Oregon Political Updates

By Robin Everett of Portland, Oregon. Robin is an advocate with the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign.

Imagine not being able to trust that the water you drink. Imagine not being able to even bathe in your own water for fear of getting sick. This is a real danger many Americans face daily due to our dependence on a dirty and dangerous form of energy: coal.

For decades, the coal industry has told the American people that coal ash is safe, but we know the truth. If the BP Oil Disaster has taught us anything, it's that we can't just take the polluter's word for it anymore.

Coal ash is the by-product of burning coal for electricity, and it contains a long list of dangerous toxins. More than 150 million tons of coal ash are created each year and dumped into thousands of ponds and dumps nationwide, many of which lack basic safety controls. Every day thousands of Americans who live near these storage sites are put at risk.

Communities across the country are exposed to heavy metals such as arsenic, lead and mercury seeping from ash storage sites into our drinking water, rivers and streams. Exposure to coal ash toxins can lead to cancer, birth defects, gastro-intestinal illnesses, and reproductive problems. And yet, coal ash is currently less strictly controlled than household garbage.

There are no federal regulations to control its disposal, and state laws governing coal ash are often weak or non-existent. More than two-thirds of all states, for example, don’t even require basic protections like liners to prevent coal ash from contaminating waterways, or groundwater monitoring to discover a leak if it occurs.

Here in Oregon, we get a portion of our power from the notoriously dangerous Colstrip coal plant in eastern Montana. Owned in part by Portland General Electric and Pacific Power, Colstrip is home to one of the worst coal-ash storage sites in the country. Indeed, Colstrip’s ash pond is on the EPA’s list of 44 highly dangerous coal-ash dumps nationwide.

In 2003, it was discovered that the coal-ash ponds at Colstrip were leaching dangerous heavy metals such as boron into the groundwater. Boron is lethal at 2 milligrams per liter, but in Colstrip, well water has turned up with boron concentrations 13 times the legal limit. Fifty-seven town residents sued the Colstrip plant for poisoning their water, and in May 2008 they won a settlement of $25 million. However, the ponds are still leaking, and the affected residents have stopped using their own wells and have switched over to city water provided by the operators of the plant, PPL Montana, from the Yellowstone River.

Clearly, current state standards are inadequate. Thankfully, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognized the very real health and environmental risks posed by toxic coal ash and just proposed new rules to protect communities and ensure the safe disposal of coal ash.

EPA has proposed two options and is seeking public comment on both. One would continue the status quo – establishing suggested state guidelines, not federally enforceable rules. The other would recognize that coal ash is substantially more dangerous than household garbage and would regulate it as the toxic substance it is, protecting public health and waterways across the country.

Effective coal-ash regulations must require basic protections for communities such as composite liners, water run-off controls, groundwater monitoring, and financial assurance that companies pay to clean up what they pollute. Protection still not afforded to the residents of Colstrip, Montana. Only strong federal safeguards can ensure this happens across the country.

Unfortunately, as expected, the coal industry is fighting to maintain the status quo on coal ash, backing the utterly inadequate option of establishing unenforceable guidelines for states. Coal use from cradle to the grave is dirty, dangerous, and damaging, but the coal industry continues spending millions on lobbying to retain and create more loopholes and exemptions for themselves.

As purchasers of power from the dirty and dangerous Colstrip coal plant we have a responsibility to speak out in favor of treating coal ash as toxic waste and encourage EPA to quickly implement the strong federal safeguards to protect the communities in Montana that bear the true cost of our energy use.

Please send your comment to the EPA today.

Where is Medford's Republican State Representative going? He's headed to Arizona to speak and paricipate in a two day rally with the group Stand With Arizona on July 30th and 31st. He's joining author and blogger Michelle Malkin, P.L.E.A. president Mark Spenser and others expressing disappointment in the judge's decision to block key components of Arizona's 1070 law yesterday. Many of the speakers have strong links to front groups associated with the extreme Tea Party movement, white supremacy groups, the Minute Men and other hard corp nativists who exploit xenophobia. Sal Esquivel HD6 is headed to Arizonal He'll be in familiar company since he is a regular speaker and supporter at Tea Party events in Jackson County.

He goes at a time of economic recession in Oregon and at a time when Oregon's unemployment numbers are stubbornly high. Oregon can ill-afford to alienate the critical economic power of Latinos in Oregon. In the July 2010 report from the American Immigration Council policy report " Oregon has 6,360 Latino-owned businesses that had sales of $1.5 billion in sales and receipts and employed 8,272 people in 2002." According to the report one-in-seven-Oregonians are Latino or Asian. The 2009 purchasing power of Latino's in Oregon totaled $7.billion - an increase of 660,9% since 1990."

