Salem Political Snark

Must-read: Salem protest story by a South High student

High school journalism is alive and well in Salem, judging by this highly professional story by Eddy Binford-Ross in the South Salem High School online newspaper, the Clypian. 

It's a first-hand account of the protest in Salem on Saturday night that led to city officials declaring a state of emergency and imposing a curfew. I believe the state of emergency is in effect until Monday, but the curfew has been lifted. 

UPDATE: Just saw that Binford-Ross is using Twitter (@Clypian) to report on tonight's, Sunday's, protest in Salem. Here's a screenshot of a recent tweet. Good job!

I've got some thoughts about the protest, which I'll share after Binford-Ross' story. She is the editor-in-chief of the Clypian. Hopefully she won't mind me copying her story into this blog post.

(Did I mention that you're an excellent writer, Ms. Binford-Ross, whose work deserves to be shared as widely as possible, regardless of minor details like copyright law?)

Hundreds of protestors took to the streets late Saturday night in downtown Salem. They were protesting against police brutality and in honor of George Floyd. The protests remained peaceful until around 11:20 when a few protestors began to throw fireworks towards the police. The organizers attempted to force the instigators away from the protest, although this was seemingly unsuccessful.

The police, dressed in riot gear, responded with flash bangs and calls to disperse the crowd. They notified protestors that if they did not disperse they would be subject to tear gas and projectiles. The crowds remained and tear gas was released. The protestors retreated to the Capitol area where they proceeded to take a knee.

Around midnight, the City of Salem declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew. Following this, the police announced that the protest was now unlawful and that if protestors did not leave they would be subject to arrest. An organizer told those assembled that “if you are here for George Floyd, you should go home.” Most protestors remained.

About twenty minutes later, the police began to move in on the protestors. They used tear gas and flash bangs in another attempt to break-up those gathered. The crowd dispersed and most protestors left.

Following the dispersion, police officers gathered at Salem Center after a small group of protestors were heard saying that they were going to loot the mall. There were reports of bricks being thrown at the officers around 12:40.

Prior to the altercation between police and protestors, the protestors gathered peacefully for hours. They marched to chants of “no justice, no peace,” “breaking stuff is not the answer,” “say his name, George Floyd,” “I can’t breathe” and “black lives matter.” They called society to address the racism in the police force, as well as, justice for Floyd and others like him.

Floyd is an African-American man who was recently killed when police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his throat for a prolonged period of time. Despite Floyd telling them “I can’t breathe,” Chauvin continued to kneel, leading to Floyd’s death. Chauvin lost his job and has been charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.

These protestors join hundreds of thousands of others demonstrating across the nation in response to the murder of Floyd, as well as the murders of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. Taylor was an African-American EMT who was shot when police entered her home unannounced while allegedly searching for a suspect who was already in custody. Arbery was a young, unarmed African-American man who, while going for a run, was shot by George McMichaels and his son, in early February. Arbery’s killers were not taken into custody until May, when a video of the shooting began to circulate.

Many protests elsewhere have turned from peaceful gatherings into riots, including in Portland, Eugene, Minneapolis, Atlanta, LA, and New York City. Buildings have been set on fire, including the Justice Center in Portland, and have been subject to looting and vandalism.

The extent of damage in downtown Salem is unknown at this point. However, there were graffiti messages written on the roads and the Capitol Steps. The windows in the glass structures on the Capitol mall were also broken.

Counter-protestors were present. People stood in front of various businesses with rifles, including Glamour Salon– whose owner publicly asked for armed protection. There were no reports of altercations between counter protestors and protestors.

This is a breaking news story and will continue to be updated. The last update was 1 a.m.

Here's my take on the protest as described above.

Like most people, I was appalled when I saw the video of the police officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on George Floyd's neck, which led to Floyd's death. Chauvin deserves many years of jail time, and the other officers at the scene who stood by probably deserve more than just being fired.

But there's no reason for protests against this injustice to turn violent in any way.

That includes throwing fireworks at police, as reported by Binford-Ross. Spray-painting graffiti also should never happen. These actions by a few Salem protesters were a major distraction from what should have been the focus of the protest -- bringing attention to the unjust deaths of African-Americans at the hands of police.

When I was in college -- the ancient days of 1966-71 -- there were frequent protests against the Vietnam War. I took part in some of the protests in the San Francisco Bay area. 

Yes, we screamed at the police, who weren't exactly hippie-lovers, of which I was one. Looking back, I wish that hadn't happened. Because while the protests were completely justified, whenever violence accompanied them the irony of protesters acting warlike (even to a small degree) while protesting the Vietnam War diluted the message.

Here's an iconic photo by Marc Riboud of a girl at a massive 1967 demonstration against the Vietnam War. The following Wikipedia description demonstrates the power of meeting violence with gentleness.

I realize "flower power" isn't a thing among young people these days. But maybe it should be. Sure beats throwing fireworks at police.

