My son started fourth grade this morning.
He is ten years old now, and Sunset Primary is not new to him. He has been walking through its doors since kindergarten. He knows the hallways, the playground, the rhythms of the mornings, the places where children wait to be picked up at the end of the day. What is new this year are some of the children.
I wonder whether he will notice. Whether the hallways will feel more crowded, whether the lunchroom will sound louder, whether thirty-three additional children are enough for a ten-year-old to feel that something about his school has changed. One of them he already knows, a good friend from his basketball team who attended Stafford Primary last year and is at Sunset now because Stafford is no longer an operating elementary school.
On December 18, 2025, in a unanimous vote after months of community meetings and parental testimony, the West Linn-Wilsonville School Board voted to close Bolton and Stafford Primary Schools effective at the end of the 2025-26 school year, and to suspend the district’s preschool program at the same time. The board did not describe the decision as educational reform. It described what it called a heart-wrenching dilemma produced by insufficient funding, declining enrollment, and the projected loss of teachers under the district’s next budget cycle. Bolton had opened its doors in 1892. Its former students walked into other schools this morning. About thirty-three of them walked into Sunset. Another one hundred and ten former Stafford students walked into Willamette Primary. Sixty-four walked into Cedaroak Park. The buildings themselves remain. The children have been redistributed. The district has contracted around them.
There is one detail about the timeline that has stayed with some parents since the vote. On November 4, 2025, six weeks before the closure decision, the voters of West Linn and Wilsonville approved a $190 million school bond intended for safety improvements, facility repairs, modernization, and technology. Two weeks after the bond passed, Superintendent Kathy Ludwig presented the school board with a fiscal plan that included closing Bolton and Stafford. The bond and the operating budget are legally and financially different things, and bond proceeds cannot pay teachers or cover ordinary operating deficits. Still, to a parent who had just voted to invest one hundred and ninety million dollars in the district’s physical future, the sequence was jarring: first an enormous investment in the school system, then, six weeks later, the announcement that the system could no longer afford to operate all of its schools.
Kieran O’Connor, a father of a third grader and a kindergartner at Bolton, put it plainly to Oregon Public Broadcasting reporter Elizabeth Miller in a story published on the morning of the closure vote. It felt, he said, like a broken promise multiple years in a row. Jennifer Zhao, the Bolton Co-PTA president, had moved her family across the country for Bolton’s Mandarin immersion program, and she told KOIN that the trust was not there anymore, that the board had voted to keep the schools open for two years and ten months later they were back in the same spot.
A father saying the promises kept breaking. A mother saying the trust was gone.
This is West Linn-Wilsonville. The district’s high schools graduated ninety-six percent of their seniors on time last year at Wilsonville and ninety-nine percent at West Linn, among the strongest rates in Oregon. The median household income in West Linn is roughly double the state median. The tax base is one of the healthiest in Clackamas County. If elementary schools are closing here, in one of the state’s most prosperous communities and one of its most successful school districts, in a district whose voters had just approved a $190 million bond, it seems reasonable to ask what exactly is happening to Oregon.
It is also election season.
Governor Tina Kotek is running for a second term, and Christine Drazan, whom Kotek defeated by less than four points in 2022, is trying again. In November, there will have been millions of dollars of television advertising telling Oregonians what their state has become, who ruined it, who saved it, and whose statistics can be trusted. It will be the first Oregon gubernatorial rematch since 1978. Oregon has not elected a Republican governor since 1982.
There is another possibility available to us before then, which is to look. Not at the commercials. Not at the politicians first. At the numbers.
For roughly the past eight years, Oregon has struggled to make many of its public systems match the state’s underlying strengths. The period spans two governors, a pandemic, enormous federal intervention, a housing crisis, an addiction crisis, extraordinary economic disruption, and a series of consequential choices made by Oregon voters themselves. No single administration created all of what follows. But governors inherit institutions, and eventually governing has to mean something more than describing what was inherited.
Oregon in 2026 is still wealthy, still educated, still globally connected. It produces semiconductors and wine and wheat and software and athletic shoes and, in 2024, roughly $28 billion in annual exports. Its high school graduation rate is the highest it has ever been. Its violent crime rate declined significantly in 2025, in line with a broader national trend that has confounded much of the political rhetoric of the previous four years. Its universities remain excellent. Its natural resources remain extraordinary. Its physical beauty, on almost any morning of any month, remains overwhelming.