Immigration law is a complicated jigsaw puzzle. Arizona's law attempted to slide slot A into Slot B and discovered forcing sharp angles into corner flats isn't easy. Arizona' attempt to become a fortress is a clumsy attempt at best .

Oregon is home to 366,405 immigrants in 2008 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Nearly the size of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jackson County, specifically House District 6, can ill afford to alienate such a critical component of its labor force, tax base and business community.

Sal Esquivel has chosen to to become tangled in the national ongoing strife over immigration reform. Too bad he's chosen to ignore the ordinary people in Medford worry most about: paying their bills, having enough money for the morgage payment or rent, saving for retirement, paying the doctor and dentist bills and hoping their kids will have a full instructional school year. And by the way, nearly 25% of the 12,000 students attending Medford Public Schools are Latino.

Note to Rep. Esquivel :the economy is the top concern for Oregonians, not immigration.

Having spent many a night poring over documents and testimony and maps related to the Urban and Rural Reserves, I was interested to read about the North Clackamas Chamber of Commerce breakfast forum held last week between Metro Chair candidates Bob Stacey and Tom Hughes.

As the former Mayor of Hillsboro, Hughes is an ardent advocate for snatching up more of Washington County's high value farmland and turning it into commercial and residential real estate. It's essentially Hughes' plan for job creation for the Metro area, in fact. He supported the badly drawn Bragdon map for urban reserves, which chews up ridiculous amounts of land for likely urbanization.

Raymond Rendleman, The Clackamas Review:

“I’m the guy who believes we should make our existing land supply work,” Stacey said, pointing out the millions of square feet of underused and vacant real estate. “We’re deferring that problem if we keep on going out to the boundaries for more land.”

Hughes shot back by arguing that Oregon’s above-average unemployment will only turn around with a real-estate infusion.

“We can’t afford to blow off the expansion land,” he said. “The concern that I have based on my experience growing jobs in Hillsboro is that we need a balanced approach... Bob has carefully and thoughtfully looked at the problem of job creation–I have actually been involved in that process.”

"Balanced approach"? Hughes told me in a previous interview that Washington County needs 3-4 one hundred acre parcels in order to accommodate the next Intel, Solarworld, Nike or Genentech. Others have told me that they've heard Hughes say between 7-9 one hundred acre parcels. Yet there's little or no discussion by Hughes (that I'm aware of--and I hope his campaign will stop by here and correct me if I'm wrong) about using the land already inside the Urban Growth Boundary--specifically the hundreds of thousands of square feet of empty commercial real estate and land sitting in Hillsboro and Beaverton. And why there isn't a substantive discussion happening at the Washington County level about encouraging small business (and large business) in the downtown areas of Hillsboro and Beaverton. Both cities have downtown regions that are beginning to crumble (I know of at least one candidate for office that was given space in downtown Hillsboro for FREE, because it's virtually impossible to rent it out right now). And there is at least one enormous plot (known as the St Mary's property) that's near already established residential development--but still Hughes looks to the rural, ag areas of Washington County instead. It's senseless, in my opinion.

If this is Hughes notion of "balanced approach", then I'd hate to see what he thinks pandering to developers looks like.

Stacey, on the other hand, is actively articulating the need to use the massive amount of existing land we already have--and reinvigorate these areas to make them attractive to business.

What we really can't afford is to blow off what we already have in favor of building huge commercial buildings/offices that are only accessible by driving (which is what building out in the middle of Cornelius at the north of Council Creek is--as is building on Scotch Church Road or any number of these other agriculture areas that aren't near any substantial residential development whatsoever), especially since Washington County can't support the traffic they have now.

BREAKING NEWS! This just in. Two new states have just joined the Union. They're going to be known as "Hawaii" and "Alaska". One tropical and one up north near the Arctic Circle. We'll see how long it takes for them to immerse themselves in American culture and public life. Might take a while, but I'm sure it'll happen someday. Who knows? Somebody we may even have presidential and vice-presidential candidates from those states.

What? Oh, that didn't just happen? You say it happened in 1959?

Weird. According to the Multnomah County Republican Party, there's still just 48 states. Here's the photographic evidence from their latest "U-Choose" meeting.

Nothing quite says Leadership for the Future like a 48-star American flag.

(FYI, the guy in the photo is Gordon Fiddes, who is running against Rep. Margaret Doherty.)

Oddly, U-Choose has its own website, but describes themselves as "the political issues action team" of the Multnomah GOP. Not sure what the rest of the county party does, if it's not political issues action. Maybe they're busy figuring out how to add a couple states to get the USA up to a round number of states.

By J. Graber of Portland, Oregon. He is a former journalist and a graduate student in strategic communications at the University of Oregon, Portland campus.

