Corvallis, Oregon has finally gotten its moment in the sun.
The television commercial keeps popping up like a bad penny.
“My name is Karen and I’m the head pharmacist at Corvallis Drug,” it begins. “We’ll get customers come in and they’re looking for a brain supplement and Prevagen is the one I recommend…It’s just a product I believe in.”
Well, good for you, Karen, and probably for your pocketbook, but not so good for your customers.
Because Prevagen is marketed as an over-the-counter dietary supplement rather than a prescription drug, standard celebrity or professional testimonial rules apply rather than strict prescription drug broadcast laws enforced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). That’s Karen’s the escape hatch.
Quincy Bioscience, the privately held company that manufactures Prevagen, used to hype that’s its secret was “an ingredient originally discovered in jellyfish”, a protein called Apoaequorin found in bioluminescent crystal jellyfish, scientifically known as Aequorea victoria.
equorea victoria
In 2024, a jury found Quincy’s advertising deceptive and fraudulent. The ruling, which came on charges first filed by the Federal Trade Commission and Attorney General of New York in 2017, forbid Quincy from making claims that Prevagen-branded products can improve memory or cognition, that Prevagen can show results within 90 days, and that Prevagen is “clinically proven” to work.
But you still see the Prevagen commercials and the product can be found at most major retailers. How come? It’s because Quincy shifted its marketing to vague taglines like “For Your Brain” instead of pulling ads its entirely. And the commercials still work.
Quincy launched Prevagen in 2007. According to the FTC, the supplement had already generated more than $165 million in sales by 2017. Because Quincy is a private company, sales since then are not public, but are believed to be substantial, and the product isn’t cheap. Amazon, for example, is advertising 60 capsules of Prevagen Extra Strength with 20mg of Apoaequorin for $193.89.
Unfortunately, Prevagen is not the only heavily promoted brain supplement. Another is Neuriva, an over-the-counter dietary supplement, not an FDA-approved drug.
Neuriva is marketed to fuel multiple “indicators of brain health” such as focus, memory, learning, accuracy, and concentration. Its key active ingredients are 100mg of coffee cherry extract and 100mg of plant-sourced phosphatidylserine.
But its brain health claims also lack strong support from well-designed clinical trials and Neuriva, like Prevagen, has faced legal challenges over how its products are advertised.
So, don’t take Karen’s advice or rely on yucky jellyfish to make you sharper.
“There’s no evidence to suggest there’s an ingredient in supplements that can improve brain health,” says Dr. Pieter Cohen, an internist with Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance, whose research focuses extensively on dietary supplements. “Nothing legally contained in supplements has been proven to improve your thinking or prevent memory loss.”
It used to be that if you didn’t read your local newspaper you simply didn’t know what was going on.
When I was growing up in the small town of Wallingford, Connecticut in the 1950s, my family read the Meriden Record, established in 1867, at the breakfast table and the New Haven Register, around since 1812, in the afternoon.
When I moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, in 1987, one of the first things I did was subscribe to the local paper, the Lake Oswego Review.
In 2006, Lake Oswego spent $20 million to acquire some property featuring an 89,000 sq. ft. office complex, intending to transform the site into a community center. But all hell broke loose when local opposition to the plan surfaced. Over coming years, the issue generated persistent news coverage in the Lake Oswego Review.
A couple years in, I asked a local friend, an educated professional, “So, what do you think about the controversy over the proposed community center?”
“Huh,” he replied. “Don’t know much about it.” I was shocked. He didn’t subscribe to the Lake Oswego Review, the principal news source for local residents.
That was back when as many as 8,500 local newspapers still played a critical role in the civic health of communities across America.
But since 2000, more than 3,200 newspapers in the country have simply vanished. In 2025, only about 36% of U.S. adults said they got news from their local daily paper at least sometimes, down from around 55% in 2000, and I suspect that percentage has continued to slip, particularly among young people. Overall news trust is also continuing to decline, although the most trusted news brands continue to be local television outlets and regional or local newspapers.
The loss of local media coverage in Oregon has been painful for the producers and consumers.
The Chronicle, which had served the southern Willamette Valley region in Lane County since 1909, focusing on Springfield, Creswell, Cottage Grove and Pleasant Hill, died a painful death earlier this month.
The staff of the Chronicle on their last day.
“We never put our heads down or ran on muscle memory,” Executive Editor Erin Tierney-Heggenstaller wrote in the last edition. “We were strategic, offering communities with virtually no other credible journalistic outlet what people say they want: award-winning hyper-local news about family, friends, and neighbors; practical reporting to make daily life easier; and curated content edited with standards that social media, AI slop, and corporatized commodity news no longer offer. “Build it, and they will come.” But they didn’t.”
The Lake Oswego Review hasn’t been spared from the same tumult.
Founded in 1921 as the Western Clackamas Review, renamed the Oswego Review in 1928, and then the Lake Oswego Review in 1961, the paper underwent several transformations, gradually expanding its readership and impact. By 1976, the paper was being published twice a week, totaling 90 pages and with a circulation of 8,200. In 1978, Eagle Newspapers, an Oregon regional newspaper group rooted in John Day, purchased the paper.
In 1996, former Review editor Steve Clark and his wife, Randalyn, bought the Review and its parent company, Community Newspapers Inc. Over the next few years, the company grew to include nine community newspapers. In August 2000, Lake Oswego residents Robert and Marilyn Pamplin bought Community Newspapers and transitioned it to Pamplin Media Group. Over the next 24 years, Pamplin grew to include two dozen newspapers in Oregon and their corresponding websites, including the Lake Oswego Review and the group’s flagship, the Portland Tribune, which had launched in February 2000.