Oregon in 2026 also produces fourth graders who score seven points below the national average in reading and eight points below it in mathematics, an economy that has grown more slowly than the national average through much of the past several years, unemployment more than a full point above the national average, homelessness that has risen from roughly 14,476 people in 2018 to more than 27,000 today, and a transportation package that the governor signed in November of 2025, disowned in January of 2026, and watched Oregon voters reject four-to-one on the May 2026 primary ballot.
Both things are true.
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Oregon’s educational numbers are difficult to reconcile with the Oregon many of us imagine ourselves to inhabit.
On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the closest thing the country has to a common academic yardstick applied consistently across all fifty states, Oregon’s fourth graders averaged 207 in reading against a national average of 214, and 229 in mathematics against a national average of 237. Washington, taking the same assessment under the same pandemic conditions, scored 238 in fourth-grade math, essentially at the national average. Between 2019 and 2024, Oregon’s fourth-grade reading score dropped by eleven points, one of the steepest declines recorded by any state in the country over that period. For the 2024-25 school year, only 40.3 percent of Oregon third graders met the state standard in English language arts, and only 28.9 percent of eighth graders met Oregon’s mathematics standard. Fewer than three in ten eighth graders.
Benjamin is ten. He is the age those fourth-grade scores measured.
Some of that decline occurred across a two-year period shaped by decisions made in Salem. Governor Kate Brown ordered Oregon schools closed in March of 2020 in response to the pandemic. Most large districts remained fully virtual through much of the 2020-21 academic year, and Brown ordered statewide in-person and hybrid reopening in spring of 2021, roughly a year after the original closure. Oregon’s public schools were among the longest-closed in the nation. Every state made its own pandemic decisions and every state has since absorbed the consequences, and Oregon’s decision to keep classrooms closed longer than most is consistent with the measurable losses documented on top of the losses every state suffered.
In 2022, before the political and pedagogical consequences of the closures had fully surfaced in test data, Oregon’s own Secretary of State audit division published findings on the state’s K-12 accountability structures. The auditors concluded that Oregon’s academic standards lacked sufficient clarity and enforceability, and that weak accountability mechanisms allowed low performance to persist even in the presence of major new investments, including the roughly two-billion-dollar-per-biennium Student Success Act passed in 2019. Oregon had substantially increased its investment in schools without building accountability structures capable of reliably telling taxpayers whether those investments were producing the promised results.
Oregon just recorded the highest high school graduation rate in its history. The Class of 2025 graduated at eighty-three percent, up approximately nine percentage points over the past decade. That improvement is real. It also arrives in the same year in which fewer than three in ten Oregon eighth graders can meet the state’s own mathematics standard. A diploma and a proficiency exam are not the same measurement, but they belong in the same conversation, and Oregon is currently producing an unusual gap between the two.
The West Linn-Wilsonville closures were the leading edge of something larger. In March of 2026, Portland Public Schools Superintendent Kimberlee Armstrong announced plans to close 5 to 10 elementary schools starting in 2027-28. On July 31, 2026, Salem-Keizer Public Schools Superintendent Andrea Castañeda announced a plan to close as many as 8 elementary schools on the same timeline. Beaverton considered closing four elementary schools in 2024 and tabled the plan after community outrage. Eugene 4J is facing a projected $40 to $50 million shortfall for 2026-27. The pressures are the same across the state: enrollment declines that began before the pandemic and accelerated during it, rising costs, and the end of pandemic-era federal COVID relief that had temporarily masked the underlying arithmetic. What is happening at Sunset Primary this morning is not a West Linn-Wilsonville event. It is a preview.
Benjamin will be in sixth grade when those Portland and Salem-Keizer children arrive at their newly consolidated schools. Whatever their parents are telling them tonight, when they get home from a first day at a school still marked for closure, is a conversation happening in living rooms across two of Oregon’s largest districts.
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It would be easy to tell the West Linn-Wilsonville story as evidence that Oregon simply does not spend enough on education. The reality is stranger than that.
For most of Oregon’s history, local property taxes paid most school costs. Then Oregon voters fundamentally rewrote the system. Measure 5, passed in 1990, capped property taxes for education. Measure 50, adopted in 1997, imposed further limitations on assessed-value growth and property tax collections. Before Measure 5, the state supplied less than one-third of Oregon’s nonfederal school funding. After Measures 5 and 50, that relationship essentially reversed. Roughly seventy percent of Oregon’s nonfederal school funding now comes from Salem.
