Posts published in “Oregon”

In 2022, Oregon had an intense contest to decide who would be the next governor. The hot statewide contest this year could be for secretary of state, not ordinarily a top attraction.

Still, enthusiasts of horse-race contests should enjoy this year’s Democratic primary for that post, the second-ranking in state government: featuring State Treasurer Tobias Read against State Sen. James Manning Jr., with no incumbent seeking re-election.

The contest does not start evenly.

The current secretary is Democrat LaVonne Griffin-Valade, appointed after the last elected secretary of state, Shemia Fagan, resigned over ethical issues concerning moonlighting for a cannabis company. Griffin-Valade is not running for a full term, so it is an open race.

That office, which also oversees election filings, reports four current candidates. More could possibly file, though well-known names would be unlikely at this point.)

The other two are Republicans: Robert Neumann of Greenhorn reports that he is “not employed” and has not raised nor spent any campaign funds. The other, Brent Barker of Aloha, is a small business owner and real estate broker whose current reported cash balance is $3,841. He has the added advantage over Neumann of having run statewide before, in 2022 for labor commissioner; but he came in a distant fourth out of seven candidates in the May primary election. Assuming a better-organized and better-known Republican doesn’t enter before filing ends, Barker likely will progress to the November election, but with slim odds of success there.

That leaves the two Democrats, Read and Manning, each of whom brings serious advantages to the contest.

Both are well known in Oregon political circles, with substantial personal and campaign background and organizational and fundraising networks. Both are keynoting “integrity” in their campaigns, logical after the Fagan uproar. Both have been in the race since September, and appear to have been actively working at it since.

Manning’s political background runs to 2016, when he lost a race for the state House in the Democratic primary (with 39.1% of the vote) to Julie Fahey. Just as well: That December he was appointed to replace Sen. Chris Edwards, who resigned. Manning was elected unopposed in 2018 and prevailed easily over a Republican, in a strongly Democratic district, in 2022.

He has a distinctive background which could provide some extra appeal: Service in the U.S. Army – from which he retired – and experience before that in various areas of law enforcement and even as a private investigator. He’s been an active legislator and picked up quick support from plenty of fellow legislators.

Read’s background is simpler. A former Nike designer, he, too, spent years in the Legislature – in the House from 2007-16 – then was elected state treasurer in 2016 (narrowly) and 2020 (against the same Republican candidate but by a much larger margin). Those statewide races could be considered successful, a partial template for this new one. They also have given him more of a statewide profile than Manning has at the start.

Another campaign that may affect this one even more than those, however, was Read’s 2022 run in the Democratic primary for governor – against the current governor, Tina Kotek. He lost that contest decisively – Kotek’s 56% to Read’s 31.7% – in a race in which he was, in effect, the outsider running against the establishment contender.

Some of that dynamic may appear this time, but it’s less clear cut.

On finances, Read has a significant advantage, with $139,104 in cash on hand compared to Manning’s $25,077.

Both have demonstrated strong backing. Read reports among his endorsers former Govs. Ted Kulongoski and Barbara Roberts and former Secretary of State Jeanne Atkins, U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, several legislators including House Speaker Dan Rayfield and local officials and Operating Engineers Local 701. Manning has a strong roster too, including a long list of legislators including Senate President Rob Wagner, a collection of city and county officials, including a number from Multnomah County, and former U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio.

Overall, Read seems to have the opening advantages: a statewide profile, a statewide network and probably a better starting fundraising base. In the next couple of months, more of Manning’s time may be taken by his legislative duties, while Read may be freer to travel.

Still, both candidates are close enough to blank slates statewide that they have considerable room to define themselves and, if they choose, each other.

There’s an opening tilt, but this looks like a race whose story has yet to be written.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

There’s a growing and widespread consensus that artificial intelligence technology needs legal guardrails, and political ads and communications are one of the prime places lawmakers are looking to place them.

As Kathy Wai of the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office put it in recent legislative testimony: “Campaigns can easily create high-quality, convincing AI generated content in the form of images, voices, deepfakes and other forms of (AI). AI is an evolving threat in our highly charged mis, dis and mal-information environment.”

Effective solutions, though, will not come easily. Getting the details right, and finding aggressive solutions, can be tricky, and it will take a persistent, ongoing effort.

In Oregon, Senate Bill 1571 would require disclosure of the use of AI to create a false impression In campaigns in ads or other materials. It came from Sen. Aaron Woods, D-Wilsonville, but also has backing from 27 other legislators in both parties and across the philosophical spectrum. It passed the Senate on Monday, and goes to the House for consideration.

