State Fagan wouldn’t have signed up for a $10,000 a month consulting contract with Aaron Mitchell and Rosa Cazarest, owners of the La Mota chain of cannabis dispensaries, if she hadn’t thought she could get away with it. The cannabis entrepreneurs are, after all, high-profile Democratic donors.
Before the Fagan scandal erupted, the Democratic recipients of La Mota funds happily accepted them. Willamette Week’s Sophie Peel did some spade work, revealing La Mota contributions to the following Democrats:
Gov. Tina Kotek – $68,365
Secretary of State Shemia Fagan – $45,000
Senate President Rob Wagner (D-Lake Oswego) – $12,500
Senate Democratic Leadership Fund – $10,000
State Treasurer Tobias Read – $1,800
Rep. Andrea Valderrama (D-Portland) – $500
Labor Commissioner Christina Stephenson – $7,500
Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson – $1,000
Rep. Dacia Grayber (D-Tigard) – $1,000
Rep. Hoa Nguyen (D-Portland) – $500
Rep. Annessa Hartman (D-Gladstone) – $500
Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt – $2,000
U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer – $3,500
Prior to the Fagan scandal, none of the Democrats who were recipients of La Mota money were apparently bothered by the fact the company was failing to pay its bills and taxes, according to an investigation by Willamette Week. Only after the Fagan scandal erupted did Democrats decide campaign contributions from La Mota were dirty money and scrambled to show their purity by pledging to donate those contributions to other worthy charitable causes.
Oregon’s Democratic Party also wouldn’t be so cavalier about all the campaign contributions it took from disgraced executives at FTX, the now bankrupt crypto company if they didn’t think they could get off scot free.
In their unbridled pursuit of power, Tina Kotek and the Democratic Party of Oregon chose to keep company with Nishad Singh, the 27-year-old wunderkind director of engineering at FTX. They welcomed his $500,000 contribution to the party’s campaign coffers in 2022.
But the wheels of justice have turned since Singh made the contribution. On Feb. 28, 2023, he pleaded guilty to six criminal counts, including conspiring to commit securities and commodities fraud, during a hearing in federal court in Manhattan.
He also pleaded guilty to defrauding the U.S. in a campaign-finance scheme in which he made illegal donations to political-action committees and candidates using funds from disgraced cyypto manager Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund Alameda Research.
John Ray III, the new boss of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, wants the $500,000 back, but the Democratic Party of Oregon has so far refused.
Fagan’s behavior is also reminiscent of the sudden downfall of Jennifer Williamson, a former House majority leader and a leading contender to be Oregon’s next secretary of state in 2020. Williamson suddenly dropped out of the race, attributing her action to a forthcoming story in Willamette Week about questionable expenditures of campaign funds when she served in the House.
Then there was Democrat Governor John Kitzhaber, who resigned in February 2015 amid a growing influence-peddling scandal involving him and his fiancee, Cylvia Hayes, becoming the state’s first governor to resign in disgrace.
Gov. Kitzhaber and Cilvia Hayes
Kitzhaber ‘s resignation came in the face of a state criminal investigation and a string of demands from top state officials to step down.
There have also been questionable actions by other Democratic leaders.
At one extreme, there was Neil Goldschmidt, a former governor, former Secretary of Transportation under President Jimmy Carter and ex-mayor of Portland. Goldschmidt, while Portland’s mayor during the mid-1970s, had sex on many occasions with a 14-year-old girl. Goldschmidt tried to define his actions as “an affair”.
He started having sex with the girl when he was 35 and married. She was a babysitter for his young children and the daughter of a neighbor who worked in his office.
A key element tying all these scandals together is the long Democratic rule in Oregon. It has led too many in the party to act with impunity, just as Richard J. Daily and the Democratic political machine ran Chicago with bare-knuckle politics for 21 years as dozens of politicians fed on the city’s political corruption.
Oregon hasn’t elected a Republican governor since 1982, when Gov. Vic Atiyeh won re-election. Republican s have also failed to achieve majorities in the Senate and House for ages.
Oregon has been ill-served by the concentration of political power in Democrat’s hands for so long that the party has an overpowering stench to it. As former U.S. Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) put it, “Unchecked power pushes parties to excess regardless of which party is in power.”
In Oregon, it’s been the Democrats for far too long.
A long time ago, at a time of retail exuberance, Nordstrom announced it would be opening an avant-garde 300,000-square-foot Nordstrom store in downtown San Francisco’s Westfield Centre at the base of Powell St. in August 1988.
