Summing up the biggest Pacific Northwest news of 2025

It was a big year in news for the Pacific Northwest. The president attempted to send the National Guard into Portland, plans for a potential ICE facility caused unrest in Newport, and communities across the region saw an uptick in aggressive immigration enforcement activity.

Meanwhile, a significant road funding bill died — then was resurrected — in the Oregon Legislature. And the deadline for Mayor Keith Wilson’s pledge to end unsheltered homelessness in Portland came and went.

Lisa Bates is a professor of Black studies at Portland State University. Jim Pasero is a principal at the public affairs company Third Century Solutions. Nigel Jaquiss is a senior investigative reporter for the Oregon Journalism Project. They all join us to break down the biggest news stories of 2025.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. It has once again been a year of relentless news. Between tariffs, cuts to the social safety net, the attempted deployment of the National Guard on the streets of Portland, and a huge increase in immigration enforcement, we could spend days just talking about the local impacts of the Trump administration’s policies.

But of course we have homegrown stories as well. Oregon’s sputtering economy, the first year of Portland’s new form of government, the failure and then passage and now uncertain future of a transportation package.

We’re going to do our best to make sense of this last year and to look forward to the next one over the course of just one hour, but I’m luckily joined by three smart people. Lisa Bates is a professor of Black Studies at Portland State University. Jim Pasero is a principal at Third Century Solutions, a public affairs company, he is a former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush. Nigel Jaquiss is a senior investigative reporter at the Oregon Journalism Project, which he joined this year after 27 years at Willamette Week. It is great to have all three of you back on the show.

Nigel Jaquiss: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: I’m going to go around the table first, just quickly, to start with. Nigel, what’s your headline for the year?

Jaquiss: You’ve already mentioned it. It’s a resistance to the president. I think almost every headline begins or includes the word “Trump,” and much of what we’ve seen is people pushing back against various administration policies.

Miller: Jim, what about you?

Jim Pasero: My headline is something that was buried in the Big Beautiful Bill, which is a federal tax credit which will allow individuals to transfer $1,700 of their federal tax dollars to local schools, both for tuition assistance for private schools, and for public schools, anything they want to do as far as infrastructure or program upgrading. The trick of the bill is that each governor individually will have to decide whether he wants his state to take federal money for local education. The Democratic Governor from Colorado has already decided that Colorado is going to participate.

Miller: Lisa, what about you, a headline?

Lisa Bates: OMG, WTF, every day a new horror.

Miller: All right, six letters and if we’re paying by the letter, you win. Let’s turn to some specifics here. Back in February, Mike Wilkerson, an economist at a prominent economics consulting firm, introduced me, and maybe many people, to a phrase I’d never heard before, a “doom loop.” The idea is that when tax revenue falls because of a loss of jobs or business activity, it leads to a drop in public services and quality of life, which can lead more people to move away, leading to a bigger drop in tax revenue, and then this sort of negative cycle just continues. That was in February when he talked about that, and made a big presentation. He joined us in September to talk about Intel job cuts, but I used that opportunity to ask him for a doom loop update, and this was part of his answer.

Mike Wilkerson: Once you face several years of employment decline, that is across every single sector, it’s very challenging to understand the root causes of that, and therefore the public policy interventions that can help support that. But certainly population decline makes it very challenging to grow jobs. And so I think if you’re starting to look at the state of the economy, Portland has historically been an attractor of people from the rest of the country, and that had been the case to where when the U.S. economy is growing, Portland’s economy always grew faster. We now have eight quarters of where that isn’t the case, and you start to think about what it is that would turn that around. What is the precipitous event that would change that? And that is what has us worried. And we’re seeing, unfortunately, an acceleration of job loss. In the Portland metro, in the last 12 months, we have 25,000 fewer jobs than we did a year ago. And if you start to look at what that means, there are only five of the top 50 metros in the country that are losing jobs. We’re 49th out of 50. We’re second to worst.

Miller: Lisa, what do you make of his analysis?

Bates: Well, what I think is really interesting about this is the clip that you just played has to do with actual people and jobs. But that discourse that we’re having about the doom loop doesn’t really seem to be related to actual realities on the ground in terms of people and what we think of as fundamentals of supply and demand. This kind of doom loop cheerleader group that is continually hyping the idea that Portland is being destroyed.

Miller: Oh, you mean people who are hyping the idea in a negative way?

Bates: Yes. People like Portland Metro Chamber, they are talking about real estate investors. They’re talking about equity capital coming into the city. I think we have to ask the question, why is a group of people who are themselves business leaders, owners of real estate, owners of hotels, invested heavily over multiple years, telling everyone in the country that Portland is a disaster. Don’t come here. Everything that’s happening is negative. What’s the interest behind that, right? And I think we’re starting to see and understand what that is, as they pursue a policy agenda that is about, frankly, undermining all of the kinds of infrastructures that we’ve been attempting to build to actually make this a healthy, vibrant place, the kind of social, physical, economic, and human infrastructures that we actually need here.

