14 Best MINDSETTER™ Columns of 2014
Saturday, December 27, 2014
GoLocalPDX News Team
Writing about anything from business, to politics, to the things that make Portland and Oregon tick, these MINDSETTERS give views and insight into some of the biggest and most important issues in the region.
Their experience and interests help produce content that will make you think, whether you agree with them or not.
So from the Portland Street Fee, to young adults in Portland, here are the 14 biggest MINDSETTER™ columns of 2014:
Related Slideshow: 14 Best MINDSETTER Columns of 2014
Check out the best of GoLocalPDX's MINDESTTERS™ columns of 2014.
Rex Burkholder: Why the Portland Street Fee Is A Bad Idea
By both lefty and righty analysis, a street fee to pay for road maintenance in the city of Portland fails. To the liberally inclined, charging every household a standard fee for road repair, regardless of how much they use or don’t use the roads, is inherently inequitable.
My neighbor, Esther, is housebound at 96. Her caretakers will pull out her car once a week and drive a few blocks to load up on groceries. The rest of the time her car sits in the garage. Under the proposal floated by Commissioner Steve Novick and Mayor Charlie Hales, she would pay almost $140 a year.
Nancy Hales: The City That Worked For An Out-Of-Town Visitor
“The City that Works.” This slogan pasted on the side of city vehicles probably doesn’t get much notice by Portlanders. But for one recent international visitor, it defined his entire Portland experience.
Last week I hosted a delegation of civic leaders from Guadalajara, Mexico. They were here to study Portland’s urban livability efforts. The 15-member team even brought a television cameraman, Ernesto Vazquez, to chronicle their week.
Ben Jatos: Why I Love My Diverse and Accepting School
In my 21 years of teaching I have worked at three schools but have spent lots of time visiting other schools for meetings or visits or professional development opportunities. I always enjoy checking out other places, but I also relish coming back to my home school where I work. I teach at Fort Vancouver High School and I absolutely love it here.
Fort Vancouver High School serves grades 9-12 and has approximately 1,500 students wandering its halls. Our neighborhood includes low-income housing and tons of apartments resulting in almost 80% of our student body being on a free or reduced lunch program. Our clientele includes students of different colors, nationalities, and backgrounds and our kids come from more than 50 different countries, speaking more than 75 languages. To say we are a diverse school would be an understatement. Because of this diversity we are viewed as a “rough” school by many outsiders.
Deborah Kafoury: How Do We Solve Portland’s Homelessness Problem?
Imagine waking up each morning in your car. Your children are tired and cranky because sleeping in a crowded vehicle, packed with all your personal belongings, isn’t going to get you a peaceful night’s rest.
You don’t have a steady income anymore because you were just laid off from a job. Your kids are enrolled in school but their lives are irrevocably changed because you can no longer afford to put a roof over their heads with no money coming in.
And to make it all worse, everyone’s hungry, but you’re not sure where your next meal is going to come from.
Roy Jay: Latino Slavery in Portland
Oregon businesses should not exploit or cheat undocumented immigrants out of wages they are due, and those workers should not be afraid to come forward and complain.
You’ve driven by them many times, sometimes without giving it a second thought.
Everyday about a block from the Oregon Convention Center, you will see groups of migrant workers from Mexico, Central America and South America strategically positioning themselves on the corners of the MLK Work Center as early as 6 AM waiting for a daily pick up to take them to some strange location for up to 10 or 12 hours a day.
Scott Taylor: Portland's Passive Aggression Problem
Portland is passive aggressive… So what about it? You got a problem with that?
I arrived with my family on a partially empty westbound flight bound for Portland, Ore., in the winter of 1995 from Washington, D.C. It was the year of the 100-year flood, which, as it turns out, would precede the year of the 101-year flood, and so on.
Within the first six months of moving and settling into the Forest Heights neighborhood, I experienced a particular string of three continuous weeks of dripping, misting, moisting, and I, in my damp, wet-to-the-bones state, would look to the gray, London-like sky and ask, outraged, in my New York accent, “Really?"
Scott Taylor: Five Things I Have to Say About Uber in Portland
Uber is just a glorified gypsy cab company with an app.
The Portland City Council feels bullied by Uber. Boo Hoo. While trying to stop Uber from coming to a city is like trying to stop the sun from orbiting the earth, it might be a lot of drama over nothing. A shiny new toy is always popular at first, but when toys get a little dirty and stinky, kids lose interest. We will too.
These App Hacks crack me up. “Ubers,” as I call them, are just digitally organized gypsy cab peddlers, plain and simple.
I get it. I happen to love gypsy cabs. When I lived in N.Y. I used them all the time. The only difference is those gypsies had style and character.