Inside Nordstrom’s Westfield store in San Francisco
“We’ve been asked to make this a major flagship store for Nordstrom, so the quality level of the building and its merchandise is being escalated in a significant way,” Charles McKenzie, Nordstrom’s project manager, told me for a story I wrote about the company for The Oregonian that ran on June 14, 1987.
More than twice the size of Nordstrom’s downtown Portland, Oregon store, the high fashion emporium in San Francisco was expected to be a long-lasting shining beacon in the magical city by the bay.
So much for that.
Earlier this week, Nordstrom announced the Nordstrom at Westfield will close at the end of August 2023 and a Nordstrom Rack store across the street will close in July.
The news came on top of recent announcements that Anthropologie’s Market Street location in San Francisco will close on May 13 and Saks OFF 5TH will shutter no later than this fall.
The dynamics of downtown have changed dramatically over the past several years, and impacted customer foot traffic, Chief Stores Officer Jamie Nordstrom told The San Francisco Standard, with unacceptable levels of disturbance by organized criminals and destitute people.
Blame for the Nordstrom closures has been placed partly on the rise of e-commerce, but more on the deteriorating scene in San Francisco’s downtown core that has contributed to 20 retailers in or near San Francisco’s Union Square shuttering or announcing plans to close since 2020.
A spokesperson with Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, which owns the Westfield mall, blamed the city for “unsafe conditions” and a “lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity.”
Sound familiar?
In 1977, Nordstrom Inc. took the wraps off its spiffy brand new $8 million store in downtown Portland. More than 15,000 shoppers and gawkers squeezed into the city’s newest attraction on opening day, Oct. 31.
It may have been just another store to Nordstrom, but it represented a lot more to Portland. As the first new retail building to be built downtown in 15 years, the store served as a catalyst for a spirited revival of downtown as the place to be.
Over the next ten years, the downtown Portland area bounded by NW Glisan St. on the north, I405 on the west, SW Arthur St. on the south and the Willamette River on the east witnessed at least $906 million in new and rehabilitated commercial and residential development, compared with just $89 million in investment during 1970-1976, according to the Portland Development Commission.
In 1982, at an Association for Portland Progress luncheon, Bruce Nordstrom, co-chairman of the company, said his company had no intention of building until he received a call from Portland Mayor Neil Goldschmidt.
Pioneer Courthouse Square, which opened in April 1984, solidified the emergence of a revitalized downtown retail core.
Nordstrom’s downtown Portland store overlooking Pioneer Square
Now not a day goes by that television, radio and newspapers don’t bemoan the deterioration of Portland’s once lively downtown.
In mid-2021, people described Portland’s downtown to The Oregonian as “destroyed,” “trashed,” “riots” and “sad.” “Persistent vandalism, accumulating trash and homelessness have soured attitudes about Portland’s economic, cultural and transportation hub,” the paper reported.
In a poll of people in the Portland metro area commissioned by The Oregonian/OregonLive, residents across the metro area said downtown Portland had become dirty, unsafe and uninviting. Many reported the presence of so many homeless people and their outdoor camping as a particular concern.
The city had moved far too slowly, for far too long, to address critical needs said poll respondent Myrna Brown, who lived in Southeast Portland, and she wasn’t optimistic the crisis would resolve itself anytime soon.
She was right to be pessimistic.
Downtown Portland has continued to struggle. As News Nation put it in March, “Two years after riots plagued the city, two years after a pandemic and the push for social justice collided, the model liberal enclave has turned into a social mess.”
A homeless camp in downtown Portland
Chet Orloff, adjunct professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University, said Portland’s mess is partly “because we’ve been so lax in how we’ve unfortunately treated criminals, and we’ve been lax in our support of the police. That has simply allowed people to continue to damage the city.”
In mid-April, outdoor retailer REI, citing frustrations with break-ins and theft, announced its 35,000-square-foot Pearl District store, in place for nearly two decades,will close when its lease comes up at the end of February 2024
“You’re really betting on the future when you invest into a retail store,” PSU Professor Thomas Gillpatrick told KGW8-TV. “So what this is really sending a message to all of us in Portland, is Portland looks not as attractive as we have been in the past.”
KGW reported viewers reacting to the REI story said they were fed up with city leadership and the state of downtown.
“Yeah, this is a travesty.,” said one. “Our mayor has done nothing. All these businesses are folding up, leaving, moving on and just plain going out of business and he has done not one thing to help prevent this from happening.”