“The Tribune and its family of newspapers provides the ‘right stuff’ that citizens need to engage effectively — with government, with each other, with the bigger world,” former Metro councilor Rex Burkholder said in 2016. “News, especially news that is about what is happening here and now, in one’s own community, is essential nourishment for anyone wanting to make a difference.”
On June 1, 2024, Mississippi-based Carpenter Media Group bought the entire Pamplin Media Group for an undisclosed sum. Carpenter, founded in 2023, says on its website, “The newspapers, websites and magazines we lead are the cornerstones of their communities, allies to businesses, incubators for innovation, and cultivators of journalistic talent. We aim to forge a well-informed, interconnected, and prosperous society – one community at a time.”
So much for that. In Oregon, a massacre followed.
Among the victims was the Lake Oswego Review, which had built a strong track record of publishing award-winning investigative and enterprise journalism, and two other Pamplin papers in adjacent cities, the West Linn Tidings and the Wilsonville Spokesman.
On February 11, 2026, the three papers were merged into one,The Review, a pale imitation of its three predecessors. The entire August 12, 2026 issue of The Review ran just 24 pages, including one self-congratulatory page promoting local stories in The Review, three pages of public notices and one page urging readers to let Oregon legislators know they value access to public notices in their local paper. The August 19 issue had just 15 pages of news.
With that kind of shrinkage in news coverage, it hardly matters whether my Lake Oswego friend subscribes to the local paper today.
Meanwhile, other local news outlets have shriveled as well.
In October 2024, Carpenter Media Group bought the EO Media Group, which owned Oregon’s Bend Bulletin, the East Oregonian and other rural Oregon newspapers, and proceeded to slash and burn the papers’ staffs. John Carr, Senior VP of Oregon and Washington at Carpenter Media, said the cuts were “necessary financial changes and cost-cutting measures that will stabilize these publications for the future.”
The Portland Tribune had 40-50 newsroom staffers when it launched in February 2001. It ceased printing in June 2025 following major newsroom cutbacks and layoffs and now operates strictly as a digital, online-only news service that requires a paid subscription to access. Although Multnomah County still describes the Tribune on its website as a ” Portland city newspaper, offering comprehensive coverage of news, sports, business, people and entertainment”, it now has just one reporter, Hannah Seibold , who describes herself as “the sole survivor of the Portland Tribune at this point”.
The Oregoniannewspaper, once the Portland area’s dominant local news source, has suffered as well. Founded in 1850 as a four page weekly, its first issue printed in a log shack on Portland’s SW First and Morrison,
I joined The Oregonian as a business reporter in 1987. It was a robust, well-respected paper then, with a proud past and a much-anticipated future. Daily Monday-Friday circulation was 319,624; Sunday circulation 375,914. When I left the paper 10 years later in 1997 to take a corporate communications job, daily Monday-Friday circulation was 360,000, Sunday circulation 450,000. We were on a roll.
Much of that success was attributed to Sandra Mims Rowe, who came on as editor in 1993 and tried to energize the newsroom with a hiring spree, bringing on reporters and editors from around the country. Under her leadership, the newsroom distinguished itself by winning five Pulitzers.
But the paper wasn’t able to escape the tumult of the newspaper business during her tenure. By the time she left the paper in Dec. 2009, she had to cut staff, salaries and benefits as circulation and revenue declined.
In 2009, The Oregonian’s daily circulation sat at 268,572 and Sunday circulation at 344,950, causing the paper to lose its position as one of the top 25 Sunday circulation papers in the country. That same year, the paper announced a long-term policy that protected full-time employees from layoffs for economic or technological reasons would end.
By 2012, daily circulation sank to 228,599, only slightly higher than circulation in 1950, and the declines continued. Talented reporters began departing in droves, some pushed out, others motivated by buy-outs. At the same time the once powerful paper saw its clout diminish as it abandoned rural Oregon and 7-day-a-week print distribution.
When I left The Oregonian in 1997 to take a corporate communications job, the paper employed a newsroom staff of about 400 journalists (reporters, editors, and photographers). The newsroom staff now consists of about 66 employees.
The paper publishes print editions just four days a week, while continuously updating its digital content. Average daily print circulation is 29,325 copies and Sunday print circulation is 44,294 copies. The days are long gone when what was in The Oregonian, particularly its opinion section and columnists, dominated local conversations all day.
So here we are. A once mighty paper hollowed out and humbled. A growing population served by a smaller paper. A weakened paper that no longer drives the daily discussion at the proverbial water cooler (or over a latte). A diminished, editorially impotent presence with a dwindling ability to hold powerful interests accountable.
But is the local news environment as depleted as often presumed? Is the gloomy view unwarranted?
As the size and impact of the traditional major dailies and weeklies in the Portland metro area have shrunk, other news outlets are working to fill the gap. Some of their audiences are limited and their coverage is not very deep, but together they are beginning to fill a continued need and judicious selectivity can provide unexpectedly broad local news coverage.
There is still, however, too much online coverage of national news and not enough of local. As Public Media Company CEO Tim Isgitt recently said to Poynter, “…public media is facing a perfect storm. We’re part of a rapidly changing media and technology landscape that is providing unlimited content — but perhaps not the content we need. We can get any national journalism we need, but we can get very little local journalism from this landscape…We’re part of a media and technology landscape that is largely failing our society — with detrimental societal impacts, whether it’s misinformation, lack of trust or the effects it’s having on polarization, teen mental health or the loneliness epidemic.”
Some local media in Oregon are trying to do better.