Caitlin Baggott: Publicly Funded Elections Should Treat All Oregonians Equally
The measure on this fall’s ballot generating the most agitation among good people everywhere may – surprisingly – not be about legalizing marijuana or telling people what is in their food.
It’s about voting.
This year, Oregonians will vote up or down to grant more than 650,000 taxpaying voters the right to have a say in their state and federal representation. They are currently barred from participating in the election that matters most: the spring primary. A recent Oregonian study showed that nearly 90 percent of those races are effectively decided in the primary – leaving a small number of contested races for the fall ballot in a spare handful of districts around the state.
Roy Jay: Why Portland Needs a Convention Center Hotel
For the past twenty plus years, there has been talk about the need for Portland to have a Convention Center headquarter hotel.
Lack of political leadership in the past kept us on square one. Voters approved a beautiful multimillion-dollar Convention Center that opened in 1990, that would be the epicenter of many future national meetings, conferences and conventions.
Portland now has a real chance to make this headquarter hotel become a reality, but there is a small group of seven hotels, well-financed, that have launched a campaign to stop the efforts to bring a headquarter hotel to the eastside of the Willamette.
Jacob Grier: Why Oregonians Should Say No To GMO Labeling
Whole Foods would like to sell you on the virtues of the Rio Star organic grapefruit. “For juicing, Rio Star is the stand alone grapefruit” and is “widely viewed as the best” grapefruit grown in Texas, home to “some of the sweetest grapefruit in the world.” And despite originating from a breeding program that blasted grapefruits with radiation to scramble their DNA, eating them probably won't kill you.
Whole Foods leaves out that last part, which is understandable given their current campaign against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Yet a surprising number of common crops arose from this crude technique for altering genes.
James Reilly: Cover Oregon Lawsuit Might Be Wakeup Call Oracle Needs
In an odd way, the lawsuit between Oracle and the State of Oregon might give the public an interesting insight into the problems facing Oracle as a company. Not it’s legal problems, it’s technology and business management ones. Oracle’s multi-million dollar legal fight with the state of Oregon is small potatoes compared to what the sleeping giant of tech might lose if it fails to navigate industry shifts to cloud computing and other new tech innovations.
It is unlikely that Cover Oregon will prevail in their claims against Oracle, especially after the eviscerating internal report by Clyde Hamstreet came to light in October. But the marketplace might be more damaging to the company than state-sponsored legal attacks.
Scott Taylor: Sick of Portland Street Kids Getting a Free Lunch
So I’m in the Safeway in Northwest Portland the other day, the one in the gut of the new shiny Pearl district on Northwest LoveJoy Street. I’m debating whether to eat healthy or go with my instinct as a NY transplant and get a carb filled, gluten loaded, fat Italian sub, chips and a water. I don’t want to over do it.
As I peruse the buffet and cold-cut fridge I notice this tall, hooded, could be a tweeker, but not obvious, kid start to load up his, “TO GO” tray with heaping, loaded spoon full’s of chicken and a bunch of other delectables.
By this time in the day I was super hungry, because I hadn’t eaten and it was now 2:30 p.m. Watching this 20 something load his tray, my mouth started watering. I quickly overrode my involuntary salivating with my learned NY street smarts and considered the fact that after profiling him, (ooooooh he said the profiling word) this kid ain’t planning on paying for squat.
Joe Cortright: Hey NY Times: Here's How You Got Portland Wrong
For the past five years at least, it seems like the New York Times has treated Portland as almost the long-lost sixth borough of New York, a sort of Brooklyn of the West, filled with bike-riding, beer-drinking hipsters and fashionable restaurants.
Nothing invites snarky contrarianism more than a long string of upbeat reporting and, predictably, the Times delivered Sept. 21 with a story titled "Keep Portland Broke." In it, reporter—and former Portlander—Claire Cain Miller tells of bearded, kombucha-drinking locals and claims that “Portland has become a city of the overeducated and underemployed—a place where young people are, in many cases, forced into their semi-retirement."
Bernard W. Sweeney: Science, Not Politics, Should Guide Clean Water Act Clarification
Fresh water is our most precious natural resource, as essential to life as the air we breathe. Fortunately, most of us in the United States don’t have to give it much thought, thanks, in large part, to the federal Clean Water Act, passed in 1972.
But ongoing confusion over what “Waters of the United States” fall under the law’s jurisdiction spurred the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to propose aclarification. This would enable the agency to better protect our wetlands, small streams and other important watershed features without being dragged into court every time someone wanted to avoid compliance by exploiting an ambiguity. The public comment period for this rulemaking closes at midnight tonight (November 14).
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