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.
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.
When a piece of legislation is flawed from the get-go, fiddling with it is fruitless.
Oregon’s Senate Committee on Housing and Development voted on April 3 to amend a rent control bill (SB 611) and send it to the Senate floor for a vote.
The original bill capped rent increases at 8%, or 3% plus the consumer price index, at buildings more than 3 years old. An amendment changed that to 10% or 5% plus the consumer price index.
But the problem isn’t the percentages. The problem is that rent control doesn’t work. Any short-term benefits, including the applause of some constituents, are always overshadowed by the long-term problems rent control creates.
In a review of 140 economics studies on rent control in Economics Journal Watch, economists overwhelmingly agreed that, “A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.” From the abstract: “I find that the preponderance of the literature points toward the conclusion that rent control introduces inefficiencies in housing markets. Moreover, the literature on the whole does not sustain any plausible redemption in terms of redistribution.”
Oregon foolishly started down this road in 2019 with a law prohibiting landlords across the state from raising rents more than 7 percent per year, plus the annual change in the consumer price index (CPI) at buildings more than 15 years old. Now, rather than abandon the whole idea, Democrats in the Senate, backed up by tenant groups, continue to ignore economic realities.
Potentially compounding the problem, the legislature is considering House Bill 3503 which would allow cities and counties across the state to enact their own rent control laws.
In testimony submitted to the House Committee on Housing and Homelessness, Ariel Nelson, a lobbyist for the League of Oregon Cities, endorsed the bill, arguing, “The current state preemption prevents local governments from enacting rent control policies that are tailored to the specific needs and circumstances of their communities. Local governments are closer to their communities, more responsive, and are able to act more quickly. HB 3503 will provide local governments with a critical tool to address the affordable housing crisis for their residents.”
But, as with SB 611, the measure would likely do more to hamper than stimulate the construction of more affordable housing in Oregon.
As Deborah Imse, Executive Director of Multifamily NW told the committee, “… this legislation opens the door for 417 municipalities to enact their own rent control. That is 417 different sets of requirements that not only do nothing to address the underlying cause of rising rents, but create a regulatory hellscape for housing providers in every corner of the state. That is arguably irresponsible state policy and simply not sustainable for any housing provider, large or small.”
But, hey, what do Democrats care. No matter how compelling the case against rent control, advocates can position themselves as saviors against the forces of evil. And that can translate into votes.
The United Way has some good programs. Offering rental assistance. I get it. Last-minute help to prevent evictions. Makes sense. But supporting rent control legislation. That’s over the line.
Not willing to leave the current bad enough rent control law alone, the Oregon legislature is back with Senate Bill 611 that would limit annual rent increases to 3% plus inflation or 8% total, whichever is lower. The exemption would apply to buildings 3 years old or newer.
The bill has the support of numerous progressive and social welfare groups, including United Way of the Columbia Willamette, which has apparently deluded itself into thinking social justice concerns override economic realities.
It has also apparently deluded itself into thinking it’s legitimate for a non-profit, which sustains itself on millions of individual and corporate contributions and says it is ”…deeply committed to helping create a just and equitable region where all people can thrive…” should advocate for legislation that contradicts economic realities and is opposed by property owners across the state?
United Way of Board members include:
Greg Geshel, Vice President Human Resources at Comcast
Ashlee Irwin, Medicaid Business and Strategy Consultant at Kaiser Permanente
Mahir Patel, Vice President of Pharmacy Services at PacificSource Health Plans
Tichelle Sorenson, Academic Director of the MBA Program at PSU
Layla Zare, Vice President and Relationship Manager at Bank of America
Kim Spalding, Senior Manager at Perkins & Co.
Charlene Zidell, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships & Family Vision at The Zidell Companies.
Do the employers who endorsed placement of all these people on United Way’s board support the deeply flawed rent control bill their employees are pressing so hard for?
