<![CDATA[politics - FuzzyChef Food & Pottery]]>http://fuzzychef.org/Ghost 0.5Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:35:03 GMT60<![CDATA[November 2020 Oregon votes]]>multinomah county ballot envelope

Unlike most other states, nobody in Oregon is waiting in hour-long lines for early voting. That's because we vote 100% by mail, a system that has worked so well that even the Oregon Republicans voted to improve it this year (with one glaring exception, below). So I had a leisurely Sunday morning to get my votes in order and decide who to endorse. Then off to the library to drop off my ballot.

Below are who and what I voted for, with some notes on why. Use it to inform your own voting. My information on issues and candidates comes from: the Voter Booklets, the Willie Week, the Portland Mercury, and the Portland Tribune.

people I'm voting for

  • President: Biden. Duh.
  • Senate: Merkeley. Pretty much up and down the line votes the way I'd want him to: climate change, anti-gerrymandering, anti-lobbying.
  • Representative: Blumenauer. Possibly the most progressive US Rep who's not a woman of color.
  • Secretary of State: Fagan. Her opponent, Thatcher, would attempt to eliminate our great system of mail-in voting if elected. So a vote for Fagan is a vote to be able to vote again.
  • Attorney General: Rosenblum. She's a civil rights attorney and judge running against a neo-fascist hack with zero political experience.
  • Treasurer: Read. He's done a great job of reforming Oregon finances to save us a ton of money, let's give him a chance to keep doing it.
  • State Senate, House: Dembrow and Warner. Both running unopposed, which isn't great (hey, all you "Pacific Greens", maybe run for an office you have a real chance at?) but neither has screwed up badly enough for a no-vote.
  • Mayor: Innarone. I've always opposed Wheeler as a silver-spoon chosen son who can't handle adversity, and this last year has borne me out on that. While Innarone is far from ideal, and Wheeler has made some progress on housing, he will be an obstacle to peace in Portland as long as he's police commissioner, and with pro-cop Mapps on the ballot we can't afford that. If you can't bear Innarone, I suggest writing in Teresa Railford.
  • City Council: Eudaly. She's make some serious mistakes in her first term, but Mapps is essentially running his campaign with and for the Portland Police Union. He will push for an expanded police force with expanded powers to beat people up. He's also likely to endorse NIMBY regulations that roll back a lot of the progress we've made on housing in the last 3 years.
  • Metro: Chris Smith. As much as Nolan is probably the better person all-around, she appears to be running for Metro as a parking spot until she can run for another higher office. Whereas Smith cares deeply about Metro transit policy.
  • East Water District: Zimmer-Stuckey, Rossi, Carlson, and Eisele, based entirely on their voter phamphlet profiles.
  • Judges: All incumbents, plus Brown. Electing judges is stupid and leads to unbalanced law enforcement. So you should always endorse sitting judges if you can, because that way they spend their time in the courtroom and not campaigning. For the one open seat, both candidates are really really good. I voted Brown because she has a better track record being successful defending civil rights in the courtroom, but would be happy with either judge that wins.