The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet is a photograph of Jan Rose Kasmir (born in 1950), at that time an American high-school student. This iconic photograph was taken by French photographer Marc Riboud.^[1] Riboud photographed Kasmir on 21 October 1967 while taking part with over 100,000 anti-war activists in the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam's March on the Pentagon to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Seventeen-year-old Kasmir was shown clasping a chrysanthemum and gazing at bayonet-wielding soldiers. The photo was featured in the December 30, 1969 special edition of Look magazine under the title The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet.^[2] The photo was republished world-wide and became a symbol of the flower power movement. Smithsonian Magazine later called it "a gauzy juxtaposition of armed force and flower child innocence".^[3]

Negative campaigning didn't work in Salem City Council races

I found a lot to like in how the four Salem City Council races on the May 19 ballot turned out.

Progressives won three of them, and narrowly lost the fourth, even though the conservative candidates had a lot more money to spend -- thanks to contributions from business related PACs (political action committees). 

Stapleton, Phillips, Oakes-Miller, and Nordyke were the progressive candidates. The * indicates who won.

So the four progressive candidates raised $70,231 as of May 22, while the four conservative candidates raised a whopping $158,350, well over twice as much. 

Yet three of the conservatives lost. And not by a little. By a lot. 

The most obvious reason is that Salem is a progressive town, despite its reputation as being a backwater between the swiftly flowing liberal currents of Portland and Eugene.

But in the two most hotly contested City Council races -- Nanke vs. Phillips in Ward 3, and Sund vs. Nordyke in Ward 7 -- I believe negative campaigning on behalf of the conservative candidates (Nanke and Sund) backfired. 

This was my guess back in December 2019 when I wrote "Sleaze warning: Reid Sund hires Chuck Adams in Ward 7 race."

Watch out, residents of south Salem's Ward 7.

A tsunami of sleaze could be coming your way as the City Council race between Vanessa Nordyke and Reid Sund heats up between now and the May 2020 primary election.

I say this because Sund's campaign finance reporting indicates that Chuck Adams' firm, New Media Northwest, is working for the Friends of Reid Sund committee.

...Now, hopefully Reid Sund will tell Adams that he wants to run a clean campaign against Vanessa Nordyke. But the fact that the Sund campaign is working with New Media Northwest, which is based in Salem, is a disturbing sign that Sund is prepared to go low when Nordyke goes high. 

If this happens, I think the tactic could backfire against Sund.

People are fed up with the never-ending rancor and divisiveness in Washington, D.C. and don't want to see this at the local level here in Salem. It's fine that Sund is a conservative and Nordyke is a progressive. This should make for an engaging battle of ideas and policy positions that Ward 7 voters would appreciate.

However, Chuck Adams has a lengthy history of stretching the truth beyond acceptable political bounds.

And that's what happened in both the Ward 3 and Ward 7 races, the truth was stretched by those supporting the Nanke and Sund campaigns. It's unclear how much this was orchestrated by Chuck Adams and his firm New Media Northwest. 

But given how much money flowed into the pockets of New Media Northwest, likely Adams' political consulting firm had some influence on the Nanke and Sund campaigns. 

Tonight I looked through the ORESTAR financial reports of the four conservative Salem City Council campaigns to see how much was paid to New Media Northwest. Here's what I came up with:

Jan Kailuweit (Ward 1): 0
Brad Nanke (Ward 3): $23,767
Jose Gonzalez (Ward 5): $3,087
Reid Sund (Ward 7): $55,131

So a total of $81,985 flowed into the coffers of New Media Northwest from the conservative campaigns, which is over half of the $158,350 contributed to those campaigns, 52% by my calculations

Pleasingly, there was a rough inverse relationship between how much money a campaign spent on New Media Northwest, and how well the candidate did.

Sund spent by far the most, and got 43% of the vote. Nanke was the next highest spender, and got 44%. Gonzales was the third highest spender, and got 52% of the vote. Kailuweit spent nothing on New Media Northwest, and got 42%.

The only reports I got of negative campaign ads were in support of the Sund and Nanke campaigns. They spent a heck of a lot of money on New Media Northwest consulting services. And they lost, big-time. Kailuweit also lost big-time, yet paid New Media Northwest a big fat zero.

To me, the lesson is that if negative campaigning ever worked in Salem, it didn't this time. Hopefully we will see less negativity in future Salem City Council races, since this doesn't seem to be a winning strategy.

Salem Reporter gets it right: this is a progressive town

It's wrong to think that Salem is a conservative backwater stuck between two cool progressive cities to our north and south, Portland and Eugene.

Sure, for a long time some have termed our town So-Lame. But if that moniker ever was deserved, it sure doesn't describe Salem now, either from a cultural or a political perspective.

As I noted on May 20 in a post-election post, "Progressives dominate in three of four Salem City Council races," progressives have made a great comeback in Salem. Back in 2015 there was just one progressive on the City Council. Starting in 2018, there have been six. 