“Next to bombing, rent control is the most effective technique so far known for destroying cities.” Assar Lindbeck, Professor of Economics
During the French Revolution, the National Convention, an attempt at a national legislature, passed the Law of the Maximum imposing a maximum price on dozens of essential goods, mostly food items. The limitations discouraged farmers and producers. They began producing less or hoarding what they did produce, rather than selling food below its real value. Less food made its way into the towns and cities, which only exacerbated the shortages and led to the emergence of a thriving black market
This is what happens when governments take actions that contradict economic realities.
Welcome to the Oregon legislature and rent control.
Oregon started down this road in 2019 with a law prohibiting landlords across the state from raising rents more than 7 percent per year, plus the annual change in the consumer price index (CPI). The limit only applies to buildings that are more than 15 years old.
Not willing to leave bad enough alone, now the legislature is back with Senate Bill 611 that would limit annual rent increases to 3% plus inflation or 8% total, whichever is lower. The exemption would apply to buildings 3 years old or newer. Landlords would also have to cover three months’ rent if a tenant has to relocate through no fault of their own, up from the current requirement of one month of rental assistance for a no-fault eviction.
This foolishness is what you get when Oregon’s Democrats are left in charge.
The problem is, no matter how much liberals embrace the concept, rent control doesn’t work. Any short-term benefits, including the applause of some constituents, are always overshadowed by the long-term problems rent control creates.
Landlords who can’t raise the rent on their property to a market price are more likely to cut back on maintenance and less likely to invest in improvements. Not only will landlords have absolutely no economic incentive to invest more in their properties, they may not even have the funds because of limits on their rental income.
Rent control distorts the housing market by misallocating rental units to those who are already renting them. Whenever government prevents the charging of prices high enough to clear the market, shortages will occur.
The imposition of rent control can lead to a “demolition derby” where older controlled rental units are purposely torn down and replaced with higher priced units.
Rent control does not guarantee low rents because it doesn’t regulate the starting rent for a new tenant. When a tenant in a rent-controlled unit moves out, any savvy landlord will set the rent in the new lease at the current market rent, which is likely to be much higher.
In a review of 140 economics studies on rent control in Economics Journal Watch, economists overwhelmingly agreed that, “A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.” From the abstract: “I find that the preponderance of the literature points toward the conclusion that rent control introduces inefficiencies in housing markets. Moreover, the literature on the whole does not sustain any plausible redemption in terms of redistribution.”
A broad survey of economists by the IGM (Initiative on Global Markets) Forum revealed a similar repudiation of rent control. The Forum is a program of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “Rent control discourages supply of rental units,” said Associate Head of the MIT Department of Economics, David Autor. “Incumbent renters benefit from capped prices. New renters face reduced rental options.”
Once rent control is imposed, it is extremely hard to get rid of, even where its futility is eventually recognized. That’s because rent control will have held rents far below the market rate, so removing them is likely to cause immediate and substantial rent increases, something few politicians (and even some rent control critics) will be willing to embrace in the face of a potential public outcry.
The bill has the support numerous progressive and social welfare groups, including the Southern Oregon social justice nonprofit Rogue Action Center, Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon, The United Way of the Columbia Willamette and The Pacific Green Party, all of which have apparently deluded themselves into thinking social justice concerns override economic realities.
Rent control supporters claim its the quickest and easiest way to provide relief to renters in danger of being priced out of their home, but the fact is it just makes the problem worse.
Even with Oregon’s public school students already suffering from abysmal scores on national reading and mathematics tests and one in five students failing to graduate from high school in four years, state politicians can’t seem to stop inserting themselves into school curriculum decisions.
State Senators James I. Manning Jr. and Deb Patterson want to add another labor-intensive, complicated and questionable instructional mandate on students and teachers.
SB 284, submitted by the two senators at the request of Oregon Educators for Climate Education, “a statewide group of educators working toward Oregon legislation that would integrate and infuse PK-12 climate change education across all core subject areas”, would:
Require each school district board to develop a written plan establishing a climate change instructional program for kindergarten through grade 12 no later than June 1, 2026.
