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Speaking Freely With Annette Newell


Oct 30, 2022

With ballots in households and in hands: Oregon’s voters are making decisions about who they’ll choose to lead their state and community, and who will represent them in Congress, in the next several years.

What are the major voter motivators?  That’s what we’re looking at in this episode. Starting: with the hotly contested Governor’s race.  This week I did a special report on the three candidates running for Oregon Governor.  Each one, has her Oregon origin story, and lengthy public service record.  I asked Democrat Tina Kotek, Republican Christine Drazan and Independent Betsy Johnson, for their thoughts on how to solve a major voter motivator: homelessness and the housing crisis.

We also saw hundreds of people testify this past week on Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler's new strategy to tackle homelessness.  We hear from Wheeler, City Commissioner Joann Hardesty, as well as city staff and members of the community as they speak about this plan, which includes ideas like a ban on street camping and designated areas where people experiencing houselessness can stay, along with support services like drug treatment and job placement, as well as a big push for more affordable housing.  it’s a plan that would require a lot of cooperation from county and state governments as well.  Some expressed support, others objected. Kaia Sand, did both.  She’s the executive director of Street Roots, a newspaper in Portland focusing on houselessness and poverty.

Portland city council scheduled more testimony and votes on the new homelessness plan, for the coming week.  Meantime, candidates are stressing it in their messaging, and voters are voting.

For more insight about that, I talked to Dr. Chris Nichols, a historian, and scholar at The Ohio State University, who has written and edited several books about American history, policy and politics.

Another issue voters are citing as a motivator in this election is abortion and reproductive health care, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court striking down Roe V. Wade.  This week Kotek held a press conference with abortion rights supporters about that.  Independent candidate Betsy Johnson says she is firmly pro choice on the issue: and I talked to republican candidate Christine Drazan, who explains her pro life position.   Dr. Chris Nichols with The Ohio State University also comments about the role of abortion as an incentive to vote in this election. 

Finally: we close this episode with some encouraging news for small businesses and non profits, still working to recover what they lost due to the pandemic.  Bookkeeper and accountant Laura Ricksecker tells members of the East Portland Chamber of Commerce that their businesses are eligible for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pandemic tax credits, intended to help the economy recover.