Maybe the reason you never see any coverage about the race for Oregon’s 4th Congressional District is because everyone in the fourth estate thinks the outcome is a foregone conclusion. I mean Peter DeFazio has held the seat since 1987 and took 82 percent of the vote in his 2008 election.

Or maybe they feel Art Robinson’s pseudo-scientific and sometimes self-serving rhetoric makes him less than a viable candidate.

Who knows? But betting on politics has always been about as safe as investing in a toll-booth factory in Vancouver these days.

So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at who these two men are.

Robinson is the President of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and one of the primary authors of a petition claiming global warming is bogus and that carbon dioxide is actually good for us. The exact wording of the petition reads:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

In the meantime Robinson also publishes the Access to Energy newsletter, which champions deregulating the energy industry and published the following argument for dumping man-made waste into the ocean in 2004:

Wastes dumped into the deep ocean will soon reach the bottom, where they are less hazardous than nearly any other place on Earth. Most materials will remain there: marine organisms are rare in the deep ocean, food chains are long, and few materials will be carried back to mankind.

And despite having been a chemistry professor at the University of California San Diego, Robinson calls public education “socialism in education” … on the Web site hawking his home-school curriculum for $195 and up.

Copies of his multi-media package on how to survive are also available for $149.

He also proposes to “defund all pork barrel and earmark projects” in the federal budget – a tall order for a would be junior congressman, eh?

Finally, he proposes lowering health care costs by undoing recent health care reforms granting 30 million Americans who otherwise would be left out access to medical insurance, and increasing the insurance companies’ ability to wiggle out of providing the very service for which they were created by reducing their exposure risk to lawsuits.

DeFazio, on the other hand, opposed Bush’s cuts to financial aid in 2005 and supported the 2007 College Cost Reduction Act that increased federal student aid by $20 billion.

He also supported the historic health care reform signed into law earlier this year that is expected to put an additional 16 million people on the Medicaid rolls, subsidize private coverage for those who cannot afford it, and regulate private insurance companies more closely, eliminating practices like denying benefits for pre-existing conditions.

DeFazio also proposes thinning national forests by the 6 billion feet board recommended by the U.S. Forest Service, providing jobs and material for renewable energy as well as reduce federal timber revenue payments to counties.

He voted against deregulating the cable television industry in 1996, has been a long-time opponent of the North American Free Trade agreement, helped draft legislation that $2.7 billion for transportation projects in Oregon in 2005, and went against his party in opposing last year’s “$700 billion bailout bill that puts taxpayers on the hook for the mistakes of Wall Street executives and CEO's.”

So there is a little insight into the two men who want to represent Oregon’s 4th Congressional District. You decide who would better serve the public good … now where did I put that number to my stock broker?

The saga of Kevin Mannix's utter incompetence with his redistricting ballot measure has now reached its apex. This morning in a Marion County court, Judge Mary James rejected a request by Mannix to have signatures reinstated to the initiative.

Peter Wong, The Statesman Journal:

Judge Mary Mertens James rejected a request by sponsors to reinstate 12,975 signatures that state elections officials excluded from their initial count because there were flaws in the petition-signature sheets.

Sponsors had requested that the signatures be added to the 91,617 already validated — the total still would have fallen short of the 110,358 required to qualify it for the Nov. 2 ballot — or to have them blended with the 114,973 that officials accepted initially for sampling.

James said she felt she did not have authority to order the latter step.

The proposed constitutional amendment would have created a panel of retired judges to oversee the redrawing of legislative district lines after every 10-year census.

In her order, Judge James made it clear that Mannix had failed to meet the standards required to rule in his favor and very carefully lays out why. The biggest problem, of course, is that even if the judge reinstates the contested signatures, the initiative still falls short of the required number to make the ballot. In other words, there's no judicial remedy to fix the fact that Mannix was incompetent with this.

Judge James order can be read here.

In a shocker, the Secretary of State announced this morning that one of the two statewide ballot measures designed to legalize a casino in Wood Village failed to qualify for the ballot. The constitutional amendment needed 110,358 valid signatures - and only had 104,629. That's 60.78% of the 172,136 signatures turned in and accepted for verification.

Back on July 3rd, I wrote that - based on the number of signatures turned in - "Both measures should handily make the ballot."

After all, as the O's Kimberly Melton reported yesterday, the average valid rate since 2000 has been 73%. But with 60.78%, the casino constitutional measure fell way short.

Willamette Week reports that initiative sponsors intend to challenge the validation process in court.

Matt Rossman, one of the project’s two local developers, says he and his business partner Bruce Studer intend to challenge the Secretary of State’s signature-validation method in court.

“We strongly believe it needs to be challenged,” Rossman said. “And we will challenge it in the courts.”