Oregon school districts are therefore unusually exposed to decisions made in the state capital, and unusually dependent upon a revenue system that is itself unusually concentrated. Personal income taxes are projected to provide approximately eighty-six percent of Oregon General Fund revenue during the 2025-27 biennium. Oregon has no general sales tax. Its individual income tax system reaches a top marginal rate of 9.9 percent above $125,000 for individual filers and $250,000 for joint filers, among the highest state marginal income tax rates in the country.
The impression that Oregonians therefore shoulder the highest total tax burden in America turns out not to be correct. Oregon’s state and local tax collections work out to approximately $7,604 per person in 2026, placing Oregon roughly in the middle of the fifty states, and its total state and local tax burden as a share of personal income is about 10.8 percent, slightly below the U.S. average of 11.2 percent. The structural fact worth naming is not that Oregonians pay uniquely high taxes. It is that Oregon has concentrated its tax burden on a small number of narrow instruments while relying on the volatility of income taxation for the overwhelming majority of its general fund.
That concentration creates a paradox. The state depends overwhelmingly on income tax receipts, one of the most economically sensitive sources of public revenue. When income tax revenue significantly exceeds the state’s forecast, however, Oregon’s constitution generally requires the excess to be returned to taxpayers through the kicker. For the biennium that ended in 2025, Oregon collected $1.41 billion more than the forecast had predicted. That triggered a kicker equal to 9.863 percent of qualifying taxpayers’ prior-year state income tax liability, returned through 2026 tax filings. Oregon voters have repeatedly chosen the system, and the system embodies a principle Oregon voters have repeatedly endorsed: unexpectedly high revenue should generally return to taxpayers rather than become available for new permanent spending. But the kicker helps explain a phenomenon that can otherwise feel absurd. In the same period during which Oregon returned $1.41 billion to its taxpayers, the West Linn-Wilsonville School District closed two of its elementary schools because it could not afford to keep them open.
The state has money, and a public service has legally available money are not the same sentence. Oregon is filled with such walls. Taxes dedicated to one purpose cannot automatically be moved to another. Transportation funds are constitutionally restricted. School funding is shaped by property tax limitations imposed decades ago. Federal money frequently arrives with restrictions on how it may be spent. The kicker removes certain unexpectedly high revenues from future legislative discretion. Every one of these restrictions has a constituency, a history, and often a defensible original rationale. Together they have produced a fiscal architecture that resembles geological strata, one generation’s limits layered upon another generation’s programs layered upon another generation’s taxes, until eventually someone has to operate the machinery, and the machinery does not always work.
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The paradox becomes sharper when you look at what Oregon actually spends.
In nominal dollars, the state’s total legislatively approved budget has nearly doubled in ten years. Oregon’s 2015-17 biennial budget totaled approximately $71.7 billion across all funds. The 2025-27 biennium is $138.9 billion. The General Fund, the piece of the budget the legislature has the most discretion over, has grown even faster in proportional terms, from roughly $18 billion in 2015-17 to approximately $37 billion projected for 2025-27. Federal funds surged and then partially receded as pandemic-era programs wound down. State employment has grown. Investment in schools, health care, housing, and behavioral health has grown. The Student Success Act alone added roughly two billion dollars per biennium to K-12 funding beginning in 2019.
Adjusted for inflation and for Oregon’s own population growth, the increase is considerably smaller than the nominal doubling suggests, but it remains substantial. Cumulative U.S. inflation from 2015 to 2025 ran approximately thirty-four percent. Oregon’s population grew about six percent over the same period. Working the math honestly, real per-capita Oregon government spending has increased by roughly thirty-six percent over the past decade. That is not the ninety-four percent the nominal figure suggests. But it is not nothing. It is a substantial real increase in what Oregon government has to work with per Oregonian, sustained across a decade, and the outcomes documented above – educational proficiency, transportation maintenance, housing production, behavioral health capacity, unemployment insurance responsiveness – have not tracked the increase in any measurable way.
The obvious question is what the money bought.
The answer is neither what critics of Oregon government nor defenders would prefer it to be. Some of the additional spending is straightforwardly explained by growth: Oregon has more people to educate, more people to insure, more people to house, more roads to maintain, and prices for everything the state buys have risen substantially since 2015. Some of it went to programs the state’s own auditors have documented as under-executed. Measure 110 committed hundreds of millions of dollars to a recovery infrastructure the behavioral health system was not able to build. The Student Success Act expanded school funding without the accountability mechanisms the auditors had recommended. The unemployment insurance system received significant investment before the pandemic and was still overwhelmed when the pandemic arrived. Some of it went to genuinely new commitments the state had made and continues to be working toward: shelter beds that did not exist before, rental assistance that kept 25,900 Oregonians in their homes, semiconductor incentive dollars that were absorbed just before the current tariff cycle began.