“What will it take for our elected officials to take concrete action to improve downtown and bring back the vital city I moved to in 1999?” said another viewer “I will not go into downtown Portland anymore, due to the open-air drug use, the ever-present graffiti and trash, the people passed (out) on the sidewalks, and the general sense of lawlessness that pervades downtown.”
“Whether you’re very conservative or very liberal, at some point everybody just gets fed up,” added Chris Ham, manager of Oregon’s Finest , a marijuana dispensary in the Pearl District.
How long will Nordstrom tolerate the situation in downtown Portland?
If it can abandon a flagship store in San Francisco, it can walk away from the once charming Rose City, too.
What is it about some politicians who just can’t behave?
I remember a saying I was told growing up in New England, “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want your parents to read about the next morning in the paper.”
Former Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, who resigned under pressure today, should have followed that advice.
If she had, she certainly wouldn’t have signed up for a $10,000 a month consulting contract with the owners of the La Mota chain of cannabis dispensaries at the same time her office audited state regulations on cannabis businesses. Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) has pointed out that the cannabis entrepreneurs are also high-profile Democratic donors.
According to OPB, Fagan, a single mother with two children, justified taking the consulting job by saying she simply could not pay her bills on her $77,000-a-year state salary.
Some of this behavior, unfortunately, has a precedent among Oregon Democrats.
In 1993, I wrote a story for The Oregonian spelling out how John Kitzhaber, when he was State Senate President, pulled in about $90,000 in speaking fees around the country during his last three years as a legislator.
Kitzhaber had earned approximately $35,000 in honoraria in 1990, about $20,000 in 1991 and about $35,000 in 1992, with payments ranging from $100 to $3,000 per speech, plus expenses. As Senate president, Kitzhaber also was paid a monthly salary of about $1,976 during those years.
Kitzhaber ‘s draw was his advocacy of the Oregon Health Plan, a proposal to reform Oregon’s Medicaid program to broaden the number of people covered by limiting the types of procedures eligible for reimbursement. Kitzhaber authored the plan and shepherded it through the Legislature in 1989.
Fagan’s behavior is also reminiscent of the sudden downfall of Jennifer Williamson, a former House majority leader and a leading contender to be Oregon’s next secretary of state in 2020. Williamson suddenly dropped out of the race, attributing her action to a forthcoming story in Willamette Week about questionable expenditures of campaign funds when she served in the House.
Whenever there’s an article about the West supplying more sophisticated and lethal weapons to Ukraine, there’s almost always a reference to hesitation because escalating the conflict could risk a direct confrontation with Russia.
As much as political and military leaders might want to argue against the risk of such a confrontation, the reality on the ground, and in the air, is that it is already occurring.
“Europeans were inspired by the visit of U.S. President Joe Biden to Warsaw and Kyiv in February. Biden reaffirmed that while the United States is far away, it is committed to freedom in Europe—and understands, as we do, that Ukraine is fighting for the freedom of all of us. Ukraine does not want to be at war with Russia. Nor do we. But it has become increasingly clear that Russia decided a long time ago that it is at war with us.”
Evidence of Russian aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere is pervasive.
Over the past several months, heavily armed Russian warplanes have repeatedly violated longstanding agreements with the U.S. by flying dangerously close to American jet fighters over Syria and over U.S. forces working in the country, US officials have said.
Russia and the United States have an agreement recognizing certain zones where the US can operate against ISIL (ISIS) fighters in Syrian areas where neither the U.S. coalition with local Kurdish troops nor the Syrian army exerts full control. Russia came to the aid of Syria’s president, Bashar Al-Assad, in 2015 in the Syrian civil war.
In March, an armed Russian Su-27 Flanker jet fighter crashed into a U.S. Reaper drone after spraying it with jet fuel on Tuesday morning over the Black Sea. The drone fell into international waters in the Black Sea.
Despite established rules designed to prevent any sort of conflict between Russian and U.S. forces operating parallel to one another in Syria, Russian pilots are locking onto U.S. aircraft with their radars and taking other provocative actions on a daily basis, according to officials with U.S. Air Forces Central Command, Task & Purpose news reported on May 2, 2023.
A Russian Su-35 Flanker fighter jet is seen maneuvering unprofessionally within 2,000 feet of a U.S. Air Force fighter jet during an intercept in Coalition Force airspace over Syria on April 18, 2023. (U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Jermaine Ayers).Source: Task & Purpose
“Russian forces have violated deconfliction protocols with Coalition forces almost 100 times in two months, conducting armed overflights of ground forces in Syria 26 times, flying within 500 feet of U.S. aircraft, and in the last week, jamming U.S. aircraft electromagnetic systems,” Air Force Lt Gen Alexus Grynkewich, head of AFCENT, told Task & Purpose. “These behaviors significantly interfere with AFCENT’s ability to execute operations safely and effectively and increase the likelihood of miscalculation.”