Miller: Jim, let me give you a chance to respond.

Pasero: Lisa’s in denial. It’s interesting because I think that’s the part that you have to… do you want to just push back against what people are saying. And certainly Fox News, which has made fun of Portland, Oregon for a year and a half. So there are plenty of people in the suburbs who never come into town anymore and they sit there and just watch Fox News. A lot of wealthy people do this and just shake their heads about Portland.

Miller: But let’s just move past that, because the people that Lisa’s talking about, they too agree. Portland Metro Chamber, they say that the idea that Portland is on fire is absurd. So that’s, I think, too easy a straw, man.

Pasero: I wasn’t going like that way.

Miller: We’ll move past that Fox world. What do you see as wrong about what Lisa said?

Pasero: Let’s start with just the superficial. I spent a lot of time, five weekends, in Seattle this summer. I spent a lot of time in San Diego, both West Coast cities with big homeless problems and some of the same issues that we’ve had. But there is a vibrancy to those cities. I drive in every Sunday to church at Saint Michael’s from Southwest Portland. By the time I go down Barbara Boulevard, I see the trash. I drive by the food carts on 4th. I get to Saint Michael’s. I’m depressed. The City looks depressed. I thought it looked depressed at Christmas time. I remember spending three years ago in Santa Fe, there were Christmas lights everywhere in Santa Fe, which is not exactly a huge Christian city.

When I walk the streets of downtown Portland this Christmas, I know what Vera Katz would do right now because before you get to all the tax issues that Tim Boyle talked about at the business conference that Governor Kotek didn’t want him to bring up, but he brought up anyway. Before you get to even those things, you have a superficial problem. This city looks and feels depressed in a way that other West Coast cities don’t.

Bates: That’s wild to me because I go downtown all the time. Obviously, Portland State is there. I was down there for the Christmas pop-up markets, Jim. It was bustling. You couldn’t get into stores. I mean, people were walking around, having a great time. I think something that’s killing our downtown, for example, is that commercial rents are so high that our vaunted restaurants, creative scene, etc. can’t be there anymore. They’re closing because they can’t afford that. We have a total misdiagnosis of both the rise and the fall of Portland.

Pasero: So when the “Big Pink” building sells for pennies on the dollar. There’s no way that commercial rents can continue to be high when the vacancy in downtown… I’ve talked to a person who’s got an office in the Yeon Building, and I’ve had friends who’ve been in the Yeon Building. He said, I am the only tenant in the entire Yeon Building. There are times when the city has people and it looks like it’s functioning. But overall, this is a very depressed place.

Miller: Nigel, I’m curious how, to go back to what we heard from Mike Wilkerson and some of those real numbers of job loss that we are now second to last in terms of job loss in recent years nationwide. How do you think we get out of this, that particular pattern?

Jaquiss: If you look at the recent rise of Portland over say, the years 1990 to 2020, we had a population growth that was, in part, motivated by how inexpensive it was to live here. I think you saw the rise of Portland’s creative, the restaurant scene, cultural scene, because people were coming here, it was cheaper than other cities. A couple of indicators that I’ve looked at, I have great respect for Mike Wilkerson. He’s a very smart guy. I think people don’t talk about the fact that the residential real estate market in the city itself has remained very strong. People still want to live here. And I think that what we’re seeing in the commercial –

Miller: You mean there’s too much of a focus on commercial real estate as a metric that rules all in this conversation?

Jaquiss: Yes, I think so. People have to remember that the majority of the property tax base is actually residential, more than 60% of the property tax revenues, which actually increased in Multnomah County last year, despite all the talk of the doom loop, come from people’s houses. So there’s no doubt that downtown has taken a huge hit. It hasn’t bounced back.

I actually see glimmers of hope in the fact that Big Pink, as Jim pointed out, traded at a very cheap price. Other commercial buildings are also starting to trade at very cheap prices. To me, that means buyers think we’re at or near the bottom. They may be right, they may be wrong. But I think that what will help Portland come back is that it is a very cheap city again.

Bates: It’s not actually healthy, for example, to massively overbuild hotels downtown. That is not an indication of real supply and demand in the market functioning. That’s an indication around there was a period of time where outside investors looked at Portland and said, oh, we want to jump in there, overinflate commercial prices in the downtown and build some stuff that didn’t actually make a lot of sense for fundamentals. So right now, for example, there are the same number of hotel rooms being occupied in Portland as there were before the pandemic, but there’s way more hotels now.

Miller: Because they thought there was going to be more tourism, that more and more people from Japan or California, New York, wherever, would want to come visit.