Both explanations turn out to be true, depending on which corner of state government one is examining. Oregon does not primarily suffer from too little revenue. Oregon does not primarily suffer from too much revenue. What Oregon appears to suffer from is a persistent gap between what its government is asked to accomplish and what its institutions have been able to deliver against those commitments, even in periods of substantially expanded resources.
That gap is not inherently partisan. It has developed across decades and through decisions made by voters themselves. But political accountability cannot be distributed so widely that it disappears altogether. Oregon has been governed continuously by Democratic governors since 1987. Whatever portion of the present condition is attributable to executive governance rather than constitutional structure, federal policy, economic forces or voter initiatives therefore belongs principally to Democratic administrations.
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Drive a few miles from Sunset Primary, and you encounter the much larger construction project on Interstate 205, where the Abernethy Bridge crosses the Willamette between West Linn and Oregon City. Anyone living near it could be forgiven for wondering whether the bridge will ever be finished. But this is one place where the visible frustration and the engineering reality need to be separated. The project is not merely resurfacing a bridge. Oregon is widening it, rebuilding interchanges, and strengthening the structure so it can survive a major Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. When finished, ODOT says it will be the first earthquake-ready interstate bridge across the Willamette in the Portland area. It is also the largest construction project ODOT has undertaken in forty-five years, and its current completion target is 2027.
A large seismic bridge project taking years is not by itself evidence that Oregon government cannot build anything. What surrounds the bridge is more concerning.
Oregon’s transportation agency entered 2026 facing an approximately $297 million deficit in maintenance and operations, on top of a $354 million State Highway Fund biennial shortfall for 2025-27 that ODOT itself had projected. Before the current legislative session, ODOT had prepared to lay off around five hundred employees, roughly ten percent of its workforce. Four hundred and eighty-three of them received layoff notices. They were the Oregonians who plow winter roads and respond to crashes and stripe lanes and staff DMV offices and answer the phone when someone in a snowstorm calls to ask where the road is passable. The prospect of dismissing them was politically untenable, because the state understood, correctly, that the visible things transportation policy is supposed to produce would begin disappearing with them.
In the 2025 regular legislative session, Democrats put forward an $11.6 billion, ten-year transportation package. It failed in the final hours of the session, with Republican House members, led by Christine Drazan, running out the clock. On July 22, 2025, Governor Kotek called a special legislative session. A slimmed-down replacement, House Bill 3991, was passed. It raised approximately $4.3 billion over ten years through higher fuel taxes, vehicle fees, and a doubling of the payroll tax supporting public transit. Governor Kotek signed the bill on November 7, 2025.
Signature collection to refer the tax and fee increases to voters began immediately. Nearly two hundred and fifty thousand signatures were gathered. On January 7, 2026, at the Oregon Transportation Forum, Governor Kotek publicly called for the repeal of the transportation bill she had championed and signed just two months earlier. In the 2026 short legislative session, the legislature scrambled to close the immediate funding gap by other means, redirecting $218 million into maintenance and operations from bridge, seismic, Safe Routes to School, and Connect Oregon programs, and cutting authorized spending by another $78 million. Oregon solved a transportation shortfall by taking transportation money away from other transportation purposes.
And on May 19, 2026, the same primary election ballot that produced Kotek and Drazan as the two candidates for November, Oregon voters were asked to weigh in on the transportation package themselves. Measure 120 asked whether the fee and tax increases enacted by HB 3991 should stand. Voters rejected it eighty-three percent to seventeen percent.
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In the spring of 2020, a Washington County resident named Audrey Heesch applied for unemployment benefits and could not get anyone at the Oregon Employment Department to tell her what was happening to her claim. Months passed. In September of that year, she testified remotely to the Oregon Senate Committee on Labor and Business, one of dozens of Oregonians describing what it was like to wait. “It is confusing”, she said. “It is terrifying. I don’t understand what’s going on.” And then, in a sentence that survives in the OPB coverage of the hearings and belongs in any honest account of what Oregon’s public systems felt like from inside a kitchen where money was running down: “I cannot get help from a human being to give me direction.”
