Latest news with #Measure110
Fox News
07-04-2025
- Health
- Fox News
Four important ways Trump can tackle the drug crisis and Make America Healthy Again
President Donald Trump's newly issued statement on drug policy priorities shows his administration has embraced the Make America Healthy Again movement as it tackles American's top public health crisis: addiction. The next step must be to re-empower the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), elevating America's anti-drug movement to the prominence it deserves. Despite the media-coined title, "drug czar," leading America's drug policy has been relegated to the background of the national fight against illicit substances for years. This office is supposed to speak for the president on drug policy and have statutory control over the federal government's drug policy budget, spread across multiple agencies. But regrettably, in a world of high emotions, big egos, congressional subcommittees, vocal interest groups, and competing issues, Americans likely haven't seen or heard much from our drug czars in decades. If utilized the right way, there is tremendous potential to reduce the suffering that is the consequence of drug addiction in the U.S. With close to 100,000 people a year dying of overdoses, more deadly drugs coming across the border, and for-profit industries targeting young people as lifelong customers, restoring ONDCP's relevance is critical. Here are four things that should be done to revitalize the office now: ONDCP must use its megaphone to show the toll drug use has taken on the nation's communities. Speaking with families, law enforcement, educators, and medical professionals will put faces to the statistics of those whose lives have been forever altered by the drug crisis. This country needs a new anti-drug message, and it needs it now. A science-based media campaign, directed especially at young people, is needed to offset the harms of extreme drug normalization policies like marijuana legalization and Oregon's short-lived Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs. As the Department of Education ramps down, ONDCP should coordinate school-based prevention programs to ensure that every student learns about the dangers inherent in today's drug landscape, refusal skills and healthy coping strategies. ONDCP should use the full power of the office to lead a "drug cabinet" convened by Trump, that drives the execution of a coordinated national drug policy. In the spirit of DOGE, ONDCP should mandate each agency provide specifics about how it is fulfilling the directives laid out in the country's annual National Drug Control Strategy. Departments, initiatives and, yes, budgets, should be judged on how they're fulfilling their statutory mission – and the results they're achieving. ONDCP serves as a critical hub for interagency coordination, ensuring that disparate agencies work collaboratively and avoid duplication of effort and gaps in action. With today's medical and scientific evidence clearly demonstrating the harms of drug use, it's increasingly clear you can't truly want to Make America Healthy Again and think more drugs in our communities is a good thing. The addiction industry and international drug cartels, continue to create more potent, industrialized drugs are responsible for a public health crisis. Many of these drugs, including marijuana and THC-infused edibles are now medically proven to cause IQ loss, psychosis, schizophrenia, depression, suicidality and, of course, addiction. The director of ONDCP was a member of the president's cabinet in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations. Re-elevating the position would underscore the Trump administration's dedication to addressing the nation's drug crisis and answer the call of the 55% of Americans who, according to a 2024 Pew poll, think that reducing the availability of illegal drugs should be a top priority for President Trump and Congress. A science-based media campaign, directed especially at young people, is needed to offset the harms of extreme drug normalization policies like marijuana legalization and Oregon's short-lived Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs. Most Americans are familiar with the role and success of border czar Tom Homan. Similarly, elevating the position would restore considerable authority to the ONDCP team to shape news coverage, tout successes, push back against radical policies such as so-called "safe use" spaces, and provide a counterbalance to the steady stream of pro-drug messaging coming from the addiction industry and celebrity culture. President Trump, through ONDCP, can use the power of the presidency to make a lasting impact on the lives of millions of Americans. By deftly using the office's budgetary oversight, today's increasingly settled science on drug use, and the bully pulpit, we can reduce drug policy and the carnage it brings. Let's make ONDCP great again. The country needs that — now.
The Guardian
01-04-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
The recovery programs tackling Oregon's drug crisis: ‘I was on the ground dying. Now I have a future'
Oregon has for years struggled with a drug crisis, reporting one of the highest rates of substance use disorders in the US and ranking last in the nation for access to treatment. The problem is systemic, rooted in decades of failure to invest in the level of behavioral health services needed for people with mental illnesses and addiction. The Pacific north-west state's significant affordable housing shortage has compounded the challenges, as people languish on the streets without care. Many drug users spiral downward until they overdose, wind up in jail or prison, or are forced into Oregon's overcrowded psychiatric system. It's a cycle that has come at great cost to families and taxpayers, and in 2020, voters opted for a radical change. Measure 110, a ballot initiative passed by 59% of voters, decriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs, with the idea that users would not be jailed for the most minor offenses and instead encouraged into treatment. With an initial $302m investment in recovery services, the measure aimed to treat addiction as a disease, not a crime. The state's groundbreaking experiment was, however, quickly deemed a failure, blamed for a variety of complex social problems as decriminalization was timed with a surge in fentanyl overdoses, growing homelessness and pandemic-era gaps in social services. Last year, lawmakers recriminalized drug possession, a swift reversal just as Measure 110-funded programs were starting to demonstrate their impact. Some of the funding for the new treatment and recovery services has, for now, remained intact, with innovative programs chipping away at the crisis, though with reduced resources. The Guardian visited organizations across the state that are successfully turning people's lives around, meeting with people who have, against steep odds, found recovery. While serving divergent populations and using different strategies, the