Bates: But again, a sort of off-kilter diagnosis of what was making Portland grow and making Portland cool. The New York Times travel section was not saying go stay in a high rise downtown when they were featuring Portland every single week. They were talking about being in neighborhoods where commercial districts are looking great. Cool. You can walk down Mississippi Ave. I was on Mississippi Ave last night. Restaurants are full. On Alberta, on Hawthorne, whatever. There’s stuff going on here.

And then there’s a problem in this kind of square of downtown that’s always been kind of dead, to be perfectly honest. Not a late night town, not a Sunday afternoon town. And one way that we could actually address that, which cities like Los Angeles have done, is to have way more housing, to have a lot of more people who live there, then people will be activating those spaces all the time. And that’s the turnaround of downtown LA since 2020.

Miller: Jim, you mentioned the governor and the Oregon Business Plan. Earlier this month, the governor released what she calls a “Prosperity Roadmap” to make the state more business friendly. It includes things like potential tax changes that lawmakers might consider. In the next long session in 2027, new tax incentive programs for business investments and streamlined permitting at state agencies. What do you think about, I was gonna say this plan, maybe this plan for a plan?

Pasero: I think the problem is that, in terms of the business community, the problem when the governor has a plan like that is that the damage… the public employee unions run the Democratic Party and they have the agenda of what they want, and then when the business climate becomes untenable and people decide to move – take example, Dutch Brothers. I mean, that’s a perfect example. That is such a dumb idea, putting more sugar in drinks, and it built them into a Fortune 500 company. Oregon should have completely embraced that because it’s environmentally friendly, it’s a creative, youthful idea, and they boomed. And then they moved because they don’t like the business climate.

So when, all of a sudden, the red lights go off, then the governor says, well, now I need to reach out to the business community and see how do I fix some of the egregious things that we’ve done. But it was telling that even when Tim Boyle gave that speech – which was all over my Facebook feed, and I’m sure lots of people saw it, I think there were like 2 million views of it or something – where he gets up and talks about we have the worst tax situation on the West Coast. The governor wanted Columbia Sportswear to participate in the business conference, but didn’t want Tim Boyle to sound, as Lisa would say, is a doomsayer, and tried to instruct him. And he said, I’m gonna say what I want to say.

Miller: Nigel, it’s notable that this, at least on the part of Kotek, this Democratic interest in tax incentives, or maybe as I understand it, targeted tax cuts for businesses to attract businesses or to prevent them from leaving. It would be coming at a time when the state is expected to lose billions of dollars in federal funding, especially for healthcare. Do you think that Democrats will actually cut business taxes in two years when there is a gigantic hole coming in the state budget?

Jaquiss: It seems unlikely. I think that the governor is making an attempt to try and change the narrative. The problem for me is that she has only made that attempt on the eve of seeking re-election. And she made that course change in a year when the legislature really kind of kept doing what it has been doing for a long time. I’ll give you an example. I think one of the bills that caused the greatest angst in Salem and the long session this year was Senate Bill 916. It made Oregon the first state to award unemployment pay to striking workers. Now, I don’t think that bill’s actually going to cost companies a whole lot of money. But it sent a signal to other states that might be competing against Oregon for a company that wants to relocate or move its operations to the United States. It sent a clear signal about the environment in Oregon and so I think the governor had an opportunity to veto that bill. She did not. And again, that, in and of itself, that bill is not tremendously financially significant. But I think that we have to think about it as a state. And the governor has to think about, as a state’s chief executive, just what kind of message we want to send to people about Oregon? How do we want to convey to them that we know we need revenue to provide the programs that we want?

Miller: Lisa, I want to turn to some of the ways that rural Oregon, in particular, people there are being affected by the second Trump administration, starting with food stamps. One of the provisions of the Big Beautiful Bill tightened the rules around SNAP benefits or food stamps. It had been the case that there were not work requirements for people in 30 of Oregon’s 36 counties. Now that exemption is being removed. On top of that, there are going to be similar Medicaid eligibility requirements that are going to hit every corner of the state, but likely to have an outsized impact on rural Oregon because rural areas have the highest rates of Medicaid enrollment. What do you think this is going to mean for people in rural Oregon in particular?

Bates: It’s going to be fairly devastating. It’s very clear and consistent in the research and our understanding of policy administration that adding means testing, adding compliance requirements does only a few things. It massively increases the cost of programs, but all of that cost goes into compliance. It decreases access for people who are ostensibly eligible and it reduces the amount of needed services that people get. Obviously this is a poor state. We do have an economic problem here. We’re not really like a West Coast state. I try to describe this to my friends and colleagues around the country. Don’t think Washington, don’t think California, think Arkansas. Think Alabama in some rankings. We don’t have a really robust statewide infrastructure. Yes, transportation infrastructure, but also educational, health, social, environmental infrastructure. We have a very serious housing crisis all across the state, very serious eviction and homelessness crisis outside of Portland.

