How I am voting in the 2024 General Election
VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE
Hey Benderinians, TODAY IS THE DAY TO FILL OUT YOUR BALLOT AND GET THAT MOFO TO A PLACE THAT THE DESCHUTES COUNTY CLERK CAN FIND IT. Don’t wait until the 5th. Lets fill mine out together right now!
WAIT, WHO ARE YOU, WHAT IS THIS, AND WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT YOUR OPINION?
That’s a great question random redditor.
Hi, I’m Tailor, and I am a pseudonym that talks about local politics here in Bend, Oregon. I’m also a housing advocate, committee member and stressed out student over at OSU-Cascades. I used to LARP as an independent journalist that covered City Council Meetings, until I ran out of time and motivation. I managed to keep that up for three years, and you can find a record of my meeting summaries if you look at previous posts here on Substack. I still watch just about every meeting and sometimes I even post about it over on Threads, so check that out if you miss our precious parasocial relationship.
You should probably care more about my positions on local races and measures, and care less as this post expands into State and Federal politics, so this post will be ordered that way.
General Housekeeping
I’m going to be filling out my ballot, yours will be different. If you have something different on your ballot, good luck!
Please do not use this voter guide in isolation. I’ve only got a day to write it, and I am quite the fallible human being. Practice lateral reading by referencing the Deschutes County Voter's Pamphlet and other sources of information like Laura’s Voting Guide, Endorsements from local organizations, and local news coverage. Seek a variety of opinions and make an informed decision.
Local Races and Measures
Bend City Council Position 1: Megan Norris
I’m voting to keep Councilor Norris on Council. Councilor Norris was appointed to the Council vacancy created when Melanie Kebler was elected as mayor in 2022. Megan is a Latina whose father was born in rural Mexico. She immigrated to the US as a child. She has served in the Peace Corps, worked for the State Legislature, the Sierra Club, a local childcare accelerator, and currently works for Hayden Homes as a planning manager. Through her time on Council, she has focused on housing affordability and childcare, though IMO her most notable characteristic is the stalwart ethics and integrity she exhibits when handling conflicts of interest related to her job. I’ve heard staff describe how she approaches declaring conflicts of interest as the GOLD STANDARD. Really the biggest issue with Councilor Norris is that because of this conflict of interest, she is often unable to vote or provide her perspective on housing, a topic she is most informed about.
Her opponent, Mr. Curtis has shown up in just about every public comment recently. In these comments he talks about how his pronouns are king and emperor, about how the Council is in the pocket of the “bike lobby”, about how the council is bullying him because he is autistic, and about how his social media accounts keep on getting banned. Accounts where he has posted things like a photoshoped selfie of himself holding an assault-style weapon at a school.
Bend City Council Position 2: Gina Franzosa
Gina is an affordable housing developer that cut her teeth on the Transportation Bond Oversight Committee and Tree Preservation Advisory Committee. After talking to her, I believe that her true passion in life is to update our street standards and specs, and I respect the hell out of someone with a dream. We need to give Councilor Mendez more allies on Council that truly prioritize transportation safety, and Gina Franzosa is that candidate. Also she’s running unopposed, so congrats to Councilor Franzosa for your landslide victory!
Bend City Council Position 3: Megan Perkins
Re-electing Councilor Perkins is an easy choice for me. Just like everyone else currently serving on Council, Megan is passionate about serving Bend and striving to make it a better place. Her focus and role on Council is centered around responding to houselessness. She is the Council liaison that serves on the board of the Coordinated Houseless Response Office, and has been focused on filling in the missing gaps of the housing continuum in Deschutes County. During her leadership we have seen considerable progress on this front. Just this month we opened the Old Mill Apartments which fill in a transitional housing gap in our system. Councilor Perkins has been attacked multiple times because of her work on housing and homelessness, and recently became a target again related to comments she made during 2020. These kinds of attacks take a huge emotional toll, and this kind of shit makes it harder to get good people to run for Council. I'm proud of Megan for standing up for her values and as someone who has watched her work on Council over the years, I can say with confidence that we're lucky to have her.
Bend City Council Position 4: Steve Platt
Steve Platt is a retired Air Force Colonel who spent 25 years managing hundreds of people and billions of dollars of assets for the military. He moved to Bend to retire, and teaches physics at Summit High School. He applied for a council vacancy in 2022, and when he didn’t make the cut, he joined the BUDGET committee. Who the fuck joins the budget committee? Steve Platt that’s who, and he did a great job. Platt has the experience, he shows up, and he has put in the work to prove he is qualified and deserving of this role.
