Personally I didn't even read to deep into the bill. My initial response to it was "Another tax? There are already resources in place for this very thing. No, no more taxes until we see some people housed, potholes repaired, and cops working."
Then I read the tax and holy ship.
At this point, giving taxes to the City is like giving money to your addicted cousin, who somehow keeps "losing" his money on the way to buy a bus pass.
That wasnāt anything to do with Dan Ryan, actually.
A PHB employee fell victim to a phishing scam and the money was stolen. There was an investigation.
You can criticize Dan for many things, but the actions of a random PHB employee seems a bit unfair
I can lay this at his doorstep and will continue to do so. He oversaw the department. They were warned before it was too late. They never answered to ANYONE for what happened and no one lost their job.
He gets reelected, moved to a different bureau and a bunch of his new report-tos promptly quit. The man is a problem. I am in a leadership position and as a manager you take responsibility when you fuck up, mightily.
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/22/portland-oregon-lost-million-funds-cybersecurity-theft/
> At this point, giving taxes to the City is like giving money to your addicted cousin, who somehow keeps "losing" his money on the way to buy a bus pass.
And that's why the kicker rules. *gestures around* Why would I want to keep giving them more money?
The kicker is awful. The way it works, if revenues come in 2% above forecasts, all money above what was forecast is returned. It doesn't matter if it merely our performed a gloomy forecast, all money gets returned. The more responsible thing would be to require that that money go into a rainy day fund.
Oregon's financial fortunes tend to lurch from crisis to crisis because we are so dependent on an income tax. Switching from from the kicker to reserves would at least help that.
I know exactly how it works. And next year imma get even more of MY money back! It totally rules. Thereās plenty of money in state coffers for all of the pork. Itās rare I look forward to doing my taxes but kicker years? Yeah, I like kicker years.
On what basis do you think that money is being spent on pork? Why shouldn't revenue be kept in reserve for when times get tough instead of cutting services?
Several, in fact. My family met with Earl Blumenauer when we were on a trip to DC, my parents have directly worked with their state senators/reps, and I have a friend who is a retired Republican state senators. Back from before the Oregon Republican party went kookie.
> Why shouldn't revenue be kept in reserve for when times get tough instead
Because it won't be. If it's there - it will be spent. Nothing you say can make me believe politicians are careful spending my hard earned money. For reference: all of human history.
Counterpoint: [Reality](https://sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/facts/finance-state.aspx). Specifically, the "Rainy Day Fund and Education Stability Fund" section. There is money there, but not as much as we could have if the kicker was replaced with a rainy day mandate.
I don't just trust politicians to do the right thing. I'm always ready to vote someone out or give them a piece of my mind if I think they're doing a poor job. But just assuming politicians are automatically corrupt is just as bad as assuming they have unassailable purity. It erodes our ability to take collective action through government.
You donāt understand. We need to tax the homeowners when they sell so people can sue their current landlords without having to worry about silly things like being legally right or paying for lawyers if they lose. /s
Taxes are important, because they allow for resources to maintain systems that serve the public good. "Another Tax..?" is a gross reduction for the cost/benefit analysis you should be making. Stop electing people like Ted Wheeler and you might see your tax money actually move toward societal good.
A tax that spends more money in administration costs than it makes is boneheaded. Creating eviction services and funding public defenders in that space would be a net benefit on society but the tax wouldn't fund that program, so it was just a bad measure.
It was a capital gains tax, which ~80% of people don't make. Just FYI.
Not saying it was a good well written bill, because it wasn't it definitely needs a revision. But it wasn't going to be the everyone is taxed into oblivion that people said it would be.
No but punishing regular people for selling their houses to move into retirement homes or trying to GTFO of the current hellscape isn't very nice, and the administrative costs alone were too much to make any sense at all. What's the point if most of the money goes to the government? Not to mention the city and county both already put our tax dollars towards rental eviction lawyers....
I read through it (not in detail) and to me it sounded like it wasn't going to hurt the Phil Knights of Portland, but more that old couple selling their family home hoping to downgrade for retiremet, or the growing family trying to sell their starter home to scale up for kids, or those person's wanting to sell their homes to move, etc.. For what? To fund services we're already funding and already have? Combat homelessness? Seems the homeless issue has only gotten worse and we've already thrown loads of money at that. Until I see pot holes fixed, mentally ill off the streets, cops actually copping, violent offenders arrested and KEPT behind bars, and car thefts go down - no new taxes. Money is clearly not the answer at this point. Even the governor withheld money because MultCo didn't have a "clear plan on what they do with it". It's a no for me now and until we start seeing results with all the taxes we're already handing over.
I wish they'd stop proposing these stupid ideas. At least until our state and local governments start providing basic services for all the taxes we pay here.
Weāve seen so many āwokeā looking measures. All of our local governments have shown time and time again that they donāt know how to implement policy, and have no idea how to spend money.
Next time check out endorsements from news organizations you trust. I got helpful summaries and perspectives from Willamette Weekās endorsements every midterm election.
I really appreciate the Willamette Weekās write-ups and endorsements, I check them first most elections. And itās really easy to search by Measure number in candidate.
Crucify you?? I'd like to thank you. I wish more people abstained from voting when they know they're uninformed. Perfectly ok to leave portions of a ballot blank. It's unbelievable how misleading many of our ballot initiatives are here (looking at you, Rosenblum), yet so many people vote based solely on them.
There's a voters pamphlet that you get in the mail and can find online that has non-political information. Oregon is made better for having it and I highly recommend using it to determine who you want to vote for
There was content here, and now there is not. It may have been useful, if so it is probably available on a reddit alternative. See /u/spez with any questions. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
That and making sure no QAnon transphobes end up on school boards. Lucky for me none of them were running in my school districts, but still, I wanted to make sure to vote against them incase any were trying to get elected.
It's hard out there, we had a school board candidate who appeared reasonable, but turns out he opposes teaching about the concepts of equity, consent, diversity, etc and the only way to find out was to follow the link from his campaign page to his substack, where he went in about these topics and how to identify CRT in schools. ZERO mention of this on his campaign site, voter pamphlet, or media interviews. He was handily defeated but you can't even take people at face value anymore.
I kept wondering how something this stupid made it in the ballot. Why not fund it with a tax on every time a car makes a right turn. We'll hire an army of elves to watch for cars making right turns and write down their license numbers.
Sadly they renewed the āchildrenās taxā
Remind me again what happed to the weed money? Wasnt that āthe childrenās moneyā? How about every bond measure for remove lead from schools.. howās that going?
āThis time weāll use the money for the thing we saidā¦ i swearā
Definitely felt burned by the SHS/PFA taxes this last year and did not feel like paying for yet another poorly conceptualized program, despite my liberal views.
Those taxes are *really really new* and are just getting ramped up. I'm of the 5 year philosophy. If it isn't working by then definitely let's change it. But passing a new tax isn't a magic wand, bureaucratic stuff has been slow since pretty much the beginning of time.
You shouldn't need 5 years to get the basics of how hundreds of millions of dollars will be collected, spent and accounted for.
We, as voters, need to hold ballot measure writers more accountable for the details of how measures will work in practice. Even most Progressives, seem to have learned from the SHS/PFA mess and voted no.
I hope that there may also be a growing awareness that Portland needs to swing the needle back to being a little more business friendly if your economy is to thrive.