programs were united in their reliance on peer support and having staffers in recovery themselves. They attribute their success to their emphasis on building relationships and trust, treating people with dignity and providing easy-to-access services outside of the criminal legal system. Here are four of their stories. On 12 November 2024, Cameron Washam, 45, was lying on the street by Portland's Union Station, on the brink of death. He and his wife, Christina Bell, 47, had long struggled with homelessness and addiction and lived on the streets during the pandemic, moving spots on a nearly daily basis in an effort to prevent their belongings from getting stolen. The two had met in a group home as teenagers, reconnecting and marrying as adults. On the streets, 'we felt lonely and judged a lot, or like we don't exist at all,' said Washam. Bell recalled feeling so invisible that at one point when a woman passing by said hello, 'I stopped her and said, 'You can see me?'' In recent years, their addictions, like so many in Oregon and across the west coast, progressed to fentanyl use, which became all-consuming. 'I didn't care where we slept, where we ate, I didn't care about anything. All I cared about was finding drugs so we wouldn't get sick,' said Bell, describing the physical toll of fentanyl withdrawal. 'You want to die. There's no way out.' Washam said getting his next fix was 'like needing to feed your children – the most important thing'. On the day in November that everything changed, Washam had developed an abscess in his gum, but had been released from the hospital in the middle of the night without help. 'I was a fentanyl user and they didn't want to figure out what was wrong,' he said. The couple had lost their belongings in the process, Washam's infection had caused sepsis, and they were lying in a puddle, soaking wet and increasingly ill from withdrawal. 'We were at the bottom and I was dying,' he said. At that moment, workers from a Portland street outreach initiative coordinated by the Mental Health and Addiction Association of Oregon (MHAAO), a non-profit dedicated to peer recovery services, approached and offered help, saying they could immediately take them to a detox program. The couple had been talking for months about wanting to get clean, and this was their chance. They entered detox, Washam got emergency surgery for his infection, and after eight days, they were placed in an outpatient program, then a sober recovery home. They had tried detox before, but this time was different. They were ready – and crucially, they were able to transition directly into housing, avoiding returning to the same environment that had fueled their addiction. The outreach effort, called the Provider-Police Joint Connection Program, started in December 2023 as a pilot partnership between Portland police, MHAAO and Health Justice Recovery Alliance, an advocacy organization for Measure 110 providers. It has since grown into a collaboration of dozens of providers in the region. Outreach teams gather downtown and share information about the resources available on a given day and then offer people on the street instant help, including detox beds, recovery housing, addiction medication and peer support. The success, supporters said, stems from the close coordination between groups that provide an array of services, so people can get the full range of help they need without having to navigate complex bureaucracy or long waits. Police are involved by suggesting outreach locations or alerting providers when they encounter someone in need, but the work is driven by the organizations and their outreach workers, many of whom are in recovery, formerly incarcerated or unhoused. Since its launch, the program has connected 1,005 people to services, including 651 who received access to programs on the same day outreach teams met them and 159 who got into detox and treatment. 'I like to say we're 'below-low barrier',' said John Karp-Evans, MHAAO deputy director. 'We'll take anyone in. You can say 'FU' to our offers of services 21 days in a row, and then if on the 22nd day, you say you want treatment, we'll take you.' 'Just 120 days ago, we were laying on the ground over there dying. Now we have a place to live. We have a future,' said Bell, seated inside an MHAAO facility as outreach workers gathered one morning. She noted that if sepsis had killed her husband in November, she would have likely soon followed him and fatally overdosed. Washam added: 'When I look back, that doesn't even seem like my life.' The two are now finishing treatment and enrolled in school, with hopes of becoming drug and addiction counselors. While in the throes of her addiction, Bell's mother wouldn't even let her inside her home when she showed up unannounced at her door. Now, they've reconnected and are rebuilding their relationship. The cycle was all too familiar for Alex Magaña, a 43-year-old living in Washington county, east of Portland: a drug-related arrest, court-ordered recovery, relapse, then back to jail. 'I get out of my addiction. I do good, but then it's too good to be true, and I self-sabotage,' he said. For years, Magaña sold drugs to get by and was often unhoused, sleeping on couches or in cars and tents. He got used to running from police, sometimes jumping over fences or hiding and tossing his drugs in hopes of evading arrest. He racked up dozens of drug charges, he said. His criminal record made employment unreachable, he said. 'Nobody wanted a junkie working for them, and that's just how society looks at us.' Over the years, Magaña entered sobriety and recovery 13 times, only to falter, he said. His 14th try was different. In the summer of 2023, he ended up at a barbecue hosted by El Jardín, a non-profit that serves people with substance use disorders and operates the only Latino recovery drop-in centers in the state. 'I could actually express myself. I was in my own culture. I felt at home,' he said, seated in El Jardín's new center in Hillsboro, which had a recent carnival-themed grand opening celebration. 'I felt like I already knew the people there.' He liked being able to speak with peers in Spanish or Spanglish and discuss the specific pressure to drink he's faced at family gatherings or festivals. It was a departure from the culture shock he had often experienced in court-mandated treatment and recovery, when his primary goal was getting off of probation or parole. Magaña had long struggled with paranoia, stemming from his drug use, which had made it hard to open up to providers seeking to help him, he said. 'I had never seen an organization that was the Hispanic community helping out the Hispanic community.' His work with mentors and groups at El Jardín has kept him on track. He's opened up about his PTSD from being unhoused: 'On the street, you have to put on a certain persona and mask. Here, I don't have to worry about being macho or people judging me. I'm just me.' He now lives by himself, with his rent partially subsidized by a voucher, and was hired this month to do harm reduction work at El Jardín. Fernando Peña, El Jardín's director, praised Measure 110 for its infusion of funds for culturally specific services, but said there was a long way to go. A 2022 study estimated the state needed 145 recovery centers to match the needs in the community, but only had eight in operation. 