Require school districts to submit their plan to the Oregon Department of Education (ODE) for initial approval and then again every seven years.
Require ODE to develop and adopt a model plan in consultation with other state agencies and stakeholders, to develop academic content standards, and to approve and make available list of resources and materials that meet academic content standards.
Require the Superintendent of Public Instruction to withhold distributions from Student Investment Account from school districts that fail to develop and implement climate change instructional program.
Require that career and technical education funding from High School Graduation and College and Career Readiness Fund be spent on programs that support climate-focused sustainability career pathways.
Meanwhile, state Rep. David Gomberg, D-Lincoln City, introduced House Bill 2905 that would add to existing requirements for Oregon’s schools to teach about BIPOC, LGBTQ, immigrant communities and others by requiring that schools “Ensure that the academic content standards for history, geography, economics and civics include sufficient instruction on the histories, contributions and perspectives of individuals who…are of Jewish descent.” The bill has already cleared the House awaits Senate action.
SB 284’s climate change mandate would come on top of a K–12 Native American curriculum for all Oregon public schools created after passage of SB 13, a Tribal History/Shared History initiative, in 2017. The initiative has developed more than 45 lesson plans for grades four, eight, and ten across multiple content areas. The Oregon Department of Education’s Office of Indian Education (ODE/OIE) launched the first phase of implementation in these grade levels During the 2020/21 academic year.
It’s all fine and good to want Oregon’s K-12 public school students to be up to speed on topics of the day, but adding more costly and time-consuming mandates when even the basic curriculum isn’t being effectively delivered is a recipe for failure.
And the legislature doesn’t have a particularly good track record with earlier curriculum changes it has imposed.
Legislation requiring that all Oregon school districts teach about the Holocaust beginning with the 2020-2021 school year is a case in point.
Claire Sarnowski, a freshman at Lake Oswego’s Lakeridge High School, came up with the idea of mandating Holocaust instruction after hearing Holocaust survivor Alter Wiener tell his story. Sarnowski approached state Sen. Rob Wagner, who agreed to introduce a bill.
It all sounded so simple and straightforward at the outset, but the final legislation was a classic example of mission creep.
The legislation went far beyond mandating that students be taught about the Holocaust. Employing the coercive power of government, teachers are now required to address a slew of social justice topics: the immorality of mass violence; respect for cultural diversity; the obligation to combat wrongdoing through resistance, including protest; and the value of restorative justice.
You can be sure that any mandated climate change curriculum would morph into similar broad terrain and impose even more demands on Oregon’s already overburdened teachers and students.
Enforce diversity, equity and inclusion justice? You betcha.
Suspend a requirement for an essential skills test in math, reading and writing to graduate from high school through the 2022-2023 school year? You got it.
Accept that nearly one of every five Oregon high school students don’t graduate in four years? Uh huh.
Increase the number of teachers employed in Oregon’s public schools to an all-time high even as the number of enrolled students drops precipitously to its lowest level in nearly two decades? Yup.
Ensure math and reading proficiency? Not so much.
Oregon’s public schools are turning too many students into functional illiterates and math morons.
Results from the recently administered National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reveal that 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.
The mathematics and reading comprehension assessments are given every two years to students at grades 4 and 8. The tests break results into four categories: below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced. Students performing at or above the NAEP Proficient level on NAEP assessments demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.
Mathematics
Grade 4
The percentage of students in Oregon who performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level: 29%
The percentage of students in Oregon who performed below the NAEP Basic level: 34%
Grade 8
The percentage of students in Oregon who performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level: 22%
The percentage of students in Oregon who performed below the NAEP Basic level: 43%
Reading
Grade 4
The percentage of students in Oregon who performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level: 28%
The percentage of students in Oregon who performed below the NAEP Basic level: 44%
Grade 8
The percentage of students in Oregon who performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level: 28%
The percentage of students in Oregon who performed below the NAEP Basic level: 33%
“If you’re blue, and you don’t know where to go to Why don’t you go where fashion sits? Puttin’ on the ritz”
Can you think of anything more incongruous than the Ritz and Stumptown?