Oregon’s unemployment insurance system, which had been flagged for years by internal reviewers as technologically outdated, buckled under the pandemic-era surge in claims. Hundreds of thousands of Oregonians filed. Many waited weeks, some waited months, for benefits they were legally entitled to receive. A subsequent state audit documented that the crisis had exposed serious risks in the state’s ability to deliver benefits during a large-scale economic shock and had highlighted the need to modernize a system that had failed Oregonians at exactly the moment they most needed it. Every state’s unemployment system was stressed by the pandemic. Oregon’s failed harder than most. The audit language is the aftermath. Audrey Heesch is what the failure sounded like in real time, on the phone, waiting.
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Oregon has serious problems is not the same claim as Oregon has no economy. Oregon remains an extraordinarily productive export state. In 2024 it shipped roughly $27.9 billion in goods abroad. Computer and electronic products alone accounted for approximately $11.3 billion.
That trade dependence turned dangerous in 2025.
Oregon’s exports fell 17 percent in 2025, a decline of $5.8 billion, while American exports overall increased 5.7 percent. For the first time in recent memory, Oregon imported more goods than it exported. Oregon’s semiconductor industry lost approximately four thousand jobs during 2025. The Port of Portland recorded a fifty percent drop in exports during one five-week span after the Trump administration’s April 2025 tariff announcements.
That is not exclusively an Oregon story. In August of 2026, Governor Kotek’s office released a state economic analysis whose title said most of what needs to be said about it: “Tariffs didn’t start Oregon’s economic slowdown, but they exacerbated it.” Oregon importers paid nearly $3 billion in tariffs between March and December of 2025 as the effective tariff rate on Oregon goods climbed from roughly 2 percent to roughly 15 percent by the fall. The total estimated revenue loss to the state came to approximately $442 million for the biennium. The report concluded that the export collapse likely reduced Oregon’s GDP growth by more than a full percentage point relative to the national trend.
Two things are true at once. Oregon’s economy entered 2025 already vulnerable, having built an unusual amount of its modern industrial base around one extraordinarily valuable but cyclical cluster of semiconductor and related technology firms. And Oregon’s economy in 2025 was then hit disproportionately hard by federal tariff policy over which the state had no control. Some of what looks in the raw numbers like Oregon dysfunction is national policy landing more heavily on a state whose economic structure makes it more exposed to that policy than most.
Oregon’s population has hovered around 4.25 million for the last five years, dipping slightly in 2022 before arriving at 4.27 million by 2025. Washington grew from 7.73 million in 2020 to eight million in 2025, adding more than seventy thousand people in the last twelve months alone. The net effect on Oregon’s population has been essentially flat while its neighbor to the north has continued to grow. That is not the pattern of a state proving irresistible to the country’s next generation of workers and families.
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Perhaps nowhere is the gap between Oregon’s identity and Oregon’s outcomes more visible than housing. For generations Oregon has treated land as something worthy of protection, an idea rooted in one of the country’s most influential statewide land-use systems. There is much worth protecting. Anyone who has driven from Portland to the coast, or south into the Willamette Valley, or east into the high desert, knows what that fifty-year commitment to preserving farmland and forest and wildlife corridor has spared Oregonians from becoming. But whatever ideological position one takes toward the land-use system, the physical arithmetic is unavoidable. Oregon does not have enough housing.
We know approximately how much it does not have, because Oregon has begun counting the absence. The state’s 2026 Oregon Housing Needs Analysis establishes an annual production target of approximately 29,000 homes, roughly two-thirds of which falls at price points affordable to households earning less than sixty percent of area median income. Governor Kotek’s original 2023 goal was 36,000 homes annually. Actual annual housing starts in 2024 came in at approximately 14,416, well below either target. Building permits are up 11.3 percent this year while national permitting is down 1.3 percent, which is a real reversal and belongs in the accounting, but the underlying production shortfall against documented need has continued to widen rather than close.
The consequences are visible beneath freeway overpasses, in tents, in the parking lots of schools where families are living in cars, in the rents that consume more than half of many working households’ incomes, and in the number of young families who cannot begin to imagine buying a home in the communities where their own parents once could. Oregon’s own housing agency found that in 2023 the state had approximately 47.5 homeless people for every 10,000 residents, the third-highest rate among the states in the analysis. Only New York and Vermont were higher.
The eight-year trajectory tells the fuller story. Oregon’s annual homelessness count stood at roughly 14,476 people in 2018, near the end of Kate Brown’s first full term. By 2022, near the end of her second term, the count had grown to approximately 17,959. By 2023, that number reached 20,142. And Oregon’s 2025 Point-in-Time count, conducted on a single January night under the Kotek administration, recorded approximately 27,119 people experiencing homelessness statewide, the highest total the state has ever recorded and roughly double the 2018 number.
