Not yet subscribed to the Oregon Roundup? Sign up here. Just enter your email address to receive these emails and nothing else, for better or worse.
Happy Fri . . . er, Thursday,
My wife has been suggesting for some time that I try sending the Roundup on a day other than Friday, the theory being that some people don’t work on Fridays and people leave early for the weekend. Because even I eventually come around to understanding who calls the shots around here, I’m giving Thursday a whirl this week. If you have thoughts about Thursday vs. Friday, you can reach me, as always, by responding to this email.
To the stuff:
First, some good (?!) news
On Monday afternoon, I spent some time at a rally in downtown Bend in support of reopening schools. It was a big crowd, almost everyone masked and most doing their best to distance, of people, most of whom I’d wager have never been to a political rally or protest in their lives. They looked like normal, apolitical Bendites, mostly moms and dads and kids. Subarus and Priuses and lifted trucks all honked in support of the rally as they passed. One guy on a recumbent bike gave a thumbs up. There were also rallies in Salem and other places around the state the same day.
There are a lot of people, including a lot of people who voted for Kate Brown and will vote for Joe Biden, who desperately want schools to reopen. They’re not activists and were willing to give the Governor the benefit of the doubt in the Spring when no one knew what Covid was really going to look like. My sense now is that they’re fed up and are asserting themselves, and maybe just maybe finally being heard.
The next day, Kate Brown announced the state would re-evaluate the COVID-19 metrics that govern whether schools can open to in-person instruction. Generally speaking, current state guidelines provide that schools can reopen if the number of positive Covid tests, and the percentage of tests that are positive, in the county and statewide are below a certain threshold. The Governor acknowledges that at least the statewide metrics are proving “quite challenging for communities around the state[.]” Apparently the state is looking at relaxing the statewide metrics, but also looking at the metrics as a whole to consider changes that would make them less challenging.
Brown should be aggressive in detaching school reopening from raw case numbers and positivity rates locally or state wide. As I’ve writen previously, a recent Brown University study found that students and teachers who have returned to in-person school this Fall in the United States are actually less likely to contract Covid in a school building than in the surrounding community. We already know thatkeeping schools closed to in-person instruction is massively harmful to kids’ education, safety, and non-Covid physical and mental health. The Brown University study indicates that keeping kids and teachers out of school, and thus in the community outside the school buildings, actually may make them and teachers more susceptible to getting Covid.
Now, this is one study, and the science I studied in school was mostly political science, but Oregon officials should consider these results and, if borne our by other evidence, scrap the notion that schools can only reopen when metrics are met, because, in a much-needed stroke of medical and scientific luck, school buildings so far look to be safe, as well as necessary.
“2020 has been, I think, a little bit rough on Oregon’s image.”
So said State Economist Mark McMullen to Oregon legislators late last month. (Hat tip to longtime Roundup friend Danelle Romain). McMullen continued,
“If you’re 3,000 miles away, and you’re seeing one day it says Portland has the worst air quality in the world. The next day you say, ‘If I go to Portland an anarchist is going to throw a can of soup at me. And they don’t even have college football and don’t rake their leaves.”
The truth is Oregon’s been in the national news too much for comfort this year. Of course it’s had Covid like most everywhere else, then months of protests that commonly transformed into late-night violent and destructive riots, and then it had the historic wildfires that destroyed whole communities and left most others shrouded in thick smoke for a week or two. I believe the only time the protests and/or riots stopped in Portland was when the smoke was really bad. When the only thing that temporarily stops one bad story is another really bad story, you’re having a bad year.
To be honest, I’m a little worried about McMullen keeping his job after speaking truth to power, as it were. I’m pretty sure it’s not ok in polite drum circles to acknowledge that there are anarchists in Portland, let alone to say they have weaponized Campbell’s. But it’s hard to see how the misery of 2020 in Oregon doesn’t take some of the shine off Portland’s at least medium-term economic prospects.
Indeed, available subtenant space in downtown Portland has grown by a lot under the double whammy of Covid and soup cans. This happens when commercial tenants can’t make their rent payments and are looking for others to occupy some or all of their space to help them make rent. The problem is that for the same reasons the original tenants can’t make a go downtown, there often aren’t a lot of subtenants who can either. The result, eventually, would be lease termination and, if necessary, eviction. But Oregon doesn’t allow commercial evictions right now, so it will probably end up with a lot of negotiations between landlord and tenant to empty out the space, and then there will be lots of empty space unless Covid and the soup cans are gone.
Whatever shine has come off Oregon as a whole or Portland specifically hasn’t yet hit here in Bend, at least not in terms of deterring people from moving here. Homebuyers fleeing other places are gobbling up residential real estate with the intensity of desperate passengers clamoring aboard the Titanic’s last life boat. We’ll see how this goes as we head into colder weather and California transplants are reminded that the result of acting upon their harmless-sounding desire for “seasons” is figuring out how to get a few tons of snow off the roof of their house and disentomb their Audi from snow compressed into frozen concrete by last night’s snow plow. I like California and Californians, and I do not wish this fate upon them, but neither can I spare them from it.
By the way, is not raking leaves a thing in Portland? If so, do I have to move to Portland to get in on that?
It’s about time a real progressive ran Portland
If you think the problem with Portland is that its mayor, Ted Wheeler, is just not progressive enough, then you’re in good company (and also, what kind of self-loathing is causing you to read this right now?). As most Americans would be absolutely shocked to learn, but most Oregonians aren’t, Wheeler’s opponent in this Fall’s election, Sarah Iannarone is (a) well to the left of Wheeler, who’s no slouch in that department, and (b) winning by 11 points, according to a recent poll.