'Providers on the ground are trying to save lives, and these services are really impactful,' said Peña, 'but we're still not anywhere close to where we need to be'. At the Recovery Cafe in Medford in southern Oregon one evening in February, nearly 70 people in recovery gathered for a home-cooked meal of chicken, beans, rice and dessert bars. Before dinner was served, the crowd applauded each other's achievements – upcoming job interviews, sobriety milestones, children's birthdays. They held a moment of silence for people lost to overdoses, though a speaker said babies could continue to make noise. The atmosphere was joyous inside the community space that many attenders said had played a vital role in helping them overcome addiction. The cafe is part of the non-profit Reclaiming Lives, which offers recovery group meetings and expanded its reach through Measure 110 funding. Unlike traditional Alcoholics Anonymous programs, the meetings aren't strictly anonymous – participants often socialize and connect outside of the organization with barbecues, rafting trips and group texts, said founder Stephanie Mendenhall. Reclaiming Lives aims to provide long-term peer support for years as people progress through recovery, she said. James Byrne, 38, said his relationships at Reclaiming Lives saved his life. In high school, Byrne was a successful athlete, securing a football scholarship. But a dirt bike accident shattered his ankle, and doctors gave him oxycodone for a year. When his prescription abruptly ended, within 24 hours, he used heroin for the first time. 'I was broken,' he recalled. 'I didn't know what I was going to do for the pain.' He fell rapidly into addiction and homelessness, at times sleeping in baseball dugouts or crashing with friends in exchange for offering them drugs. He was eventually jailed for stealing from his mother and later for distributing drugs, he said. For years, he was in and out of the system, at times ordered into treatment, but unable to consistently stay clean, particularly as he began using fentanyl. 'With fentanyl, I found myself needing to find it three, four, five times a day. Being dope-sick was like the worst flu on steroids,' he said. He said he 'died twice', suffering overdoses reversed by Narcan. 'Every day was Russian roulette,' he said, adding that he knew dozens of others, including close friends, who had been killed by fentanyl. When he was arrested for a parole violation in spring of 2024, he told the officer he would never be in handcuffs again. He was approaching 40 and wanted to survive. From jail, he sent a message to a friend who worked at Reclaiming Lives, who had overcome addiction. They made a plan for his recovery, and the staffer was waiting for him when he was released. Byrne came to Reclaiming Lives daily for months, attending groups or just napping on the couch: 'This was the safest place to be and I had people who believed in me. There's a lot of shame and guilt with addiction. So having somebody nonjudgmental there for you, no matter what, day or night, is a big deal. With peer support, you have accountability and friendship and trust.' He now works in outreach for a local non-profit that serves unhoused people. The other key to his success, he added, was that the services were not court-mandated – but rather he was ready to change. 'Pushing treatment on someone doesn't work,' he said. 'You have to want it.' On a quiet residential street 20 minutes outside of downtown Portland, residents overcoming addiction have access to the kind of support none previously had been offered in their treatment journeys: a recovery home specifically for LGBTQ+ people. The Quest Center for Integrative Health, founded in 1989 to support people living with HIV, opened Oregon's first LGBTQ+ recovery house in 2018, and a second home in 2023, helped by Measure 110 funds. The sober home offers transitional housing after participants complete intensive outpatient treatment for substance use. Brando Foucheaux, a 37-year-old Quest resident, who is transgender and Two-Spirit, moved from California to Portland in 2023 in hopes of separating himself from the community that had fueled his addiction. He was drawn to Portland in part because of its reputation as a haven for trans and queer people, but struggled to access treatment programs geared to LGBTQ+ people and sensitive to traumas he had experienced. 'It took time to find a community that really fit me and I could trust,' he said, noting it was hard not to relapse when he was isolated and living alone. Foucheaux was well aware of the value of culturally competent care: he had previously worked as an EMT, encountering trans youth in crisis, and also worked for a doctor providing trans healthcare 'I knew what kind of help I needed, but I didn't get that care until I got here,' he said. Quest has provided queer sober living while also offering support through groups, relapse prevention and other services to get Foucheaux's life back on track. He said he wished there was more empathy for people battling addiction and more support for programs that help them. 'It takes a community and a society to create an addict, and it takes a community to help one.' Echoe Reed, a 43-year-old Quest resident, said her addiction stemmed in part from her grief after losing two friends, her stepfather and mother in rapid succession. She had also long been in the closet as a trans woman, which fueled her drug use: 'I wasn't true to myself and the only way I could connect with someone was getting high,' she said. In recent years, she transitioned, quit her information security job, left her home state of Texas and moved to Oregon for a fresh start. Based on a therapist's recommendation, she moved into Quest last year. Transitioning from struggling alone to living with other LGBTQ+ people in recovery was a game-changer, she said: 'It was amazing to suddenly have this new family.' She had had an image of recovery as 'straight old bikers' in Alcoholics Anonymous, but was relieved to connect with people in Quest group classes who had remarkably similar journeys. 'Here people are just who they are, they're themselves, they're not ashamed, they're not hiding,' Reed said of living in Quest. Her one-on-one sessions with her peer mentor also felt more helpful than traditional therapy, she added. 'We have shared experiences. They're not there to judge. It's like being with a friend for an hour.' She recently got certified to be a peer wellness specialist and now provides mentorship to LGBTQ+ youth.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Yahoo
Oregon abandoned its radical drug law. Then came the mass arrests