The most recent picture is more complicated than that raw increase implies. Sheltered homelessness accounted for most of the growth between 2023 and 2025, expanding forty-nine percent, while unsheltered homelessness grew twenty-seven percent, meaning the share of Oregonians experiencing homelessness who were literally on the street rather than in a shelter actually declined. Unsheltered homelessness among families with children fell approximately forty percent over the same period. Kotek’s homelessness emergency declaration, in place since her first month in office in January of 2023, has, by her administration’s accounting, delivered 6,286 new or maintained shelter beds and rehoused approximately 5,539 previously unsheltered people, while another 25,900 Oregonians facing eviction were kept in their homes. Central Oregon’s Point-in-Time count showed a nineteen percent overall reduction. Yamhill County reported a twenty-five percent decrease.
National homelessness, meanwhile, declined in 2025. Oregon’s rose.
One of the 5,539 rehoused Oregonians was a grandmother named Shelley. Metro’s supportive housing services program told her story earlier this year. She had worked for years as an in-home health aide while simultaneously caring for her granddaughter, a girl born with two rare genetic diseases requiring round-the-clock care. In 2022, the balance collapsed. For more than a year, Shelley and her grandchildren lived without permanent housing, moving from motel to motel, sometimes as often as weekly, hauling a roomful of medical equipment each time because her granddaughter’s compromised immune system made even a shelter dangerous. “All I wanted was a roof over my head”, Shelley told Metro. “When one person said no, I had to keep looking. I started to lose hope.” She eventually secured an Oregon City apartment with a Metro-funded Regional Long Term Rent Assistance voucher.
Shelley is one household. The 27,119 is thousands of households, each with its own version of the medical equipment being loaded and unloaded every week, its own version of the phone calls to 211 and churches and county offices, its own version of the fear of losing hope. Oregon’s official definition of students experiencing homelessness, drawn from the federal McKinney-Vento Act, explicitly includes children living in motels, shelters, cars, campgrounds, or doubled up with other families because they have nowhere else adequate to go. Some of the children walking into Oregon fourth-grade classrooms this morning did not wake up in bedrooms.
Benjamin walked into Sunset this morning from a bedroom in a house his father owns.
The state’s emergency intervention appears to be working on the piece of the problem it was designed to work on. And the underlying pressures producing homelessness in the first place – the housing shortage, the affordability crisis, wage stagnation relative to rent, the collapse of certain categories of employment – have continued to worsen faster than the shelter and rehousing response has been able to catch. The election will determine who inherits it next.
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Something else happened during those eight years that belongs adjacent to the housing story, because it involves the same behavioral health infrastructure the state’s homelessness response depends upon.
On a downtown Portland sidewalk in December of 2023, a man who gave his name as Joseph lay curled in a sleeping bag, sick from fentanyl withdrawal. He was part of a pilot program that had launched only that month, in which officers with the Portland Police Bureau’s bike squad were partnered with addiction treatment providers to offer people using drugs in Old Town an immediate connection to care. An officer asked if he was interested in treatment. He said yes. The officer called a nearby outreach worker from the nonprofit Mental Health and Addiction Association of Oregon, and within an hour, after nearly sixty minutes on the phone locating a bed and juggling insurance issues, Joseph buckled himself into a blue sedan that would drive him to detox. He completed it. About a month later, according to reporting by OPB and ProPublica, he was continuing his recovery in an intensive outpatient program in Portland. He had asked not to be identified further, to protect his medical privacy. What Oregon voters had approved in November of 2020, when they passed Measure 110 by roughly a fifty-eight to forty-two percent margin, was a public-health rather than a criminal-justice pathway for exactly the sequence of events that got Joseph off a sidewalk and into treatment.
The measure decriminalized personal possession of small amounts of controlled substances, including heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine, replacing criminal penalties with a $100 fine that could be waived through a health assessment call to a state-funded hotline. It also directed hundreds of millions of dollars in cannabis tax revenue toward a new statewide network of addiction recovery services. Oregon would become the first state in the country to treat drug use primarily as a health condition rather than a crime.