According to the Rand Corporation, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley reportedly has kept a list of “U.S. interests and strategic objectives” in the Ukrainian crisis since late 2021 which includes: “contain war inside the geographical boundaries of Ukraine.” That has already been violated.
NBC News reported on April 11 that Ukrainian agents have pursued drone attacks inside Belarus and Russia and leaders in Kyiv have considered further targets outside Ukraine, according to recently leaked secret Pentagon documents.
One document marked “Top Secret,” noted attacks allegedly orchestrated by Kyiv on a military airfield outside Minsk, Belarus, and a gas compressor station in the Moscow suburbs.
The increasing tension with Russia may play a part in what appears to be an erosion of American support for Ukraine as the battle goes on.
In WWII, The United States declared War on Japan on Dec. 8, 1941. “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory,” President Roosevelt declared. On December 11, Congress approved a resolution declaring war with Germany. The unconditional surrender of the German Third Reich was signed on Monday, May 7, 1945. Japan signed an official Instrument of surrender on September 2, 1945.
In other words, for almost five years the Americans persevered in the face of a brutal war with international repercussions.
Russia took control of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in March 2014. It escalated the fight in Feb. 2022 when it invaded and occupied larger portions of Ukraine. President Biden declared the attack “unprovoked and unjustified”, issued severe sanctions against top Kremlin officials and began a NATO-led military assistance program to Ukraine. In other words, aggressive U.S. military involvement in the Ukraine war has extended for slightly more than 13 months.
Yet many Americans are already wearying of the conflict.
An April Wall Street Journal poll found that while the number of voters who believe the U.S. is providing the right amount of support has remained stable, at about 35%, more and more think Washington is too involved.
About 38% of voters said the U.S. was doing too much to help Ukraine, a big jump from 6% in March 2022. Meanwhile, only 20% said the U.S. should do more, down from 46% in March 2022.The erosion in support is particularly noticeable among Republicans. About 60% of Republicans said the U.S. was doing too much to support Ukraine, up from 48% in October 2022, compared with just 15% of Democrats. Even 42% of independents said the U.S. was doing too much.
In my view, this erosion of support is a dangerous trend. If we do not see this through Russia will be emboldened, the independence of former Soviet Republics will be threatened, China’s aggressiveness will be encouraged and western influence on the global stage will be challenged.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a prominent French intellectual, explained why he was dodging Russian sniper fire in Ukraine to make a documentary there. “In Ukraine, I had the feeling for the first time that the world I knew, the world in which I grew up, the world that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren, might collapse,” he said.
Yes, it might… if we lose our will to win in Ukraine.
Multnomah County Democrats, who have probably never found a tax they didn’t like, are supporting a new capital gains tax on county residents, further burdening an already overtaxed populace.
People who take the time to read their voters pamphlet for the May 16, 2022 election will see Multnomah County Ballot Measure 26-238, “Eviction Representation for All”. The measure would create a program that would provide “free, culturally specific and responsive legal representation, with translation, to persons sued in Multnomah County residential proceedings (including post foreclosure) as well as related housing claims and appeals, including to maintain public housing assistance.”
The program would be funded by a new, adjustable 0.75 % tax on net capital gains of county residents. The tax rate could be increased or decreased based on the county’s annual reports.
In other words, the new tax revenue would pay for lawyers to help people fight with property owners.
Minimizing evictions may be a worthy goal, but not every social problem should generate a new tax on already burdened taxpayers. A realignment of priorities would be preferable
Without a doubt, this measure is a disaster in the making.
Although advocates argue the measure would only tax individuals, not businesses, that’s a fiction. As a study done by Perkins & Co for the Portland Business Alliance concluded, “Businesses organized as pass-through entities such as a sole proprietorship, partnership, limited liability company (except those electing to be taxed as a C corporation), and S corporation are taxed at the individual level. The majority of Multnomah County small business owners reflect the annual activity of their businesses on their individual income tax returns.”
Someone selling their business in Multnomah County would also have to pay the capital gains tax with no other investments to offset any gains.