Willamette Week, an alternative paper and digital media outlet, continues to offers cultural, civic and political coverage and reaches hundreds of thousands of print and online viewers, even if it tends to focus on only a few topics each week and its daily local online news coverage is limited.
The Portland Mercury, an alternative bi-weekly, offers coverage of local arts, music, and city culture.
Other options include the solid news site OPB, City Cast Portland, a website and a daily podcast for local news, Oregon Capitol Chronicle, part of the States Newsroom, and a relative newcomer, Axios Portland, with two reporters, Meira Gebel and Kale Williams.
And there’s still Oregon Business, around since 1981, that reports on a wide range of topics such as leadership, innovation, technology, culture, politics and environment, and the Portland Business Journal, published since 1984, which delivers local commercial news, data, and networking opportunities for the Portland, Oregon metro area.
Another innovative outlet focusing on local business news is Portland Inno, a digital media outlet powered by the Portland Business Journal, focused on Portland’s local startup, technology and innovation economies. A recent story, for example, broke the news that Mark Ronay, who founded materials company Liquid Wire in 2016, had launched a company is called Spectralsurf, aimed at bringing down the costs of semiconductor manufacturing, with funding from Portland Seed Fund and ONAMI .
Then there are Portland’s television stations, KGW 8, KOIN 6, KATU 2 and KPTV Fox 12, offering varying levels of useful local news.
Portland’s local news outlets sometimes provide mindless drivel and poorly-researched gossip, comparable to the blitzing of the podium done by the Trump administration on a regular basis, and there’s a lot of slop out there, but they can also produce substantial deeply-researched impactful stories and the fact is the public is hungry for reliable local news.
Increasingly, however, that hunger for local news is being met not by the news outlets noted above, but by social media. Young people, in particular, move between podcasts, X accounts and YouTube livestreams where there’s no editorial control, no reviews and no accountability, where skepticism is required, but not often employed. Of course, young people will eventually grow older, but there is little likelihood that they will grow into accessing media as their parents did.
For the first time globally, more people are getting their news from social media platforms featuring independent online news personalities and commentators on platforms like Substack, TikTok and YouTube than television or news websites, according to a new report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. This is particularly the case with younger audiences who often stumble upon information passively, consuming news that is automatically served to them through algorithm feeds, comment sections, and trending topics.
“…most Americans now get their information and form their opinions through creators, podcasts, Substacks, group chats,” says Renée DiResta, an Associate Research Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “Most traditional institutions have only minimal engagement or presence in those spaces. So that ecosystem runs on a very different model of legitimacy. People are following people, not institutions. They’re following people that they find appealing or relatable. Somebody coming to you from their kitchen.”
Substack is one beneficiary off this trend. One of the more prolific, and controversial, Substack commenters in the Portland area is Keven Dahlgren, who writes on homeless issues in Truth on the Streets. Another widely read site is Oregon Roundup by Jeff Eager, which says it covers “Oregon’s uniquely dysfunctional state government and the politics that create it.”
One problem, though, is that of the strong, reliable news, even local news, is only available if you are willing to shell out for a subscription, and many people are not. As one commenter on a substack post, Second Rough Draft, recently noted, “…the press sells what the public wants to buy. If there was a greater market for light, the media would cut back on the heat…elite audiences willing to pay are getting ample good information and others choose to pay less and get less.”
The Reuters Institute notes in a report, another troubling sign, that it is seeing stagnation or decline in overall online news engagement. People are turning away from the news. “The trends are worse among younger people and those without a university degree,” Reuters says.
Some of that decline may be simply due to the way social media works. “Social media algorithms are optimised for engagement, with the goal of keeping people on the platform as long as possible, ” according to Reuters. “This has seen social media companies prioritising things like entertaining short-form video and de-prioritising news…Political news caused headaches for them, so they turned away.”
The problem is locally-focused social media can be a swamp and it can be hard to separate truth from the muck.
“… in different, darker corners of the internet, it has become a source of endless misinformation and disinformation dispensed by a panoply of influencers, conspiracy theorists, edgelords, grifters and con men, DIY gurus, hostile foreign actors, and partisan echo chambers full of dittoheads and doxers,” observes John Ramage, a former and Arizona State University professor of English, on Substack. “It is a world without gatekeepers, regulators or arbiters, an epistemic wild, wild west where anyone who relies on evidence-based reasoning is dismissed as an establishment tool.”
Then there’s the problem of what’s happening when news-searchers engage with social media, such as items on X. 404 Media recently noted that X’s algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site’s algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user’s For You Page.
“When a user on X sees a post that makes them mad — like a press release from a politician from a political party they don’t like — sometimes they’ll fight about the post in the replies,” 404 Media noted. “It doesn’t matter who you follow or what your stated values are, X reads replying as engagement and will send more of the infuriating posts the user’s way.”
Reviewing The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, New York Times book critic Alexandra Jacobs noted that with social media,”All was sweet, innocent fun for awhile, then the algorithm came along and ruined everything, like a drifter in a Cormac McCarthy novel”, with all sorts of deleterious effects.
Or as historian Anton Jäger said recently on the Ezra Klein Show, “…our attention is fundamentally shaped now by algorithms that care about controversy, that care about newness, that are hunting amorally and constantly for whatever will get a rise out of people.”
It’s also important to realize that slop is proliferating on the web — some studies say 50 percent of online articles are now artificially generated. Then there are so-called “pink slime” sites, publications that mimic the appearance and output of traditional news organizations. Snopes, an online fact-checking and myth-busting website, can help sniff out such sites.
