By Julia Shumway | Editor
I’ve enjoyed seeing excerpts of poems and other quotes along trails in Colorado and Washington this year. Can you think of any Oregon trails that integrate literature with nature? (Photo by Julia Shumway/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
Good morning!
We’re just more than a month from the election, and mudslinging is picking up. This week, Alex Baumhardt has a fascinating look at data center politics in the Gorge, home to Oregon’s first data center campus (and many more). Republican state House nominee and Wasco County Commissioner Scott Hege has done more than most to build the industry, signing off on multi-million-dollar tax breaks as a county commissioner, selling land to Google as executive director of the Port of The Dalles and even working for a construction company that helped build Google’s data center campus.
Hege isn’t running from his record on data centers, but he is using them as a cudgel to attack Democratic nominee Hank Sanders. A website and video ad slam Sanders, who has called for a moratorium on data centers, as a hypocrite for supporting tax breaks for small businesses, based on a largely-deleted podcast the 25-year-old had last year. (Is the moral of the story that we need a moratorium on politicians starting podcasts? Maybe.)
On the data center front, Pacific Power shared its plans to make data centers pay their energy costs. And on the election front, Mia Maldonado reports on how Oregon went from having three of the country’s most intense congressional elections in 2022 and 2024 to having six snoozers this year.
Oregon kids still aren’t reading, writing or doing math or science at the same level as their peers across the nation or their counterparts pre-pandemic, test results show.
Shaanth Nanguneri continues to cover court battles over where the Oregon Department of Corrections should place nearly 120 incarcerated people who identified themselves as trans women. After a district judge ordered Oregon to place those incarcerated trans women in the state’s only women’s prison or use “creative” alternatives to recognize their identities, a panel of three Trump-appointed judges ruled in favor of Oregon’s case-by-case approach to housing those prisoners. The state Department of Justice welcomed the outcome of the ruling, but not the text, which refers to the plaintiffs as “male inmates who claim to be female.”
The state also reworked its foster and adoptive parent guidelines after a lawsuit from an Eastern Oregon woman who wants to take in children but refused to agree to affirm a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity, Shaanth reported. The state will still aim to place LGBTQ+ kids in safe and supportive homes, a spokesman said.
Freelancer Jake Thomas, who previously covered psilocybin companies’ dire warnings that steep fee hikes would doom their industry, reported that the Oregon Health Authority backed off those increases.
The state parks department is closer to turning Abiqua Falls into a recreation area, Mia reported.
And Shaanth previewed new bipartisan legislation that aims to ban automated license plate readers. Lawmakers created a right to sue over improper use or data storage this session, and several cities have ended their contracts with Flock after public backlash.
Today’s story, via The Oregonian, is a deep dive into why Oregon isn’t using an important suicide prevention tool to its full effect.
YOUR SATURDAY STORY
He saw it on her face. She wanted to live.
Scott Hughes still remembers holding the young woman’s hands, reminding her she wasn’t alone, asking if she had any pets. That was when he saw her mind click as she thought about her cat, alone in her apartment. She loved her cat. Her cat needed her.
Then he helped her back over the bridge railing.
That was two years ago. In the 20 years Hughes has worked at nearby Portland Fire & Rescue Station 22, he estimates he’s talked to dozens of people in crisis on the 95-year-old St. Johns Bridge, a hazard hidden in plain sight in a state where suicide is the eighth leading cause of death. Every other day last year, on average, someone called about a person potentially in crisis on the St. Johns Bridge.
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