And there still are six, since the "to be determined" Ward 5 race shown in yellow ended up going to Jose Gonzalez rather than Hollie Oakes-Miller. 

Today the headline of a story in the Salem Reporter spoke the truth: "Salem Council results indicate voters prefer a progressive agenda." Here's how the story starts out.

Salem continues to head down a progressive path if Tuesday’s election results say anything about the makeup of the city.

Salem city politics have gradually become more progressive in recent years. For the latest election, two councilors chose not to run for re-election and one resigned, but most of the seats they leave will be filled with candidates who follow in their ideology.

Councilor Chris Hoy said Tuesday affirmed where the council has been headed in recent years, with his election to council in 2018 tipping the political balance to progressive majority.

“This just reinforced that it wasn’t an anomaly. This is the direction Salem wants to go,” Hoy said.

For sure. 

The progressive handwriting has been on Salem's wall for quite a few years. But conservatives in our town, notably including the Chamber of Commerce, haven't been reading it.

In 2012 Salem went for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 10 points, 53% to 43%. Six of Salem's eight wards favored Obama, which happens to be how many progressive city councilors there are now in 2020, six.

In 2016 Salem went for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by 11 points, 49% to 38%. All eight of Salem's wards favored Clinton, though the margin in Ward 4 was just 20 votes.

So it isn't exactly a shocker that in 2020 voters favored progressives in three of the four city council races. Yet the Salem Reporter story includes some quotes that indicate how strongly political denial has taken root in the minds of local conservatives. For example:

Jan Kailuweit, a manager in the Oregon Employment Department, lost his second bid to represent downtown Salem’s Ward 1, getting 42% of the vote. His opponent, stay-at-home mom Virginia Stapleton, won with 57%.

“Ideology and partisanship won over pragmaticism,” Kailuweit said Friday.

He said partisanship has crept into city council races since a contingent of liberal residents known as Progressive Salem started helping elect candidates in 2014.

Kailuweit is fairly new to Salem, so I'll give him a pass on that last completely-wrong statement. Otherwise he'd deserve a failing grade.

Here's how I described the truth of political partisanship in Salem, which extends far beyond 2014, in a blog post titled "Chamber of Commerce no longer running Salem. Let's keep it that way." 

Back in 1998, though, the Salem Chamber of Commerce set out to elect a Mayor and City Councilors who would bow at the altar of job creation. This is from a March 2016 post on the Build Jobs PAC web site, where the PAC announced that it was endorsing Chuck Bennett for Mayor and Jan Kailuweit and Warren Bednarz for two council seats (both of whom lost). 

Eighteen years before 2016 gets us to 1998, when Mike Swaim, a progressive, was Mayor from 1997 to 2002. Janet Taylor was elected Mayor in 2003, kicking off a string of Chamber-supported candidates who controlled the City Council until this year, 2017.

Thus Chamber of Commerce-backed candidates wrested control of the City Council in the early 2000s, and lost control in 2017. Gosh, progressives have had the council majority for a whole three years, having worked hard to tilt the partisan pendulum back in a liberal-leaning direction.

Which is what Salem voters want, as the recent election shows. May three years turn into many more.

Campaign finance facts about Salem City Council races in 2020

If you're interested in how much is being contributed to City Council races here in Salem, you're going to love the reports that Jim Scheppke sent me -- which I've shared below in the form of screenshots. 

A post-election story in the Statesman Journal said that Councilor Tom Andersen is looking into the possibility of limiting spending on the races, which points to the relevance of these reports.

For five positions that pay absolutely nothing to have more than $200,000 for political campaigns is alarming, said Salem City Councilor Tom Andersen. 

"I think that's way too much of an influence of big money," he said in a meeting before the May 19 election.

Andersen said he was researching the option of amending the city charter and bringing the issue of campaign contribution limits to voters.

"It seems to me that it makes sense to let the citizens decide if we want all this money -- from whatever source -- funneled into city campaigns," he said. 

There's a lot to digest in the information Scheppke has provided. Here's some headlines.

(1) As of May 22, $228,582 was reported to have been contributed to eight candidates in four City Council races.
(2) That's an average of $28,573 per 2020 candidate.
(3) By contrast, for races in 2014-2018, $11,999 was contributed to each candidate on average.
(4) Five business-related groups contributed $99,250 to conservative candidates in 2020.
(5) Thus those five business-related groups accounted for 43% of all 2020 contributions. 
(6) Contributions to the four winning candidates averaged $7.96 per vote for them.
(7) Contributions to the four losing candidates averaged $13.06 per vote for them. 
(8) In losing, Reid Sund was at $22.87 per vote, and Hollie Oakes-Miller was at 88 cents per vote.
(9) In winning, Jose Gonzalez was at $12.13 per vote, and Virginia Stapleton was at $5.50 per vote.
(10) The four candidates with the highest percentage of small donations were all progressives.
(11) The four candidates with the highest percentage of business PAC donations were all conservatives.

