News As of the end of day Friday, only 21.5 percent of registered voters had turned in their ballots for this month's election. Historically, off-year elections draw a light turnout. In 2011, 36.6 percent of registered voters cast ballots in Multnomah County. The May ballot includes a Metro parks' operating levy; a renewal of the Children's initiative; school board and education service distric...   More

News Former State Rep. Mike Schaufler (D-Happy Valley), who lost his seat in a hotly contested 2012 primary battle with now-Rep. Jeff Reardon, has a new gig.WW has learned that Schaufler—who served in the House from 2003 through last year—is now a corrections officer at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton. AFSCME, the union that represents corrections offic...   More

News Former State Sen. Rick Metsger (D-Welches) was nominated yesterday by Pres. Barack Obama to serve on the three-member National Credit Union Administration Board. Metsger, who served in the Senate from 1999 through 2010, concentrated on transportation and financial services issues in Salem. Metsger remains well-known in Portland from the 15 years he spent as a sports and news reporter...   More

News Former Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul De Muniz issued a written mea culpa to lawmakers today in the wake of a story that appeared in the current print edition of WW.At issue is the role that De Muniz, who retired from the Supreme Court in January, is playing in the Capitol. As a...   More

News Today's large donation to Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland, the campaign proposing Measure 26-151, which would fluoridate Portland's water supply, comes from Upstream Public Health.
Upstream, a Portland non-profit, is the group that started the fluoridation movement rolling last year in clandestine tal...   More

News UPDATE, 6:25 pm: Several procrastinating readers have alerted WW that the arts tax website—the city's preferred method of payment—has crashed. It could not handle the volume of people trying to pay on the last day before a promised $20 penalty.
"At this ...   More

News Last week, the Hon. Paul J. De Muniz, recently retired chief justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, strode into a state capitol hearing room to offer his legal opinion on a bill being debated by l   More

News As we enter the final week of the May election cycle, the big money continues to flow into the "yes" side of Measure 26-151, which calls for the fluoridation of Portland's water supply.Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland reported two contributions totaling $68,000 from the Dentists of Oregon PAC, bringing that group's total giving to the campaign to $98,000. The anti-fluoridation c...   More

News An Oregon State Bar panel has found (PDF) two prominent lawyers guilty of conflicts of interest and misrepresentation in a long-running case that dates to 2000.The three-member trial panel ruled that Barnes Ellis and Lois Rosenbaum violated Bar ethics rules governing conflic...   More

News The bulk commodities giant Kinder Morgan has announced it won't pursue a coal export terminal it hoped to build at Port Westward in Columbia County."Kinder Morgan’s terminal would have exported up to 30 million tons of Wyoming and Montana coal a year to Asia. The company projected its investment at $150 million to $200 million with 80 permanent jobs at the terminal," The Oreg...   More