The Perkins & Co report also noted that “taxpayers would be subject to this tax even if they were otherwise nontaxable for federal, Oregon, and other local tax purposes. “ For example, retirees withdrawing from their retirement investment accounts might not be subject to federal or Oregon income taxes, but they might have to pay could pay have to pay Multnomah County’s capital gains tax on their savings , reducing their retirement income if their withdrawals are categorized as capital gains.
Equally disturbing, Perkins & Co. concluded that homeowners selling their residence at a profit would owe the proposed local capital gains tax on all gains from the sale.
The Cascade Policy Institute has rightly pointed out another flow in the measure — the 0.75 % tax rate is adjustable. “Most of us have been around long enough to know that when a tax rate is adjustable, the only way is up,” Cascade says.
Resident small business owners in Multnomah County already face a barrage of taxes, resulting in the second highest marginal individual income tax rate in the United States after New York City, and has suffered population losses in each of the past two years. Piling on with yet another poorly designed tax would compound the county’s problems.
Gov. Tina Kotek has taken every opportunity to wax eloquent about the promise of legislation she signed on April 13, 2022 to attract semiconductor-related investment and good-paying jobs to Oregon.
“This bill is an absolutely essential tool for leading a coordinated effort with the private sector to ensure we can compete for federal funds to expand advanced manufacturing in Oregon,” Kotek said in a news release. “We are poised to lay the foundation for the next generation of innovation and production of semiconductors.”
She’s been less forthcoming about exactly how she intends to implement the legislation.
Under Oregon’s innovative statewide land use planning program, created in 1973 with passage of the Oregon Land Use Act (SB 100), each of the state’s cities and metropolitan areas has created an urban growth boundary around its perimeter – a land use planning line to control urban expansion onto farm and forest lands.
Senate Bill 4 granted Kotek a blank check to bring some plots of land into Oregon’s urban growth boundaries, changing land use restrictions at her whim, to entice investment in Oregon’s semiconductor industry.Kotek will be able to designate up to eight sites, including two more than 500 acres in size, for manufacturing facilities.
In an April 21 KGW-TV interview on Straight Talk with Laurel Porter, Porter asked, “If somebody doesn’t want to sell, will the state be able to take that land?” A skilled politician, Kotek sidestepped the question, saying it isn’t yet clear yet whether land outside the current urban growth boundary will need to be accessed.
Of equal or greater consequence, Kotek has also been less than forthcoming about whether she would use her authority under the legislation to site data centers.
Data centers house networked computers, storage systems and computing infrastructure that organizations use to assemble, process, store and disseminate large amounts of data. Enterprise data centers increasingly incorporate facilities for securing and protecting cloud computing resources and in-house, on-site resources.
Senate Bill 4 says the governor can designate land that relates “to the semiconductor industry, advanced manufacturing or the supply chain for semiconductors or advanced manufacturing.”
Seeking to clarify the governor’s intentions, I asked her office, “Does the governor interpret this to mean the bill would allow her to designate sites to be used for data centers?”
The governor’s office asked me to give them a date/time I was seeking a response by and I did so. After that, crickets.
Repeated requests for a response drew a blank.
The question deserves a clear answer from the governor.
In my view, the legislature did not intend to give the governor authority to commandeer sites for data centers, which already enjoy substantial financial subsidies and access to abundant water and energy. Any attempt to do so should be aggressively challenged.
The primary motivations behind Senate Bill 4 were to secure not only investment, but also a sizable number of high-paying jobs to bolster Oregon’s economy.
If there’s one thing data center investments do not bring, it is an abundance of high-paying jobs.
The cavernous highly automated data centers that have been proliferating in Hillsboro and elsewhere in Oregon are mostly devoid of people.
Intel’s multiple campuses in Hillsboro and Aloha serve approximately 22,000 employees, the company’s largest concentration of facilities and talent in the world, and likely an equal number of contract workers.
In contrast, while Hillsboro is considered one of the fastest growing data center markets in the country, workers at the centers are sparse.
For example, The Oregonian reported earlier this year that Twitter employs only 18 people at its Hillsboro data center while Digital Realty Trust’s data center had just three Hillsboro employees.
Not only are data centers underpopulated, the workers in them are not generally highly paid. While the average annual wage of Intel Oregon employees exceeds $132,000, the average annual wage of data center technicians in Oregon is $46,800 per year for entry level positions and $62,400 for the most experienced workers, according to Talent.com.
In other words, the last thing Oregon needs is for Gov. Kotek to bypass Oregon’s land use laws to attract more massive data centers that gobble up even more land..
And she needs to make it clear now that she will not do so.
Parents of Oregon’s K-12 public school students are between a rock and a hard place. Stay with their faltering public school or push for more school choice.
