On Monday, November 23, Oregon initiative king and convicted
fraudster Bill Sizemore quietly filed the papers to run for
governor in the Republican primary. “Breaking the power of the
public employee unions is essential to the survival of this state and I
am probably the only one willing to take them on head to head,”
Sizemore told the Mercury, via email, about his surprise run.
Among the hurdles Sizemore will face? Well, there’s a court order
banning him from raising or spending money on political campaigns, to
begin with. “I may have to run my campaign from inside a jail
cell,” acknowledged Sizemore in his statement released on the NW
Republican website on Monday. Ironically one Democratic gubernatorial
candidate, John Kitzhaber, walloped Sizemore the last time he
tried to run for governor, defeating Sizemore 64 to 30 percent back in
1998. SARAH MIRK
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The city kicked off a month-long series of public workshops on the
Portland Plan on Tuesday, November 17. The plan is a giant urban
planning document that will set Portland’s goals for the next 25
years. Though only a third of the roughly 150 attendees were under
the age of 40, they voted that investment in bike infrastructure should
be the city’s top transportation priority in coming years. One astute
audience member, Alex Johnson, pointed out a hole in the plan: Despite
Oregon ranking the highest homelessness per capita in the nation, the
plan only mentions the word “homeless” once. SM