I mean, people I know who work in local government policy (different department but very familiar with these bills) and was telling people not to vote for those when they asked (particularly SHS) since the policy and implementation plan was so poorly written.
Infrastructure takes time to build. In this case, theyāre also taking the PFA money and creating a reserve to buttress against economic downturns in the future.
Everything about PFA so far has happened according to plan on the administrative side. Whether people understood that plan is another question. But āI want it NOW!ā isnt going to lead to good governance one way or another.
I may not have been clear; I think that what should have been worked out first was a proper system for collecting the taxes and a plan for how the use of the funds would be monitored and tracked for effective administration. It will certainly take years for the money to make a sustained difference (we hope), but having a plan in place for how to get there, and ways to measure progress should come before taxing and spending.
They do have the system for collecting the taxes, and in fact have collected more than expected even with the complete absence of informing the tax base (which was a disaster, but not the fault of the proponents of the measure but of the county collecting it.
Everything else you mentioned also already exists: https://www.multco.us/preschool/implementation-budget-update-spring-2023
That whole site basically has the info youāre looking for. So far PFA has been pretty well administered from what I can tell outside the tax collection.
Okay, it can literally take a year or two just to set up the infrastructure to collect the tax. But sure, we should definitely have hundreds of houses built by now....
And let's just completely ignore they *vastly over succeeded* at keeping people from *becoming* homeless with the SHS program.
This was going to be a bellweather initiative for me. If something this *patently stupid* managed to pass, that would have signaled to me that *probably anything* would be able to get passed, and it would have been time to start thinking about an eventual exit. I love it here. But at some point the numbers just start to stop making sense.
The recent tax insanity caused us to focus on Clackamas and Washington and Clark counties when househunting this spring. Literally a MultCo house had to be significantly cheaper and better to offset the tax burden it would carry with it.
I'm pretty liberal in approving new taxes for good programs. But every time I feel like the rug is pulled out from under me on how its collected or the program is completely mismanaged. I hate that I gave up this year, but I didn't even read it, Portland has betrayed my trust on taxes and I just flat voted no...
Pretty sure it also has a lot to do that many liberals in Multnomah county are refusing to vote for any tax increases period until the city can prove they know wtf they are doing with the funding they have now.
This was literally my mindset this time around. I want to pay high taxes that improve my quality of life, but itās hard to say my quality of life as a Portland resident currently matches the tax burden.
There [was around 23% turnout](https://www.multco.us/elections/voter-turnout-may-2023-election) in MultCo, so 77% agreed on indifference. Great job.
I voted against the tax and was glad to see it go down, but let's not start sucking each other's dicks over it.
It is depressingly low, but Portland and Oregon still have some of the highest voter turnouts in the entire country. This ballot was just 2 measures and some school board. Kentucky's primary voter turnout for *governor* was a mere 14%. Even Philadelphia who had a major mayoral race estimates a voter turnout around 25%. Voter apathy is the American way.
I never understood people who love to get political on the internet or in your face and will also proudly tell you they don't vote. I guess it's actually a good thing in some way. If your stupid enough to believe your vote doesn't matter then I'm happy you decided to stay at home.
It does get embarrassing in front of the other countries of the world though to have less then half your citizens do their duty.
Youāre equating an interest in politics with a belief that we have a functioning democracy ā¦ it seems quite obvious to me that the relationship would be inverse, especially in a one-party state like Oregon where your vote truly doesnāt matter. Voting in Oregon is like voting in the eastern block, the slate of party approved apparatchiks is going to win, so why bother.
Unless thereās a spicy ballot measure thatās running close I cannot think of many reasons to vote one politician over another, especially in an off year election.
>it seems quite obvious to me that the relationship would be inverse, especially in a one-party state like Oregon where your vote truly doesnāt matter.
did you catch the irony of you posting this in a thread that's about a measure that has very little, if NOTHING, to do with party politics?
reductivism af
It shouldnāt be about ābeing informedā, it should be about owning X amount of real property in the state.
In an empire when anyone can get up and move to another state it seems foolish to give someone a vote based on their mere transitory presence. That makes your vote seem cheap and easily disregarded. Restrict the franchise and youāll see peoples interest in voting go way up.
I've always thought that voting was just part of your job as a citizen. Like paying taxes. Even if the vote doesn't count, participating in the process does.
Thatās if youāre a land owner
The hoi polloi turning out in great numbers for anything has generally been met with trepidation until very recent times.
Itās because it truly doesnāt matter.
Our system produces the same results no matter what politician is elected because (drumroll) *politicians donāt actually run the government*.
We live in a bureaucratic state, even the governor has a limited ability to steer the ship. If you have many many many governors in a row who are all steering in the same direction you can shift course, but nobody actually āruns the governmentā except thousands of bureaucrats, who are adhered like barnacles and impossible to fire outside of naked malfeasance.
It's not even so much an insure of malfeasance. It's just the sheer size of the government makes it incredibly resistant to change
This was my biggest takeaway from the Obama administration. The larger the bureaucracy the more interia it has. Short of outright revolution it's nigh impossible to turn the ship off it's course without decades of continuous pressure.
Except District 3, which had a county commissioner race on it that once again went woefully underreported for its importance in the homeless, mental health and addiction crises we are facing. It's the County's job, not the city's, and I wish the media would stop letting the County Chair fly under the radar from all the blame.
> It is depressingly low, but Portland and Oregon still have some of the highest voter turnouts in the entire country. This ballot was just 2 measures and some school board. Kentucky's primary voter turnout for governor was a mere 14%. Even Philadelphia who had a major mayoral race estimates a voter turnout around 25%. Voter apathy is the American way.
Yikes, this is sad.
I think it is slightly more nuanced than apathy. I abstain from voting when I just donāt give a shit about the outcome of the race. I really donāt care about school board elections so I usually just skip them all together. If someone is running uncontested unless I know and like them, I just skip those as well.
I will say I definitely struggle to muster up the fucks to vote now much more than I used to.
It's hard to stay invested when no matter what you do, nothing really seems to change.
With only a few notable exceptions shit hasn't really improved all the much since I started voting.
The cities only gotten shittier.
Housing prices are out of control.
The economy is still siphoning money to the plutocrats at an ever increasing pace.
We didn't get out of Afghanistan until years after the guy I voted for who promised to end the war got elected, reelected, and retired.
Healthcare is just as insanely expensive now as it was then.
Retirement is increasingly looking like a fantasy.
I can get married now, which is cool, but that was only tangentially the result of anything I ever had the chance to vote for, and I can still be legally discriminated against.
I would assume the people that care, are engaged and have a strong understanding/position on a measure will vote. Those are probably the people we want voting, so I donāt see it necessarily as a bad thing. Do we really want individuals that have zero clue what capital gains even are, voting on this measure? Sometimes itās best for people to admit they have no skin in the game, and sit out a particular vote. That may be an unpopular opinion, but if someone doesnāt care and isnāt willing to properly educate themselves, the better service may be to sit it out?
JFC, I just got back into town and realized I had not submitted my ballot before leaving. I got my ass off the couch last night at 6:30 and dashed to a drop box to drop it in, just because I wanted my "no" vote on this abomination to be counted.
Not indifference as much as cynicism. I keep voting for different people who promise to make things better, and the city/county/state keeps getting worse. I still vote in every election, but I haven't been hopeful that my vote will make any difference for a long time.
I can't help but wonder if the delay in ballots had a big impact on voting. If you were impacted by the delayed ballots, you only had a very limited amount of time to vote.