Like a diamond in the rough, The Ritz-Carlton Residences Portland at 550 S.W. 10th Ave. are set to open for occupancy in July 2023.
Owners of the 138 residential condominiums on floors 21-35 atop The Ritz-Carlton, Portland will enjoy magnificent views as the $600 million building becomes a landmark in a dynamic Pacific Northwest city, the developers exult.
Keller Williams Realty Professionals is already marketing 39 of the individual condos at prices ranging from $1,1000,000 for a one bedroom 2 bath 1,105 sq. ft unit to $8,999,000 for a 3 bedroom 4 bathroom 3,256 sq. ft unit. Principal and interest on the mortgage, plus property taxes and condo fees, could translate to an $8000 a month expense for the 1 bedroom.
“We are seeing interest from folks that have made businesses in other cities that are spending more time in Portland,” he said, “and they want to be here. They like the lifestyle of Portland and the quality of life that we have here,” Brian Owendoff, owner’s representative for the tower, told KGW-TV in March.
Is he serious? Is “…the quality of life that we have here…” in Portland going to be a magnet for well-heeled luxury-seeking sophisticates?
In 1992, journalist and urban criticPhilip Langdon marveled at how “this courteous, well-kept city of 453,000, and especially its downtown, has become a paragon of healthy urban development.” Nobody’s saying that now.
With Ineffectual government at all levels, property crime more than double the national average, motor vehicle thefts through the roof. (More than 11,000 vehicles were stolen in 2022, up from 6,500 in 2019; and it’s not just individuals being hit. International Auto Sales on Southeast 82nd Avenue in Portland has had twenty two vehicles stolen in just two years, costing near a quarter million in damages.), homeless encampments sprouting like weeds, used hypodermic needles littering the sidewalks and parks (In 2022, crews collected 176,962 used needles in the 213 block Downtown Enhanced Service area), open air drug markets, routine store break-ins, routine homeless camp fires (Portland Fire & Rescue responded to more than a thousand tent or tarp-related fires during 2021-2022), gun violence, homicides (2022 was a particularly bloody year for Portland, with homicides climbing from 36 in 2019 to 97 in 2022 – a record), bicycle thefts galore (More than 1,000 bikes are reported stolen in the city each year, according to Willamette Week), public urination and defecation, Portland is far from the magnet it once was.
Businesses in the Ritz-Carlton area are already up in arms over Multnomah County’s new Behavioral Health Resource Center on S.W. Park Ave. between Oak and Harvey Milk Streets. Willamette Week recently reported business owners are asking the county to do more to keep the neighborhood free from what some of the center’s clients are bringing, including threats of violence and drug use. Painting a bleak picture of the situation, the businesses are frustrated to no end and question how the Ritz-Carlton will be able to attract customers to its $518 a night and up hotel rooms.
Polls conducted in 2022 showed only 11% of voters thought Portland was heading in the right direction — a steep drop from 76% in 2000.
There’s a reason why an outpost of the upscale Saks Fifth Avenue at Portland’s much-heralded Pioneer Place Mall abruptly closed in 2010 and was replaced by Off Fifth at Bridgeport Village in the suburbs, a discount venue that offers closeouts, clearance items and private-label goods. “Saks didn’t quite fit in with our fleece and flip-flops,” Kathleen Healey, senior associate broker with Urban Works, told The Oregonian.
That’s another way of saying Portland has a reputation for being kind of quirky, dismissive of pretense, leery of brazen displays of wealth. Drenched in wetness and lefty idealism, where people wait till the “Walk “ sign lights up even if no cars are coming, it is hardly a haven for moneyed showoffs or a welcoming place for a Ritz-Carlton.
Like with Saks Fifth Avenue, the prognosis isn’t promising.
There just aren’t enough of Slim Aaron’s beautiful people in Portland
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