We’ve chosen a set of fiscal policies in Oregon, things like the kicker tax credit coming back, that undermine the ability of the state to actually support its people, edge to edge. And yes, in the city of Portland or in Multnomah County, there’s these little piecemeal attempts to sort of add little taxes and fees to do special purpose activities to fill in some of that infrastructure, things like childcare, things like environmental justice that we don’t have everywhere in the state. Instead of trying to figure out how we extend that and make a platform across the state for people to be able to participate in the economy, to thrive in the economy and get the social support that we need, we sort of redouble down on this kind of libertarian pioneer spirit stuff and we’re just not investing.

Pasero: Can we go back to something that she said, because I was really struck by it. When she said the idea that don’t think Washington, don’t think California, think Arkansas. Why, Lisa? Why do you think that is?

Bates: Because we literally do not have a functional set of public institutions and infrastructures that support people’s lives.

Pasero: You mean like the California higher ed system versus the Oregon higher ed system? Is that what you’re referring to?

Bates: Sure.

Pasero: Okay. I mean, because Oregon has a wealth of resources. Almost anybody who looks at Oregon potentially as a place to do business, and certainly when you look at the per capita income statistics of the different regions of the country, as put together by the Commerce Department, the West has always been a wealthy region. And Oregon, although it has lagged behind Washington state in per capita income, has been part of that wealth. And now we’re struggling as a state. You think that’s because we just don’t have the institutions to support economic growth?

Bates: We have serious poverty across the state.

Pasero: But why?

Bates: What do you mean why? Because we would rather get back a big check of our state taxes than use them to fund and support kids learning how to read.

Pasero: Well, I think you’re just sort of washing government money around. I mean, a business climate is a choice. We can decide as a community to have a vibrant business climate in this state if we want it.

Miller: Jim, I want to go back to the issue that we’ve been talking about just before, the specific cuts to these safety net systems, whether it’s Medicaid or food stamps. If rural Oregonians in particular are angry or unhappy about the loss of some of these benefits that they’re currently getting in the coming years, who do you think they will blame? Do you think there will be political consequences?

Pasero: That’s such a complicated question because we don’t know how this election’s going to play out in 2026. I’ve had a couple of meetings with people around Chris Dudley potentially running for governor. One of the conversations that comes up is what kind of economic situation we will have. The economy nationally grew by 4.3% in the third quarter? Is that a real number or not a real number? And will we have a situation where the national economy is growing and the local economy isn’t? Or will we have a situation where the national economy isn’t growing and the local economy isn’t growing? That could be very different politically.

Miller: Nigel, for a lot of people in Oregon and around the country, the biggest story of this year, by far, has been immigration crackdowns. The Trump administration talked about going after the worst of the worst, undocumented people who’d committed heinous crimes. But ICE actions everywhere, including in Oregon, meaning they’ve been a lot less targeted, sweeping up thousands of people who are on their way to work or on their way to drop off kids at school. The Capitol Chronicle reported this week that there was a nearly tenfold increase in immigration arrests in Oregon from last year to this year. The number of people in ICE detention nationwide is now at a record high. From your own reporting, what has all this meant for immigrant communities?

Jaquiss: Like every question you’ve asked, this is a complicated one. But I think there’s a level of shocking intellectual dishonesty about this whole debate. I think the idea that we’re going to deport the worst of the worst was always kind of a diversion from other real issues. I think Oregon has a large immigrant population, a large undocumented immigrant population. Where we see those people are often in the jobs that other people don’t want to do, agriculture, roofing, framing, manual labor.

We saw stories earlier this year about fruit rotting in the fields because it wasn’t picked because people were afraid to follow the annual migration to come to Oregon. I think there have been consequences to the economy around the edges. I think it’s sent a chilling effect through communities where people are here legally. And again, I think it’s a classic Trump diversion from other, more genuine issues. It hasn’t really served anybody well.

Bates: This immigration crackdown, we’ve talked about it so much in Portland and you see so much activity of groups like PERC (Pacific Enforcement Response Center) or CLEAR Clinic that are supporting and defending immigrants. The immigration crackdown will be devastating for rural Oregon. Timber, agriculture, fisheries, these are all industries that have quite a lot of immigrant labor of all kinds of documentation status. I’m from a very small town in rural Pennsylvania. So something that has been really difficult, like spiritually difficult, is to think about what I see as a very serious mismatch between the values of everyday life in rural communities and the politics that people have attached themselves to and the way that many people in rural communities have attached themselves to Trump mass deportations now.