At 7.45am on a cool February morning in Medford, Oregon, six police officers pulled up to a desolate road lined with tarps and a shopping cart and began making arrests. The officers directed four adults to sit on the sidewalk, handcuffing them behind their backs and rifling through their pockets. They were being detained for illegal camping, but the officers were also searching for evidence of drugs. 'Love you!' a husband and wife shouted at each other as they were separated to be taken to jail. Related: Oregon judge blocks city from enforcing homeless camping ban Officer Paul Verling placed one 43-year-old woman in the back of his car while his team tested a confiscated glass pipe for drug residue. He told her she could potentially avoid jail if she entered drug treatment. The woman said she had been using methamphetamine to cope with homelessness and would be grateful for treatment. But once Verling ran her name through the system, he discovered she had a warrant for a probation violation. That made her ineligible for 'deflection'. She, too, would be going to jail, he said, possibly for a month. 'You wanna engage in some rehab when you get out?' he said. 'Yes sir,' she mumbled. 'I'm glad we had this talk today,' Verling said, as he took her out of the car to escort her into a jail enclosure. Welcome to Oregon's 'war on drugs' 2.0. In September, Oregon lawmakers enacted legislation turning low-level drug possession into a more serious crime punishable by up to 180 days in jail. The resulting crackdown has led to thousands of arrests statewide in recent months. People targeted in cities such as Medford, and overworked public defenders tasked with representing them, say the drug enforcement has been chaotic and at times brutal. While the new policy has appeared to reduce visible drug use in some public spaces, unhoused people, who have been most impacted by the police response, say it has exacerbated their struggles. The new law also marks a stunning reversal of policy for the Pacific north-west state. Just four years ago, Oregon voters passed Measure 110, a groundbreaking drug decriminalization measure that abandoned jail sentences for possessing small amounts of drugs and imposed an infraction citation instead. Passed on the heels of Black Lives Matter uprisings, the measure aimed to treat addiction as a disease instead of a crime, prioritize services and recovery over jail, reduce overcrowding behind bars and help address racial disparities in policing and prosecutions. At the time, Oregon was grappling with rising overdoses. It ranked second nationally for drug addiction rates and worst in the US for access to treatment. The problem was systemic, rooted in decades of failure to invest in the level of behavioral health services needed for people with mental illnesses and addiction. Measure 110 called for an infusion of $302m for addiction recovery and harm reduction services, with a focus on underserved communities, including Black and Indigenous people impacted by criminalization. Drug policy reform advocates hoped the first-in-the-nation decriminalization experiment would become a model. But the timing could not have been worse. The law went into effect in 2021 as fentanyl was rapidly entering Oregon's unregulated drug market, the pandemic was shuttering vital social services and homelessness was surging amid Covid and unprecedented wildfires. As Measure 110-funded recovery programs were just getting off the ground, the decriminalization measure was widely blamed for crime, surging fentanyl overdoses and the increasing visibility of homelessness and drug use, even as research suggested a complex set of factors behind these trends. The backlash was fierce, and the state's Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, signed the bill last year recriminalizing possession. Supporters say the renewed enforcement is restoring order on the streets, while helping people with addiction and maintaining funding for services. Kotek said she did not want the policy to be 'business as usual' of jailing drug users, but a 'treatment first' approach. The bill encourages counties to set up 'deflection' programs, enabling some arrestees to forgo charges if they get help for their substance use disorders. People with possession cases can also avoid conviction if they complete probation, and lawmakers have promised pathways for records to eventually be expunged. And part of the funding for new treatment programs first passed under Measure 110 has remained intact, enabling some innovative projects to continue their work, though with fewer resources. Implementation of the new law varies widely by county. Data reveals some jurisdictions are launching mass arrests, while referring very few people to treatment. The Medford police department has led the state in drug criminalization – by a lot. The city is located in a region near the California border that is one of the more conservative areas of a blue state; more than half of voters in Jackson county, which includes Medford, supported Donald Trump. From September, when the new law was enacted, through 26 March, the Medford police force carried out 902 drug possession arrests – more than double the number of cases in Portland (a city with seven times the population). Jackson county has logged 1,170 arrests total. Verling, an officer on the city's 'livability' team, a unit focused on low-level crimes, including unlawful camping, trespassing, public drinking and drug possession, said many police were relieved when drugs were recriminalized. The 2020 reform had led to increasing reports of drug use on the streets and growing concern about public intoxication. Recriminalization, Verling said, allows him to engage people in hopes of pushing them to treatment. 'I really don't want to see someone go to prison … but this gives us the ability to get back into their lives,' he said on a recent patrol through Medford. He said the job was most rewarding when seeing someone turn their life around after they've been jailed – and when his team arrests dealers, potentially 'making people sober by making the drugs inaccessible'. One of the livability team's main priorities has been clearing homeless encampments, and as Verling drove his patrol car onto a pedestrian greenway, the impact was clear. During the pandemic, encampments were a common site. Now, there were few visible signs of homelessness. Several locals were jogging. Where did people go? 