However you consume local news, “Studies have shown that the supply of local news is correlated with higher rates of civic engagement,” says the Agora Journalism Center at -the University of Oregon. “Robust local journalism matters to how informed citizens are, and according to another recent Knight Foundation report, a healthy news and information ecosystem creates “a virtuous circle whereby improved information contributes to improved community outcomes.”
If you want an educated, informed public in a position to make wise judgments, quality local journalism is key. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787, “The way to prevent irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.”
The Portland City Council approved a term sheet for a possible Moda Center renovation on August 12, one more step in a potential misguided commitment to a billionaire and his buddies.
The term sheet commits what The Oregonian has dubbed “a torrent of taxpayer money” of up to $573 million in public funds for the renovation of the Moda Center, including a state commitment of $365 million, a Portland commitment of $120 million and a Multnomah County commitment of $88 million. Portland would also commit up to $275 million in maintenance costs on the arena over the next 20 years and Multnomah County would chip in $13 million for capital expenses.
Don’t cry for Texas billionaire Tom Dundon and Rip City Rising, the group he leads in the Blazers deal, under which the group purchased 80.1% of the Trailblazers at a $4 billion valuation and the remaining 19.9% at a $4.5 billion valuation. Whatever they pay is likely to be rewarded with a much bigger payday down the road. At some point they are going to turn it over and probably make a bundle.
On august 21, it was reported that Marc Lore had agreed to sell his control stake in the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves and the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx to billionaire investor Marc Stad at a $4.5 billion enterprise value. Lore and Alex Rodriguez purchased their initial controlling stake in the Minnesota Timberwolves and Minnesota Lynx from Glen Taylor based on a $1.5 billion valuation, completing the process in June 2025.
And look at what one owner just pulled off selling the Los Angeles Lakers.
Earlier this month, Mark Walter sold the Los Angeles Lakers to Bob Iger, the former Disney CEO and Los Angeles notable, and Josh Kushner, a venture capitalist. The deal came together in three days: $12.5 billion for a team that Walter bought less than a year ago for $10 billion.
Dundon and his investment group also stand to reap billions from the Blazers acquisition down the road. What makes ordinary people who would never go along with subsidies for billionaires become willing supporters of such rewards when they become politicians?
The payoffs for other buyers of NBA teams who have subsequently sold their teams have been eye watering.
Boston Celtics: Bought by an investment group, Boston Basketball Partners L.L.C, led by Wyc Grousbeck that purchased the team in 2002 for $360 million; sold to an investment group led by private equity mogul Bill Chisholm in August 2025 for $6.1 billion.
Phoenix Suns: Bought by Robert Sarver, leading an investment group called Suns Legacy Partners, in 2004 for $401 million; billionaire mortgage lender, Mat Ishbia, purchased the majority stake of the Suns and the WNBA’s Mercury for $4 billion in 2023.
Dallas Mavericks: Mark Cuban purchased a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks from H. Ross Perot Jr. in January 2000 for $285 million; Cuban sold a majority interest in the team to Miriam Adelson and Patrick Dumont of the Adelson family casino empire for $3.5 billion in 2023.
Charlotte Hornets: Michael Jordan bought a majority stake in the Charlotte Bobcats (now the Hornets) from founder Bob Johnson in March 2010 for $275 million; sold his majority stake for $3 billion to a group led by Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall in July 2023.
Golden State Warriors: Bought from Chris Cohan by Joe Lacob and Peter Guber for $450 million in July 2010; current valuation estimated at $10.8 – $11.3 billion.
Milwaukee Bucks: Bought by former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl in 1985 for $18 million; sold by Kohl to Wes Edens and Marc Lasry in 2014 for $550 million; current estimated valuation $4.1 – $4.5 billion.
LA Lakers: Bought by Jerry Buss in 1979 for $67.5 million; in June 2025, Buss family agreed to sell controlling interest to Mark Walter, a minority owner since 2021 and owner of the L.A. Dodgers, for $10 billion.
And the money changing hands in these deals is likely to get bigger. “I am absolutely convinced that we have not reached anything close to a ceiling,” Irwin Kishner, a partner at the law firm Herrick and co-chair of its sports law division, told The New York Times. And particularly with the most recognizable teams, he said, “you could only envision the numbers going further north.”
A YouTube channel called Election Time recently ran an item showing Democrat Tina Kotek polling at 45% and Republican Christine Drazan at 44% in the governor’s race.
And this isn’t the only outlet saying Kotek has the advantage.
“While Oregon’s 40-year history of electing Democratic governors and the state’s strong distaste for Republican President Donald Trump suggest Drazan has a difficult road ahead of her,” the Oregon Capital Chronicle opined on May 26. And I recently heard a couple political analysts on OPB saying Kotek will likely win it all again.
They can’t be serious.
This is the “Tax Everything that moves Kotek” who just tried to pull a fast one on Oregonians by shifting a despised transportation tax measure to May in hopes reduced voter participation would doom it, but still saw more than 83% of voters across the political spectrum reject it.
This is the leader of Oregon’s Democratic party that has fostered an anti-business climate for decades, enabled horrendous K-12 school performance despite high per pupil spending, filled the state Supreme Court with liberal judges ever since the administration of Republican Victor Atiyeh, whose term ended in January 1987, and exploded the state budget since then, increasing it from $12.57 billion in 1987-1989 to $138.9 billion in 2025-2027.
It’s the party that gleefully accepted, and then stalled returning, a $500,000 contribution from a disgraced and bankrupt crypto company after the U.S. Attorney’s Office requested it return the money to the federal government.