The bill would carry teeth: Campaigns caught using AI and not disclosing it could face a fine up to $10,000 for each violation. It would exempt news media and some satirical publications from the requirements, and would allow the secretary of state to draft rules to put enforcement into effect.

But even if campaigns disclose the use of AI in any campaign material, any ad, flyer or other message still could easily lead to false impressions – usually about the subject of an attack. And with AI technology becoming so commonplace nationally, it’s likely to start showing up in small and local political activities before long.

Oregon isn’t the first state to consider regulating the use of AI in campaigns. Quite a few states already have entered the fray: Half of all the states considered AI-related legislation in last year’s session, and they’ve adopted varying approaches.

A law passed in Texas in 2019 bans deepfakes within 30 days of an election if the purpose is “to injure a candidate or influence the result of an election.” California that year – and again in 2022 – passed a roughly similar measure with a 60-day period. Washington state last year added a law banning AI messages with an “appearance, speech or conduct that has been intentionally manipulated with the use of generative adversarial network techniques or other digital technology” that give a false impression of a candidate or issue.

The Oregon bill defines a false impression as, “A fundamentally different understanding or impression than a reasonable person would have from the unaltered, original version of the image, audio recording or video recording.” That still might afford significant wiggle room in specific cases if one got to court.

There’s also a reasonable question in most of these efforts about how effective those rules would be. The required disclosure in the Oregon bill, for example, might translate into a small-print notice that would be ignored by viewers or readers emotionally swept away by powerful images.

In the Senate Rules Committee hearing, almost all the testimony on SB 1571 was favorable. However, a major exception was Emily Hawley from the American Civil Liberties Union who said, “We appreciate the scale of these potential electoral risks but believe this bill as written would likely be challenged and overturned.”

Oregon law already has long-standing limits on speech in areas such as libel, fraud in some cases, soliciting, perjury and conspiracy, and but Hawley said that while the new bill covers some of that territory, it doesn’t “proscribe the speech only when it actually or necessarily produces the harm.”

AI is evolving so fast – as are its uses  – that it has become hard to define. That doesn’t mean Oregon legislators should wait to address it, but it means they ought to set up an ongoing review – probably a persistent interim committee – to monitor its evolution and track the ways laws might usefully address it. They should anticipate this will be an ongoing work area for years to come.

In arguing for the current Oregon bill, Woods, the sponsor, said “The bill will build awareness.” That it may do, whether it passes or even if it doesn’t, since more voters may be locally alerted to some of the new ways some candidates or causes may try to deceive them. And that would be a significant plus all by itself, whatever the legal challenge emerging down the road.

 

The Oregon Supreme Court decision barring 10 Republican state senators from another term after the current one was quickly assailed by Republicans, as you’d expect.

Republican Sen. Suzanne Weber of Tillamook responded, “I’m disappointed, but can’t say I’m surprised that a court of judges appointed solely by Gov. (Kate) Brown and Gov. (Tina) Kotek would rule in favor of political rhetoric rather than their own precedent. The only winners in this case are Democrat politicians and their union backers.”

That’s not quite right. Democrats and their backers aren’t likely to gain much out of it, though in a couple of years Weber’s district could be an exception.

The court decision grew out of a dare and a long-shot bluff. After a series of extended walkouts during legislative sessions by enough Republican legislators to bring statehouse business to a halt, voters in 2022 passed a constitutional amendment providing that any legislator with 10 or more unexcused absences in a session could be barred from serving a subsequent term. Republicans challenged it on grounds that the ban could be read to refer to a future term after a walkout happens; the secretary of state and high court said that interpretation was contrary to voter expectations.

In the 2023 session, 10 Republican senators absented themselves regardless: Minority Leader Tim Knopp of Bend, Weber of Tillamook, Kim Thatcher of Keizer, Lynn Findley of Vale, Dennis Linthicum of Klamath Falls, Art Robinson of Cave Junction, Bill Hansell of Athena, Daniel Bonham of The Dalles, Brian Boquist of Dallas and Cedric Hayden of Fall Creek.

That might sound like a huge boon for Democrats, since legislative seats usually are easier to flip if they’re open than if an incumbent is defending them. But it’s not that simple.

Of the 10, six senators are serving terms that expire after this year’s election. But two of those, Findley and Hansell, had announced their plans to retire from the Legislature anyway. (Their districts are very strongly Republican and highly unlikely to switch parties.)  Two more appeared to be paving the way for successors, with Robinson’s son and Linthicum’s wife filing to take their seats.

