Opinion: Portland needs your help now
Portland has a problem. And it isn’t just COVID-19, rising homelessness, declining public safety and garbage piling up across the city. It goes beyond a weak form of city government and layers of inexplicably overlapping jurisdictions – city, county, state and however you explain Metro to your friends. Of course, it’s all of these things in some measure. But Portland’s biggest problem is the failure of our elected officials at all levels to lead with the urgency, innovation and cooperation required to rescue our broken city.
As political consultants, we are usually behind the scenes. Over the years, we’ve fought on the opposite sides of some significant campaigns. Today, we come together to save the city we love. We’ve just launched People for Portland to provide a platform for everyday Portlanders to amplify their voices and make politicians listen harder to the people they were elected to serve. We want to create an “election day” every day to demand action that serves the common good.
My thoughts on finding a safe place for the homeless is find a piece of property that is not close to schools and family communities where they can learn to care for themselves with help from the city and don’t keep putting them in the Southeast part of the city. We would like nice living conditions also. Seems we are always getting the bad end of the stick. Roads are not kept up here either. How about helping clean up some of our areas where the Homeless dump on us? Let us all share in the good and the bad. We need more police not less. Crime is bad here in Portland. Get back to doing what is right for the people.