Wheeler’s campaign manager is quoted in the linked story as saying, “We have a clear path to victory.” Ouch. In campaign parlance, that’s the equivalent of saying “we’re not doing very well and will probably lose but if X, Y and Z happen we could win.” It’s the kind of thing longshot candidates say to skeptical donors. None of this means that Wheeler won’t or can’t win, but it looks pretty bad for him.
Which is a shame. Because, while Wheeler has been a bad mayor in my opinion, Iannarone would be far, far worse. A regular participant in downtown Portland protests, Iannarone has denounced the City of Portland and Wheeler for arresting people who commit acts of vandalism in those protests. She refused to condemn rioters setting fire to a police precinct building with officers locked inside.
She recently wore in public a skirt featuring the faces of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong who between them killed an estimated 65 million of their own people in service of dictatorial communism. I don’t know if Iannarone is a dictatorial communist, but we’d sure kick to the curb any politician who wore clothes bearing the likeness of Hitler or Mussolini. To say the least, these are not people we want our leaders to admire.
Whatever weirdness Portland has ahead of it, it doesn’t need a more progressive mayor. It needs someone who at least wants to stop violence and the property destruction that’s hollowing out portions of downtown, not support it. Wheeler’s been bad but appears to have at least a vague desire for peace in the streets. At least to this conservative who lives east of the Cascades, Wheeler’s by far the better choice, which means he’ll probably lose.
A most cruel tax
Continuing our Portland, or at least Portland-area, theme, I bring you the worst tax proposal I’ve seen from a local government since the City of Portland’s art tax: Metro’s $150 million payroll tax hike. If you don’t know, Metro exists because the three counties of the Portland metro area got together and all said, “Well, I think what would really serve our residents is another layer of government. Sure we have cities and we have counties and we have the state and of course the federal government, but why can’t there be another layer in there – between county and state – to, you know, do more stuff? What we need, here in Portland, is more government and more taxes.”
Because governments are going to government like their municipal corporate lives depend on it, Metro wants to impose a payroll tax on every business with more than 25 employees and their employees a payroll tax of up to 0.75%. The proceeds would go to transportation projects, including light rail.
A payroll tax is, in my mind, one of the least defensible taxes. It taxes, and thus deters, one of the things that we know helps people improve not only their financial lives, but their lives: work (the others being getting and staying married, and finishing high school). Add to that the fact that the area covered by Metro suffers from very high unemployment (Multnomah County = 9.5%), taxing remunerative work, which is the same as disincentivizing it, is a bad idea and poorly timed.
You down with NDD?
Next week, the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett are scheduled to being. One legal concept that is likely to come up is the non-delegation doctrine (hereinafter, “NDD,” yeah, you know me). NDD is a relatively neglected constitutional doctrine that constrains Congress from undermining Constitution’s separation of powers by delegating to the executive branch the lawmaking power the Constitution commits entirely to Congress. The founders thought that Congress would jealously protect its preeminence in the federal structure, but over the last 100 years or so, it has not. Today, most federal laws with which we must comply are created by the executive branch, in the form of executive orders but also more commonly in administrative rules belched in the thousands from the innumerable federal agencies. Congress has mostly been a willing accomplice, happily handing the hard work of lawmaking over to the executive branch.
The result? A system of laws originated to a large extent by bureaucrats who nominally are under the authority of just one elected official: the president. In truth, even the president struggles to control his own executive branch, due to its immense size and inertia. While the president’s power over the outsized executive branch is limited, voters have correctly determined the elected official closest to lawmaking power and have, for this and other reasons, fixated upon the presidency.
The problem is the U.S. is too big and diverse to lodge so much perceived and sometimes actual power in one person. If more of our policy battles were fought out in Congress, different states and regions would have their voices heard, even if they lose. When the presidency is the titular focal point of policy making, particularly in this highly polarized time, significant constituencies feel for good reason completely locked out. This has a lot to do with why supporters of one presidential candidate or another are literally fighting with each other on the streets of Bend and Portland.
Judge Barrett has indicated support for NDD, the revival of which could help reverse the trend of moving decisions from elected officials and placing them in the hands of people only remotely electorally accountable. This is likely to be portrayed as her support for a doctrine that could gut the ability of the EPA to determine, from whole cloth, what it does and does not regulate. Ultimately, though, more often than not hashing out the big questions in Congress, with elected representatives, rather than with unelected folks is better It would help align voters’ interests with that of their elected officials, remove some of the white-hot spotlight from the presidency, and all the turmoil related thereto, and, most importantly, ensure that only the elected representatives of the people are entitled to create laws governing those people.
The non-delegation doctrine, on top of being constitutionally appropriate, holds the possibility of gradually releasing some of the pressure straining our body politic before it pops.
Were you forwarded this message? Sign up. No sales, no spam, just the weekly(ish) email smart people delete without reading less often than other emails.
Have a great end of the week!
Jeff Eager
jeff@eagerlawpc.com
Read past Oregon Roundup editions
What I do:
EagerLaw PC – A business and real property law firm in Bend, Oregon.
Insite LGA Corp. – A campaign consulting, strategic communications and local government monitoring firm.
Waste Alert – Local government monitoring for the solid waste and recycling industry.