Here's the information Jim Scheppke has put together. I'll also share the PDF files.
Download Campaign Finance Facts 5-22 PDF
Download Historical Campaign Contributions

 

Progressives dominate in three of four Salem City Council races

Last night progressives were heartened by the results of four Salem City Council races -- even one in which the liberal candidate is narrowly behind. Spending on these races set a record, about $220,000, with most of the money coming from individuals and groups aligned with business interests.

The Chamber of Commerce and builder/realtor PACs went all out to change the left-leaning political landscape of the City Council. And in the end, they ended up with at best, the same balance of power.

As the image below that a friend sent me shows, the election started with a 6-3 progressive majority on the council. Currently it is assured that the six progressive seats will remain, plus two conservative council members (Mayor Bennet and Councilor Lewis), with the Ward 5 race too close to call.

Progressives have made a great comeback in Salem. Back in 2015 there was just one progressive on the City Council. Starting in 2018, there have been six. 

Here's screenshots of the current election results for the four City Council races. I haven't shown the mayor's race. Mayor Bennett, who sits on the Council, won easily over Brooke Jackson, 64% to 35%. Scroll down for my comments on each race.

Ward 1: Stapleton (58%) vs. Kailuweit (41%) If there was a near-sure-thing in this election, it was Virginia Stapleton winning. This is the most liberal-leaning ward in Salem. Stapleton had the strong support of Cara Kaser, the progressive incumbent who decided not to run again. Kailuweit had run against Kaser four years ago and lost by a large margin. I give credit to Kailuweit for giving his candidacy a second try. However, the outcome was about the same as in 2016.

Ward 3: Philips (57%) vs. Nanke (43%) The Salem Reporter called this an upset, and the margin of victory by Phillips certainly was surprising. However, last fall Nanke had said that he wasn't going to run again after 20 years on the City Council, then decided to enter the race at the last minute after being pressured to do so. So he was a rather reluctant candidate. In fact, last night I observed in a Zoom election night get-together that Nanke probably was almost as happy with the outcome as Phillips is. 

Ward 5: Oakes-Miller (49%) vs. Gonzalez (50%) This is a very close race, with just 18 votes separating Oakes-Miller and Gonzalez. The Salem Reporter story says:

Marion County Clerk Bill Burgess said that race is too close to call and his office still has more than 1,000 ballots to count. He said final results could be two to three weeks away.

Few gave Oakes-Miller much of a chance. She was outspent by Gonzalez by a 12:1 margin. She's an avowed Democratic Socialist.

But Oakes-Miller was able to send out a mailing that apparently resonated with Ward 3 voters. Here's her positions as shown on the mailer. So I count this as a progressive-plus, even if Oakes-Miller doesn't prevail once all the votes are counted. She showed that a progressive in Salem with little money can go up against a well-funded business-backed candidate and hold their own.

Ward 7: Nordyke (58%) vs. Sund (42%) Since Nordyke had been appointed to the Ward 7 seat after Sally Cook resigned following the untimely death of her husband, Nordyke had the advantage of incumbency. 

Still, Sund broke a fund-raising record for a City Council race, raking in $71,715 while Nordyke raised considerably less than half that amount, $29,039. Clearly the Chamber of Commerce and business PACs wanted to squash Nordyke's political career in the bud, since she is a compelling candidate who, in my opinion, is well-suited to seek a higher office.

Sund ended up spending almost $30 per vote that he ended up getting, while Nordyke spent less than $9. (Hollie Oakes-Miller wins the thrift prize for cost per vote: $1.70.)

So the balance of power between progressives and conservatives on the Salem City Council will end up about the same. However, this is a win for progressives, since they were defending three seats and conservatives only one. 

And if Oakes-Miller ends up pulling out a victory, that would expand the progressive majority to 7-2 from the current 6-3. One interesting twist in this Ward 5 race is that to my understanding, write-in votes are counted in the vote total. So Gonzalez needs to get 50% of the total number of votes plus at least one more vote to avoid a November runoff election.

Currently he is at 50.3%. Thus it's possible that if Oakes-Miller narrows the margin but doesn't take the lead, she could still force Gonzalez into a runoff.

Thank you, Salem Mayor and City Council candidates

I've dusted off a blog post from May 2016. Changed the election day to what it is in 2020, May 19. Updated the names of the candidates.

Otherwise, left it the same, because what I said back then on election day eve is what I also want to say today, with the election tomorrow. Thank you, candidates. 

I offer a heartfelt Namas'cray to all of the Salem people running for Mayor and City Council seats in tomorrow's 2020 primary election.

Thank you for being crazy enough to put in so much time, effort, and money seeking an office that pays exactly nothing, requires a hell of a lot of work, and puts you in the firing line for constant criticism. 