This is a party so beholden to unions, which represent just 15% of working Oregonians, that it enacted a law to pay striking public and private workers unemployment benefits, that has watched Oregon’s business reputation tank in national rankings, that tolerates underperforming K-12 schools while suspending the requirement that high school students must pass standardized proficiency exams (the “Essential Skills” requirement) to graduate, that has watched the projected cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement project swell from $4.8 billion to $14.4 billion, and potentially $17.7 billion.
Oregon is in trouble and continuing Democratic Party control isn’t the solution.
It’s a tactic as old as the hills. Put controversial measures on the ballot in predicted low-turnout elections, hoping to gain from voter apathy.
Oregon Democrats, ever anxious to ignore the public will, pushed the vote on Measure 20, the much-reviled $4.3 billion transportation funding referendum, to the upcoming May 19 primary ballot, rather than the November ballot, in hopes that would give it a better chance of passing.
Maybe they were right. With only about a week to go to cast ballots, about 87 percent of eligible Oregon voters have not done so.
Critics of the measure came up with about 250,000 signatures to get the measure oin he ballot in the first place, more than three times what was required. Where are all those people now?
If approved,
At a time of escalating gas prices due to the Iran war, and President Trump discussing lowering the federal gas tax, gas prices in Oregon would increase six cents per gallon to 46 cents.
Vehicle registration fees would increase from $43 to $85 for passenger vehicles; $63 to $105 for utility trailers; $44 to $86 for mopeds and motorcycles; and increase passenger vehicle title fees from $77 to $216.
Payroll taxes would double to 0.2%.
The deadline to have a ballot postmarked or in a drop box is 8:00 p.m. May 19. DO IT!
“Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act helped roughly triple the ICE budget, allocating $45 billion for building new immigration centers and hiring 10,000 new ICE agents. One dispiriting lesson of the imperial boomerang is that, once. bought and paid for, structures of intimidation and oppression tend to endure.” David Wallace-Wells, 1/25/2026
Update, 1/30/2026 – The Washington Post reported that local officials are raising logistical and humanitarian concerns in 23 towns where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to convert industrial buildings into detention centers that combined would hold up to 80,000 people. ICE has offered few details about its plan since The Washington Post first reported on it in December 2025. One detention center the Department of Homeland Security wants to open would be a more than 1 million sq. ft. industrial warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia that would be retrofitted to hold 8,500 detainees and hundreds of staff, more than the city’s total population. The City Manager, Eric Taylor, has said the city does not have the water or sewer infrastructure to support the facility. Unaddressed is the question of why the government needs such huge detention facilities when it says it’s objective is to deport people.
Update, 2/12/2026 – It’s not just more detention centers coming down the pike. Wired reported that ICE and DHS have quietly carried out a months-long expansion, securing more than 150 new leases and office expansions across nearly every state, often in or near major metro areas. Many new facilities sit near schools, medical offices, and places of worship, with DHS pressing the GSA to bypass standard procurement rules and hide lease details under claims of “national security.”
Update, 2/21/2026 – Funding for the Department of Homeland Security expired has expired and Democrats have made 10 demands to rein in Trump’s surge of deportation forces into U.S. cities. One of those demands is “Compliance with Basic Detention Standards and Oversight of Facilities.” Think about it. Incarceration facilities are already legally required to be humane and hygienic., but as Radley Balko has reported on SubStack in The Unpopulist, there is a growing pile of reports from attorneys, journalists, human rights groups, judges, and others about shocking, inhumane conditions at facilities around the country.
Update, 3/7/2026 – So far, DHS has completed the purchase of 10 of the 23 detention center properties it initially pursued, spending more than $890 million, according to deed records or statements by local officials. Efforts to acquire 10 other properties — in Indiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia — have failed, according to statements by local officials or building owners.
In the years preceding his death in 1875, George Templeton Strong, a prominent Wall Street attorney, kept a voluminous journal of his life and times. In April 1865, near the end of the American civil war, he wrote, “These four years have reduced me to something like pauperism, But I am profoundly grateful for them nevertheless. They have given me — & my wife & my boys, — a country worth living in & living for, & to be proud of.”
I can’t say President Trump’s inhumane crackdown on immigrants and harassment and murder of American citizens in the past year have given me a country worth living in, living for and to be proud of.
Not while the Trump administration promotes hatred of “the other”. David Masciotra. David Masciotrar ecently wrote in the Washington Monthly, “Through (Elie) Wiesel’s story and the stories he told and created, two truths become inescapable. The first is that it is naïve, if not catastrophic, to underestimate the power of hatred. “
I doubt 7-year-old Diana Crespo, a second grader at Gresham’s Alder Elementary School, and 5-year-old Liam Ramos, the bunny-hatted child detained by immigration agents in Minneapolis, see America as a country worth living in and living for and to be proud of either. They are both being held at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s South Texas Family Residential Center in Texas.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has spread its detention center tentacles across the United States:
Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) reported on January 29, 2026 that ICE is planning another detention center in Newport, Oregon as soon as May.
The Atlantic reported that the warehouses expected to be detention centers could become white elephants if there’s a change in ICE policies and the detainee population decreases. “If the goal is to not have endless illegal immigration, those centers will be obsolete in three to five years,” a longtime ICE official told me. “The amount of money going into them is abhorrent.”
The spread of these. detention centers reminds me of another brutal time.
Most of us know the names of a few Nazi concentration camps, like Dachau, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died. But they were part of a massive complex of more than 850 ghettos, concentration camps, forced-labor camps and extermination camps CNN has identified. They stretched from France and the Netherlands in the west to Estonia, Lithuania and Poland in the east that the Nazis established during the 12 years Adolf Hitler was in power. Their purpose — to segregate , oppress and persecute their opponents.