The public-health system the measure envisioned was never fully built. Implementation began under Governor Brown in early 2021 and continued under Governor Kotek after January of 2023. A state audit covering the years 2021 through 2025 concluded that the addiction recovery infrastructure Measure 110 was supposed to create had remained substantially unrealized because of persistent structural and operational weaknesses in Oregon’s underlying behavioral health system. Roughly $800 million had been awarded to providers over the audit period. The hotline was underused. The provider network was incomplete. Coordination among the Oregon Health Authority, county governments, and community-based organizations was poor. Most remarkably for a program designed around measurable health outcomes, the auditors concluded that the Oregon Health Authority had not collected sufficient information even to determine how many people had been served or what outcomes the program had produced. The state had spent hundreds of millions of dollars implementing a policy the state could not, by its own accounting, measure the effect of.
And meanwhile, the drug landscape Measure 110 had been drafted for changed underneath the policy. Fentanyl, still emerging as a mass-market street drug in 2020, became by 2023 the single largest driver of Oregon overdose deaths, and the harm-reduction infrastructure the state had promised to fund proved unable to keep up with the new epidemic. Portland’s downtown fentanyl visibility became a national story. Overdose deaths climbed. Public opinion turned. In March of 2024, the Oregon legislature passed, and Governor Kotek signed House Bill 4002, restoring criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of controlled substances effective September 1, 2024.
The Measure 110 story is difficult to describe partisanly. The voters approved the policy. Two Democratic governors implemented it. Recovery Works Northwest opened Oregon’s first Measure 110-funded medically monitored withdrawal facility in East Portland in September of 2023. The state auditor documented that Oregon’s behavioral health system was not capable of doing what the voters had asked it to do, and that the state could not even measure what it had accomplished with the money it had spent trying. The legislature partially reversed the policy under a Democratic governor.
What the episode revealed was not primarily whether decriminalization was a good idea or a bad one. What the episode revealed was that Oregon had built neither the criminal-justice infrastructure nor the public-health infrastructure capable of responding adequately to a drug crisis, and that when asked to shift from one to the other, the state was unable to reliably reproduce, at scale, the chain of events that got Joseph off a sidewalk in December of 2023 and into an intensive outpatient program a month later. There is a sadness particular to that finding. The state was not failing an abstraction called Measure 110. The state was failing to reliably reproduce a rescue.
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The temptation now would be to announce the verdict. Oregon is failing.
Except that would be too easy, too broad, and in several important respects untrue. Oregon’s graduation rate is the highest it has ever been. Its exports still approach $28 billion a year. Its public pension system is comparatively well funded by national standards. Its property tax burden is not among the highest in America. Its absence of a sales tax leaves low-income households protected from a major category of consumption taxation that residents of Washington encounter every day. Violent crime declined significantly in 2025, in line with a broader national trend that has confounded the political narrative that every visible sign of disorder corresponds to an unprecedented crime wave. Unsheltered family homelessness has dropped meaningfully under a sustained state emergency response. Overall tax burden as a share of income is slightly below the national average, not above it. Housing permits are rising while national permits are falling.
Oregon is not a failed state.
It is a rich American state with extraordinary natural resources, major universities, world-class companies, productive farmland, enormous human capital, and one of the most beautiful physical environments on Earth. We should therefore expect it to work.
Why does Oregon always seem to be out of money? That may be the wrong question, because Oregon is not always out of money. Sometimes Oregon has so much money that the constitution requires the state to give $1.4 billion of it back to its taxpayers. Sometimes the state’s total budget doubles in ten years while the outcomes the state promised to purchase with the money remain stubbornly unimproved. The deeper problem is that Oregon has accumulated, over decades, a fiscal architecture in which different pots of money are collected differently, restricted differently, distributed differently, and governed by constitutional provisions written in different political eras and reflecting different political fears. Oregonians restricted property taxes. That moved school funding toward Salem. Oregonians rejected a sales tax. That left Salem heavily dependent upon income taxes. Oregonians adopted the kicker. That limited the government’s ability to retain unexpected income tax revenue. Transportation remained dependent in significant part on fuel taxes and fees while vehicles became more efficient and construction became dramatically more expensive. Federal transportation money arrived but could frequently be spent only for federally approved purposes. Cities and counties accumulated their own restrictions. And through all of it, Oregon continued accumulating public obligations.
Each individual decision had a constituency, a history, and often a perfectly defensible rationale. Together they have produced something resembling geological strata, one generation’s limits layered upon another generation’s programs layered upon another generation’s taxes. Eventually someone has to operate the machinery. And sometimes the machinery does not work very well.