'People leave town. They're like, 'OK well it's a crime to camp here,'' he said, adding he believed many were in shelters. The issues of homelessness and drug addiction are deeply intertwined, and Verling said he had become adept at spotting signs of drug use and paraphernalia: 'Focus on their hands – that will lead you to it.' Oregon's recriminalization law allows the state's 36 counties to adopt individualized approaches to deflection. Jackson county designed its program so officers could directly hand over arrestees to drug treatment programs instead of jail, a collaborative approach meant to get people immediate help without involving the courts. But many don't qualify, aren't offered this alternative during their arrest, or they decline an officer's offer. According to the latest available data, while there have been nearly 1,200 possession arrests, as of 27 March, only 69 people have been referred to deflection. Instead, many get arrested. And rearrested. One 43-year-old unhoused woman said police were 'acting like every person on the street is a drug addict, which is not true', and that she had been arrested four times by Medford's livability team since October, generally for camping violations. While she was quickly released after her last arrest, her partner was not, leaving her to camp outside alone. The woman, who asked not to use her name out of fear of police retaliation, said she was sleeping in front of a social services center in hopes her partner could easily find her when he gets out. 'The separation makes me feel like I can't breathe,' she added. 'Police say they're helping the homeless, but they're just throwing us in handcuffs and jail.' Inside the county jail, as livability officers were processing an arrest of an unhoused man who had camped under a bridge, officer Elliott Jantzer said the hardest part of the job was 'arresting the same person over and over again and seeing no change'. 'Society is supposed to fix these problems. We can't really fix it. We don't have capacity,' he said. But the criminal justice system is where most people targeted by the new law end up. On two days that week in February, dozens of defendants waited to be arraigned in courtroom 301 of the Jackson county circuit court justice building. Some appeared in person in the windowless hearing room, others appeared over video from the county jail in Medford. Some pleaded with the judge, saying they needed to get home to take care of children, asserting the charges were incorrect or expressing bewilderment about the entire ordeal. None of the jailed defendants had lawyers for their cases, and most said they wanted one. One man facing a drug possession charge quietly asked for a lawyer, but then changed his mind and pleaded guilty, seemingly hoping for a quicker resolution. The defendants were there on all types of charges, but when drug possessions were called for defendants not already in jail, the outcome was the same: the defendant didn't show. 'Failure to appear – warrant', the judge repeated four times. The scenes laid bare the impact of recriminalization on the state's criminal system, which for years has struggled with a massive public defender shortage, in part due to difficulties recruiting lawyers to the low-salary, high-caseload jobs. In that particular week, there were more than 900 defendants in Jackson county alone who, despite having active criminal cases, had no lawyers. 'It's a violation of their constitutional rights,' said Clint Oborn, the executive director of the Southern Oregon Public Defender Inc (SOPD), walking back to his office after arraignments. 'Some people plead guilty and never get an attorney, or if they want one, they're put on a waiting list.' Most clients with drug possession cases who don't show up to court are unhoused and eventually get jailed on warrants, he said. Cyril Rivera Neeley, one SOPD attorney, said one of his clients was a senior citizen charged with drug possession in September who refused to plead guilty, had to wait five months for a trial and then was jailed for missing a court appearance; another is a defendant who thought they were being hospitalized for a mental health episode, but was instead jailed for a drug misdemeanor when officers found paraphernalia. Patrick Green, the Jackson county district attorney, said he supported recriminalization because defendants end up supervised by probation officers, who hold defendants accountable and connect them to treatment and services. And he argued jail can be helpful: 'We know with addiction, you do have to get a person some clean time for them to be in the right frame of mind to be willing to engage in treatment.' But he also acknowledged that the return of possession arrests had increased his staff's caseloads. The majority of his 18 prosecutors have had to take on these cases, giving them less time for other matters, and the new law has exacerbated jail overcrowding, he said. Many possession cases are resulting in 'conditional discharge', he said, where defendants waive their right to a trial or an attorney and are immediately placed on probation, but can be jailed again if they lose contact with their officer or commit other violations. 'Once they get out of jail, they often keep using, their probation gets revoked and they return to jail,' said Colin Murphy, another public defender. 'It's the same cycle I saw before we decriminalized. If this approach to getting rid of drugs in our community actually worked, it should have worked by now, because we've been doing this since the 1970s.' The strategy diverts police away from serious investigations, he said: 'We're told law enforcement has very scarce resources. But in these possession cases, I see five cops standing around investigating one unhoused person because she had a baggie in her pocket.' With limited use of deflection, and a shortage of lawyers to represent people, the new system has felt pointless to some unhoused people in Medford. 'It's not fair, it's unethical, it's a fucking scam,' said 34-year-old Nikki, sitting early one morning under a bridge in Medford's Hawthorne Park. A thick layer of fog hung in the air, and she gestured at the flowing creek beside her: 'Look at how beautiful this place is.' The state's affordable housing shortage is the primary driver of homelessness, with over 27% of renters facing severely unaffordable rent, forced to spend half or more of their income on housing. Some unhoused people like Nikki come from out of state in hopes of better services. Her main motivation, she said, was healthcare: she's a transgender woman, and her deep-red home state of Missouri had become a leader in anti-trans laws and medical restrictions. But she also liked the environment of Medford, in an area known as the Rogue Valley. There's a backdrop of mountain ranges, and a greenway bike path connecting local cities. 'It's been awesome living here, and it's been shit,' said Nikki, who asked to use a nickname as she talked openly about drug use. She said she regularly uses meth and has done stints in rehab that didn't last. She said she had spent time in the county jail when she was picked up on warrants, forced into the men's section. For people with serious addictions, detox in jail is 'horror beyond what you can imagine', she said. Incarceration can also increase overdose risks when people are released with lower tolerance. Now, Nikki tries to sleep in hidden corners in the woods where police won't bother her – 'out of sight, out of mind'. Christopher De Falco, a 30-year-old who had gathered in Hawthorne Park for a weekly potluck lunch for the unhoused, said he had long dealt with addiction, homelessness and incarceration and felt the new approach would help few people getting sober: 'Until the person truly wants to quit, they're not going to. Forcing people into treatment, it's against our will and unjust.' Nearby, 38-year-old Ray, who only gave his first name, said going to jail felt routine to him: 'another day in the office.' He heard other countries had safe injection sites, which he said seemed like a better way to get people into services than jail time. Nikki said one Medford officer recently came up to her while she was sitting by the creek asking, 'What's in your bag? What's in your pocket? Where are your drugs?' she recounted. 