Like the ICE detention centers, the Nazi system started small and then metastasized like a cancer, according to the Wiener Holocaust Library.
Initially there were so-called SA camps. (Sturmabteilung (SA), or “Brownshirts,” was the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing). After the Night of Long Knives in 1934, the SS and Heinrich Himmler shut down the SA camps and consolidated control of all camps in Germany. Himmler and the SS used Dachau, an original SS camp, as a blueprint for all camps. From 1934 onwards, the SS developed and then operated the camp system, which lasted until Germany’s defeat in 1945.
The SS started building major camps, beginning with Sachsenhausen in 1936, then Buchenwald in 1937, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen in 1938 and Ravensbrück for women in 1939. Political prisoners were the first inmates. Then people with previous criminal convictions. Next were the so-called “asocials”, such as Roma, homosexuals, prostitutes, the homeless and the “work-shy”. The mass imprisonment of Jews began in 1938 after the Anschluss and Kristallnacht.
As the Second World War began in earnest, foreign citizens from newly occupied countries such as Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands began to be imprisoned , followed by Soviet prisoners of war (POW’s) after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Those who believe U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can and will be restrained under the Trump administration might want to stop and reconsider.
With an administration where cruelty is the point, it can happen here.
Black Friday is probably going to turn into Bleak Friday for some credit users at Oregon retailers.
“When it Comes to West Coast Furniture Stores, We Have the Best Prices in Home Furniture,” Mor Furniture says on its website. On Nov. 26, the site is highlighting: “IN-STORE ONLY. No interest with equal monthly payments for 61 months on purchases of $6000 or more made with your Mor Furniture credit card. Equal monthly payments required for 61 months. Learn more.”
If you’re not careful, it could be a costly trap
Let’s say you buy furniture that costs $6,800. The monthly payment due for 61 months, Mor told me, would be $112.00. BUT, if you still owe any of the $6800 at the end of the 61 months, even $1, Mor Furniture will charge you interest on the full $6800 at a 35.99% rate starting from the purchase date.
Do the math. The total interest on an amortized $6800 loan paid off in 61 months at an annual interest rate of 35.99% would be approximately $7,422.39, more than the cost of the furniture itself. In other words, that furniture will cost you $6,800 + $7,422.39, a total of $14,222.
Shop at Key Home Furnishings and you will encounter the same problem if you don’t pay off your entire purchase price in the time required.“No interest will be charged on the promo balance if you pay it off, in full, within the promo period.,” Key says. “If you do not, interest will be charged on the promo balance from the purchase date. The promo balance is equal to the promo purchase amount and any related optional debt cancellation fees. “
Wayfair credit card financing also offers 0% interest options for a set period (e.g., 6, 12, or 24 months) on qualifying purchases, but if you don’t pay the balance in full before the promotional period ends, you will be charged retroactive interest on the entire original purchase amount at a high APR.
A perceptive consumer observed on Reddit, “One really has to study a business structure. They aren’t furniture dealers first, they are credit companies first, predatory lenders that have attached a tangible item or service to their scheme.”
It’s worth noting that deferred financial schemes are not restricted to furniture stores. Numerous other retailers offer it, too.
For example, Car Toys, a specialty car audio and mobile electronics retailer, promotes “No interest if paid in full within promotional period” but “Interest will be charged to your account from the purchase date if their purchase balance is not paid in full within the promotional period.”
Window company Renewal by Andersen can trap consumers, too. NO MONEY DOWN, NO MONTHLY PAYMENTS, NO INTEREST FOR 12 MONTHS* its website says. Then it adds, “*Interest is billed during promo period but will be waived if the amount financed is paid in full before promo period expires.’
Anybody can be caught in these credit schemes, but the people most likely to be vulnerable are consumers with lower credit scores who suffer a job loss or medical emergency that makes it hard to pay off the balance, triggering the retroactive interest charge.
The now beleaguered federal Consumer Finance Protection Bureau cautions all consumers to know the difference betweenzero interest and deferred interest, because the differences can have big effects on your wallet.
A zero percent interest promotion will not add interest based on the balance of your purchase during the promotional period. If you still have an unpaid balance when the promotional period is over, you will start to pay interest on the remaining balance only from the date the promotional period ends.
In contrast, some retailers offer financing such as “No interest if paid in full in 12 months.” That’s when you need to be wary because it usually means the promotion is a deferred interest offer.
Portland may be “The City That Works”, but the city’s speed camera program doesn’t. And that’s costing a bundle.
Portland started using fixed speed cameras to identify and fine drivers in 2016. It began by issuing warnings starting on Aug. 25 of that year for violations occurring on the SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway corridor. The program started issuing formal speeding tickets at the end of a 30-day trial period on Sept. 24, 2016.
But a persistent problem quickly emerged. Every photograph had to reviewed and every citation had to be issued by a sworn police officer. That was creating a backlog in processing citations and hindering the city’s ability to expand its automated enforcement program.
In 2020, Portland’s fixed speed cameras issued 38,502 tickets. Each one had to be reviewed by a sworn police officer, a massive time sink to say the least.
Finally, in 2022 a solution was found when the Legislature took up HB4105, which allowed the City of Portland to utilize non-police staff (specifically, “duly authorized traffic enforcement agents”) to review and issue citations based on photographs from fixed speed cameras, thereby freeing up police officers to focus on other duties.
Support for the bill was widespread.
“Allowing duly authorized enforcement agents to review citations will create more review capacity – while at the same time ensuring that appropriate training and certification for reviewing personnel are in place,” the City of Portland testified before the House Committee on Rules. “This will address police capacity as well as traffic safety needs.”