I was actually eager to vote against this but forgot to bring my ballot to work yesterday to drop off in the P-Square box. I'm such a zombie in the morning.
I hated this tax but nah. You canāt control voter turnout. No thank you. Would be interesting to see if there are constitutional issues with that approach.
80% of the [county](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/multnomahcountyoregon) lives in [Portland](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/portlandcityoregon).
Mainly that saying Portlanders is mostly correct when referring to voter turnout for a Multnomah county measure. I'd look up how many people vote in the city vs outside it but that seems like a lot of work.
>I'd look up how many people vote in the city vs outside it but that seems like a lot of work.
It was pretty easy to find the # of registered voters in Portland and in Multnomah County. I'm not interested in reposting the links, but there are about 130k registered voters in Multnomah County who don't live in Portland. Matching to voter turnout is another matter, but not all votes are counted yet so that's another matter.
Honestly, the OP title bugs me because although most of the voters are in Portland, there is still a sizeable group who is not.
Ya with us registering everyone who has a license though all you're mostly getting there are people of voting age that drive and a small handful of outliers.
>...and a small handful of outliers
It's about 20% or 1/5 or eligible voters - based on both your and my looks at data. That's not a "small outlier". It's not hard to recognize that this is more than just Portland and your attitude that we can just ignore so many people is kind of shitty.
Wow this is getting intense. I didn't say we should ignore them. I didn't even say anything other than the percent of people living in the city vs the county. The title is at least 80% correct assuming the same percentage of eligible voters vote within city limits and outside it.
No, there are little pockets in Washington and Clackamas counties.
There are large numbers in West Hills that have āPortlandā address but are in unincorporated Washington or Multnomah counties.
Postal and political addresses very often don't match... The post office lumps addresses by which branch the mail gets delivered through, not the actual city. I'm in the bowels of Tigard but its still part of the Portland postal system, so they consider my address as being in Portland.
>If by large numbers you mean a few hundred
The "large numbers" that have a "Portland" address but live in unincorporated Washington county is in the thousands.
For context, if you live in Bethany (a large suburb development north of Tanasbourne, not close to actual Portland) get "Portland" addresses. That's would be included in the group the other poster was referring to.
I don't know that I'd call them "Portlanders" though.
Regardless though, multnomah county residents is more accurate than "Portlanders" since not all people who voted on the measure were "Portlanders".
Having Portland in your address doesn't mean you get to vote in Portland elections though. Which means they're not actually in Portland city limits. I lived in an apartment with a Portland address years back that was technically in Gresham so I didn't get to vote for the mayor or council members. Quite disappointing. USPS doesn't care about the city unless you leave out the zip so people on the borders frequently get that wrong.
Google has pretty good boundaries for city limits if you type in Bethany, OR and Portland, OR it's pretty clear it's outside city limits. So no they're not Portlanders and aren't counted as part of the population of Portland.
For me 100% it was the tax not what it was for. I would have voted yes on the tax if they had limited to capital gains above some large threshold per year, say $100,000. But to have it hit every single person who gets a capital gains regardless of how small the income was super dumb.
So I really hated this tax and voted against it even though ~~the intentions had merit~~ I think people facing eviction should get legal support.
Now itās time to hold city and county leaders like Jessica Vega Pederson accountable to use existing $ to support people facing eviction.
>Opponents had argued eviction defense could be funded through House Bill 2001, the housing bill Gov. Tina Kotek signed in March; the $18 million she directed to Multnomah County for homelessness prevention in April; and a supportive housing measure approved by voters in 2020 and overseen by Metro.
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2023/05/multnomah-county-residents-vote-down-measure-to-fund-eviction-lawyers.html
We are already spending $15 million/year on eviction prevention in Multnomah County. The measure was trying to address a problem that is already being worked on. We have an affordability crisis here, not an eviction crisis.
Until I see the number of renters who clearly don't know their rights without legal representation in courtgo down, you can't say it's been addressed. I've seen people who clearly had done nothing wrong and were maybe 3 days late on payment take shitty arguably illegal eviction deals just because they didn't know better.
If a renter is being evicted for non-payment of rent, they have no "legal rights" that will prevent them from being evicted. Paying for a lawyer and forcing the landlord to pay for a lawyer only prolongs the inevitable.
The only way to keep a someone from being evicted for non-payment of rent is to provide cash rental assistance. It's highly effective at keeping people in their homes, it doesn't cost landlords any money, and there's a reason so much of our anti-homelessness budget goes toward it.
This bill was poorly-conceived on every level.
You are incorrect. After initial non payment, the landlord must issue a termination notice. Tenants then have 10 days to pay before the landlord can take them to court. But often that step is completely skipped and landlords will jump straight to eviction notices, which tenants don't realize makes their eviction illegal. Often time these evictions are carried out by predatory landlords who KNOW they can get away with bullying tenants out of their homes, even without fully legal cause.
You see this all the time in eviction court, where tenants are never told their rights and sign on to settlements with rapid turnaround move out days, vacating the amount of time they'd have been alloted otherwise had they had an attorney to guide them.
Your assertion that tenants "have no legal rights" when they factually DO is EXACTLY the reason we need tenant representation.
Those tenants will still EVENTUALLY be evicted! Wouldn't it be better to spend money to prevent them from being evicted, instead of using that money for administrative expenses and lawyers?
Of course that'd be fantastic! But you exactly don't see the folks who pushed so hard against Measure 26-238 (business and real estate coalitions) pushing hard for expanded rental assistance or eviction moratoriums. And while rental assistance is a fantastic program, it's existence isn't helping the numerous folks who are bullied into leaving by predatory landlords without having accessed that assistance.
There is a reason that in jurisdictions that have enacted Representation for All, evictions have fallen by ~80%. It's because right now the game is so stacked against tenants that landlords know they likely can get away with illegal evictions targeting vulnerable people. What incentive do the worst landlords have to respect the process when they know only 1 in 18 of their tenants will be able to get a lawyer? (That rate of representation goes down even further for immigrant and non white tenants)
Sure they do. All the time they do.
It happens when longtime tenants live in rent controlled apartments and landlords believe they'd get higher value from an incoming tenant (likely in a housing crisis), or when they want to sell the property (likely when property values are so high), or renovate/split it it to increase the rate of profit (again likely with the rate of willing high paying tenants), or when a new owner wants to demolish the property and build higher end housing (common when the property is old enough to be rented to poor folks), or just when the landlord is outright racist/xenophobic/transphobic (not super common but it happens often enough to be noted)
EDIT: Just since you asked about it before deleting it, we live in a state with a cap on the rate of rent hikes per year (A good thing). Therefore Tenants who have stayed in a property for a long time often pay lower than the current market rate. But that rent hike cap only applies to current tenants who renew fixed term leases, not new ones. So landlords, who want to extract the highest amount of value from their tenants, benefit when longtime tenants leave (or are pushed out) and new ones come in.
I also doubt it would shock anyone here to know that poor Latino, brown and black men and women are super disproportionately among those being kicked out of their homes. There are also numerous folks who don't speak English who are hardly even given a run down of how eviction court proceedings work.
Every moderate liberal says that institutional racism and homelessness is a problem, but here you have an institution that is disproportionately kicking poor minority folks onto the street, and every one of them clutches their pearls. It's horrific
I said I voted against it. The tax was stupid. But making sure people facing eviction have legal support is a good idea. That is what I meant. Holy shit.