That leaves only two seats specifically impacted this year. Knopp represents a Bend-area district which has developed a significant Democratic voter registration edge, and whether he or someone else is the Republican nominee, they’d probably face an uphill climb to keep the seat. Last month, Knopp – possibly anticipating what was coming from the Supreme Court – said he would back Downtown Bend Business Association Executive Director Shannon Monihan, who filed about the same time, for his seat.

That leaves only Boquist, a four-term senator who quit the Republican Party but recently rejoined it. He represents a district centered on Yamhill and Polk counties which overall is strongly Republican; his weakest Senate vote, in 2020, has been 58.3%. Democrats would need an unusual candidate or environment, and more than a little luck, to flip his seat this year.

With a March 12 filing deadline fast approaching, Democrats would have a hard time developing competitive campaigns for most of these seats in this election cycle.

That does leave the question of the four other impacted senators whose terms won’t be up until after the 2026 election: Weber, Bonham, Hayden and Thatcher. They still have a couple of years left in the chamber, and any of them could simply decide to retire, or maybe run for another non-legislative office at the next election.

As election results and voting registration numbers suggest now, at least one of those seats – Hayden’s in rural eastern Lane and Douglas counties – is very likely to stay Republican.

The other three are a little less certain. Bonham, Thatcher and Weber personally all have won by solid margins, but all three represent areas that are among the most politically marginal in Oregon, places where a strong candidate from either party cannot be discounted. Their departure from the Senate will throw a real challenge at Republicans to hold on to those seats in another couple of years.

The Supreme Court decision didn’t – at least immediately – change the partisan outlook for the Oregon Senate much, at least for this year, and it could spur senators who will barred from a subsequent term to walk out over an issue they care about, like reinstituting criminal penalties under Measure 110. Knopp voiced a veiled threat about that on Wednesday.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court decision reinforced the blunt message voters sent in 2022: Extended legislative walkouts in future will have consequences, even if those most directly hit individuals rather than parties.

This column first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

Oregon’s leading political issue in recent years, homelessness, is also one of the most difficult to solve.

A solution to the problem is unlikely to consist of a single silver bullet. It may be more of a targeted cocktail of solutions that attack the problem piecemeal – not the sort of thing well-suited to a political campaign’s talking points.

That means the efforts highlighted by Oregon government and Gov. Tina Kotek in the last year, and for the year to come, ought to be considered the first steps in a much more broadly ranging effort.

In the 2022 gubernatorial contest, all three major candidates agreed the problem was serious and called for a declaration of emergency – though they didn’t talk much about what the declaration might do. The focus does have reason: Oregon for years has had one of the highest rates of homelessness nationwide.

Kotek signed an executive order a year ago which declared homelessness an emergency and this month extended it, partly with the intent of keeping some homeless shelters open. And she’s signed more, including Executive Order 24-03 to “refresh the state’s Interagency Council on Homelessness and direct them to develop plans for the governor’s consideration in response to the analysis” which was required in another executive order.

Beyond that, she recently pointed to other actions taken during her first year in office to diminish homelessness. The state has poured money into new affordable rental options, especially in rural areas around the state. The homeless shelter capacity has been increased by an estimated 1,032 beds, and the state reported finding housing for nearly 1,300 families that might otherwise have become homeless. The Oregon Housing and Community Service agency said it has awarded $7.5 million “towards developing housing for those who are experiencing homelessness or are at risk of homelessness” in rural locations.

Has all that activity lessened homelessness in the state?

Many Oregonians probably would be doubtful. Homeless people still are widely visible, not only in Portland but in many communities around the state.

Oregon doesn’t have a definitive number of homeless people, but we may know more when the closest we have to solid numbers – the annual “Point in Time” count – is conducted at the end of this month. Last year’s count for Oregon totalled 20,142, probably many more than the recent initiatives could have reached. The number has been rising rapidly: In 2020, the estimate was 14,655. The 2021 count reported far fewer people, but the count was likely skewed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beyond that, the relatively generic effort to build new residential apartments – a necessary first step in a state and nation with inadequate supplies of housing – covers only part of the problem.

Homelessness is a common end result of a large array of causes, including high housing costs, but also substance abuse, domestic abuse, mental illness and more.