I think that in general, Barb has been a great councilor. She’s passionate about this community, broadly has the right priorities, and over the last couple years has really repositioned herself on issues I care about like housing. Unfortunately, she lost the Deschutes Dems endorsement, and every single person she serves with on Council with has endorsed Steve Platt, and then her campaign failed to submit a statement to the voter guide.
I don’t think she has a path to getting re-elected, but I do think she has a path to split the Dem vote enough to open up a path for Chet Wamboldt.
Deschutes County Sheriff: Kent Vander Kamp
Everyone is pulling a Chappell Roan on this race, and I refuse to be the exception. In case you didn’t know, the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office is a mess, it is possible after this election it may become less of a mess. Or maybe not. This is the only race I considered leaving blank this year, but I am going with Kent Vander Kamp. Vander Kamp is endorsed by the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Employee Association, and County Commissioner Phil Chang. Also very importantly, he is not endorsed by Sheriff Nelson like his opponent.
Measure 9 - 173: Expand County Commission from three to five members
I was sitting next to a fire in a camp chair when John told me that he was going to try to get an initiative to expand the County Commission on the ballot. I responded encouragingly and skeptically, as I always do when John tells me about the ways he wants to change the world. A few weeks later he hands me a clipboard to start gathering signatures, and a few months after that we (he) had gathered enough signatures to get it on the ballot. It has been absolutely incredible to watch an idea from John's head turn into a ballot initiative that, if passed, would make our local representative democracy a little more representative, and a little more democratic. I can not be more proud, or more excited to vote on this in November.
It is not hard to find real world examples to show why expanding the County Commission is a good idea. When you only have three commissioners, and you have one Commissioner that wakes up crazy every morning, all you need is one to wake up on the wrong side of the bed to blow everything up.
For example, last month the City and the County finally agreed to set up a temporary managed camp in Juniper Ridge to try and get a handle of the clusterfuck that is happening up there after some houses almost burned down. The City promised to dedicate the last of their ARPA funds to the project. But last week when the County actually had to agree to something Commissioner Chang got cold feet about some pedantic interpretation of land use policy and now the whole plan and a month of work is on fire.
No other important government entity in Central Oregon operates with 3 members, and expanding the commission is endorsed by just about every government entity that has to work with Deschutes County. The only people who seem to be really opposed to this are the two people who will lose personal power. Weird.
Measure 9-176: Permanently Fund the Soil and Water Conservation District
Yeah
The DSWCD does a lot of important work in our county, and they're currently subsisting on short-term grants.
Funding it via the teensiest ($0.06/$1000 AV) of property taxes would give it a sustainable future, allowing it to maintain and expand its current offerings.
This rate limit would be permanent. It would never cost more than $15ish per year for the average Deschutes county property to fund its many programs for rural and urban community members alike.
State Races and Measures
Oregon State Senator, 27th District: Anthony Broadman
I have watched years of City Council Meetings in which Anthony Broadman did his thing, and the only reluctance I have in endorsing him as a State Senator is that it means that Bend has to share him with more people. Anthony is amazing, and I have absolutely nothing negative to say. Anthony has the right priorities, and he knows how to make people from across the political spectrum feel heard. I mean look at that endorsements list.
When Broadman decided to run for what eventually became an open Oregon State Senate seat, we were sad to see him go, as he has been a solid YIMBY ally on Council. He has a deep understanding of the technical issues facing legislative change and has been willing to face thorny local political issues head on. As housing becomes a huge part of the Governor’s legislative agenda we are confident that Broadman will be an advocate for YIMBY housing issues in the State Senate. - Bend YIMBY
Oregon State Representative: 53rd District: Emerson Levy
Emerson is running for her second term in office after sniping Sipe in the last election. In those two years, she’s shown herself to be a reliable advocate for affordable housing, and she did a great job hitting the State house floor running. She is also focused on updating ebike legislation. Her first piece of landmark legislation, Trenton’s Law was passed unanimously. It changed State law so that it matches the Class 1, 2, and 3 federal ebike classification standards. Regrettably, the most important part of the bill, allowing kids to use Class 1 ebikes, was removed from the bill days before it was voted on. This caused Bend-LaPine schools to ban e-bikes on campus, which I am pretty bummed about. Hopefully we send her back to Salem to finish the work she started.
Asking voters to replace an incumbent with someone new is not unheard of — but it has to come with some big teeth. Show voters the problem, and then give them some good, solid ideas about how to solve them. It's easy to criticize; harder to come up with solutions that aren't campaign-time platitudes. For that reason, we're sticking with Levy on this one.
