Kotek's downtown Portland balancing act
The progressive in chief tries to trim the failed policies she spearheaded
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek last week confirmed two important facts: (1) that downtown Portland is stumbling, woozily and alarmingly, from drugs and homelessness; and (2) that the policies she has championed throughout her public life as a legislator and as governor are, at least in part, to blame.
Those confirmations were contained in the recommendations of Kotek’s downtown Portland task force, formed last summer when the economic and social collapse of the core of the state’s largest city became too manifest to continue to deny and downplay.
The task force recommendations suggest reversing recent progressive policies on drugs, policing and taxes. Ban public drug use. Increase the number of sworn police officers downtown. Declare a moratorium on new taxes and offer targeted tax relief to struggling businesses. Oregon Republicans have been calling for policies like this for years, for which they were called fascists by the preening progressives guiding downtown Portland to its destruction. Now, the most senior and accomplished elected progressive in the state has endorsed those policies.
The recommendations are damning for those who supported the policies they roll back, including Kotek herself. Measure 110 decriminalized hard drugs and created the legal environment in which public drug use flourishes. Portland partially defunded and rhetorically defenestrated its police force, ensuring there was inadequate resources and institutional appetite to challenge the chaos fomenting downtown. The confluence of profligate governments in Portland - state, regional, county and city - created what the task force describes as the second-highest taxed jurisdiction in the United States, after only New York City. Taxpayers are fleeing the crushing tax burden, leaving the downtown core to folks whose economic activity, such as it is, is off the books and untaxed.
Though directionally meaningful, the task force recommendations are limited and inadequate, on their own, to effectuate lasting improvement. Downtown Portland is but the most visible venue of an entire state suffering from permissive progressivism’s war against accountability. Reversal will require a fundamental, extended focus on getting government out of the business of encouraging antisocial behavior and tolerating its own failure.
But in the church of progressivism, small sins are rarely tolerated. So, the task force’s limited walk-back of progressive policies was executed carefully, on account of it being largely populated by, well, progressives who enacted those policies. Kotek filled the task force with over 50 people, hand-selected to ensure that blame for the task force’s deviation from progressive orthodoxy could be shared among all conceivable elected officials, all of whom have identified, to one degree or another, as progressives:
Governor Tina Kotek, State of Oregon, Co-Chair
Senator Ron Wyden, US Senate
Congressman Earl Blumenauer, U.S. Congressional District 3
Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici, U.S. Congressional District 1
Representative Janelle Bynum, Oregon House District 39
Representative Rob Nosse, Oregon House District 42
Representative Tawna Sanchez, Oregon House District 43
President Lynn Peterson, Metro
Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, Multnomah County
District Attorney Mike Schmidt, Multnomah County
Mayor Ted Wheeler, City of Portland
(Source: KOIN)
Nonetheless, the nonprofit and activist community that forms the beating heart of Oregon’s progressive experiment, did not appreciate the apostacy. The ACLU objected to the crackdown on drugs. Health Justice Recovery Alliance, the primary defender of Measure 110, warned that “criminalization will not work and is the wrong direction.”
Kotek is not dumb, but she is very progressive. She came up in the progressive nonprofit world, having worked for the astonishingly politicized Oregon Food Bank prior to becoming governor. But she knows Oregon voters are fed up with the bad outcomes from the policies she prefers, and has enacted as Speaker of the House and now as Governor. The task force recommendations represent her attempt to give where she feels she must while maintaining the core thrust of progressivism. It is a balancing act she believes is necessary to keep the progressive party raging in Oregon, which of course will require her re-election in 2026, and retention of progressive majorities of the legislature in 2024.
The problem is that Kotek, at her core, has always supported the policies that have ruined downtown Portland. She feels she can give just enough that voters are placated and she can continue to reshape Oregon into the progressive, permissive paradise she keeps promising, but can never deliver.
Another bullseye, Jeff. Keep up the great work
But have the voters been sufficiently mugged by reality that they will elect at least traditional centrist Democrats if not Republicans?