ballot measures

  • State 107: Yes. Permits (but does not implement) laws limiting spending on state races for the first time in Oregon's history, as well as requiring some additional transparency. Oregon has more "dark money" in politics than any other state our size; let's fix that.
  • State 108: No. This tobacco tax steeply ($2) increases the price of a pack of cigarettes, at a time when 1/5th of our blue-coller workforce has been recently laid off. And despite advertising, most of the money just goes to the General Fund.
  • State 109: Yes. There was never any good reason for "magic mushrooms" to be illegal in the first place.
  • State 110: Yes. Rolls back the "war on drugs" in the most dramatic way we've seen since 1978. Will help end the prison-drugs-prison cycle, as well as saving us tons of money on police enforcement and prisons.
  • Local 26-211, Library Bond: Yes. While I have a bone to pick with current library administration, it's still true that Multinomah has one of the most popular and cost-efficient library systems in America. This is the first bond they've asked for in a long time, and will allow us to take advantage of COVID closures to work on much-needed expansions of library branches.
  • Local 26-214, Free Preschool: Yes. I will personally end up paying this high-earner tax, and I have no children. But it still makes sense; free preschool both helps women re-enter the workforce and leads to more educated kids. Plus the actual budget is modest.
  • Local 26-213: Parks Levy: Yes. One of the greatest things about Portland is our huge system of local and regional parks. But without use fee income (COVID), a lot of them are falling apart. It's worth fixing them up, and if you hate paying the tax, well, a nearby nice park enhances your property values. Plus it's a levy, not a bond, so we're not paying interest on it.
  • Local 26-217: Police Accountability: YES!!! The biggest problem with Portland's police has been the total lack of effective civillian oversight. In short, it has never been possible to discipline the bad cops so that the good ones can do their jobs. While this measure doesn't do everything, it's a huge step in the direction of making the PPD work for the citizens of Portland instead of working for themselves.
  • Local 26-218: Transport Tax: No. With us going into a recession and 10% of the poplation already laid off, a 0.75% payroll tax (meaning an up to 1.7% decrease in actual take-home money for working folks) is way too high, and will result in further layoffs and small business closures. Given that at least half that money is just to build a train line to Tigard, it's simply not worth it.
  • Local 26-219: Water Parks Funds: No. It's simply too dangerous to allow the Water Bureau to use funds for anything other that providing water, no matter how trivial. We're voting Portland Parks a huge levy to take care of parklands; they can cover the water parks rather than adding it to our already preposterous water bills.
  • Local 26-215: School Bond: No. We voted in the "once-in-a-lifetime" $800m bond four years ago because PPS promised us it would fix 30 years of neglect and they wouldn't need to ask again. And yet, here they are, asking again, having failed to do most of the work that the original bond was paying for. PPS needs to learn to budget, and we need to close the purse strings until they do.

Hope that helps you make up your mind, or at least remember what races you're voting in.

]]>http://fuzzychef.org/nov-2020-votes/471b8b54-ac5a-4818-8a97-4ffe2885eb2bSun, 25 Oct 2020 19:57:26 GMT<![CDATA[Portland ballot recommendations 2018]]>Portland Ballot Endorsements

Continuing my set of recommendations with background, after doing the Oregon races I'm continuing with the Portland, Metro, and Multinomah County races.

I'm not listing the uncontested races, because why bother?

City Council

Endorsement: JoAnn Hardesty

Reason: Portland has a serious problem with its police department. Rogue cops are roughing up protestors and intimidating people of color, but allow out-of-town white terrorists to set up shop downtown and bring violence to our city, without arrest of prosecution (see story in link). Our police chief is the primary enabler of this (in retrospect, her name, "Outlaw", should have been a tipoff).

Yet neither the Mayor or the standing city council members will stand up to the PPD and demand an investigation and purge of lawbreaking police officers, let alone replace our renegade police chief.

Hardesty is the only candidate for any city office who has made getting the police under control and fulfilling their mission to support the community. While Smith has excellent credentials, she is very pro-PPD and has no plans for reform. We need someone on the Council for whom the PPD is their primary issue. Vote for Hardesty.

Update: Smith just decided to revive the failed plan to house the homeless in Wapato Jail. This plan is now impossible (due to sale of the property) as well as a really bad idea, but apparently she plans to waste city council time with it anyway.

Links:

Soil and Water Conservation, District 1

Endorsement: Gabrielle Rossi (write-in)

This position was going without any candidates, but Rossi, of the Rossi Urban Farm, has decided to run. Can you think of a better candidate than someone with a 5-acre community farm in the county? I can't.

Multnomah County Auditor

Endorsement: Jennifer McGuirk

This is a weak endorsement, since both candidates are hardworking, dedicated accountants who plan to aggressively pursue fraud and waste in the county. Frankly, whichever one of them gets elected, I'll be happy with. McGuirk is a senior auditor for the county with an excellent record who is challenging her boss's spotty record to run. Learn is a former investigative reporter and CPA with a dedication to finding the truth.

Given how equally qualified they are, I'll endorse the woman in the race, particularly since the press tends to endorse men over women.

Links:
* https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/10/17/wws-november-2018-endorsements-for-portland-city-hall-multnomah-county-and-metro/ * https://www.portlandmercury.com/feature/2018/10/25/23935691/a-mercury-voter-guide-for-the-november-2018-election#5

Judge of the Circuit Court, Position 30

Endorsement: Benjamin Souede

This is a rare contested judicial seat. The challenger, Callahan, seems to be mainly running as a protest against the system of judicial appointments. That might carry him, except that Souede is one of the best respected judges on the Oregon bench, with 79% of the state bar supporting him.