Right now, what we’re actually seeing is that people faced and confronted with the reality of that are realizing, wait, Miss Susie down at the diner, or this person who is my kid’s friend at school’s dad is being smashed out of a car window and dragged out. And people are starting to realize this. So you see this huge shift in public opinion. Right now, the latest Pew opinion polls have 79% of Americans saying immigration is good for America. The deportation agenda is not popular.

While I wish that people had had those thoughts and feelings and those realizations that these are everyday people who they see in their lives and that are part of their towns, their economies, not just their workforce, but their livelihood, their everyday life, their culture, their space, their communities, their churches, etc. I wish they had had that thought 18 months ago. But now people, I think, are really seeing the devastation that will be wrought by this. But in terms of rural economy, you can see across the country, construction projects, agricultural industries, anything involving working with your hands, is on pause or at a standstill.

Miller: Jim, before the break we were talking about immigration. I want to give you a chance to respond.

Pasero: It’s so complicated in many different dimensions. I think sometimes we sit here in Portland, Oregon, and we don’t talk about all the dimensions. One, the border was out of control. And Trump gets credit for solving that problem. Second, on the immigration side, we’re a nation of immigrants. We have to have immigrants, not only on the lower end, but on the higher end too. Had a couple of surgeries this year. I had a Thai doctor and a Greek doctor. We’ve kept the greatest technology system in the world, but we don’t have the education in this country. We have to bring people in. And third –

Miller: Obviously that means that some of the top officials in the White House totally disagree with what you just said.

Pasero: Well yeah, and JD Vance is a fool. But third, we have one out of four babies in this state that are Hispanic. And the population of 16 or 17% of the state is now Hispanic. And they don’t have a voice yet, commensurate to their population. and you go to Southern California in San Diego where it’s 30% Asian, 30% Hispanic, 8% African American, and you see multi-generational Hispanics, you see all sorts of different kinds of wealth. This state is going to change demographically rapidly, I think in the next 5 or 10 years. I think it’s gonna be fascinating to watch and the government can’t control all of that.

Miller: Let’s turn to where Lisa started, which is pushback. Nigel, according to a recent tally by The Statesman Journal, Oregon has sued President Trump’s administration 50 times since January. This includes challenges to policies about SNAP benefits, tariffs, grant cuts, gender affirming care, birthright citizenship, and other issues. In the big picture, how successful would you say this approach has been?

Jaquiss: I keep coming back to the word narrative. I think that how you present yourself to the world is how the world will perceive you.

Miller: If you’re lucky.

Jaquiss: If you’re lucky. I give Attorney General Dan Rayfield and Governor Kotek a lot of credit on that front. They have, I think, both selectively gone after issues such as Oregon’s taken a leadership role in challenging President Trump’s tariffs, for instance. But they have, almost every week said, look, what the president is suggesting doesn’t make sense. Maybe it makes sense, but it’s Congress’s purview. So I think, in that regard, they’ve done a pretty good job of trying to keep the playing field at least somewhat level and not just letting President Trump run roughshod over the country and over Oregon.

Miller: Jim, what have you heard about tariffs and tariff uncertainty from people in the business community? Anytime you’ve been on, you talk about the conversations you have with business leaders. When you’ve had those conversations over the last year about tariffs, what have you heard?

Pasero: Well, I think that originally, the people were on a sugar high when his presidency started. I think even business people, except for The Wall Street Journal, were like, well, let’s see how the tariffs work out. But I think most business people believe in classical economics, believe in free trade, and understand that you take advantage of your comparative advantage. So they are not supportive of those tariffs. What paused people is that the economy grew by 4.3% in the third quarter. Trump claims it’s because of the tariffs. Most people claim it’s because of AI. So there is growing, growing pessimism about his tariffs, and especially when you see something like in Japan, where he went over there and Japan agreed to 10 years from now, if you don’t give us any tariffs, 10 years from now, we’ll give you 5% of our GDP. I mean, it begins to look a little bit like a joke.

Miller: So legal challenges are one way to push back against the administration. But another is a kind of go it alone approach, and that is what Oregon, Washington, and California have been doing with vaccine recommendations. The stated reason is to depoliticize these decisions. I talked about this with State Epidemiologist Dean Selinger back in, I think this was in September, when Oregon signed on with Washington, California to put out their own COVID-19 recommendations. I asked if he was concerned that competing sets of public health authority recommendations, meaning Democratic-led states on the one hand and Republican-led administration on the other, if that would run the risk of amplifying political differences or distrust in public health agencies, I want to play part of his response.

Dean Selinger: You know, it is painful for me, as a public health professional who’s based my career and what I do on data and science and trying to encourage people to make healthy choices and to support those healthy choices. But yeah, certainly there is a partisan divide. But I think we need to continue to have a conversation, and some of the things I say, you wouldn’t think that I am a health official in a blue state. The actions that we took yesterday are preserving choice for people. This is a preserving choice for anyone in Oregon who’s choosing protection from COVID-19 with a safe and effective vaccine for their child or for themselves. But it is going to take a long time to recover from this polarization and politicization of what was an extremely well respected system for public health that really has been dismantled.

