Murmurs: Grocers Bag Booze Measure

GROCERS BAG BOOZE MEASURE: The Northwest Grocery Association announced May 17 it was withdrawing Initiative Petition 35, which would have allowed Oregon grocery stores to sell hard liquor. Conceding the end of the NGA’s campaign, president and CEO Amanda Dalton still insists consumers want the convenience of one-stop shopping. “Oregonians firmly believe that we should be able to buy liquor along with beer and wine at their local grocery stores as our neighbors in Washington and California are able to do,” Dalton says. The campaign paid $100,000 to a signature-gathering firm earlier this month but never officially launched the initiative. Now, the NGA has determined it couldn’t have gathered 112,000 valid signatures by July 8, the deadline for placing the measure on the November ballot, blaming “the challenges of COVID and court delays in certifying a [ballot] title.”

GOVERNOR FACES ADDICTION FRICTION: Gov. Kate Brown’s office scheduled a Zoom call May 17 with 14 leaders in the field of addiction treatment. Members of that group have been critical of the state’s poky efforts to deploy new mental health care funding allocated by lawmakers, as well as the glacial rollout of treatment dollars promised by Measure 110, the 2020 ballot measure that decriminalized many hard drugs. One name notably missing from the invitation: Mike Marshall, executive director of Oregon Recovers. Marshall has been an outspoken critic of Brown and the Oregon Health Authority, and organized a protest on Mother’s Day outside Brown’s Southeast Portland home. After WW contacted the governor’s office May 17 to ask why Marshall was excluded, the meeting was abruptly canceled—just a couple of hours before it was set to begin. Brown spokesman Charles Boyle says the meeting was just for the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, of which Oregon Recovers is not a member. He didn’t say why the meeting was canceled.

COUNTY AUDITOR SAYS WORK IS THREATENED: Although the city of Portland’s proposed charter reforms have gotten more ink, Multnomah County is also planning to put reforms on the ballot in November. County Auditor Jennifer McGuirk, who is independently elected, is seeking to peg her office’s budget to the county’s general fund. (She says the auditor’s staff hasn’t increased since the 1990s, while county staff has grown by 15%.) McGuirk also wants to enshrine a fraud hotline and her office’s access to county records in the charter, in part because the current hotline is less robust than best practices call for and county officials have been slow in some cases to produce requested documents. “These proposed charter amendments address existing threats to the county auditor’s ability to serve the public interest,” McGuirk says. “My team needs to be able to access information to do our work on the public’s behalf, and the public needs to have enough resources dedicated to auditing for their county auditor’s office to provide sufficient oversight.” Kafoury says transparency and accountability are top priorities for her, and she supports, with conditions, adding the fraud hotline to the charter and hiring an ombudsman for the auditor’s office: “I funded every request that the county auditor put forward in my 2023 executive budget in what will be the largest expansion of the auditor’s office in county history.”

SPENDING ON FLYNN TOPS $13 MILLION: As of election day, national political action committees had spent more than $13 million in independent expenditures on political newcomer Carrick Flynn, who is running in the Democratic primary for Oregon’s new, 6th Congressional District. Of that spending, $11.4 million came from Protect Our Future, a PAC backed by crypto-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. Nearly $1 million came from House Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC affiliated with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Other Democrats got outside backing, too: Flynn’s chief opponent, state Rep. Andrea Salinas, was buoyed by more than $1.6 million in independent expenditures.

LOW VOTER TURNOUT LEAVES DEMS UNEASY: As election day dawned in Oregon, the story of the 2022 primary continued to be a lack of excitement on the part of voters. With a partial count of ballots received Monday, figures released by the secretary of state showed the statewide percentage of ballots returned was 22.5%. Overall, Republicans (31.6%) were voting more frequently than Democrats (30.3%), while unaffiliated voters, who are shut out of party primaries but can vote in nonpartisan contests, were barely bothering to open their ballots (8.9%). Turnout in rural counties was higher than in the Portland metro area. A Democratic Party of Oregon analysis of voter turnout showed that primary voters were mostly older: 79.4% of the first 500,000 voters to cast ballots were 50 or older. That’s a big skew, considering only 49.2% of registered voters are 50 or above. How will that affect top contests, including primary races for governor? Visit wweek.com for results.

Correction: the Murmur about Initiative Petition 35 originally said it proposed a constitutional amendment. It was statutory. WW regrets the error.