Ballots are starting to arrive in the mail for the November 6 special election in Oregon. It’s pretty simple this year, with just two ballot measures and no candidates.

More Hockey Less War and Wacky Mommy endorse “Yes” votes on both measures.
Measure 49: Yes. Measure 49 would fix Measure 37, which in 2004 threw a monkey wrench in the works of Oregon’s strong land-use regulations. Measure 37 opened up the door for all kinds of development on land previously reserved for forests, farms and open spaces. Though it was billed as a remedy for old folks banking on subdividing their property to fund their retirement, it was mainly a huge windfall for commercial property developers.

Measure 49 would restore some balance to our land-use regulations, allowing grandpa and grandma to build a few houses on their land to feather their retirement nest. But it would prevent helter-skelter, large-scale commercial development.
Measure 50: Yes. Measure 50 would raise cigarette taxes to pay for children’s health insurance. I think both things on their own are good, but have issues with coupling them. But since our Democratic-controlled state house and Democratic governor can’t seem to get it together to fix our broken state revenue stream, this is currently the best hope we have for insuring the 117,000 Oregon kids who currently lack access to basic health care.

Big tobacco is spending millions to defeat this one. For some people, that’s all they need to know.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Politics, Portland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.