Some of you, I heartily disagree with politically. Some of you, we're political bed-fellows. Doesn't matter. I honor your craziness, your fine madness:

Chuck Bennett and Brooke Jackson, Mayor; Virginia Stapleton and Jan Kailuweit, Ward 1; Trevor Philips and Brad Nanke, Ward 3; Hollie Oakes-Miller and Jose Gonzalez, Ward 5; Vanessa Nordyke and Reid Sund, Ward 7.

Politics really is a crazy sport.

At first I had "cruelest sport" in the title of this post, because there's also that side to politics. Putting up with the craziness/cruelty is admirable on any level of elective office-seeking, but it really deserves accolades on a local level like Salem's. 

Like I said, no pay, long hours, lots of aggravation. 

Of course, just about everybody happily volunteers to do things that are somewhat similar. Such as, competing in various kinds of sports as an amateur. 

In many ways, politics is a sport. But here's why I consider running for political office -- and specifically, Salem Mayor or City Councilor -- is a super-crazy sport. 

The "season" is one game. In golf, tennis, basketball, football, or whatever, losing or winning is temporary. Almost always another game is coming up soon. Next time... we'll learn from this loss... coming up with a better game plan. In politics, though, it's two or four years before another chance. And maybe never. 

In Oregon, the "final score" pops up abruptly. I really feel for candidates on election night, May 19. Since we have vote by mail, ballots are tabulated quickly on election day. Often, if not usually, results are available online a few minutes after 8 pm that stand up. Meaning, the winner is known. It's akin to playing a game hard for months, but not knowing if you're winning or losing. Then, when you're exhausted, the final score pops up. In most other states, returns dribble in, so you have time to adjust to the outcome. In Oregon, it's pretty much Instant Joy or Sorrow.

Rules are loose. Trick plays abound. All sports have rules. So does politics. However, the political game is played pretty fast and loose. Even more so than in football, say, where arguably holding or pass interference could be called on almost every play, if the referees were sticklers. So feelings get hurt. Sort of like when a team goes for a touchdown in the last 30 seconds even though it is ahead 48-0. Hey, you're supposed to take a knee! But the rules allow it.

The stakes are large. So is disappointment. Candidates for political office, especially in local races, run because they care about their community. When they lose, it must feel like more than a personal loss. Wanting to do something positive for their fellow citizens, they've failed. (Well, the way I see it, actually they've won, no matter the outcome, because running for office is such a positive thing to do; but I'm sure it hurts a lot to come up short at the ballot box.)

There's more crazy aspects to the sport of politics, but I'll stop here. With a final thank-you to the candidates, and a hope for the political scene in Salem:

Let's remember that politics is a game, albeit a serious and important one. Both teams going out together after a game for beers, pizza, and some laughs is a big part of many amateur sports. There's no reason politics can't be somewhat the same. 

Fight. Battle. Scream. Yell. Push. Argue. Leave it all on the field. 

Then, when the match is over, do our best to remember that the Bigger Game is life itself -- way beyond politics. 

Oregon Right to Life inserts itself in Salem City Council election

Oregon Right to Life has a nasty habit of sending out last-minute mailers in local elections that have nothing to do with abortion. Here they go again, with the mailer below urging a vote for Brad Nanke in the Ward 3 election for a Salem City Council seat.

Supporters of Nanke claim that he is a "non-partisan" member of the council. Not true. Nanke is deeply conservative. Oregon Right to Life says he is "an advocate for the unborn." 

Since I'm not aware that abortion has ever been discussed at a Salem City Council meeting, it's pretty damn clear that Oregon Right to Life simply is trying to energize right-wing voters to support one of their kind.

So if you're a Ward 3 resident who hasn't turned in your ballot yet, keep in mind that Trevor Phillips is the candidate you should vote for if you want someone who is looking out for the broad public interest, not narrow special interests.

Marion County not allowed to reopen. Who's to blame?

Frustrating. Not good. Irritating.

There's a lot of words I could use to describe my feeling about Marion and Polk being the only counties in Oregon whose applications to start reopening were rejected by Governor Brown and the Oregon Health Authority. 

Of Oregon's 36 counties, 31 were given the OK to reopen. Three haven't applied yet (Multnomah, Clackamas, Washington). And two, Marion and Polk, have the dubious distinction of not passing the re-opening criteria, apparently mostly because of continued high numbers of new COVID-19 cases.

On the sort-of bright side, today's OHA Coronavirus Update said, "The applications for Marion and Polk counties were not approved, and those counties will be monitored for seven days to see if conditions in those counties have improved." But the update also showed that, once again, Marion County had the highest number of new cases in Oregon.

Oregon Health Authority reported 67 new confirmed cases and no new presumptive cases of COVID-19 as of 8 a.m. today, bringing the state total to 3,479. The new confirmed cases reported today are in the following counties: Deschutes (2), Linn (2), Malheur (1), Marion (33), Multnomah (19), Polk (1), Umatilla (2), Washington (2), Yamhill (5).

Here's a map that tells the reopening tale, courtesy of the Oregon Health Authority.