Miller: Lisa, how do you think about this question? What happens if increasingly we live in a country where the federal government says don’t get these vaccines or do, and states say don’t or do say the opposite?

Bates: I guess I think about it less as a political polarization problem and more as a health problem. We have already had measles outbreaks. People are talking about nearing the point where we can no longer say measles are eliminated in the United States. There’s a whooping cough outbreak in our region right now here. I think there’s a deeper issue. Yes, there’s this recent politically aligned, anti-vax fringe minority. Frankly, it’s still not most people who have become anti-vax since COVID. But I think we actually need to think a little bit more about the homegrown wellness hippie anti-vaccine issues of Oregon. We’ve already had a longer period of time of vaccine refusal. It’s why we don’t have fluoride in the water here, it’s because of this wellness goofy behavior.

And so I think we actually need a deeper education around public health, more broadly, so that people can understand this stuff. We need to get out of this do your own research mindset and start to figure out how people with expertise can communicate effectively and seriously with the public. Whether that means getting into a small group of people in someone’s living room or less pronouncements on the stage. I don’t know exactly what that is, but we have to tackle a longer homegrown problem here in Oregon.

Miller: I want to switch gears again. In late September, President Trump announced in a post on Truth Social that he was ordering federal troops to “protect war-ravaged Portland.” In the weeks that followed, there was a big increase in protest activity at the facility, which is just about one mile north of us, a facility where it had been actually very quiet in the preceding weeks. There’s also been a whole legal odyssey of district and appellate court rulings. But so far the end result of that is that courts have blocked the deployment of troops. What’s at stake in this, in your mind?

Jaquiss: I think at a larger level, what’s at stake is the ability of the president to act like a tin pot dictator and send troops, who are not meant to be used domestically, into domestic situations. I think what he’s tried to do is outrageous, and I think it’s appropriate that the courts have so far stopped him. I also think, to go back to Trump’s playbook, that he started to do this as his popularity began to fade a little bit, as the sugar high that Jim referred to, began to wear off. And so he used Portland, like California, a favorite whipping boy of his, as a sort of diversionary tactic. And it’s absolutely outrageous that he would try and send federal troops to any city.

Miller: Why do you think protests never got even close to what they were in 2020? Some of the same ingredients were in play. Obviously 2020 was a different time in some significant ways as well. But we never saw anything close to the cataclysmic protests of 2020 this year.

Jaquiss: I’m totally speculating, of course, but I think there was an exhaustion even among the people who were committing acts of crime during the late stages of the 2020 protests, a sense of exhaustion. Also, as you point out, the venue is now in a less central part of town. There are less media available to watch, and I think we don’t have the white hot heat that we had around George Floyd’s murder as an animating force. It’s been a kind of slow roll, and for anybody who’s been there at all, something that certainly wouldn’t require additional troops or any troops to come into it.

Miller: Lisa, how much do you think this is a result of tactical changes on the part of the Portland Police Bureau?

Bates: In terms of their new mindset on crowd control?

Miller: Yeah.

Bates: I don’t know how much that has to do with it. It’s five years later. Some people just grew up and said we want to participate in a different way. I’m much more interested in thinking about and heartened by hundreds of people are coming out constantly in defense of immigrant neighbors. They’re just coming out to actually do something very directly.

Miller: With clipboards.

Bates: They’re coming out to circle around schools in St. John’s to say, you’re not welcome here. They’re coming out to deliver groceries around Hillsboro to people who are afraid to come out. They’re in Woodburn or out at day labor sites to try to make sure that they know who’s there, to signal when ICE is coming or PPB is coming. And I think that I’m just much more interested in those kind of really powerful moments of solidarity and mutual aid that are happening on the street.

Miller: Jim, to switch gears again, let’s turn to some Portland stories. Just broadly, how would you say that the first year of the new form of Portland city government went?

Pasero: Poorly, but I get it anecdotally from my neighbor, who is high up in the fire department and comes and steals my beer and complains about what’s going on in the City Council. But I’m interested in what the mayor did about the homeless crisis and the beds. And Zapata from Portland State said that addiction was about fifth on the list of why people are on the streets. When my business partner ran for governor, Bridget Barton in 2022, her signature issue was you have to be clean to take care of your house. Ben West has weighed in on this and on several other issues, the Clackamas County commissioner, about the idea, where are we and has this argument just stopped? What causes people to be on the streets of Portland? And the new mayor, it doesn’t feel like he’s addressed the issue. But he’s maybe done a good job in making sure people don’t freeze to death at night. But have we just quit arguing about what causes people to be on the streets?