'I didn't even have drugs on me!' She said she was being profiled: 'I've got two bags, messy hair, dirty pants and dirty shoes.' As she described the encounter, a Medford 'livability' officer drove by. Nikki jokingly hummed a Nazi anthem as the vehicle passed, adding: ''livability' just means they work for everybody but you.' People who do enter deflection in Medford are often taken by officers directly to the Addictions Recovery Center (ARC), one of two treatment providers partnering with police on the program. Staff address participants' basic needs, including food, clothes, medications; conduct an addiction assessment; and place them in temporary shelter. The clients are required to complete ten appointments, generally within 30 days, which can include meetings with counselors or peer support staff, at which point the threat of prosecution is erased. Ben Spence, ARC's community justice program manager, said roughly half of their participants have successfully completed deflection; some people fail when they become unreachable, though his staff works hard to track people down and keep them engaged. The ten appointments are just a start to their recovery journey, he added. Of the 69 referrals in the county, as of 27 March, 23 had successfully completed the program, 26 had failed and 17 remained in the process, said Vicky Armstrong, the county's deflection coordinator. She emphasized that the program was in its early days and that deflection was just one of many pathways into treatment: 'You can't legislate people into sobriety. You can legislate opportunity.' Green, the DA, said he felt deflection was a better path to treatment than the criminal system, which can be a slow process, and that the fact that only some people were succeeding was a good sign: 'We didn't [make it] too easy or too hard. We really found that sweet spot.' At Medford police headquarters, Lt Rebecca Pietila, in charge of community engagement, said law enforcement viewed recriminalization with deflection as a 'compromise – a happy medium'. She said deflection was working well due to close partnerships between police and providers, noting that Jackson county had a higher success rate than the state average. She said it would take time to build law enforcement buy-in as many officers were pleased to have an opportunity to restart arrests. 'They want to hold people accountable, because we know drug crime is not just about addiction, it leads to theft and disorderly behavior and victimization,' she added. Pietila said she would like to see drug laws become tougher, with stiffer penalties for certain possession quantities, and that she supported efforts to expand the county jail so more arrestees could be held longer. For unhoused people with severe addiction, 'sometimes jail is the only intervention'. For many in the region, it is still easier to get a jail cell than into treatment. OnTrack Rogue Valley, another drug treatment provider and deflection partner, has more than 300 people on its waitlist for residential programs. That includes 200 people waiting for a 16-bed program, said executive director Sommer Wolcott. 'Many of those 200 people are unhoused with severe substance use disorders who desperately want a treatment bed,' Wolcott said. 'They need 24-hour care and support. They can't just stop using.' Some people are stuck for more than a year on the waitlist, and at times, when staff try to track them down, they discover the client has died of an overdose. Wolcott personally knows of three people who died while on her treatment waiting list last year. But, she said, there could be many more. As Medford police escalate their crackdown on possession, and treatment facilities remain at capacity, some advocates are doing their best to keep drug users safe and alive through harm reduction. Max's Mission, a southern Oregon group founded by a couple whose son died of an overdose in 2013, does weekly outreach in Hawthorne Park, which involves syringe exchanges, connecting people to housing and treatment services and giving out tarps, socks, snacks, wound care kits and naloxone, the overdose-reversal drug. Crystal Bilyeu, who was helping lead Max's Mission outreach one recent afternoon, said she had reversed 48 overdoses with naloxone, including 17 in 2024. The 41-year-old was herself unhoused and struggling with addiction in the early years of the pandemic. While living outside, she would give out cards advertising a 'never use alone' hotline people can call while using so that EMS can be alerted if they overdose, and she became known as someone who always had naloxone in her backpack. The strict anti-camping laws worsened her substance use disorder, she said, as she often used drugs to stay awake since sleeping brought the risk of trouble with law enforcement. 'I used it for survival,' she said. She got clean after she became pregnant, she said, and Julia Pinsky, Max's Mission founder, got her a motel room until she could get into treatment. Having somewhere stable to sleep made the start of her recovery possible, she said. Bilyeu, who was eventually hired by the organization, now gives out harm reduction supplies to the same communities she used to live with. 'We meet people where they are at,' she said. 'I think empathy matters. I've been there before and I can help them with an open mind and no judgment.' The presence of someone like Bilyeu can be the difference between life and death. Later that day, Christy Sexton, 50, stopped in Hawthorne Park to greet another volunteer assisting the unhoused. Her 31-year-old son, Mike, had died of a fentanyl overdose two weeks earlier, she said, and she had just viewed his body. 'He looked very peaceful,' Sexton said. 'I couldn't stop kissing his head and telling him how much I loved him.' Sexton is unhoused, living in her car, and her son was also struggling with homelessness. She described him as 'everybody's friend' and a devoted son: 'He made sure every single day that I knew how much he loved me.' She didn't know the circumstances of his overdose, but wished more people were aware of the state's Good Samaritan law, dictating that people can't be prosecuted for drug possession if they seek aid for someone overdosing. While starting to process the shock of her son's death, she said she was plagued by the thought that someone might have been too scared of police to call 911 – and instead left her son to die. 'I'll never understand why my son's life had to be taken.'
