Downtown Portland isn't too unsafe for Columbia Sportwear's Sorel brand, after all. Three months after threatening to move the brand's HQ amid concerns about homelessness (and also three months after Mayor Ted Wheeler outlawed sitting on the sidewalk near the Columbia store), the company says it's decided to stay put.
LEGISLATIVE ROUND-UP TIME! With less than two weeks left of this year's short legislative session, the pace is picking up.
Yesterday, the Senate unanimously approved a bill that will let the City of Portland clear homeless camps that are on land controlled by the Oregon Dept. of Transportation. We wrote about the proposal earlier this month.
(Speaking of camps, the NYT has a look at Seattle's experience with organized homeless communities, and whether the city's 11 camps are moving the needle or not.)
Also: A plan to have voters decide whether health care should be a fundamental right under the state constitution appears dead. There weren't enough votes in the Senate to pass the bill, Democratic leaders said. That's because it would have had some very uncertain outcomes, including possible lawsuits or huge increases in what the state must spend on health care.
And legislators passed a law on hit-and-run crashes, which resulted from that unspeakably awful incident in Forest Grove where a teenager decided to run her car through a pile of leaves on the side of the road, not seeing the two girls playing within.
OH! And Oregon's one-of-a-kind tax on new bike sales could soon apply to (expensive) kids bikes as well.
On the Gun Control Front: Trump claims he'd have rushed the Parkland shooter, and says he'll ban bump stocks even if Congress refuses to act. So that's all trustworthy and solid.
And then there's the lieutenant governor of Georgia, who issued a tweet Monday vowing to kill tax breaks for Delta Air Lines if the company didn't reinstate a discount for NRA members.
And here in good old Oregon, AR-15s are still being auctioned off to help pay for youth sports.
The O has an interesting item, by the way: A rundown of state legislators who've given their campaign money to the NRA—typically via purchasing tickets to events or fundraisers—rather than received money from the gun lobby. The top NRA spender? A Democrat.
If you haven't, dig into the Oregonian's well-done series on the effect displacement has on schoolchildren.
