News As the calendar moves toward a sleepy May 21 election date, money is barely trickling into school board campaigns. Metro's operating levy for its green spaces has raised $70,000 so far and has no organized opposition.  Most of the noise, at least online, is coming from the bitter argument about Portland's p...   More

News As WW reported earlier this week, Lewis & Clark tax law Prof. Jack Bogdanski has filed a legal challenge in Oregon Tax Court to the $35 per person arts tax voters approved last November.
Bogdanski, better known as the blogger Bojack, has declined to c...   More

News Rep. Brent Barton (D-Oregon City) barely defeated his Republican opponent, Steve Newgard, last year, winning by just 348 votes, the narrowest margin of six hotly contested Metro-area House races.
Barton was returning to the House after losing a Senate race in 2010. He says he thought he could put the campaign behind him after November and get busy legislating.
But in F...   More

News For decades, Portland Fire & Rescue has had the political clout to fight any meaningful change in the way it does business. And, as city records show, that’s meant big budgets, slow respon   More

News At the corner of Southwest 3rd Avenue and Oak Street lies an empty, weed-filled lot that may be the most costly dirt in the city’s history. The lot is on its way to costing its owner nearly    More

News Seth Woolley, a Green Party activist and two-time candidate for Secretary of State, has filed suit (PDF) in Marion County Court against Secretary of State Kate Brown alleging that the elections division, which Brown controls, failed to properly investigate an earlier elections complaint Woolley filed aga...   More

News Clean Water Portland, the committee opposing the proposed fluoridation of Portland's water reported receiving three checks in recent days. The committee got $5,000 from a Utah company call Abundant Living Information Services; $3,000 from a local man named Roger Burt and $1,000 from a Californi...   More

Cover Story Oregon has one of America’s best prison systems.  Gov. John Kitzhaber knows that. After all, he helped build it. When Kitzhaber was governor from 1995 to 2003, he spent hundreds of millions   More

News The City of Portland employs an ombudswoman named Margie Sollinger as a repository for complaints about city agencies. In the past, the ombudsperson has been in the thick of serious doings—the federal investigation that resulted city parking meter czar Ellis McCoy's f...   More

News State Rep. Peter Buckley (D-Ashland) today redefined what a tax is. Buckley, a five-term incumbent, knows a lot about taxes—he's co-chairman of the Joint Ways and Means Committee, which writes the state's budget.But when Buckley stood today to talk about a new proposal from the Oregon School Boards Association that would cut public employee retirement benefits by $1.8 billion, he c...   More