Link: https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/10/30/wws-november-2018-endorsement-for-multnomah-county-circuit-judge/

City Measure 26-200

Endorsement: Yes

This is a general initiative to increase transparency and impose spending limits on local campaigns. Currently, the state of Oregon is among the least transparent in the country for campaign donations. This measure really needs to go in at the state level, but a local measure is a good start.

Links:

Portland Measure 26-201

Endorsement: No

In terms of intent, this is probably the best bill we've seen in years, with a focus on increasing home energy efficiency, particularly for the city's poorer residents. Those residents are often caught in the trap of not being able to afford better insulation and appliances because their power bills are so high.

However, it does so with a gross receipts tax on very large retailers (pretty much Comcast, Wells Fargo, Walmart, and Kroger). I've discussed the problems with gross receipts taxes before, chief among which is that the tax would be passed down to consumers ... hitting low-income Portlanders the hardest.

Add that to the fact that the spending guidelines for the money have a lot of weasel words ("should", "directly or indirectly", etc.) and it's a no for me.

Links:

Metro Measure 26-199

Endorsement: No (reluctantly)

There is no question that the Metro area needs more below-market-rate housing; this area is becoming completely unaffordable to anyone making lest than $50K.

Affordable housing bonds strike a devil's bargain of making housing more affordable for some people by making housing less affordable for everyone else. Over the past few years, Portland has raised property taxes multiple times. For salaried folks like me, the extra cost is annoying but not harmful. But for many of my neighbors, retirees on fixed incomes, that extra tax burden means that they have to do without -- and that some of them will end up in search of affordable housing themselves.

Two years ago, Portland passed a $250m affordable housing bond, of which it has spent almost nothing, waiting for Measure 102. Let's spend that money first and see how far it goes. Further, the real answer to affordable housing is to make it cheaper, faster, and easier for builders to create market-rate high density housing, especially apartments. In San Francisco, we've seen what happens with the combination of restrictive housing development combined with a small amount of subsidized housing: only the very rich and the very poor can afford to live there.

My final thought on this is: Oregon is in a big financial hole. Eventually we will need to dig ourselves out, and this will almost certainly mean more taxes. We need to leave our citizens a financial reserve so that we can draw on that to get out of debt.

However, almost nobody agrees with my assessment, so here's some links:

]]>http://fuzzychef.org/portland-ballot-recommendations-2018/20e3b4a6-e78b-4f70-9bd1-b4dadb87adceSat, 03 Nov 2018 17:37:58 GMT<![CDATA[recommendations for the Oregon ballot]]>Some of you will still have your ballots and be planning to fill them out this weekend. For your benefit, I've researched the candidates and initiatives on the ballot, and come up with a set of endorsements and recommendations. Whether or not you agree with me, please use the text and links that follow to make an informed vote.

Tommorrow, I will post on the Portland city and county races.

Governor

Endorsement: Kate Brown

Governor's Race: Kate Brown has done quite a bit for the disadvantaged and vulnerable in Oregon. This includes saving 400,000 low-income Oregonians from losing healthcare, increasing the minimum wage, securing paid medical leave for all workers, appointing four women (two women of color) to Oregon's Supreme Court, enacting automatic voter registration, adopting a phase-out plan for coal power, making community college affordable for everyone, passing gun safety laws, and imposing first-in-the-nation protections for transgender kids in school.

However, she has done little to cut the Gordian knot that is Oregon's financial crisis, which is something that some voters cannot forgive her for (I also suspect that some voters aren't keen on her support for gay rights either).

While her opponent, Knute Beuler, is running on his ability to "fix Oregon's finances". However, while he is happy to criticize Brown's poor track record on this issue, he has no specific proposals of his own on how he would fix the financial crisis. This leads me to believe that, in fact, he has no solution, and once elected would be just as ineffective on the problem as Brown has been -- probably even more so, given that he would need to work with a Democratic legislature. His voting record does not suggest that he has any ideas either, and he could have been getting more done on financial reform as a legislator than he would as governor.

Bueler is also running as "the progressive's Republican", being pro-Choice, pro-environment, and pro-public-healthcare. He's also a physician, which would be a nice change from the usual career political backgrounds of gubernatorial candidates. Based on his promoted platform alone, he would be a great alternative to the inaction currently in Salem.