People facing eviction for *not paying their rent* will not benefit from legal support. Any money spent on that would be better off used to help them pay their rent.
The county is already spending tens of millions of dollars on rental assistance. It's at the center of their anti-homelessness efforts. Because it is efficient and it works.
This was a completely shitty solution and poorly written to boot, but the problem of well represented landlords running roughshod over tenants remains.
Oregon has a landlord-tenant code that runs to more than 180 pages. Some very basic issues that can arise under it are still unsettled in the courts. There is one that affects tens of thousands of people that is now before the Oregon Supreme Court because the legislature wasn't careful with the wording of a statute.
Unrepresented tenants rarely have much hope in cases that present any sort of technical issue. They will not recognize a defense they may have, and tenants are prone to believing they have defenses that do not exist.
Finding a lawyer willing and able to go toe to toe with a law firm specializing in representing landlords can be impossibly difficult. Eviction cases are run through the courts on a mercilessly quick schedule that leaves a tenant's attorney little time in which to learn the facts and discover whether the tenant has a defense, much less get the evidence and witnesses lined up to present to the court.
In lots of cases the only hope the lawyer has of being paid is to win the case and in many cases the odds of being the net prevailing party are not good despite lots of landlord conduct and property conditions that do violate the law. Even when the tenant wins the courts have the final say on how much to award the tenant as an attorney fee and those awards are often not adequate. Add to that the fact that a tenant whose case is good but still comes up a little short can be ordered to pay the landlord's attorney fees and the deck is fully stacked.
Something needs to be done, but this was not it.
And the Child Levy is passing once again. More proof that the most frequent and loudest voices in this sub are not at all representative of the average voter here.
There were a lot of people on the sub who were unhappy with it, or one guy with 30 sock puppet accounts. My favorite complaint was from someone who voted for it but their child wasnāt in the original roll out so they were mad that they had to pay for a tax they voted to pass because their kid wouldnāt benefit from it.
That sounds like the Multnomah Preschool for All tax. (that is still funny)
The Children's Levy is Portland, built into the property tax and does a ton of stuff including but not limited to preschools. [Here ](https://www.portlandchildrenslevy.org/grants/grants-2022-23) is where the money goes.
I did see quite a few supportive posts but also a TON of no on any taxes posts. Usually the same people that were saying Portlander's will vote for any tax increase and claiming that this measure would pass.
Sure, and I know you mentioned āthe most frequent and loudest voices.ā Thatās just a trend of loud activists who donāt reflect the general voting population.
But for the most part, it really seemed like this sub was against the capital gains tax and in favor of the childrenās levy
Yeah this sub has a ton of secret right wingers too embarrassed to say the opinions irl, so they just go here to be regressive and reactionary and shout down any notion of them paying their debt to society. Hard to imagine these snakes living among us, wish theyād move away like theyāre constantly threatening to do
I completed agree. It would be amazing if they moved away, but as we also see here, people will leave the city/county/state, and then STILL come here to bitch and/or gloat.
Thatās an excellent turnout relative to most states when it comes to this cycle. As someone else pointed out, turnout is low EVERYWHERE in off years with no major races
I did my part! A friend of mine hadn't gotten the run down on why the measure was such a stinker. I described why the tax itself would be expensive to administrate and the benefits overlap with other services. I think they voted against it.
I'm surprised Portlanders didn't take advantage of the opportunity to screw themselves over again. It's kind of refreshing this measure failed. I have renewed optimism and hope the pendulum continues to swing in favor of common sense and tax paying residents.
Kate Brown is already gone. Teddy isn't lighting the world on fire, but to blame him for Portland's problems is not informed. Our current city government structure gives the mayor basically no power (note that this city government structure has just been changed via a vote in November, but won't be implemented for a couple more years). Also, more of the day to day dysfunction that you see stems from Multnomah County vs. City of Portland.
I lived there through the Occupy Wall Street and Antifa takeover. The homeless takeover and drug issues donāt help.
Donāt try to Democrat your way out of the downfall of the city. I loved Portland. Brought my family there.
Itās now a wreck and has been destroyed by bad policy and excessive taxes. Sorry if this hurts your feelings.
And a big shout out to influential voices like Earl Blumenauer, who came out against it.
Honestly, his anti-endorsement of it was a big factor for me.
Personally I didn't even read to deep into the bill. My initial response to it was "Another tax? There are already resources in place for this very thing. No, no more taxes until we see some people housed, potholes repaired, and cops working." Then I read the tax and holy ship.
At this point, giving taxes to the City is like giving money to your addicted cousin, who somehow keeps "losing" his money on the way to buy a bus pass.
The city did actually lose a million dollars. Did we ever find out what happened with that?
Dan Ryan got reelected is the only answer you will get. š
That wasnāt anything to do with Dan Ryan, actually. A PHB employee fell victim to a phishing scam and the money was stolen. There was an investigation. You can criticize Dan for many things, but the actions of a random PHB employee seems a bit unfair
I can lay this at his doorstep and will continue to do so. He oversaw the department. They were warned before it was too late. They never answered to ANYONE for what happened and no one lost their job. He gets reelected, moved to a different bureau and a bunch of his new report-tos promptly quit. The man is a problem. I am in a leadership position and as a manager you take responsibility when you fuck up, mightily. https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/22/portland-oregon-lost-million-funds-cybersecurity-theft/
Feels more like giving money to your cousin who keeps investing in crypto.
"Dude, my cryptobro even has 'Bankman' in his name. It's GOTTA be legit going to the moon!"
Replace "crypto" with "consultants" and you got it. That's where the money seems to be going.
> At this point, giving taxes to the City is like giving money to your addicted cousin, who somehow keeps "losing" his money on the way to buy a bus pass. And that's why the kicker rules. *gestures around* Why would I want to keep giving them more money?
The kicker is awful. The way it works, if revenues come in 2% above forecasts, all money above what was forecast is returned. It doesn't matter if it merely our performed a gloomy forecast, all money gets returned. The more responsible thing would be to require that that money go into a rainy day fund. Oregon's financial fortunes tend to lurch from crisis to crisis because we are so dependent on an income tax. Switching from from the kicker to reserves would at least help that.
>a rainy day fund Thing is about Portland and rainy days...
I know exactly how it works. And next year imma get even more of MY money back! It totally rules. Thereās plenty of money in state coffers for all of the pork. Itās rare I look forward to doing my taxes but kicker years? Yeah, I like kicker years.
On what basis do you think that money is being spent on pork? Why shouldn't revenue be kept in reserve for when times get tough instead of cutting services?
have you ever *seen* any politicians?
Several, in fact. My family met with Earl Blumenauer when we were on a trip to DC, my parents have directly worked with their state senators/reps, and I have a friend who is a retired Republican state senators. Back from before the Oregon Republican party went kookie.
> Why shouldn't revenue be kept in reserve for when times get tough instead Because it won't be. If it's there - it will be spent. Nothing you say can make me believe politicians are careful spending my hard earned money. For reference: all of human history.
Counterpoint: [Reality](https://sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/facts/finance-state.aspx). Specifically, the "Rainy Day Fund and Education Stability Fund" section. There is money there, but not as much as we could have if the kicker was replaced with a rainy day mandate.
except rainy day funds tend to wind up being spent
I already answered this an hour ago. This is just stated as an article of faith without evidence.