So how is it that Marion County, along with our neighbor Polk County, is going to continue being shutdown tomorrow, while all of the uncolored counties in the map have been approved for a Phase 1 reopening? Which, according to a State of Oregon summary, consists of:

First reopening stage, allowed in specific counties that qualify. Includes limited reopening of restaurants and bars, personal services, gyms, and malls. Gatherings of up to 25 people allowed for recreational, social, cultural, civic or faith events – with physical distancing requirements.

When I first heard today that Marion County's reopen application had been turned down, my snap reaction was to blame the three Republican county commissioners.

After all, one of them, Sam Brentano, is a notorious global warming denier. So it was easy for me to envision he and the other two commissioners ignoring public health scientists, being big on Trump-style "let's get the economy open again and not worry much about whether this causes more deaths and disease." 

There could be some truth to this. The Marion County Health Department has been notably silent on our local coronavirus crisis. I'm a news junkie and haven't seen any meaningful public utterances about the unusually high number of COVID-19 cases here. 

In fact, I've read news stories where staff from the Health Department declined to comment on the high rate of infections in Marion County. That got me to thinking that department employees were being stifled by the County Commissioners in the same way Trump has been preventing federal scientists from releasing coronavirus guidelines and other information.

But an excellent Salem Reporter story by Rachel Alexander, Saphara Harrell and Jake Thomas caught my eye a little while ago. The timing was great to publish today's "WATCHDOG: In Marion County, high concentrations of coronavirus blamed on inequality of care."

Along with other news outlets, Salem Reporter is making coronavirus-related stories free to everybody. So you should be able to read the link above without a subscription -- which i highly recommend that you do, as it is by far the best analysis I've seen of the situation in Marion County.

It's a detailed, nuanced, well-researched story.

Notwithstanding the headline citing inequality of care as the culprit in Marion County, the story shows that there's plenty of blame to go around. Read it to get the full picture.

Here's my summary of the blamees, with excerpts from the Salem Reporter piece -- which focuses on the heavily Latinx Woodburn area that has by far the most coronavirus cases in Marion County.

Marion County Health Department 
Days passed before the Marion County Health Department approached the groups to ask their help to slow the rapidly escalating number of infected individuals."

"But an investigation by Salem Reporter found that state and Marion County health officials were slow to get timely, accurate information about COVID-19 to agricultural workers and non-English speaking residents in the north county. 

Constrained by limited testing capacity, limited staffing and sometimes days-long delays in getting results back, health officials reacted as new cases were reported, but did little to proactively ensure some of the county’s most vulnerable residents were armed with information to protect themselves and their families.

Inequality/Inequity

Community leaders and state health officials said Marion County’s outbreak is exposing longstanding inequities for Latinos and non-English speaking residents who are more likely employed in agriculture, manufacturing and other fields where work has continued despite the pandemic.

The leaders described as slow or inadequate the outreach early on that could have helped people still working in essential jobs better protect themselves and their families.

“The gaps that are already in our community, the gaps that have already been there between our Latinx community and our county, they’ve been magnified in a really big way,” said Lopez, the PCUN director.

Bad business practices

Employers in grocery stores, agriculture, manufacturing and construction weren’t required to follow all of the state’s guidelines about social distancing at work, though they still had an obligation to protect employees from COVID-19 under general workplace safety rules, according to Oregon OSHA spokesman Aaron Colvin.

Staying far apart from other workers is possible in some field jobs, but Lopez said PCUN received reports from workers that they were working “shoulder to shoulder” in farms and food processing plants and didn’t have hand washing stations or sanitizing supplies. PCUN encouraged people to file complaints with state agencies, she said.

Workers have filed 29 complaints with Oregon OSHA alleging Woodburn businesses failed to follow social distancing guidelines or provide protective equipment. Six relate to grocery stores and three to nursery and meat packing businesses. Most are still being investigated.

Culture

Close contact at work wasn’t the only concern. Workers often shared van rides to jobs, providing another way for the virus to spread. Many live in large households, making it easier for the virus to spread to a larger group if a working adult unwittingly brings home the disease.

Large households have been a common factor for people seeking COVID-19 testing at Woodburn’s Salud Medical Center.

“Family is the center. You may be interdependent on other portions of your family. Maybe your cousin is your babysitter. Maybe your grandparents live with you or your parents,” said Lori Kelley, director of quality for Yakima Valley Farmworkers Clinic, which operates Salud.

Health care access

Access to health care also plays a role, according to Latino health providers and community leaders. State data shows that Latinos are less likely to have health insurance, meaning it’s more difficult to get testing.

That means those testing positive in official counts likely reflect a small portion of the true number with COVID-19. Kelley said the percentage of patients testing positive at Salud has been higher than at Yakima Valley’s other Marion County clinics, suggesting those coming in are more sick.

Lack of testing

Lopez said she’s heard reports of Latinos with COVID-19 symptoms turned away from testing sites in the county, sometimes because they didn’t have insurance. 

