News The Oregon Senate today approved legislation that will move the controversial $3.4 billion Columbia River Crossing to the next stage.Prior to the bill being introduced, Senate President Peter Courtney (D-Salem) took the unusual step of admonishing visitors and spectators to mind their manners, in recognition of the passionate opposition the project has generated.
After a low-key floor discussi...   More

News There are a couple of key takeaways from a quick skim of the budget that the co-chairs of the Legislature's Joint Ways and Means Committee released today. 1. There's slightly more money for K-12 education, the biggest single line item in the budget, than there was in Gov. Jo...   More

News The unmanned flying vehicles called drones get lots of bad press because of their use in killing people in Afghanistan and other global hotspots. As WW has reported, drones also provide a lot of good jobs in parts of this region that don't have great employment opportunities.In...   More

News Former Oregon Supreme Court Justice Michael "Mick" Gillette has injected some momentum into Gov. John Kitzhaber's quest to reduce public employee pension benefits by hundreds of millions of dollars during this legislative session.The back story: the big driver of Kitzhaber's proposed cuts is a plan to reduce cost-of-living increases on pension benefit that exceed $24,000 annually. Pu...   More

News Eric Utne founded the Utne Reader, a print forerunner of content aggregation sites such as the Huffington Post, in 1984. The magazine, published bimonthly, pulled in excerpts and reprints from a range of media sources. It's mission is to bring readers "the best of the alternative press."

In 2000, Utne walked away from the maga...   More

News When the Oregon House rubber-stamped a $450 million appropriation for the Columbia River Crossing project on Monday, two voices missing from the debate were former Reps. Jefferson Smith (D-Portland) and Katie Eyre (R-Hillsboro).
Both raised hard questions about the CRC in th...   More

News Lawmakers in Salem are considering many changes in Oregon's property tax system, hoping to address issues of fairness, compression and, in some cases, they're trying to bust the limits created by ballot measures over the past 23 years.
Prior to the session, the  League of Oregon...   More

News In Portland, we've built streetcars and an aerial tram, while leaving 59 miles of city streets unpaved and big swaths of outer-Southeast and Northeast Portland without sidewalks.  Now L...   More

News The pro-fluoride group with the cavity-inducing name "Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland" has reeled in the first big check for the May election on whether or not to fluoridate Portland's water.
The political action committee of Dentists of Oregon gave the pro-fluoridation side $30,000 in a transaction reported Tuesday. That contribution brings the group's total to $35,...   More

News Tom Koehler, a co-founder of the Chinook Book and Pacific Ethanol, will run for the Portland Public School Board Zone 6 seat being vacated by two-term incumbent Trudy Sargent. Consuelo Saragoza, who works for Multnomah County, previously filed for the position.Koehler brings political and private sector experience to the race. While a student at Oregon State University, he ran...   More