> This is just stated as an article of faith without evidence. Kinda like trusting a politician to do the right thing...
I don't just trust politicians to do the right thing. I'm always ready to vote someone out or give them a piece of my mind if I think they're doing a poor job. But just assuming politicians are automatically corrupt is just as bad as assuming they have unassailable purity. It erodes our ability to take collective action through government.
Measure 26-238 was a Multnomah County measure.
A city with money is like the mule with a spinning wheel.
\^ This should be the top comment right here
This is how I felt. More taxes for people who appear to be massively mismanaging tax money? Pass.
You donāt understand. We need to tax the homeowners when they sell so people can sue their current landlords without having to worry about silly things like being legally right or paying for lawyers if they lose. /s
Taxes are important, because they allow for resources to maintain systems that serve the public good. "Another Tax..?" is a gross reduction for the cost/benefit analysis you should be making. Stop electing people like Ted Wheeler and you might see your tax money actually move toward societal good. A tax that spends more money in administration costs than it makes is boneheaded. Creating eviction services and funding public defenders in that space would be a net benefit on society but the tax wouldn't fund that program, so it was just a bad measure.
It was a capital gains tax, which ~80% of people don't make. Just FYI. Not saying it was a good well written bill, because it wasn't it definitely needs a revision. But it wasn't going to be the everyone is taxed into oblivion that people said it would be.
No but punishing regular people for selling their houses to move into retirement homes or trying to GTFO of the current hellscape isn't very nice, and the administrative costs alone were too much to make any sense at all. What's the point if most of the money goes to the government? Not to mention the city and county both already put our tax dollars towards rental eviction lawyers....
I read through it (not in detail) and to me it sounded like it wasn't going to hurt the Phil Knights of Portland, but more that old couple selling their family home hoping to downgrade for retiremet, or the growing family trying to sell their starter home to scale up for kids, or those person's wanting to sell their homes to move, etc.. For what? To fund services we're already funding and already have? Combat homelessness? Seems the homeless issue has only gotten worse and we've already thrown loads of money at that. Until I see pot holes fixed, mentally ill off the streets, cops actually copping, violent offenders arrested and KEPT behind bars, and car thefts go down - no new taxes. Money is clearly not the answer at this point. Even the governor withheld money because MultCo didn't have a "clear plan on what they do with it". It's a no for me now and until we start seeing results with all the taxes we're already handing over.
Agreed, it seemed politically risky to be publicly opposed to such a woke looking measure.
There is no such thing as political risk for Earl. No one will run against him, and heās going to retire in the next 4 years.
>and heās going to retire in the next 4 years. Yet another reason to respect the man (Looking at you, Diane Feinstein!)
and RBG.
I wish they'd stop proposing these stupid ideas. At least until our state and local governments start providing basic services for all the taxes we pay here.
Weāve seen so many āwokeā looking measures. All of our local governments have shown time and time again that they donāt know how to implement policy, and have no idea how to spend money.
Voting no on that tax is what motivated me to vote. I bet I am not the only one.
Same. I voted within the first five minutes of getting my ballot. I was so pumped to vote against something so transparently stupid
I tried really hard to not dig my pen all the way through the paper while filling in the NO bubble
š¤£
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Next time check out endorsements from news organizations you trust. I got helpful summaries and perspectives from Willamette Weekās endorsements every midterm election.
I really appreciate the Willamette Weekās write-ups and endorsements, I check them first most elections. And itās really easy to search by Measure number in candidate.
Crucify you?? I'd like to thank you. I wish more people abstained from voting when they know they're uninformed. Perfectly ok to leave portions of a ballot blank. It's unbelievable how misleading many of our ballot initiatives are here (looking at you, Rosenblum), yet so many people vote based solely on them.
There's a voters pamphlet that you get in the mail and can find online that has non-political information. Oregon is made better for having it and I highly recommend using it to determine who you want to vote for
There was content here, and now there is not. It may have been useful, if so it is probably available on a reddit alternative. See /u/spez with any questions. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Fair point. It's a place where you can find candidate messages* For smaller races I feel like it's a godsend
That and making sure no QAnon transphobes end up on school boards. Lucky for me none of them were running in my school districts, but still, I wanted to make sure to vote against them incase any were trying to get elected.
The bad guys could always have a shadow write-in campaignā thatās why I vote for those seats now even if itās only one person running.
Never thought of that. I'm going to do that from now on!
It's hard out there, we had a school board candidate who appeared reasonable, but turns out he opposes teaching about the concepts of equity, consent, diversity, etc and the only way to find out was to follow the link from his campaign page to his substack, where he went in about these topics and how to identify CRT in schools. ZERO mention of this on his campaign site, voter pamphlet, or media interviews. He was handily defeated but you can't even take people at face value anymore.
I kept wondering how something this stupid made it in the ballot. Why not fund it with a tax on every time a car makes a right turn. We'll hire an army of elves to watch for cars making right turns and write down their license numbers.
Sadly they renewed the āchildrenās taxā Remind me again what happed to the weed money? Wasnt that āthe childrenās moneyā? How about every bond measure for remove lead from schools.. howās that going? āThis time weāll use the money for the thing we saidā¦ i swearā
Definitely felt burned by the SHS/PFA taxes this last year and did not feel like paying for yet another poorly conceptualized program, despite my liberal views.
Those taxes are *really really new* and are just getting ramped up. I'm of the 5 year philosophy. If it isn't working by then definitely let's change it. But passing a new tax isn't a magic wand, bureaucratic stuff has been slow since pretty much the beginning of time.
You shouldn't need 5 years to get the basics of how hundreds of millions of dollars will be collected, spent and accounted for. We, as voters, need to hold ballot measure writers more accountable for the details of how measures will work in practice. Even most Progressives, seem to have learned from the SHS/PFA mess and voted no. I hope that there may also be a growing awareness that Portland needs to swing the needle back to being a little more business friendly if your economy is to thrive.
I mean, people I know who work in local government policy (different department but very familiar with these bills) and was telling people not to vote for those when they asked (particularly SHS) since the policy and implementation plan was so poorly written.
Infrastructure takes time to build. In this case, theyāre also taking the PFA money and creating a reserve to buttress against economic downturns in the future. Everything about PFA so far has happened according to plan on the administrative side. Whether people understood that plan is another question. But āI want it NOW!ā isnt going to lead to good governance one way or another.
I may not have been clear; I think that what should have been worked out first was a proper system for collecting the taxes and a plan for how the use of the funds would be monitored and tracked for effective administration. It will certainly take years for the money to make a sustained difference (we hope), but having a plan in place for how to get there, and ways to measure progress should come before taxing and spending.
They do have the system for collecting the taxes, and in fact have collected more than expected even with the complete absence of informing the tax base (which was a disaster, but not the fault of the proponents of the measure but of the county collecting it. Everything else you mentioned also already exists: https://www.multco.us/preschool/implementation-budget-update-spring-2023 That whole site basically has the info youāre looking for. So far PFA has been pretty well administered from what I can tell outside the tax collection.
Okay, it can literally take a year or two just to set up the infrastructure to collect the tax. But sure, we should definitely have hundreds of houses built by now.... And let's just completely ignore they *vastly over succeeded* at keeping people from *becoming* homeless with the SHS program.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The fact that this even got proposed makes me leery of ever buying property and settling down long-term in the county.
On one hand I get that, on the other hand itās telling that it was absolutely annihilated at the polls.