As a whole, it’s a dark moment for Oregon’s public schools:
One of every five Oregon high school students don’t graduate in four years.
A depressingly small percentage of Oregon students in grades 4 and 8 tested at a proficient level or higher in mathematics and reading in 2022 in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
Severe mental health challenges and behavioral issues have ramped up in schools as students have shifted from online to hybrid learning and back to in-classroom learning.
Oregon’s young people have been abandoning public schools at an distressing rate. Enrollment declined 3.7%. in the 2020-2021 school year, another 1.4% in the 2021-2022 school year and 0.1% in the 2022-2023 school year. Public school enrollment statewide dropped by more than 30,000 students, or 5%, from October 2019 to October 2022 statewide, the second highest in the country, according to Stanford University. Only Mississippi, not a state we want to envy, lost a larger share.
Conservative public policy research organizations such as the Portland-based Cascade Policy Institute, say the time is ripe for more school choice.
“Oregon families urgently need more options so they can find the right fit for their children to learn effectively and safely,” says Cascade. “Traditional public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, online learning, private and parochial schools, homeschooling, and tutoring are all paths to success for students.”
The frustration many parents have with Oregon’s underperforming public schools is understandable as well.
As a conservative, it’s tempting to unreservedly join the school choice chorus and to think that going full speed ahead in broadening school choice will calm down the tempest and enhance learning.
But some caution is needed.
The problem is that for all the handwringing about traditional brick-and-mortar public schools by school choice evangelists, they too often fail to acknowledge that the “do your own thing” alternatives aren’t necessarily better. And some are worse, much worse.
No matter how bad some public schools are, the fact is bad teachers, weak curriculum. incompetence and sloth are not found just in public brick-and-mortar schools.
Options school choice advocates usually trumpet include public brick-and-mortar charter schools, public online charter schools, private schools and homeschooling.
There are currently 133 public charter schools serving 46,275 students in Oregon, according to the Oregon Department of Education. Of those, 102 are physical brick-and-mortar schools and 31 are virtual/online/cyber schools.
Under Oregon law, a charter school is a separate legal entity operating under a binding agreement with a school district sponsor. Charter schools in Oregon, including online charters, are publicly funded, so parents don’t pay tuition. Instead, the Oregon Department of Education distributes State School Fund money to each school district that sponsors a charter school.
Unfortunately, the performance of Oregon’s charter schools is all over the map in terms of tested proficiency in key areas, graduation rates, parent satisfaction and other criteria.
For example, at Oregon Charter Academy (formerly Oregon Connections Academy), a heavily advertised online charter school sponsored by the Santiam Canyon School District, just 35.1% of all students taking the state assessment in Mathematics, 54.6% of all students taking the state assessment in English Language Arts and 51.4% of all students taking the state assessment in Science tested “Proficient” in 2021-2022.
Some other online public charter schools in Oregon are much worse.
At Cascade Virtual Academy, an online charter school sponsored by the Mitchell School District, just 21.7% of all students taking the state assessment in Mathematics, 35.2% of all students taking the state assessment in English Language Arts and 24.8% of all students taking the state assessment in Science tested “Proficient” in 2021-2022.
The experiences of many Oregon children during the pandemic also revealed that exclusive online schooling led to depression, undue stress, low levels of social inclusion, anxiety and learning losses for many students.
Oregon’s brick-and-mortar charters have an uneven record as well.
For example, at The Academy for Character Education, a K-12 public charter school in Cottage Grove, 58% of all students taking the state assessment in Mathematics, 63.8% of all students taking the state assessment in English Language Arts and 48.8% of all students taking the state assessment in Science tested “Proficient” in 2021-2022.
In contrast, at the Ione Community Charter School, a K-12 public Charter school in Ione, just 26.8% of all students taking the state assessment in Mathematics, 40.8% of all students taking the state assessment in English Language Arts and 13.3% of all students taking the state assessment in Science tested “Proficient” in 2021-2022.
The same variability in quality exists with private schools in Oregon.
At private schools, parents, not the state, pay the bills. There are 483 private schools serving 57,768 K-12 students in Oregon, with about half religiously affiliated (most commonly Christian and Catholic) according to Private School Review.
The Cascade Policy Institute, which asserts that the K-12 public school system is a “dysfunctional government school monopoly,” wants to establish an Empowerment Scholarship Account program under which a portion of state-level education fundingwould be converted to portable accounts for students to use wherever they want, which would benefit private schools.