The unhoused are distinct in many ways, their stories individual. Some are individuals, some are in family groups. Some need medical or social services, others don’t. Some are only briefly without a home, others for much longer. Some are camped on sidewalks, while others find limited shelter in vehicles, abandoned buildings or elsewhere. Some would reject assistance or support systems if made available; others would use them enthusiastically.  And problems vary by geographic location.

That means a lot of ideas will have to be floated, and a wide range of solutions – many of them targeted – will be needed.

The advocacy group Friends of the Unsheltered has compiled a number of ideas. That group said, “as evidenced by many failed plans, it makes sense to pay particular attention to those efforts that have really solved the problem within local jurisdictions.” It cited successful localized efforts in Gresham and Eugene.

Portland City Council candidate and former councilor Steve Novick – who has said, “We won’t truly solve the homelessness crisis until we solve the affordable housing crisis” – outlined a couple of examples of different ways of thinking about solutions in a Jan. 4 email, growing out of a discussion with “someone at the city” involved with homeless issues.

Discussing the Clinton Triangle alternative housing site in southeast Portland, he said the costs have been high, but the “pods in the site, the little structures which actually have a door to close so people have privacy and safety, cost $25,000 apiece. That may sound like a lot, but as he pointed out, the city  could buy 7,000 of them for the amount the Metro homeless services tax generates in six months.”

One of the problems with shelter, Novick said, is simply finding a place for them. His contact at the city noted that Washington County, and implicitly Clackamas as well, might have better topography for locating shelter sites.

Casting a wide net to solve the homeless problem will be the next step – for the state and community.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

 

If you take your dog for a walk from your home, walking some distance to a local park and then back, you’re engaging in recreation.

But does your recreation begin when you leave your house, start en route to the park or only after you get there, or does it start after you’ve reached some designated part of the park?

Determination of that issue may decide whether a bunch of Oregon cities will be closing part or all of their park areas to recreation in the months ahead. But that could be averted if the Oregon Legislature changes a vague section of a law that puts courts, local governments and recreating citizens in a bind.

The law is not new but the issue erupted last year with the case of Nicole Fields v. City of Newport, decided by the Oregon Court of Appeals in July, with some questions returned for consideration to a lower court. (The state Supreme Court has declined to review it.)

Fields was walking her dogs, with a friend, along the ocean to Agate Beach at Newport. When she reached a wooden bridge on the trail, she slipped and fell, and her leg was broken. The slipperiness of the bridge seems clear, because a rescue team who came to get her, and even one of their vehicles, also slid around the bridge.

The city of Newport manages the area, and Fields sued it for damages. The city’s defense was “recreational immunity,” which is described in state law: “It is the public policy of the state of Oregon to encourage owners of land to make their land available to the public for recreational purposes … by limiting their liability toward persons entering thereon for such purposes.”

A little more specifically, the law says, “The limitation on liability provided by this section applies if the principal purpose for entry upon the land is for recreational purposes … and is not affected if the injury … occurs while the person entering land is engaging in activities other than the use of the land for recreational purpose.”

The shield against liability, then, applies if you’re using the property for “recreational purposes” – as Newport argued that Field was – but not if you’re using it for some other purpose. Field’s argument was that she was using the bridge simply to get to Agate Beach, and her intent was to recreate, with her dogs and friend, there. Oregon law lists some activities that can specifically be considered as recreation, but others could be included as well.

All of this put the courts in the position of deciding what “recreation” is and isn’t, and because of a specific provision in the immunity statute, deciding whether a specific spot was an “unimproved, nonrecreational” trail. The Court of Appeals weighed in on Field’s side, but its decision seemed to struggle with the vagueness in the statute.

A trial on some of the facts, ordered as a followup by the Court of Appeals, is expected this year.

Does this matter outside of Newport?

At least one plaintiff’s attorney suggests the impact is not likely to be large, that the facts are specific enough to the Newport case; the fact that the trail was adjacent to the ocean also has a specific connection to the state’s law on liability.

Property owners, including local governments, are less sure. CIS Insurance Services, which insures many Oregon local governments, warned that the Court of Appeals decision effectively ended recreational immunity for improved trails: “Public and private landowners of improved trails are no longer protected from lawsuits,” a CIS lawyer said.

CIS even advised local governments to close improved trails used to access a recreational areas: “This especially includes trails, walkways and stairs used to access bodies of water, such as the ocean, lakes, rivers, streams and reservoirs.”

That warning has been heard. The cities of Waldport and Oceanside and the Port of Garibaldi have shut down trails near the ocean, and other trail plans have been put on hold. Other cities, including many far from the coast, are weighing their options, which may include shutting down park access.