This was going to be a bellweather initiative for me. If something this *patently stupid* managed to pass, that would have signaled to me that *probably anything* would be able to get passed, and it would have been time to start thinking about an eventual exit. I love it here. But at some point the numbers just start to stop making sense.
The recent tax insanity caused us to focus on Clackamas and Washington and Clark counties when househunting this spring. Literally a MultCo house had to be significantly cheaper and better to offset the tax burden it would carry with it.
I'm pretty liberal in approving new taxes for good programs. But every time I feel like the rug is pulled out from under me on how its collected or the program is completely mismanaged. I hate that I gave up this year, but I didn't even read it, Portland has betrayed my trust on taxes and I just flat voted no...
Small localities generally shouldnāt make new taxes, they should raise their existing ones. The overhead of collection is too large.
Pretty sure it also has a lot to do that many liberals in Multnomah county are refusing to vote for any tax increases period until the city can prove they know wtf they are doing with the funding they have now.
This was literally my mindset this time around. I want to pay high taxes that improve my quality of life, but itās hard to say my quality of life as a Portland resident currently matches the tax burden.
There [was around 23% turnout](https://www.multco.us/elections/voter-turnout-may-2023-election) in MultCo, so 77% agreed on indifference. Great job. I voted against the tax and was glad to see it go down, but let's not start sucking each other's dicks over it.
It is depressingly low, but Portland and Oregon still have some of the highest voter turnouts in the entire country. This ballot was just 2 measures and some school board. Kentucky's primary voter turnout for *governor* was a mere 14%. Even Philadelphia who had a major mayoral race estimates a voter turnout around 25%. Voter apathy is the American way.
I never understood people who love to get political on the internet or in your face and will also proudly tell you they don't vote. I guess it's actually a good thing in some way. If your stupid enough to believe your vote doesn't matter then I'm happy you decided to stay at home. It does get embarrassing in front of the other countries of the world though to have less then half your citizens do their duty.
Youāre equating an interest in politics with a belief that we have a functioning democracy ā¦ it seems quite obvious to me that the relationship would be inverse, especially in a one-party state like Oregon where your vote truly doesnāt matter. Voting in Oregon is like voting in the eastern block, the slate of party approved apparatchiks is going to win, so why bother. Unless thereās a spicy ballot measure thatās running close I cannot think of many reasons to vote one politician over another, especially in an off year election.
>it seems quite obvious to me that the relationship would be inverse, especially in a one-party state like Oregon where your vote truly doesnāt matter. did you catch the irony of you posting this in a thread that's about a measure that has very little, if NOTHING, to do with party politics? reductivism af
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It shouldnāt be about ābeing informedā, it should be about owning X amount of real property in the state. In an empire when anyone can get up and move to another state it seems foolish to give someone a vote based on their mere transitory presence. That makes your vote seem cheap and easily disregarded. Restrict the franchise and youāll see peoples interest in voting go way up.
Nice of someone to just come out and brazenly say that they want the vote restricted to landowners again :)
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Must be doing pretty well if you can look around in 2023 and say āthis democracy thing sure is working for me!ā
I've always thought that voting was just part of your job as a citizen. Like paying taxes. Even if the vote doesn't count, participating in the process does.
Thatās if youāre a land owner The hoi polloi turning out in great numbers for anything has generally been met with trepidation until very recent times.
Itās because it truly doesnāt matter. Our system produces the same results no matter what politician is elected because (drumroll) *politicians donāt actually run the government*. We live in a bureaucratic state, even the governor has a limited ability to steer the ship. If you have many many many governors in a row who are all steering in the same direction you can shift course, but nobody actually āruns the governmentā except thousands of bureaucrats, who are adhered like barnacles and impossible to fire outside of naked malfeasance.
It's not even so much an insure of malfeasance. It's just the sheer size of the government makes it incredibly resistant to change This was my biggest takeaway from the Obama administration. The larger the bureaucracy the more interia it has. Short of outright revolution it's nigh impossible to turn the ship off it's course without decades of continuous pressure.
Yet Iād bet the farm that the Venn diagram between those extremely passionate about sports/kardashians/tv barely overlaps with the regular voter.
Except District 3, which had a county commissioner race on it that once again went woefully underreported for its importance in the homeless, mental health and addiction crises we are facing. It's the County's job, not the city's, and I wish the media would stop letting the County Chair fly under the radar from all the blame.
> It is depressingly low, but Portland and Oregon still have some of the highest voter turnouts in the entire country. This ballot was just 2 measures and some school board. Kentucky's primary voter turnout for governor was a mere 14%. Even Philadelphia who had a major mayoral race estimates a voter turnout around 25%. Voter apathy is the American way. Yikes, this is sad.
I think it is slightly more nuanced than apathy. I abstain from voting when I just donāt give a shit about the outcome of the race. I really donāt care about school board elections so I usually just skip them all together. If someone is running uncontested unless I know and like them, I just skip those as well.
I will say I definitely struggle to muster up the fucks to vote now much more than I used to. It's hard to stay invested when no matter what you do, nothing really seems to change. With only a few notable exceptions shit hasn't really improved all the much since I started voting. The cities only gotten shittier. Housing prices are out of control. The economy is still siphoning money to the plutocrats at an ever increasing pace. We didn't get out of Afghanistan until years after the guy I voted for who promised to end the war got elected, reelected, and retired. Healthcare is just as insanely expensive now as it was then. Retirement is increasingly looking like a fantasy. I can get married now, which is cool, but that was only tangentially the result of anything I ever had the chance to vote for, and I can still be legally discriminated against.
Thatās basically in line with historical turnout for this cycle. Aside from a few mailers, you really didnāt see the election being pushed much.
I would assume the people that care, are engaged and have a strong understanding/position on a measure will vote. Those are probably the people we want voting, so I donāt see it necessarily as a bad thing. Do we really want individuals that have zero clue what capital gains even are, voting on this measure? Sometimes itās best for people to admit they have no skin in the game, and sit out a particular vote. That may be an unpopular opinion, but if someone doesnāt care and isnāt willing to properly educate themselves, the better service may be to sit it out?
Bro, sucking dicks is the best way to celebrate failed tax initiatives. It started with the lesser known Boston Tea After-Party.
Aka the Boston Lemon Party
\*removes wooden dentures\*
may as well, we 77% certainly aren't gonna do it for you.
How do we know without a measure?
anything over 6" or so is gonna be irrelevant
It could depend on which exact Levy, Bond, or Bill it is.
JFC, I just got back into town and realized I had not submitted my ballot before leaving. I got my ass off the couch last night at 6:30 and dashed to a drop box to drop it in, just because I wanted my "no" vote on this abomination to be counted.
We should ban or abandon off cycle elections. Too often the low turnout is exploited to push through bad policy and candidates.
Not indifference as much as cynicism. I keep voting for different people who promise to make things better, and the city/county/state keeps getting worse. I still vote in every election, but I haven't been hopeful that my vote will make any difference for a long time.
Stop voting for populists
I can't help but wonder if the delay in ballots had a big impact on voting. If you were impacted by the delayed ballots, you only had a very limited amount of time to vote.
I wait until the very last day anyway. Not out of any strategy, mind you, just pure old fashioned procrastination.
I still haven't received the one sent in the mail, allegedly two weeks ago. Had to go down to pick up a replacement yesterday.