Miller: I want to put a pin in homelessness. It’s a huge issue, and I want to come back to it. But I want to stick, for a second, on this big change. And I know it’s hard. It’s only been one year, and it’s hard to separate the current makeup of the council, the current mayor, from the changes. But, Nigel, do you have a sense, one year in, for what the changes themselves have meant for the city, separate from the people who happen to be elected this first go around?

Jaquiss: I think that we would all acknowledge that when you make a cataclysmic change like this, it’s going to take some time for us to understand how it’s going to settle out. But when I think back to councils, over the past decade, for instance, there was generally a large priority issue that the council was working toward. A good example is the residential infill project where, say five years ago, the City said, ‘we simply are not creating enough housing, let’s basically upzone everything that we can to try and create more housing.’ And that took years and it was painful. It involved massive amounts of data collection, huge numbers of public meetings, lots of impassioned testimony.

But they got to a place on a major issue. What I don’t think we’ve seen yet this year is this council coalescing around the big problems that the city faces and saying, okay, let’s identify two or three really big issues and let’s try to collectively work toward a solution. So far it’s been a little bit chaotic. It’s been a lot unfocused, and I think it’s going to take some time for us to see whether this experiment will work or not. But it’s certainly too soon to judge it, in my opinion.

Miller: All right, well then, let’s take it to homelessness because this is where, I think maybe your point Nigel, and Jim’s earlier, they come together. Arguably in the absence of a five-person city council saying this is what we want to do over a couple of years, it was the mayor who said, I was elected saying that I would get rid of unsheltered homelessness in one year, and I’m going to have a laser focus on doing this by creating a whole bunch of nighttime only emergency shelter bed or shelter bed options. He did claim victory. Unsheltered homelessness absolutely still exists. In fact, by some counts, it’s worse than it was a year ago. But the mayor did open around 1000 new shelter beds. How significant is that, Lisa?

Bates: Well, it’s something. He’s doing something. I don’t think it has much to do with the root causes of homelessness, and I don’t think it has very much to do with actually the larger groups of people who are unhoused right now. I think we spend a lot of time talking for lots of reasons, some for legitimate and serious reasons, and some not about people that are most visibly homeless, that you see on the street, are unwell, or people feel are disruptive. And actually our fastest growing groups of people who are homeless are children and families. Those are housing problems. Those are serious housing and housing affordability problems in a moment where we have seen both at the state level and at the local level very deep cuts around our housing system, particularly in things like eviction and displacement prevention.

So when I think about the new form of government, of course, I think the big story was this missing $21 million in the housing bureau that the bureau Director Helmi Hisserich attempted to bring to the attention of City Council, in time to address in the budget adjustments in the fall, and was blocked from doing so by the deputy city administrator and presumably by the city administrator Michael Jordan himself. Those are some problems that we have and parsing through, like, what are the roles of these people? What is the job of the mayor? What is the job of the city administrator? What is the job of council? What can it be? What should it be? Why would a bureau director not be able to talk directly to City Council, particularly when we’re talking about trying to get down to brass tacks on such a very significant problem? So it’s hard for me to see how the City Council, the mayor, the administration would get together and coalesce around an issue like that in a climate of total distrust, on top of the kind of confusion of this cataclysmic change and the lack of role definition that happened in the year leading up to our new form of government.

Miller: Nigel, I want to turn to some state politics for a second. This was a rare year that arguably the biggest story of the session wasn’t what lawmakers did, but what they didn’t do. Their big priority was a transportation package. It didn’t pass at the last minute, and then eventually the Governor called a special session and a slimmed down package that was still going to raise something like $10 billion more over 10 years, did pass. What did that whole saga tell you about the Democratic Party in Oregon right now?

Jaquiss: There was a crucial moment in this entire debate, back in February when the Chief Financial Officer of the Oregon Department of Transportation got in front of the legislature and said, hey we made a billion dollar mistake in our budget. I think that was emblematic of both the difficulties that the agency has in keeping track of its money, which is huge, and secondly it led to a lack of trust on both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans alike, in the agency. I think ODOT never recovered from that. I think that the leadership around that bill was not particularly good. So I think it perhaps was the story of the year in Salem, and I think it’s emblematic of a lack of trust that the public and elected leaders have in state government right now.

Pasero: The deal’s become a statewide leader of 250,000 signatures, and the irony is –

Miller: For people who aren’t paying attention, what you just said doesn’t yet make sense. So in the special session, a slimmed down but big transportation package passed. And then the governor eventually signed it, waiting a little till the last moment to delay the amount of time that signature gatherers would have to put this on the ballot. But in a short amount of time, and they needed under 100,000 signatures, they’ve turned in, this week, something like 250,000. What does that tell you?