Without widespread testing, it’s more likely for people with no or very mild symptoms to spread the virus, especially if they’re still going to work. Public health workers are also challenged to identify where the virus is spreading when they can’t track all those who are infected, something that can revealed by extensive testing.

Inadequate information 

Lopez said government health authorities should have worked with rural radio stations, Spanish language media or other similar outlets. Even when social distancing guidelines did get out, she said they often failed to address the realities of daily life for people who carpool to work or live in large households with a single bathroom.

“What I mostly heard was confusion from our Latinx community, especially our elders, saying ‘Hey, am I going to get arrested if I go out to work?’” Lopez said.

In case you're wondering why the Salem Reporter story focused so much on the Woodburn area, that's the biggest "hot spot" in Marion County. Here's a chart from the story.

Three takeaways from SJ story about record City Council campaign spending

Here's what came to mind after I read today's excellent Statesman Journal story by Whitney Woodworth, "City Council campaign spending breaks records, $200K in contributions."

(1) We need local newspapers. I'm a frequent critic of the Statesman Journal. In-depth reporting on local issues has been lacking for a number of years. But Woodworth's story made me feel better about Salem's daily print newspaper. Temporarily, at least. 

Sure, five days ago I'd written about this same subject.

Being a part-time unpaid blogger, though, limits what I can do compared to a full-time professional journalist. It was great to see the quotes in her story from council candidates that Woodworth had spoken with, notably Vanessa Nordyke and Reid Sund, some of which I'l share below.

There may come a time when the Statesman Journal is unneeded or irrelevant to Salem. This could happen if the online Salem Reporter grows in significance. In the long run, daily print newspapers face a host of problems that could doom all but the major newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times.

That day hasn't come yet. I subscribe to both the Statesman Journal and Salem Reporter. Consider doing the same (that said, the Statesman Journal keeps raising its subscription price, while lessening the quality of the paper, so I understand why many people have given up on it.)

(2) Conservative campaigns are sleazier than progressive campaigns. I've been closely following Salem City Council campaigns since 2014, four election cycles (half of the city councilors are elected every two years). People aren't shy about emailing me nasty mailers that they've received, or telling me about negative TV ads.

I've never heard about a sleazy mailer or ad supporting a progressive city council candidate. So far as I know, only conservative campaigns are marked by the sort of falsehoods and half-truths discussed in today's Statesman Journal story. 

The chamber's political action committee seems especially opposed to current councilor Vanessa Nordyke. They posted a video attacking Nordyke for allegedly supporting a payroll tax even during the coronavirus pandemic. 

"Candidate Reid Sund says, the last thing we should be talking about is a payroll tax," the video says. 

Nordyke says the video and mailers are misleading and untrue. She joined her fellow councilors in voting to take the payroll tax off the ballot. 

The video posted online showed a clip of her saying she understood the need for the payroll tax but cut off her remaining remarks saying the devasting economic impact of the pandemic demanded it be removed from the ballot. 

The allegations made in the mailers sent out that she supports the payroll tax despite the pandemic are flat-out untrue, Nordyke. 

I joined my colleagues in unanimously voting to withdraw that payroll tax from the ballot," she said. "Now that we are over a month from that meeting, the economic forecast is not looking any better. It's only getting worse."

She said she does not see supporting a payroll tax anytime soon, especially during the pandemic. 

"Voters deserve to make informed decisions about who they want to represent them," she said. "That's why I believe it's important to stick to the facts so that voters can make informed decisions based upon the facts."

She also pointed to another pro-Sund mailer that used an old photo of downtown Salem with homeless camps clustered around the former Nordstrom site. 

The outdated photo misleads voters who haven't visited downtown in past the two months into believing there are still these encampments, Nordyke said.

On a recent visit, the sidewalks were clear. 

It's one thing to take issue with her voting record, she said. But it is a whole other issue to mislead people about her record.

"Ads that are misleading are a disservice to the public," Nordyke said. 

The mailers and ads were especially dismaying after she and Sund agreed earlier this year to leave negative campaigning out of the election. 

Well, this goes to show that Reid Sund can't be trusted to keep his word.

A brief bit of Googling would have informed Sund that on March 23 the Salem City Council voted unanimously to support removal of the proposed payroll tax from the May ballot given the coronavirus crisis. So Sund either made a conscious decision to mislead voters about Nordyke's position on the payroll tax, or he is horribly uninformed about this issue. 

The first possibility strikes me as by far the most likely.

(3) Spending on City Council races needs to be reined in. I heartily agree with a quote from Jim Scheppke in the Statesman Journal story. 

Scheppke also pointed to in-direct, high-dollar contributions like a $25,000 contribution made by Mountain West Investment Corp. to the Create Jobs PAC, another Chamber-back political action committee, in January.  

Create Jobs PAC then gave the majority of the money to the Build Jobs PAC, which contributed to local candidates. 

These campaigns keep setting records, he said, adding that he hopes the trend will end with this election thanks to a recent Oregon Supreme Court ruling that opened the door for campaign contribution limits. 