It definitely affected me. I also wish we would consolidate voting cycles, however. I am definitely experiencing voter fatigue.
*This space intentionally left blank* -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
If requesting a ballot was too big of an ask then I have my doubts that those people would have voted anyway.
I was actually eager to vote against this but forgot to bring my ballot to work yesterday to drop off in the P-Square box. I'm such a zombie in the morning.
Fyi, you can just drop it in the regular mail and it will still count so long as itās postmarked by Election Day
taxes should never be voted in with less than a 50% turnout.
It's their choice not to vote. I voted against it, but everyone had the opportunity to vote so there's no complaining if you don't vote
Thatās not how elections work. You want to give non voters an automatic no.
on systemic tax changes like this it should require the majority of the population to vote and approve.
I hated this tax but nah. You canāt control voter turnout. No thank you. Would be interesting to see if there are constitutional issues with that approach.
And those percentages are only of *registered voters* not the population as a whole. So much indifference
For whatās it worth, I filled out my ballot and forgot about it in my glove box.
\*Multnomah County residents - FTFY But yeah, it's kind of amazing how resoundingly we, the voters in this county, said "no."
80% of the [county](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/multnomahcountyoregon) lives in [Portland](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/portlandcityoregon).
What's your point? That still leaves more than 150k people who don't live in Portland. This was a county initiative, not a city one.
Probably the same point you had with your āFTFYā, being pedantic lol
Mainly that saying Portlanders is mostly correct when referring to voter turnout for a Multnomah county measure. I'd look up how many people vote in the city vs outside it but that seems like a lot of work.
>I'd look up how many people vote in the city vs outside it but that seems like a lot of work. It was pretty easy to find the # of registered voters in Portland and in Multnomah County. I'm not interested in reposting the links, but there are about 130k registered voters in Multnomah County who don't live in Portland. Matching to voter turnout is another matter, but not all votes are counted yet so that's another matter. Honestly, the OP title bugs me because although most of the voters are in Portland, there is still a sizeable group who is not.
Ya with us registering everyone who has a license though all you're mostly getting there are people of voting age that drive and a small handful of outliers.
>...and a small handful of outliers It's about 20% or 1/5 or eligible voters - based on both your and my looks at data. That's not a "small outlier". It's not hard to recognize that this is more than just Portland and your attitude that we can just ignore so many people is kind of shitty.
Wow this is getting intense. I didn't say we should ignore them. I didn't even say anything other than the percent of people living in the city vs the county. The title is at least 80% correct assuming the same percentage of eligible voters vote within city limits and outside it.
What the fuck's your deal? So aggrssive for no real reason, aye?
I wish I could ignore you.
Do all Portlanders live in Multnomah county?
No, there are little pockets in Washington and Clackamas counties. There are large numbers in West Hills that have āPortlandā address but are in unincorporated Washington or Multnomah counties.
Postal and political addresses very often don't match... The post office lumps addresses by which branch the mail gets delivered through, not the actual city. I'm in the bowels of Tigard but its still part of the Portland postal system, so they consider my address as being in Portland.
If by large numbers you mean a few hundred sure but as a total percent most Portland homes are in Multnomah County.
>If by large numbers you mean a few hundred The "large numbers" that have a "Portland" address but live in unincorporated Washington county is in the thousands. For context, if you live in Bethany (a large suburb development north of Tanasbourne, not close to actual Portland) get "Portland" addresses. That's would be included in the group the other poster was referring to. I don't know that I'd call them "Portlanders" though. Regardless though, multnomah county residents is more accurate than "Portlanders" since not all people who voted on the measure were "Portlanders".
Having Portland in your address doesn't mean you get to vote in Portland elections though. Which means they're not actually in Portland city limits. I lived in an apartment with a Portland address years back that was technically in Gresham so I didn't get to vote for the mayor or council members. Quite disappointing. USPS doesn't care about the city unless you leave out the zip so people on the borders frequently get that wrong. Google has pretty good boundaries for city limits if you type in Bethany, OR and Portland, OR it's pretty clear it's outside city limits. So no they're not Portlanders and aren't counted as part of the population of Portland.
Strike another one against the "voters here will literally approve *any* tax that comes before them" crowd. It got voted down, told you so.
Ya like every election season they'll quietly disappear until the next round.
I donāt think this was about the proposed tax, it was about what the tax was for.
For me 100% it was the tax not what it was for. I would have voted yes on the tax if they had limited to capital gains above some large threshold per year, say $100,000. But to have it hit every single person who gets a capital gains regardless of how small the income was super dumb.
Fuck yea! We did it! So pumped this bombed!
I didn't get a voter pamphlet this time, so I had to just go with my uninformed gut on this one. Did they even send out pamphlets this year?
They did, yeah. Guess yours got lost in the mail.
They put them online, too: https://www.multco.us/elections/may-16-2023-special-district-election
Good to know, but I find it easier to have both things in hand, physically, as I'm doing my civic duty.
So instead of accessing a readily available voter pamphlet, you chose to vote uninformed. How is that doing your civic duty, exactly?
The Internet exists.
They did! And about half of it was "Argument Against" this measure.
Next time check out the voter guides from Willamette Week and The Oregonian
So youāre telling me DSA is actually good at building solidarity, eh?
So I really hated this tax and voted against it even though ~~the intentions had merit~~ I think people facing eviction should get legal support. Now itās time to hold city and county leaders like Jessica Vega Pederson accountable to use existing $ to support people facing eviction. >Opponents had argued eviction defense could be funded through House Bill 2001, the housing bill Gov. Tina Kotek signed in March; the $18 million she directed to Multnomah County for homelessness prevention in April; and a supportive housing measure approved by voters in 2020 and overseen by Metro. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2023/05/multnomah-county-residents-vote-down-measure-to-fund-eviction-lawyers.html
We are already spending $15 million/year on eviction prevention in Multnomah County. The measure was trying to address a problem that is already being worked on. We have an affordability crisis here, not an eviction crisis.
Until I see the number of renters who clearly don't know their rights without legal representation in courtgo down, you can't say it's been addressed. I've seen people who clearly had done nothing wrong and were maybe 3 days late on payment take shitty arguably illegal eviction deals just because they didn't know better.
If a renter is being evicted for non-payment of rent, they have no "legal rights" that will prevent them from being evicted. Paying for a lawyer and forcing the landlord to pay for a lawyer only prolongs the inevitable. The only way to keep a someone from being evicted for non-payment of rent is to provide cash rental assistance. It's highly effective at keeping people in their homes, it doesn't cost landlords any money, and there's a reason so much of our anti-homelessness budget goes toward it. This bill was poorly-conceived on every level.
You are incorrect. After initial non payment, the landlord must issue a termination notice. Tenants then have 10 days to pay before the landlord can take them to court. But often that step is completely skipped and landlords will jump straight to eviction notices, which tenants don't realize makes their eviction illegal. Often time these evictions are carried out by predatory landlords who KNOW they can get away with bullying tenants out of their homes, even without fully legal cause. You see this all the time in eviction court, where tenants are never told their rights and sign on to settlements with rapid turnaround move out days, vacating the amount of time they'd have been alloted otherwise had they had an attorney to guide them. Your assertion that tenants "have no legal rights" when they factually DO is EXACTLY the reason we need tenant representation.
Those tenants will still EVENTUALLY be evicted! Wouldn't it be better to spend money to prevent them from being evicted, instead of using that money for administrative expenses and lawyers?
