Steve Novick Wants to Know Why the Oregonian Editorial Board "Hates the People of East Portland"

Portland Mercury:

Anyone even passingly familiar with Portland City Hall knows just how closely Commissioner Steve Novick follows the work of what could reasonably be seen as the region's leading organ when it comes to shaping the opinions of the masses, the Oregonian's editorial board. [Insert throat-clearing, "ahem"-style coughing sound here.] That's maybe doubly true now that he and Mayor Charlie Hales have been trying, for months and months, to raise tens of millions in new revenue for road maintenance and safety projects. And Novick now says he's noticed a couple of things in the paper, over the past few months, that he's found... a bit peculiar. First, in October, the edit board said it wanted all—and not merely the majority—of any millions raised to be spent on paving and maintenance. As in, nothing for safety projects. The current idea, which hasn't been tweaked despite a lot of other changes in recent weeks, is to spend a bit more than 40 percent of available revenue on safety projects, with almost of half of those projects out in long-overlooked stretches of East Portland. "Given the $90 million hard sell by Novick and Hales just months ago, you'd think every cent of the net would be used to correct the underlying problem, wouldn't you?," the board asked. Then, far more recently, the edit board finally offered its preferred mechanism for raising new revenue, after dismissing an income tax and then an income-graded gas fee: a bond measure that would be funded through a property tax hike. (Bond measures, for those who don't know, are intriguing revenue options because they exist outside Oregon's Byzantine rules that cap, or "compress," property tax collections if they reach a certain threshold.) Novick noted both of those points, he said. And then he noted some numbers (pdf) he'd asked the city's budget office to pull—numbers showing which Portland residents, because of compression, pay the least amount of property taxes and the most. According those stats, he says, "90 percent of people in outer East Portland"—where homes are valued lower, along with personal incomes, and yet crime is sometimes higher—"pay a higher property tax rate, if you’re looking at real market value, than 99 percent of the people in Inner Southeast or Inner Northeast."

He stitched the three things together into a conclusion he contends is inescapable: the Oregonian's editorial board has it in for East Portland. As Novick explains, the board wants to strip away safety improvements like sidewalks and intersection fixes from the neighborhood—while at the same time seeking a revenue-raising mechanism that disproportionately targets the neighborhood's tax bills.

"I understand why the Oregonian editorial board hates me. Because we're ideological opposites," says Novick, a proud progressive, riffing off the widely accepted belief that the O's opinion statements lean rightward. "But why do they hate the people of East Portland? I can't quite figure that out." [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

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