The last eight years put the argument into unusual relief. Governor Brown left office in January of 2023 having presided over school closures among the longest in the nation, an unemployment insurance system whose failures the state’s own auditors have since documented, a homelessness crisis that had grown by nearly a quarter under her administration, and the early implementation years of a voter-approved drug policy the state was not equipped to execute. Governor Kotek inherited every one of those institutional strains. Three years and eight months into her term, the trajectory has not clearly reversed. Homelessness is higher. Educational proficiency remains weak. Transportation financing has collapsed and been rejected by the voters four-to-one. Population growth has stalled. Measure 110 has been partially reversed under legislation Kotek herself signed. Housing production remains at roughly half of the state’s own target. Two of the state’s largest school districts have announced plans to close as many as eighteen elementary schools between them beginning in the fall of 2027. That is the record. The election will determine who inherits it next.
Oregon has tried, generation by generation, to be a particular kind of place. It has protected its farmland when other states paved theirs. It has funded schools more equitably across rich and poor districts than most states do. It has treated addiction as an illness that deserves recovery rather than merely a crime that deserves punishment. It has sheltered families rather than let them freeze under overpasses. It has committed to building an earthquake-ready bridge across the Willamette because the science says a bridge that cannot survive a Cascadia event will not survive a Cascadia event. It has returned unexpected tax revenue to its citizens on the principle that the state should not permanently keep money it did not permanently expect. These aspirations are not incidental to Oregon. They are Oregon. The failures documented above are painful precisely because the aspirations are real. The distance between the Oregon we meant to build, and the Oregon we have actually built is where the disappointment lives.
We value education. Four in ten third graders meet the state English language arts standard, and Oregon’s fourth graders posted a sharp reading decline between 2019 and 2024. We value infrastructure. The transportation agency needed an emergency legislative intervention to cover a $297 million operations deficit, the funding law the governor herself signed was disowned by the same governor two months later, and Oregon voters rejected the whole package on a primary ballot by a margin of nearly five to one. We value housing. Oregon estimates it needs to produce roughly 29,000 homes a year and is producing roughly half that, and the state’s homeless population has nearly doubled since 2018. We value public health. Voters approved decriminalization; the state’s behavioral health system proved unable to deliver the promised recovery infrastructure; the state could not even measure what the money it spent had accomplished; the policy was partially reversed within four years. We value economic opportunity. Unemployment is above the national average, and Oregon exports suffered an extraordinary decline last year that federal tariff policy substantially worsened. None of those statistics tells us whom to vote for. They tell us what whoever wins has to govern.
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I don’t know whether Benjamin noticed any of this when he walked into Sunset this morning. He is ten now, and he has gone to that school since kindergarten, which means he knows the building in the intimate, unexamined way children know the places of their childhood. Maybe the thirty-three additional students will be invisible to him. Maybe the cafeteria will simply seem louder. Maybe there will be a longer line somewhere. Maybe he will mostly be happy that his friend from basketball, who went to Stafford last year, goes to his school now.
Children inherit our public institutions before they understand that they are inheriting anything.
The problems documented here were built over thirty, forty and fifty years, under governors of both parties, by legislatures and voters and initiatives and constitutional amendments and federal programs and the ordinary accumulated small decisions of a state that has, generation by generation, accumulated obligations while restricting the ways the money supporting those obligations can be raised and moved.
The adults in Oregon get another election in November. The children in Oregon started this year with two fewer elementary schools than they had last year, and two of the state’s largest districts have already announced plans to close as many as eighteen more before the fourth graders walking into Sunset this morning finish sixth grade.
No election will unwind any of that in a single term. Some of the problems may still be here in 2036, when the fourth graders walking into Sunset this morning will be young adults, voting in elections of their own, and having their own conversations about whether the state they are inheriting is the state they thought their parents had built.
What we owe them, and what we owe every child walking into a public school across Oregon this morning, is the honest work of understanding the state we have actually built before we decide what kind of state we intend to leave them.
That work is not partisan. It is older than any campaign, and it will outlast any election. It belongs to anyone who has ever loved a place enough to look at it directly.
For the first September in 134 years, no child walked into Bolton for the first day of school.
Benjamin walked into Sunset this morning.
His friend from basketball was somewhere in the building.
Thirty-three children from Bolton were also somewhere in the building, unpacking backpacks in classrooms whose names they did not yet know, sitting next to children they had not yet met, finding the cubbies and the reading corners and the patches of playground that would, over the course of the school year, become the small, unremarkable geography of their fourth-grade lives.
The school felt almost exactly the same as it had last year.
And not exactly the same.