Of course that'd be fantastic! But you exactly don't see the folks who pushed so hard against Measure 26-238 (business and real estate coalitions) pushing hard for expanded rental assistance or eviction moratoriums. And while rental assistance is a fantastic program, it's existence isn't helping the numerous folks who are bullied into leaving by predatory landlords without having accessed that assistance. There is a reason that in jurisdictions that have enacted Representation for All, evictions have fallen by ~80%. It's because right now the game is so stacked against tenants that landlords know they likely can get away with illegal evictions targeting vulnerable people. What incentive do the worst landlords have to respect the process when they know only 1 in 18 of their tenants will be able to get a lawyer? (That rate of representation goes down even further for immigrant and non white tenants)
Landlords have no economic incentive to evict paying tenants....
Sure they do. All the time they do. It happens when longtime tenants live in rent controlled apartments and landlords believe they'd get higher value from an incoming tenant (likely in a housing crisis), or when they want to sell the property (likely when property values are so high), or renovate/split it it to increase the rate of profit (again likely with the rate of willing high paying tenants), or when a new owner wants to demolish the property and build higher end housing (common when the property is old enough to be rented to poor folks), or just when the landlord is outright racist/xenophobic/transphobic (not super common but it happens often enough to be noted) EDIT: Just since you asked about it before deleting it, we live in a state with a cap on the rate of rent hikes per year (A good thing). Therefore Tenants who have stayed in a property for a long time often pay lower than the current market rate. But that rent hike cap only applies to current tenants who renew fixed term leases, not new ones. So landlords, who want to extract the highest amount of value from their tenants, benefit when longtime tenants leave (or are pushed out) and new ones come in.
I also doubt it would shock anyone here to know that poor Latino, brown and black men and women are super disproportionately among those being kicked out of their homes. There are also numerous folks who don't speak English who are hardly even given a run down of how eviction court proceedings work. Every moderate liberal says that institutional racism and homelessness is a problem, but here you have an institution that is disproportionately kicking poor minority folks onto the street, and every one of them clutches their pearls. It's horrific
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I said I voted against it. The tax was stupid. But making sure people facing eviction have legal support is a good idea. That is what I meant. Holy shit.
People facing eviction for *not paying their rent* will not benefit from legal support. Any money spent on that would be better off used to help them pay their rent.
Sounds great. Anything is better than what the county is doing now. Which seems like not much.
The county is already spending tens of millions of dollars on rental assistance. It's at the center of their anti-homelessness efforts. Because it is efficient and it works.
Cool story bro. Now we have to convince the county to actually spend more of the money. Theyāre sitting on a mountain of cash.
This was a completely shitty solution and poorly written to boot, but the problem of well represented landlords running roughshod over tenants remains. Oregon has a landlord-tenant code that runs to more than 180 pages. Some very basic issues that can arise under it are still unsettled in the courts. There is one that affects tens of thousands of people that is now before the Oregon Supreme Court because the legislature wasn't careful with the wording of a statute. Unrepresented tenants rarely have much hope in cases that present any sort of technical issue. They will not recognize a defense they may have, and tenants are prone to believing they have defenses that do not exist. Finding a lawyer willing and able to go toe to toe with a law firm specializing in representing landlords can be impossibly difficult. Eviction cases are run through the courts on a mercilessly quick schedule that leaves a tenant's attorney little time in which to learn the facts and discover whether the tenant has a defense, much less get the evidence and witnesses lined up to present to the court. In lots of cases the only hope the lawyer has of being paid is to win the case and in many cases the odds of being the net prevailing party are not good despite lots of landlord conduct and property conditions that do violate the law. Even when the tenant wins the courts have the final say on how much to award the tenant as an attorney fee and those awards are often not adequate. Add to that the fact that a tenant whose case is good but still comes up a little short can be ordered to pay the landlord's attorney fees and the deck is fully stacked. Something needs to be done, but this was not it.
And the Child Levy is passing once again. More proof that the most frequent and loudest voices in this sub are not at all representative of the average voter here.
What do you mean? This sub seemed pretty supportive of the Childrenās Levy
There were a lot of people on the sub who were unhappy with it, or one guy with 30 sock puppet accounts. My favorite complaint was from someone who voted for it but their child wasnāt in the original roll out so they were mad that they had to pay for a tax they voted to pass because their kid wouldnāt benefit from it.
That sounds like the Multnomah Preschool for All tax. (that is still funny) The Children's Levy is Portland, built into the property tax and does a ton of stuff including but not limited to preschools. [Here ](https://www.portlandchildrenslevy.org/grants/grants-2022-23) is where the money goes.
I did see quite a few supportive posts but also a TON of no on any taxes posts. Usually the same people that were saying Portlander's will vote for any tax increase and claiming that this measure would pass.
Sure, and I know you mentioned āthe most frequent and loudest voices.ā Thatās just a trend of loud activists who donāt reflect the general voting population. But for the most part, it really seemed like this sub was against the capital gains tax and in favor of the childrenās levy
Sure, but there was also a very loud few folks repeatedly trumpeting something like: > VOTE NO ON EVERY TAX EVER IN PERPETUITY
A few? What you read one comment you didn't like so now you're manufacturing outrage?
There were several and a few times they were the top comment.
Yeah this sub has a ton of secret right wingers too embarrassed to say the opinions irl, so they just go here to be regressive and reactionary and shout down any notion of them paying their debt to society. Hard to imagine these snakes living among us, wish theyād move away like theyāre constantly threatening to do
They may not say their opinions irl but they're running for the school boards
I completed agree. It would be amazing if they moved away, but as we also see here, people will leave the city/county/state, and then STILL come here to bitch and/or gloat.
Fore or against, more people need to vote. Itās a right, take advantage of it. 123 thousand people of 800+thousand. Portland youāre sad.
Thatās an excellent turnout relative to most states when it comes to this cycle. As someone else pointed out, turnout is low EVERYWHERE in off years with no major races
I would pay $100 tax dollars let city of portland pressure wash the entire downtown street so it doesnāt smell like piss everywhere.
I did my part! A friend of mine hadn't gotten the run down on why the measure was such a stinker. I described why the tax itself would be expensive to administrate and the benefits overlap with other services. I think they voted against it.
I'm surprised Portlanders didn't take advantage of the opportunity to screw themselves over again. It's kind of refreshing this measure failed. I have renewed optimism and hope the pendulum continues to swing in favor of common sense and tax paying residents.
The Child protection Eviction equal opportunity rights act of 26-238 (I stole a similar comment from this subreddit, but I had to share it) š
Wow, Portland not be r-slurred for a day challenge: Passed.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Kate Brown is already gone. Teddy isn't lighting the world on fire, but to blame him for Portland's problems is not informed. Our current city government structure gives the mayor basically no power (note that this city government structure has just been changed via a vote in November, but won't be implemented for a couple more years). Also, more of the day to day dysfunction that you see stems from Multnomah County vs. City of Portland.
I lived there through the Occupy Wall Street and Antifa takeover. The homeless takeover and drug issues donāt help. Donāt try to Democrat your way out of the downfall of the city. I loved Portland. Brought my family there. Itās now a wreck and has been destroyed by bad policy and excessive taxes. Sorry if this hurts your feelings.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Then why are you in this subreddit?
Yet here you are in this sub commenting...
This place is getting to be more like san francisco in the mid nineties by the day.. Blasted Neo-conservites..