We'd also be remiss in not mentioning walkouts. Lopez was not definitive about whether she'd walk out, as her Republican colleagues have done numerous times in recent years. (To be fair, Democrats also walked out over 20 years ago.) Voters have been clear about this issue, voting to disqualify legislators with more than 10 unexcused absences, and we see it as a bare minimum to commit to doing the job you want voters to give you.
In this race, Levy appears more prepared and ready to continue the work she's begun over the past two years. Vote Emerson Levy for House District 53
- Source Weekly
Measure 115: Let the State Legislature Impeach People
I’m voting yes on this, every other State has a mechanism for impeachment except Oregon for a reason.
If state officials engage in behavior that is clearly "malfeasance or corrupt conduct in office, willful neglect of statutory or constitutional duty or other felony or high crime," there should be a way to remove them, beyond them resigning themselves. With the requirement of a two-thirds majority, it would be rare to see this used in a partisan manner. (Even during the recent supermajority by Democrats, that party held 37 of 60 seats in the state House and 18 of 30 seats in the state Senate.) In other words, even if a supermajority should happen again, they'd need support from the other party to impeach someone. - Source Weekly
Measure 116: Make it so elected officials don’t pick their salary
Yah
Measure 117: Ranked Choice Voting for State and Federal Races
Absofuckinglutely. Just going to block quote the entire Source endorsement on this one here.
The case for ranked-choice voting may be most easily understood when looking at recent presidential elections, where "splitting the vote" has had some very real consequences. Maybe you were a Bernie Sanders supporter, but you felt the need to vote for Hillary Clinton so as not to by consequence throw your support to Donald Trump. Ranked-choice voting helps to alleviate these binaries by allowing voters to rank their choices — ranking all the candidates in a race in order of preference. If a candidate wins the majority of first-preference votes, they win. If no one gets a majority, the candidate getting the lowest number of votes is out and the first-preference votes for that person are taken out of the equation. The votes are then re-tallied to determine anyone still in the race now has the majority, and the elimination process continues until a majority is reached. Supporters say this is a way to enfranchise more voters and to see more diverse candidates serving in elected offices. We think it's worth a shot. Vote yes on Measure 117.
Measure 118: UBI MONKEY PAW
I am so fucking mad that you are making me vote no on a UBI. I wanted to vote yes on this so bad, and I wanted to encourage you to vote yes on this so bad. Unfortunately as I spent more time learning about this measure to write this post it just got worse and worse the more that I looked at it.
As far as I can tell this initiative is just a really convoluted way to incentivize small business by taking money from mostly poor people that buy goods from big businesses and giving it back to mostly poor people, and it is not clear at all how much money it is going to cost poor people, and if they will get more money than their costs will rise.
I wanted to write a narrative about how it is so Oregon to pass something idealistically correct but technically flawed and iterate to make it great, a la SB 100, but the structure of this is just fundamentally wrong.
Hopefully we will see a more grounded measure soon, like a progressive kicker, or some other strategy that meaningfully improves our Gini Coefficient.
Measure 119: Prevent union busting in the weed industry?
Yeah.
Federal Races
US Representative, 5th District: Janelle Bynum
Source Weekly Primary Endorsement
I am going to vote for Bynum because Oregon’s 5th district is one of the few competitive seats that has the potential to change who has power in Congress, but also because I will never forgive Lori for continuing to focus on her political stunt trip to the border instead of being an actual leader and grieving with our community following the Safeway shooting.
Bynum possesses a warm, grounding energy that runs counter to the hard-charging style of some other politicians, and that's one thing we liked about her on a personal level. On a professional level, she's strong on societal issues such as access to abortion, and has enough of a track record to lean on to prove to voters that she'll be productive in these areas. - Source Weekly
United States President: Kamala Harris
Harris Rally in Wisconsin ft. Liz Cheney
Obviously. As excited as I was to vote for a well-intentioned living corpse over a proto-fascist, abusive, misogynistic, at-least-a-little-bit-racist, nepo-baby-turned-living-corpse, I am comparatively much more excited to vote for Kamala Harris. I like how her plan to deal with our housing crisis is to build more houses, instead of rounding up millions of people and also her political opponents.
Everything left over that I don’t have anything to say about
All the Judges are fine
I don’t know anything about the Deschutes Soil and Water Conservation District
Oregon Attorney General: Dan Rayfield
Oregon State Treasurer: Elizabeth Steiner
Oregon Secretary of State: Tobias Read
That’s all I have time for. I hope you found this helpful. Thanks for reading, and no matter what you decide, THANK YOU FOR VOTING. <3 <3 <3