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Oregon abandoned its radical drug law. Then came the mass arrests
At 7.45am on a cool February morning in Medford, Oregon, six police officers pulled up to a desolate road lined with tarps and a shopping cart and began making arrests. The officers directed four adults to sit on the sidewalk, handcuffing them behind their backs and rifling through their pockets. They were being detained for illegal camping, but the officers were also searching for evidence of drugs. 'Love you!' a husband and wife shouted at each other as they were separated to be taken to jail. Officer Paul Verling placed one 43-year-old woman in the back of his car while his team tested a confiscated glass pipe for drug residue. He told her she could potentially avoid jail if she entered drug treatment. The woman said she had been using methamphetamine to cope with homelessness and would be grateful for treatment. But once Verling ran her name through the system, he discovered she had a warrant for a probation violation. That made her ineligible for 'deflection'. She, too, would be going to jail, he said, possibly for a month. 'You wanna engage in some rehab when you get out?' he said. 'Yes sir,' she mumbled. 'I'm glad we had this talk today,' Verling said, as he took her out of the car to escort her into a jail enclosure. Welcome to Oregon's 'war on drugs' 2.0. In September, Oregon lawmakers enacted legislation turning low-level drug possession into a more serious crime punishable by up to 180 days in jail. The resulting crackdown has led to thousands of arrests statewide in recent months. People targeted in cities like Medford, and overworked public defenders tasked with representing them, say the drug enforcement has been chaotic and at times brutal. While the new policy has appeared to reduce visible drug use in some public spaces, unhoused people, who have been most impacted by the police response, say it has exacerbated their struggles. The new law also marks a stunning reversal of policy for the Pacific north-west state. Just four years ago, Oregon voters passed Measure 110, a groundbreaking drug decriminalization measure that abandoned jail sentences for possessing small amounts of drugs and imposed an infraction citation instead. Passed on the heels of Black Lives Matter uprisings, the measure aimed to treat addiction as a disease instead of a crime, prioritize services and recovery over jail, reduce overcrowding behind bars and help address racial disparities in policing and prosecutions. At the time, Oregon was grappling with rising overdoses. It ranked second nationally for drug addiction rates and worst in the US for access to treatment. The problem was systemic, rooted in decades of failure to invest in the level of behavioral health services needed for people with mental illnesses and addiction. Measure 110 called for an infusion of $302m for addiction recovery and harm reduction services, with a focus on underserved communities, including Black and Indigenous people impacted by criminalization. Drug policy reform advocates hoped the first-in-the-nation decriminalization experiment would become a model. But the timing could not have been worse. The law went into effect in 2021 as fentanyl was rapidly entering Oregon's unregulated drug market, the pandemic was shuttering vital social services and homelessness was surging amid Covid and unprecedented wildfires. As Measure 110-funded recovery programs were just getting off the ground, the decriminalization measure was widely blamed for crime, surging fentanyl overdoses and the increasing visibility of homelessness and drug use, even as research suggested a complex set of factors behind these trends. The backlash was fierce, and the state's Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, signed the bill last year recriminalizing possession. Supporters say the renewed enforcement is restoring order on the streets, while helping people with addiction and maintaining funding for services. Kotek said she did not want the policy to be 'business as usual' of jailing drug users, but a 'treatment first' approach. The bill encourages counties to set up 'deflection' programs, enabling some arrestees to forgo charges if they get help for their substance use disorders. People with possession cases can also avoid conviction if they complete probation, and lawmakers have promised pathways for records to eventually be expunged. And part of the funding for new treatment programs first passed under Measure 110 has remained intact, enabling some innovative projects to continue their work, though with fewer resources. Implementation of the new law varies widely by county. Data reveals some jurisdictions are launching mass arrests, while referring very few people to treatment. The Medford police department has led the state in drug criminalization – by a lot. The city is located in a region near the California border that is one of the more conservative areas of a blue state; more than half of voters in Jackson county, which includes Medford, supported Donald Trump. From September, when the new law was enacted, through 26 March, the Medford police force carried out 902 drug possession arrests – more than double the number of cases in Portland (a city with seven times the population). Jackson county has logged 1,170 arrests total. Verling, an officer on the city's 'livability' team, a unit focused on low-level crimes, including unlawful camping, trespassing, public drinking and drug possession, said many police were relieved when drugs were recriminalized. The 2020 reform had led to increasing reports of drug use on the streets and growing concern about public intoxication. Recriminalization, Verling said, allows him to engage people in hopes of pushing them to treatment. 'I really don't want to see someone go to prison … but this gives us the ability to get back into their lives,' he said on a recent patrol through Medford. He said the job was most rewarding when seeing someone turn their life around after they've been jailed – and when his team arrests dealers, potentially 'making people sober by making the drugs inaccessible'. One of the livability team's main priorities has been clearing homeless encampments, and as Verling drove his patrol car onto a pedestrian greenway, the impact was clear. During the pandemic, encampments were a common site. Now, there were few visible signs of homelessness. Several locals were jogging. Where did people go? 'People leave town. They're like, 'OK well it's a crime to camp here,'' he said, adding he believed many were in shelters. The issues of homelessness and drug addiction are deeply intertwined, and Verling said he had become adept at spotting signs of drug use and paraphernalia: 'Focus on their hands – that will lead you to it.' Oregon's recriminalization law allows the state's 36 counties to adopt individualized approaches to deflection. Jackson county designed its program so officers could directly hand over arrestees to drug treatment programs instead of jail, a collaborative approach meant to get people immediate help without involving the courts. But many don't qualify, aren't offered this alternative during their arrest, or they decline an officer's offer. According to the latest available data, while there have been nearly 1,200 possession arrests, as of 27 March, only 69 people have been referred to deflection. Instead, many get arrested. And rearrested. One 43-year-old unhoused woman said police were 'acting like every person on the street is a drug addict, which is not true', and that she had been arrested four times by Medford's livability team since October, generally for camping violations. While she was quickly released after her last arrest, her partner was not, leaving her to camp outside alone. The woman, who asked not to use her name out of fear of police retaliation, said she was sleeping in front of a social services center in hopes her partner could easily find her when he gets out. 