Of course, that's a tall order. The courts have been reluctant to get into the nitty-gritty signature-by-signature process, and have regularly upheld the overall system used by the elections division.

No word yet on what this means legally. After all, without the constitutional measure, the companion ballot measure proposes enacting an unconstitutional statute. Perhaps some of our legal eagles could talk through the scenarios. Could the statute sit out there waiting for a constitutional amendment to pass later? Or would it be immediately and forever struck down as unconstitutional?

And, of course, there's the question of what the sponsors will do. If they lose their court fight, will they pull the statutory measure? Can they even pull it once signatures are turned in?

There's coverage from the Oregonian, the Gresham Outlook, the Business Journal.

When Congress shelved the Clean Energy Bill last week I’ll admit that for the first time during the Obama administration I felt discouraged. Let’s just set aside a little problem called global climate change, which if left unchecked will continue to change civilization as we know it. Let’s just talk pure electoral politics.

On July 5th, the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, reported that Democrats are planning on winning in 2010 by spending millions to mobilize the Obama 2008 electoral coalition of young people and communities of color, while doing reasonably well among white voters. The challenge is that although this was a great plan for a big turnout Presidential year, it has historically proven to be very difficult to pull off in midterm elections. The reality is that turnout among these groups typically drops precipitously in non Presidential election years. Therefore, any strategy that depends on breaking these historical trends has to be connected to a clear and motivating agenda these voters care deeply about. This is where the inability to pass a clean energy bill makes absolutely no sense.

Major international studies and domestic polling show that protecting the environment and addressing climate change is one of the most important issues to young people. Polls going back to 2002 have shown that communities of color care more about environmental protection then the population at large.

And polling recently conducted in four Oregon counties by the OLCV Education Fund showed that residents strongly support and want to see the Legislature work to creating clean energy jobs in their region. In other words, the dots are not being connected where they should be. And once again, the conventional wisdom inside the Beltway that the smart political move is to avoid clean energy legislation is bollocks.

With that rant aside, the reality is that Oregon’s political leadership - at all levels of government - get it. The failure of the federal clean energy bill in the Senate came despite the major efforts of Senators Wyden and Merkley to get it done. And we can thank Congressman Schrader, Blumenauer, Defazio and Wu for passing the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill through the House last year. When you add this all up, there's no question that it is imperative for all of us who care about clean energy and stopping climate change to work our tails off this fall. Let’s run down the ballot –

• US Senator Ron Wyden has been a champion for clean energy jobs, and last year, after years of work with Congressman Blumenauer, finally pushed the historic Mt. Hood Wilderness protection bill through the Senate. There is a reason that Ron Wyden continues to be one of Oregon's most respected and liked public officials - he consistently fights to do what is right, not what is easy.
  

• In John Kitzhaber we have a chance to elect the strongest environmental Governor since Tom McCall. With Kitzhaber’s proven record of protecting Oregon’s environmental legacy and building a thriving economy, just imagine what he will be able to accomplish with strong Legislative leaders to work with.

• Congressman Kurt Schrader is one of the freshmen of the year. In his first term, he cast a gutsy vote for the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill and pushed a bill through to protect the Molalla River. He also led the effort to bring the NOAA research fleet to Newport, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars in economic development to the coast.

• Congressmen Earl Blumenauer, Peter DeFazio and David Wu continue to be champions for balanced growth, livable communities, improved transportation and clean energy jobs.
  

The last two sessions of the Oregon Legislature have been the two best pro-environment sessions since the 1970s including investing hundreds of millions of dollars in renewable energy development, which continue to create clean energy jobs across Oregon.

In 2010 we need to think local. National politicians may not get it, but our leaders in Oregon sure do. They continue to fight, day after day/week after week, to be part of the solution. If you care about protecting the natural legacy of Oregon. If you care about creating jobs through renewable energy produced in America. If you care about continuing to make progress then the only conclusion you can reach is that 2010 is one of the most important local elections in our history.

Candidate Chris Dudley has been invited to speak at the RNC meeting at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, California. On August 13th at 11:00 am he's included in a panel of two other West Coast candidates running for governor.

The RNC is featuring Andrew Breitbart now infamous for his doctored video that brought deceit to a whole new level. This kind of kinship is costly for participants, the cheap seats start at $1,000 with options to donate at $5,000, $15,000, $30,400 and top out at $60,800. Imagine the toe-curling pleasure to be gained by listening to Andrew Breitbart explaining his painful dilemma of releasing the video clip he posted minus the entire context. After his deceit is discovered a previously unknown woman becomes a martyr for civil rights.

Dudley, who sometimes appears to be as empty as a new computer may wish to rethink participating in this RNC event.