Pasero: Well, it tells you that in a system that wasn’t politically dysfunctional, if the governor running for re-election had the major piece, this reaction against it, this strong, she’d be in trouble for re-election. She’s polling right now at the lowest of any of all the 50 governors at 49%. But ironically, if you go through the last 11 elections the Democrats have won, they average about 49%. So, even though she’s the most unpopular governor in the country and gonna have her major piece repealed, she’s still a very solid favorite for re-election. And so therefore that’s why people are so frustrated about the state. You know, why is it always Groundhog Day here?

Miller: Nigel, is it a given for you that this bill is either going to be tweaked or changed in the short session or repealed outright by voters?

Jaquiss: Yeah, I think the logical course for Democrats right now, if this is on the ballot in November, voters will crush it. I think everybody acknowledges that. So the question for Democrats is, do we wait and take a year’s worth of pain or do we repeal it in February and move on and come back in 2027 and try and really fix this deeply troubled agency.

Miller: Jim, we talked about job losses earlier. One brand that is staying in Portland, it seems, is the Blazers. The Paul Allen estate is selling the Blazers to an ownership group led by the businessman Tom Dundon, who says he’s going to keep the team here. How close do you think we came to actually losing the Blazers, like Seattle lost the Sonics 17 years ago?

Pasero: Not that close because the nefarious story in the NBA is there’s something between $5 billion and $10 billion of Chinese money that’s coming into the NBA and divided up amongst the teams, which is why the Blazers sold for $4.2 billion instead of $2.2 billion. And it’s not talked about. But the television ratings for a LeBron James game in China are like 75 million and on TNT they were about 1.5 million. So, this is now, the Blazers aren’t just a small market team anymore. They’re part of the NBA that is this big, huge global brand.

Miller: What we’ve heard, Nigel, is that the Blazers’ staying is contingent on major upgrades to the Moda Center. But this is in a city, certainly in a state possibly, that is allergic to the idea of public money going to a stadium. Something has to give though. What are you expecting?

Jaquiss: I think that the governor and the mayor have been pretty clear that they’ll make it a priority to keep the team here. That may require working around the City Council, which I wouldn’t expect to be enormously supportive. But I think that top elected officials would look at the state and realize that they couldn’t take that kind of a PR hit. The Blazers remain very popular in this city and this state.

Miller: All right, let’s go around the table. We’ve talked a lot about 2025, some about the year to come because it’s impossible to basically just only talk about the past. The future is always hanging over us. But Lisa, first, what is an issue or a story that you’re expecting to be really big in the coming year?

Bates: I don’t know if I can predict really big, but the story that I’m paying attention to the most is the attempt at a Portland social housing experiment. Obviously, as a housing person, it’s something I care a lot about and trying to see if there is a way to create a system, on a local scale, that can sort of back us out of some of the traps that have been recently reported in our current affordable housing finance system. They’re not unique to Portland or Oregon. They’re national scale issues around low income housing tax credit, affordability rates, but we do have a significant problem with things like vacancies in our affordable housing, evictions in our affordable housing and to think about how we can start to build that social infrastructure that’s necessary for people to be able to live here.

Nigel was talking about the affordability of Portland as one of the reasons that Portland was able to grow and I think social housing could be part of that. But that’s very much caught up in this battle between council, the mayor, the city administrators, transparency about budget and rules and policymaking. It is a better investment than putting public money into a sports arena.

Miller: Nigel, what is the story you’re looking forward to covering this year?

Jaquiss: I think the governor’s race is going to be particularly interesting. I think that we haven’t had a Republican elected in this state since Vic Atiyeh in 1982 –

Miller: To be governor, we had a secretary of state.

Jaquiss: To be governor. And I think that Governor Kotek is really going to have to confront the difficulties that a Democratic governor doesn’t often confront in this state, and that she’s going to have to say no to some of her friends, and she’s going to have to make a convincing case that she actually does care about the economy and that she does care about figuring out how to rebuild Oregon’s business climate. I think it’s going to be difficult for her. So I’m looking forward to the conversation that the election will inevitably bring.

Miller: Jim, 30 seconds to you.

Pasero: The federal tax credit bill. It looks as if, talking to people inside the education world, that of the 20 blue states that are going to look at it and decide whether they want federal money to help their local schools, about 15 of the 20 blue states are going to say yes. That’s the projection, which will leave probably the ones on the West Coast deciding no, which will highlight the governor. Again, going back to Nigel’s point, she’s going to have to choose between helping people with tuition assistance or defending the public unions.

Miller: Jim, Nigel, and Lisa, thanks very much. Happy New Year.

Bates: Happy New Year.

Pasero: Happy New Year.

Miller: Jim Pasero is principal at Third Century Solutions, Nigel Jaquiss is senior investigative journalist at the Oregon Journalism Project, and Lisa Bates is a professor of Black Studies at Portland State University. Thanks very much for tuning in to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC. I’m Dave Miller.

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