Pricey campaigns will just exclude those who aren't wealthy or backed by powerful PACs, he said. 

"Who is going to want to run for city council with the idea that you are going to have to raise $20,000 or $30,000 to be competitive?" Scheppke said. "It means normal people aren't even going to try."

For sure. Especially since city councilors get no pay for the many hours they put in on their public service.

The City Council needs to seriously consider putting a limit of, say, $500 on how much an individual, organization, or PAC (political action committee) can contribute to a campaign, either directly or indirectly through an independent campaign contribution.

If this isn't legally possible for the City Council to do, then Salem voters should be asked to pass a limit on campaign contributions similar to what Portland voters did in 2018 by amending the city charter. 

For now, here's my recommendation on how people should vote in the May 19 election.

With so many COVID-19 cases, Marion County shouldn't reopen soon

I'm as eager as anyone to have Marion County get back to a semblance of normality in these coronavirus times. i miss my Tai Chi classes. I miss going to the Courthouse Athletic Club. I miss having my hair cut (though I'm looking more like Willy Nelson every day, which can't be a bad thing).

But I'm also an avid reader of the daily Oregon Coronavirus Update that gets emailed to me by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA). Disturbingly often, Marion County has an outsized number of new cases, frequently outpacing Multnomah County which has a much larger population.

According to the most recent OHA data, May 8, Oregon as a whole has had 3,068 confirmed coronavirus cases. Marion County has had 626, 20% of the state total. Yet in 2019 Marion County comprised only 8% of the Oregon population (347,818 out of 4.218 million). 

Nonetheless, a few days ago the Salem Reporter ran a story by Saphara Harrell and Rachel Alexander, "With highest COVID-19 rate in the state, Marion County wants to start reopening businesses."

Marion County says it is ready to start lifting restrictions intended to slow the spread of COVID-19. But the county’s plan, released Wednesday, will face its first test when it’s sent to the governor’s office to determine if the area has met key measures needed to reopen.

The proposal by the Marion County Board of Commissioners comes as the county is experiencing the highest rate of the coronavirus infections in the state and lags behind other urban counties in testing.

Marion County hasn’t met many of the state’s requirements for reopening, including adequate testing, adequate contact tracers or a downward trajectory of cases over a 14-day period. But on Wednesday, materials were presented at the board meeting making the case that the county is making progress on key measures.

OK. But progress is one thing. Meeting the state's requirements is a whole other thing. It seems to me that Marion County should be one of the last counties in Oregon to start reopening businesses, churches, and such, not one of the first.

Today I looked over Marion County's application to the state to begin reopening. As the Salem Reporter story says, Marion County isn't meeting some of the criteria that the state says are needed to ensure the safety of people as Governor Brown's Stay Home, Save Lives orders are gradually relaxed.

Notably, the number of new coronavirus cases in Marion County isn't on a two-week downward trend. A chart in the Marion County application shows this.

Two weeks from May 1 was April 17, which is just past the legend on the horizontal axis. I didn't do any sophisticated statistical analysis of that two-week trend, or even an unsophisticated analysis. But it seems obvious that the Marion County application to start reopening on May 15 doesn't demonstrate a two-week downward trend in new coronavirus cases.

Instead, the application says, "There has been a decline of cases from a peak on April 19, 2020." Well, yes. April 19 was the high point so far in new Marion County cases. But cherry-picking one day doesn't make a trend. My eyeballs don't see any sort of overall trend -- just a steady increase in cases with ups and downs in the daily count.

County-level data from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center confirms that Marion County isn't experiencing a recent downturn in confirmed coronavirus cases. Here's the graph for Marion County. Sure doesn't look like any "bending the curve" is going on in Marion County so far. The last data point is May 7, yesterday.

Here's the graph for Multnomah County, which has the most cases in Oregon. A small bit of bending seems to be occurring. 

I readily admit that part of my skepticism about Marion County being ready to start reopening stems from the deeply conservative bent of the three Republican county commissioners. I don't trust that they're committed to using the best science to base reopening plans on. Rather, I strongly suspect that their Trumpian brand of politics is at play.

Namely, wrongly believing that the Marion County economy can start getting back to normal even though the coronavirus crisis hasn't abated. If people are afraid to go to work, shop, eat at a restaurant, visit a gym, or whatever, it doesn't matter if those places are reopened. Probably they will be largely empty until the COVID-19 outbreak is on a decided downturn in Marion County.

Which, right now, it isn't. 

Any what's up with the director of the Marion County Public Health Department refusing to comment on the Salem Reporter story? That also seems Trump-like.

The Health Authority this week released case numbers by ZIP code, showing the Gervais and Woodburn areas were leading the state in the number of cases per capita.

Two weeks ago, Katrina Rothenberger, director of the Marion County Public Health Department, said the numbers concerned her that the county was headed in the wrong direction.

On Wednesday, Rothenberger declined an interview through a county spokeswoman.