Multnomah County testified that requiring police officers to review and issue citations “reduces the capacity (of sworn police officers) for other police priorities and also creates a costly barrier to use of automated enforcement.”
Dana Dickman, at the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT), testified that not only was each traffic safety camera violation being reviewed by a sworn police officer, but “100% of traffic safety camera violation review occurs on police overtime. Expanding the pool of qualified reviewers would lower the cost of this function.”
Reporting on HB 4105, Willamette Week noted that Portland was then advertising a starting salary for officers of $66,934. “In a 2,000-hour year, that’s $33.47 an hour. At time-and-a-half, an officer would be paid $50 an hour to review photo radar tickets.” Willamette Week said those payments explained why the Portland police union opposed changing the law.
Maybe that’s why once the bill passed in 2022, any sense of urgency in implementing it seemed to evaporate.
In December 2024, Jonathan Maus, publisher/editor of BikePortland’s news site, reported that he had asked the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s (PBOT) Communications Director, Hannah Schafer, about the status of implementing the new authority given to them in HB 4105. “PBOT is currently developing the program that will result in PBOT staff reviewing and issuing citations for moving violations from the automated enforcement cameras,” Schafer replied.
Well, here we are in October 2025, 34 months after the effective date of the law, and sworn police officers are still reviewing each and every moving violation recorded by one of the city’s cameras.
Earlier this year, Willamette Week reported that even though speed cameras have been effective, more have not been installed because, as PBOT spokesman Dylan Rivera put it, police officers are currently the ones to review all citations, mostly on overtime shifts, and the bureau is limited by police availability. They’re also hamstrung by capacity at the Multnomah County Circuit Court, which adjudicates the citations.
Meanwhile, the cost of all that overtime? I filed a public records request to find out and it took repeated requests to get the precise numbers I asked for:
Year
Overtime Hrs.
Cost ($)
2022
501.83
41,964.57
2023
411.59
36,963.07
2024
423.00
40,991.56
2025
628.21
60,423.17
Total
1,964.63
$180,342.37
It comes out of the fines paid by speed scofflaws, not the city budget, but still, that’s $180,342.37 down the drain and into police officers’ pockets.
The overtime rule has obviously been quite lucrative for some Portland Police officers. A complete annual breakdown in overtime payments each year is provided in the footnote.[1]
In July 2025, PBOT’s Speed Safety Camera Program Manager, Steve Hoyt-McBeth, told me he’s “very eager to get the ( duly authorized enforcement agents ) program up and running” but “the current holdup is funding”.
Hiring the positions had been held for approximately six months because of PBOT’s budget challenges, he said. “I was hopeful that I’d be able to begin the recruitment this summer, but the lack of a funded state transportation package, which puts an approximately $11 million hole in PBOT’s FY25-26 has kept the pause button pressed.”
Hoyt-McBeth said part of the holdup is also tied to staff capacity to develop the program. “No municipality in Oregon currently utilizes the statutory authority to have Agents issue citations, so we have to develop the training and program ourselves without a template from another jurisdiction,” he said.
So, when are the Portland Police going to relinquish their lucrative overtime work on speed camera violations and pass it on to non-police staff?
There’s a saying of uncertain providence, “Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime”.
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson wants to give the homeless in the Pearl District a fish.
Wilson wants to turn an industrial building at NW 15th Avenue and NW Northrup Street into a so-called “low-barrier” overnight-only homeless shelter able to accommodate up to 200 people. An all-night warehouse for the homeless. According to the NW Examiner last month, the city and property owner Vanessa Sturgeon of Sturgeon Development Partners signed a 12-year lease in May that Mayor Keith Wilson has described as a two-or-three-year deal. The $18,000-a-month lease covers the main floor and part of a basement, a total of 16,000 square feet, to be used only for shelter for unhoused individuals.
Low-barrier means the people who stay there from 8pm to 6am wouldn’t have to show an ID, be sober (there’s be no sobriety checks) or drug-free, although alcohol and drugs would not be allowed. The 200- bed shelter at Northwest 15th will have only two showers and sex offenders will be allowed inside the low- barrier shelter because no one will be checking for IDs.
A critic posted on reddit: “It’s basically a night prison. 200 people, 6 toilets, low barrier, barely a snack, no meals, no counseling, no fresh clothing. And then they are going to “disperse” these people every morning near parks and schools.”
Potential overnighters could access a bed by standing in line before the shelter opened. At a July 28, 2025, public forum at the Armory, Skyler Brocker-Knapp, who oversees the city’s shelter plan, said people will be handed a card with information about where to receive social services after leaving the shelter.
I still remember going to a free lunch for the homeless program in an underground Portland parking garage a number of years ago. Tables spread out across the center of the garage displayed a bounty of meal options put together by multiple well-meaning social justice volunteers, from sandwiches and lasagna to potato chips and hot ethic dishes. Homeless people streamed in, wearily assembled in slow-moving lines, grabbed hold of what they wanted and found a spot on the concrete floor to sit and eat.
It wasn’t uplifting. It was depressing.
Nobody was there to help the struggling people get their lives back on track, to inquire about the welfare of their children, or to make them aware of accessible pathways towards lasting change. The whole thing was a misguided feel-good effort at charity by naïve good Samaritans.
More recently, I saw a group of fresh-faced, eager suburban teenage girls handing out sandwiches from the trunk of their car to homeless people at the Tom McCall Waterfront Park. That might have eased their consciences, but how, exactly, did that drive change?