Cascade praises a new Arkansas law which creates Educational Freedom Accounts for all K-12 students, to be phased in by 2026. Individuals choosing a Freedom Account will get 90% of what public schools get per student in state funding from the previous school year, equal to $6,600 for the current year. They can spend this money on private school tuition, textbooks, tutoring, and other approved educational expenses.
But “private” does not automatically mean “superior”. The academic performance of private schools can vary widely and it can be hard to pin down their performance because they are not required to participate in statewide testing.
So parents take their chances when they send their children to private schools.
School choice could become an even more contentious issue in Oregon if there’s pressure to provide taxpayer dollars to religious schools.
Wisconsin, Iowa and Utah already offer vouchers to parents to enroll their children in approved private and religious schools. An effort is also underway in Oklahoma to extend publicly paid vouchers to online religious schools. The Catholic Church in Oklahoma City and Tulsa wants to create St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would be the country’s first publicly-funded religious charter school.
For many Oregon parents, the preferred alternative to public or private schools is homeschooling.
Oregon law (ORS 339.035) allows a child (between ages 6, and 18, grades 1-12) to be taught by a parent, guardian, or private teacher in the child’s home. Homeschool families may choose their own curriculum, and may use the Oregon’s Academic Content Standards to guide their instruction; however, there is no requirement to adhere to Oregon academic standards.
Oregon education officials estimate that most of the more than 20,000 students in Oregon who are not in public schools are being homeschooled, about 40% more than in 2019, before the pandemic moved classes online.
Parents of students between the ages of 6-18 are supposed to notify their local Education Service District (ESD) of their intent to home school within 10 days of beginning to home school, but compliance is not comprehensive.
A homeschooler is expected to take standardized testing by August 15 of the summer following the completion of 3rd, 5th, 8th, and 10th grades, as long as the child has been homeschooled since at least February 15 of the year preceding testing (18 months before the test deadline).
The required tests include grade-level math (concepts, application, skills), reading (comprehension), and language (writing, spelling/grammar, punctuation, etc.)
With the above information, you might think that public oversight of homeschoolers is comparable to that of public school because the state knows how all homeschooled students are performing. You’d be wrong.
As Earthsong Homeschool says, “Homeschooling in Oregon is easy. There are no laws specifying record keeping, attendance, or mandatory subjects. You do not need a college degree or teaching degree to teach your child. You register your child as homeschooled and test every few years. It’s that easy. In Oregon, you do not have to use grade level curriculum. Your child does not have to do what their public-school counter parts are doing.”
Homeschooled students are not required to take common standardized tests that measure academic progress. They can opt out, and many of them do.
Homeschoolers’ tests are also scored on a percentile, so the score a child gets represents how many people taking the same test got a lower score. In other words, the scores don’t represent how well the child knows the material, only how well the child performs relative to every other homeschooler taking the test. Even then, if a child scores at the 15th percentile or above, then the ESD simply files the report and there’s no follow-up.
Homeschoolers also don’t have to report their scores to anybody unless their education service district (ESD) asks for them. But the state cares so little about how these children are doing that ESDs almost never request test scores, according to the Oregon Department of Education.
Not that it would make much difference if ESDs did request the scores.
That’s because homeschoolers only need to report their composite percentile score. This is an almost useless single percentile representing a child’s performance on all three subjects together. It’s almost as though the state doesn’t really want to know how homeschoolers are doing.
Earthsong points out that Oregon homeschooling parents “can even legally be radical unschoolers”, relying on a child’s innate curiosity and desire to learn by not following any set homeschool curriculum.
Psychologist Peter Gray, author of “Free to Learn,” wrote in Psychology Today that unschooling parents “allow their children freedom to pursue their own interests and to learn, in their own ways, what they need to know to follow those interests,”
Unschooling advocate Akilah Richards frames it as a social justice practice, defining unschooling as a “child-trusting, anti-oppression, liberatory love-centered approach to parenting and caregiving.”
Critics of unschooling assert that it ignores research on the benefits of direct instruction for mastering skills in math and reading, which can leave children without basic literacy or numeracy skills, and is correlated with higher rates of drug use, delinquency, social isolation, and poor academic performance.
So, what to do?
As King Mongkut reluctantly cries in the play, The King and I, “Tiz a puzzlement!”
There is some validity to the view that the traditional public school system in the United States, a monopoly financed by taxes whether or not your child attends, and a one‐size‐fits‐all approach that doesn’t respond to the needs of diverse students, provides few incentives to innovate or respond to families’ needs.
