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A billboard that appeared this week in downtown Portland urges voters not to reelect City Councilor Mitch Green, one of the three Democratic Socialist councilors up for reelection this fall. The money behind that billboard can be traced in part to the Portland Metro Chamber, the city’s chamber of commerce—and the message shows how eager the city’s business lobby is to unseat him.
“Politician Mitch Green voted to use your taxes. Didn’t pay his own taxes,” the billboard reads, which emerges as drivers are deposited off of the Morrison Bridge into downtown.
Green is running for reelection in District 4, which covers all of the westside and a sliver of Southeast. He made headlines this summer for three distinct missteps: He failed to pay a $7,328 property tax bill until The Oregonian pointed it out to him; he lit a brush fire in his backyard at the height of wildfire season and told WW he was unaware of the many burn bans in place; and, most recently, a pundit posted a sampling of Green’s tweets from 2020 and 2021 in which he made fun of business owners seeking graffiti abatement and called police officers “absolute monsters,” among other pejoratives that Green has since described as “spicy.”
The billboard is funded by a political action committee called “Ditch Mitch” that was registered earlier this week with the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office. The website of the PAC says the committee’s biggest funder so far is the United for Portland Action fund, a political action committee that was created and funded by the Portland Metro Chamber.
The billboard isn’t exactly a surprise. The Portland Metro Chamber is seeking to unseat Green—or one of the other two socialists up for reelection in District 3, Angelita Morillo or Tiffany Koyama Lane, in order to secure a centrist majority on the City Council, which has become increasingly divided by 6–6 votes.
The treasurer of Ditch Mitch is Kyle Prosen, who according to his LinkedIn is a business analyst with the diagnostics testing company Natera. He appears to live in District 3. He’s also a drag artist who in 2024 made headlines for showing up for jury duty in drag as Sarah Palin.
No contributions or expenditures have yet been reported by the PAC in the SOS’s public database. That’s likely because of the seven-day reporting window that committees have to report them.
Green did not immediately respond to a request for comment. United for Portland Action Fund did not immediately respond to a question about how much money it’s contributed so far to the PAC or how much more it plans to contribute.