As Kevin Dahlgren has noted in his Substack, @truthonthestreets, “We don’t have a homeless crisis; we have a mental health and addiction crisis. Unfortunately, many still treat the homeless crisis as if it’s a housing crisis and push for more and more shelter beds. The problem is these shelters are far too low a level of care for the majority of our mentally ill.”
“Many advocates for the homeless assume that homelessness is primarily due to the unaffordability of housing, rather than drug use, antisocial behavior, criminal activity or mental illness,” says Devon Kurtz,director of public safety policy at the conservative Cicero Institute. “From this assumption flows misguided confidence that living on the street is an unfortunate but preferable alternative to institutions that curb the civil liberties of individuals who are simply poor. This assumption is wrong. In the largest survey of homeless Americans ever conducted, only 4% cited high housing costs as the primary reason they were homeless. Significant majorities said they had mental-health issues, had used illegal substances and had been to jail or prison for extended periods.”
A woman who directed a social service agency in the Portland area that served low-income families once told me the whole free food approach was “antiquated”, a long-ago discredited tactic , and that unrestricted aid was counterproductive.
So’s the proposed low-barrier Pearl District homeless shelter.
Portland started using fixed speed cameras to identify and fine drivers in 2016. It began by issuing warnings starting on Aug. 25 of that year for violations occurring on the SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway corridor. The program started issuing formal speeding tickets at the end of a 30-day trial period on Sept. 24, 2016.
But a persistent problem quickly emerged. Every photograph had to reviewed and every citation had to be issued by a sworn police officer. That was creating a backlog in processing citations and hindering the city’s ability to expand its automated enforcement program.
In 2020, Portland’s fixed speed cameras issued 38,502 tickets. Each one had to be reviewed by a sworn police officer, a massive time sink to say the least.
It took until 2022 for a solution to be found, a notable victory for Portland. That was when the Legislature considered HB4105, which allowed the City of Portland to utilize non-police staff (specifically, “duly authorized traffic enforcement agents”) to review and issue citations based on photographs from fixed speed cameras, thereby freeing up police officers to focus on other duties.
Support for the bill was widespread.
“Allowing duly authorized enforcement agents to review citations will create more review capacity – while at the same time ensuring that appropriate training and certification for reviewing personnel are in place,” the City of Portland testified before the House Committee on Rules. “This will address police capacity as well as traffic safety needs.”
Multnomah County testified that requiring police officers to review and issue citations “reduces the capacity (of sworn police officers) for other police priorities and also creates a costly barrier to use of automated enforcement.”
“We are very concerned about the epidemic of traffic fatalities trending upward across Oregon,” said The Street Trust. “We would like you to rethink trac enforcement as an administrative function in order to increase municipal capacity to enforce traffic laws and to reduce costs to expand their automated traffic enforcement (ATE) programming in ways that meet local community’s needs.”
Dana Dickman, at the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT), testified that not only was each traffic safety camera violation being reviewed by a sworn police officer, but “100% of traffic safety camera violation review occurs on police overtime. Expanding the pool of qualified reviewers would lower the cost of this function.”
Reporting on HB 4105, Willamette Week noted that Portland was then advertising a starting salary for officers of $66,934. “In a 2,000-hour year, that’s $33.47 an hour. At time-and-a-half, an officer would be paid $50 an hour to review photo radar tickets.”
Willamette Week said those payments explained why the Portland police union opposed changing the law.
Once the bill passed, any sense of urgency in implementing the new law seemed to evaporate.
In December 2024, BikePortland noted that the change still wasn’t in place, even though the bill had been on the books for nearly two years. Jonathan Maus, publisher/editor of BikePortland’s news site, reported that he had asked the Portland Bureau of Transportation’s (PBOT) Communications Director, Hannah Schafer, about the status of implementing the new authority given to them in HB 4105. “PBOT is currently developing the program that will result in PBOT staff reviewing and issuing citations for moving violations from the automated enforcement cameras,” Schafer replied.
Bike Portland said PBOT expected to have about 40 cameras in operation and to be issuing 100,000 citations by 2025.
So here we are in July 2025 and sworn police officers are still reviewing each and every moving violation recorded by one of the city’s cameras.
Earlier this month, Willamette Week reported that even though speed cameras have been effective, more have not been installed because, as PBOT spokesman Dylan Rivera put it, police officers are currently the ones to review all citations, mostly on overtime shifts, and the bureau is limited by police availability. They’re also hamstrung by capacity at the Multnomah County Circuit Court, which adjudicates the citations.
According to Willamette Week, PBOT says “it’s looking to hire three people who can review citations to alleviate the burden on police staffing and increase the number of tickets the city can process.”
PBOT’s Speed Safety Camera Program Manager, Steve Hoyt-McBeth, tells me he’s “very eager to get the program up and running” but “the current holdup is funding”.
Hiring the positions has been held for approximately six months because of PBOT’s budget challenges, he said in an email. “I was hopeful that I’d be able to begin the recruitment this summer, but the lack of a funded state transportation package, which puts an approximately $11 million hole in PBOT’s FY25-26 has kept the pause button pressed.”
Hoyt-McBeth said part of the holdup is also tied to staff capacity to develop the program. “No municipality in Oregon currently utilizes the statutory authority to have Agents issue citations, so we have to develop the training and program ourselves without a template from another jurisdiction,” he said.
Clearly, this entire situation with the speed cameras has been mishandled by Portland, which continues to shell out overtime money to cops . But it seems the City Council is clueless. Meredith Washington, Community Liaison for Councilor Angelita Morillo, read this post and responded to me, “I’m unsure what your message is here.”
So, when are the Portland Police going to relinquish their lucrative overtime work on speed camera violations and pass it on to non-police staff?
ThinkingOregon 