However, his statements and record on racial issues and immigrants are quite different. He supports measure 105, and has indicated that, as governor, he would undermine the Sanctuary Law even if 105 does not pass. His talking points on this also echo the arguments used by the racist hate group OFIR. Within the last year, his ACLU scorecard has dropped to 33%. He seems to be OK with getting into bed with racists, and I'm not OK with that.

He's also done a huge about-face on the issue of campaign finance reform. Once a champion of repeated Oregon finance reforms in multiple bills, to run for governor he has accepted as much as $1.5m from a single individual, and has refused to participate in voluntary campaign financing limits. This suggests, at least, that his principles are malleable.

This last point becomes super-critical because he is running as a Republican. The national GOP has, multiple times in the last 2 years, required individual candidates to vote against their principles to retain campaign support. They appear to have done this at least once with Bueler, as he voted against a bill to extend Medicare that he had orignally co-sponsored. So we can't trust Knute to remain a moderate: he will get his marching orders from the White House.

So, this is a lukewarm endorsement of Kate Brown, and a strong endorsement against Bueler. You may not love Brown, but Bueler would be a disaster for human rights in Oregon.

Links

Measure 102

Endorsement: Yes

Two years ago, Portland voters endorsed a $250m bond for building affordable housing. That money is on hold, due to a state restriction on using affordable housing money for anything other than city-owned, city-run, new construction. Such construction takes a long time and is very expensive ($200K per family), as opposed to offering incentives for privately built affordable housing, or even direct subsidies for residents.

Passing Measure 102 could allow that $250m to go far enough to house all 4000 of Portland's homeless. Wheeler has been right to halt the spending of those funds in hopes of making them stretch further with this change.

Yes, we will have to watchdog for corruption in this. Measure 102 also enables politicians to divert affordable housing funds for private development projects that mainly benefit them. However, that was possible under the old rules anyway (witness what Hales did with the first of the $250m).

Links:

Measure 103

Endorsement: No

This measure is a Trojan horse. Pretending to somehow be about preventing taxes on our groceries, it's really an attempt by soda distributors to head off potential soda taxes in Oregon's cities. These companies are the funders behind the measure, and its beneficiaries, and the rest of us will pay the price for it. I'm not actually a fan of soda taxes, but cities and counties should be able to decide that for themselves.

Links:

Measure 104

Endorsement: No.

Reason: Measure 104 would require a 3/5 majority to pass any "tax increases" in the state legislature. We already have a 3/5 majority rule for new taxes, but this initiative extends that to thinks like removing tax deductions and loopholes. It's specifically motivated by, and funded by, real estate interests, because they want to prevent any possibility of (for example) eliminating the mortgage interest deduction on Oregon state taxes, something that's been discusssed.

So, why am I against it?

California passed an initiative like this in 2010. The result was annual budgetary paralysis, with the state legislature unable to pass any kind of budget. Most of the time, California runs without a legislated budget because no compromise can get a 2/3 majority. And it means that negotiating the budget takes up even more of the governor's and state legislature's time, forcing them into expensive "emergency" sessions to pass other legislation.

Note that Measure 104 would require the 3/5 majority to remove any tax exemption, even if the net tax load on Oregon taxpayers was reduced by other changes. For that matter, it would be possible for the legislature to enact a tax exemption with a simple majority, but would require a super-majority to revoke it.

We are in a financial crisis, and Salem will have to be creative to get us out of it. Budgetary gridlock will make that job impossible.

Links:

Measures 105, 106

Endorsement: NO, No, No, NO!

This pair measures could be described as the "Axis of Evil", consisting of two initiatives to get you to vote away your rights or the rights of others. They go together with a measure that was, fortunately, disqualified from the ballot but sponsored by the same people, which would have voted away our right to vote.

Measure 105 is a discriminatory measure intended to take away the rights of immigrants and people of color. It's sponsored by a anti-immigrant hate group supported by out-of-state money.

Measure 106 takes away the healthcare rights of women who work for the state, such as schoolteachers and firefighters. Like 105, this initiative is mostly funded by money from other states.

We need to stand firm in favor of the rights of all Oregonians. Vote no.

Links:

]]>http://fuzzychef.org/endorsements-for-the-oregon-ballot/5d683c15-6211-4b67-8a79-a2a8491c30bfSat, 03 Nov 2018 00:56:04 GMT