The uncertainty over immunity grows out of the peculiar phrasing of the state’s recreational immunity law, which was crafted at the Oregon Legislature and could be revised there to creaste greater clarity. The issue is likely to come up at the February short session, which usually takes up only a limited number of non-financial issues.

If lawmakers don’t act, and lots of constituents this spring and summer find their access to local parks curtailed, they may wish they had.

 

The public school system in Shaker Heights, a suburban city southeast of Cleveland, is something of a model for Oregon. It has one of the most racially integrated, as well as well-funded and thoughtfully organized, public school systems in the nation.

It was renowned for breaking racial barriers early in the ’60s and has continued to push new and innovative efforts since.  It is not a problem-free district, and in some ways is plagued by issues that are also found in Oregon.

The book Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity by Laura Meckler, details the many issues still bedeviling students, teachers, administrators and parents. Gaps among various groups in achievement and attitude stay stubbornly pervasive and in too many cases, Meckler remarks, “Teachers no longer teach; students no longer learn.”

Her quest to learn why this is happening has unearthed many prospective answers, but one is prominent and bookended her account: Too many students don’t feel as if they really belong in their school.

Or, as she said in an interview, “One of my takeaways was that a lot of this comes back to a sense of belonging, and whether we are creating spaces where students and parents really feel like it is their place, their space.”

That takes us to the new Oregon Statewide Report Card on schools, released Nov. 30.

Signed by Charlene Williams, who officially became director of the Oregon Department of Education in September, it recounts the usual list of serious problems and some that seem to be more concerns than issues, such as declining numbers of students in many places.

She said, “At the same time, Oregon school districts lean into ways to improve the learning conditions for students, they have faced enormous challenges from declining enrollment to chronic absenteeism as well as social and political tensions. In addition, leadership turnover continues to occur as many of Oregon’s 197 school districts have new superintendents.”

In one key paragraph, Williams said: “Moving forward I’m focused on three areas that are central to student success: early literacy, sense of belonging, accountability.”

The middle one jumps out. After all, while accountability is important, it can – and often has – descend swiftly into a routine of teaching to the test, and at best highlights but does not solve problems. Early literacy is obviously critical, but the question of addressing it remains.

The sense of belonging underlies some of the key items in the rest of the report.

Some of this is reflected in the most basic of school measurements: Student attendance. Average daily attendance in Oregon is “the annual average of daily student attendance for students residing within the district. It is collected by the federal government and is used as the basis for funding in some states, but not in Oregon.”

Still, the numbers developed by the state are starkly meaningful. In the 2018-19 school year attendance was 573,705, while in 2022-23 it fell to 546,477. Other measures of students, such as raw registration numbers and figures parsed in various ways, showed a similar decline.

The pandemic and emphasis on distance learning may have affected some of this, as it almost certainly did in the case of high school dropouts. The report said that student dropout rates “were impacted by the pandemic and the shift to distance learning for all in the spring of 2020.”

Exact numbers of dropouts have become hard to measure over time since the criteria for measuring has changed. The report said, “In 2019-20 and 2020-21… districts were instructed not to drop students from enrollment without confirmation of a transfer to a different educational setting. This reduced the number of dropouts reported for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years. Many students who otherwise would have been reported as dropouts in these years were reported when districts were allowed to drop students from their enrollment in 2021-22. As a result, data from 2019-20 and 2020-21 reflect an undercount in dropouts, and data from 2021-22 reflect an over count.”

Another way of putting it: There’s been a recent loss of consistency of determining when schools and students have lost connection.

Other measures suggest that subsets of students who may not feel a sense of belonging to the school may be experiencing diminished results there.

The report noted in the area of discipline, for example, that “during the 2022-23 school year, 6.8 percent of Oregon students experienced disciplinary incidents. Across race/ethnicity, students from historically underserved groups were disciplined more often than other students, with Black/African American students and American Indian/Alaska Native students disciplined most often, 13.2% and 11.2%, respectively). Students in Special Education and students federally identified as economically disadvantaged were also disciplined more often than other groups.”

Diminished results were found too among students who experienced residential insecurity or outright homelessness. The study said the four-year graduation rate for all students in 2022-23 was 81.3%, but for those described as houseless, it was 58.6%.

The problems of schools often seem a many headed hydra, encouraging us to keep looking for answers all over the place.

Not all of the answers will come from dollars, statistical analysis and abstract policies, though. Some may be more personal. They may come from giving more students the sense that they have a welcoming place in their school.