It’s also true that opinion on public education is souring, with Americans now giving lower grades to schools both locally and nationally than before the pandemic. Today, only about one in five Americans give the nation’s schools an A or B. Last year, Gallup found public satisfaction with K-12 schools was at its lowest level in more than 20 years.
In a June 2022 poll, Gallup found that only 13 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of Democrats have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in U.S. public schools.
A shift to an education system that offers more choices could drive quality improvements in traditional public schools, because there would be a financial incentive for them to retain students.
Broader school choice would also allow parents to seek educational institutions that fit their children’s needs better than their traditional public schools.
“A universal (school choice) program would generate enough demand for robust market entry in the long run, meaning more choices for all families,” argues the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank. “If parents do not perceive that certain schools or services will be appropriate for their children, they will not choose them—enticing schools to improve or force them to close down. The schools that are a quality match for many children will be financially rewarded and expand in the long run.”
“If the primary school choice mechanism is the supply of high‐quality schools, we should allow the market to determine which institutions are high quality,” says the Cato Institute. “The choices of individual parents, rather than bureaucrats, can determine which schools remain open and which ones close.”
Clearly, it’s criminal to keep children in lousy underfunded public schools with lousy teachers and lousy administrators, and with no ability to opt out, to choose a better alternative.
But let’s not fool ourselves. More choices could mean a further splintering of the body politic.
A shift to an education system that offers a multitude of taxpayer-funded choices could end up shattering efforts to foster national identity and rich common values that foster mutual respect and active citizenship.
As Kwame Anthony Appiah, a British-American philosopher and writer, put it in a graduation address at the University oi Pennsylvania, education is “a means both to foster the autonomy of the child—the capacities to make his way in the world—and to promote the welfare of the polity.”
If American parents all “do their own thing”, as many school choice evangelists advocate, the divisiveness and polarization inflicting American society today is likely to increase and we’ll become even more atomised.
Disadvantaged and vulnerable children may also be shortchanged in the maelstrom. And as more children are taught only what their parents want them to learn, shared values will erode. School choice shouldn’t be a license for parents to handicap their children. America has an interest, after all, in an educated populace.
In short, the pell-mell rush toward more school choices will not be an unalloyed good if it undermines academic achievement, community, justice, common principles, mutual respect and political coexistence.
All this suggests teacher unions, parents and the legislature need to move forward with care if Oregon’s children are to be well-served in their education.
Oregon’s legislature seems to be hell bent on ceding its authority to the governor. That’s a mistake.
Senate Bill 4, signed by the governor on April 13, granted Kotek a blank check to bring some plots of land into Oregon’s urban growth boundaries, changing land use restrictions at her whim, to entice investment in Oregon’s semiconductor industry.Kotek will be able to designate up to eight sites, including two more than 500 acres in size, for manufacturing facilities.
The usual tension between legislative bodies and executive branches of government is because legislatures insist on jealously guarding their authority in the separation of powers. Separation of powers, coined by the 18th century philosopher Montesquieu, refers to the division of government responsibilities into distinct branches to limit any one branch from exercising the core functions of another. The intent is to prevent the concentration of power and provide for checks and balances.
Separation of powers issues usually arise at the federal level, where constitutional scholars have long been arguing that Congress has been negligent in ceding powers to the Executive. As Brian McKeon and Caroline Tess have written in Foreign Affairs, “A Congress that delegates its powers or consistently acquiesces in the face of executive action not only ignores that invitation; it abdicates its responsibilities.”
But as the National Conference of State Legislatures has written,”There is an inherent measure of competition and conflict among the branches of government,” so state conflicts can arise as well.
Under Oregon’s innovative statewide land use planning program, created in 1973 with passage of the Oregon Land Use Act (SB 100), each of the state’s cities and metropolitan areas has created an urban growth boundary around its perimeter – a land use planning line to control urban expansion onto farm and forest lands.
“These (land use) regulations have resulted in 50 years of success protecting our farm and forest lands, containing urban sprawl, and protecting natural resources. Senate Bill 4 throws that out the window,” Republican state Rep. Anna Scharf has observed.
Republican state Rep. Ed Diehl expressed similar concern, saying, “I cannot in good conscience give the governor what is essentially a super-siting authority to take lands and bring them into the urban growth boundary. That is not the Oregon way.”
No, it’s not.
The desire of some of Oregon’s legislators to attract investment and good-paying jobs associated with the semiconductor industry is valid and worth pursuing with wise legislative action. But giving so much power to the governor is an unwise move that legislators will regret.
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