'The separation makes me feel like I can't breathe,' she added. 'Police say they're helping the homeless, but they're just throwing us in handcuffs and jail.' Inside the county jail, as livability officers were processing an arrest of an unhoused man who had camped under a bridge, officer Elliott Jantzer said the hardest part of the job was 'arresting the same person over and over again and seeing no change'. 'Society is supposed to fix these problems. We can't really fix it. We don't have capacity,' he said. But the criminal justice system is where most people targeted by the new law end up. On two days that week in February, dozens of defendants waited to be arraigned in courtroom 301 of the Jackson county circuit court justice building. Some appeared in person in the windowless hearing room, others appeared over video from the county jail in Medford. Some pleaded with the judge, saying they needed to get home to take care of children, asserting the charges were incorrect or expressing bewilderment about the entire ordeal. None of the jailed defendants had lawyers for their cases, and most said they wanted one. One man facing a drug possession charge quietly asked for a lawyer, but then changed his mind and pleaded guilty, seemingly hoping for a quicker resolution. The defendants were there on all types of charges, but when drug possessions were called for defendants not already in jail, the outcome was the same: the defendant didn't show. 'Failure to appear – warrant', the judge repeated four times. The scenes laid bare the impact of recriminalization on the state's criminal system, which for years has struggled with a massive public defender shortage, in part due to difficulties recruiting lawyers to the low-salary, high-caseload jobs. In that particular week, there were more than 900 defendants in Jackson county alone who, despite having active criminal cases, had no lawyers. 'It's a violation of their constitutional rights,' said Clint Oborn, executive director of the Southern Oregon Public Defenders (SOPD), walking back to his office after arraignments. 'Some people plead guilty and never get an attorney, or if they want one, they're put on a waiting list.' Most clients with drug possession cases who don't show up to court are unhoused and eventually get jailed on warrants, he said. Cyril Rivera Neeley, one SOPD attorney, said one of his clients was a senior citizen charged with drug possession in September who refused to plead guilty, had to wait five months for a trial and then was jailed for missing a court appearance; another is a defendant who thought they were being hospitalized for a mental health episode, but was instead jailed for a drug misdemeanor when officers found paraphernalia. Patrick Green, the Jackson county district attorney, said he supported recriminalization because defendants end up supervised by probation officers, who hold defendants accountable and connect them to treatment and services. And he argued jail can be helpful: 'We know with addiction, you do have to get a person some clean time for them to be in the right frame of mind to be willing to engage in treatment.' But he also acknowledged that the return of possession arrests had increased his staff's caseloads. The majority of his 18 prosecutors have had to take on these cases, giving them less time for other matters, and the new law has exacerbated jail overcrowding, he said. Many possession cases are resulting in 'conditional discharge', he said, where defendants waive their right to a trial or an attorney and are immediately placed on probation, but can be jailed again if they lose contact with their officer or commit other violations. 'Once they get out of jail, they often keep using, their probation gets revoked and they return to jail,' said Colin Murphy, another public defender. 'It's the same cycle I saw before we decriminalized. If this approach to getting rid of drugs in our community actually worked, it should have worked by now, because we've been doing this since the 1970s.' The strategy diverts police away from serious investigations, he said: 'We're told law enforcement has very scarce resources. But in these possession cases, I see five cops standing around investigating one unhoused person because she had a baggie in her pocket.' With limited use of deflection, and a shortage of lawyers to represent people, the new system has felt pointless to some unhoused people in Medford. 'It's not fair, it's unethical, it's a fucking scam,' said 34-year-old Nikki, sitting early one morning under a bridge in Medford's Hawthorne Park. A thick layer of fog hung in the air, and she gestured at the flowing creek beside her: 'Look at how beautiful this place is.' The state's affordable housing shortage is the primary driver of homelessness, with over 27% of renters facing severely unaffordable rent, forced to spend half or more of their income on housing. Some unhoused people like Nikki come from out of state in hopes of better services. Her main motivation, she said, was healthcare: she's a transgender woman, and her deep-red home state of Missouri had become a leader in anti-trans laws and medical restrictions. But she also liked the environment of Medford, in an area known as the Rogue Valley. There's a backdrop of mountain ranges, and a greenway bike path connecting local cities. 'It's been awesome living here, and it's been shit,' said Nikki, who asked to use a nickname as she talked openly about drug use. She said she regularly uses meth and has done stints in rehab that didn't last. She said she had spent time in the county jail when she was picked up on warrants, forced into the men's section. For people with serious addictions, detox in jail is 'horror beyond what you can imagine', she said. Incarceration can also increase overdose risks when people are released with lower tolerance. Now, Nikki tries to sleep in hidden corners in the woods where police won't bother her – 'out of sight, out of mind'. Christopher De Falco, a 30-year-old who had gathered in Hawthorne Park for a weekly potluck lunch for the unhoused, said he had long dealt with addiction, homelessness and incarceration and felt the new approach would help few people getting sober: 'Until the person truly wants to quit, they're not going to. Forcing people into treatment, it's against our will and unjust.' Nearby, 38-year-old Ray, who only gave his first name, said going to jail felt routine to him: 'another day in the office.' He heard other countries had safe injection sites, which he said seemed like a better way to get people into services than jail time. Nikki said one Medford officer recently came up to her while she was sitting by the creek asking, 'What's in your bag? What's in your pocket? Where are your drugs?' she recounted. 'I didn't even have drugs on me!' She said she was being profiled: 'I've got two bags, messy hair, dirty pants and dirty shoes.' As she described the encounter, a Medford 'livability' officer drove by. Nikki jokingly hummed a Nazi anthem as the vehicle passed, adding: ''livability' just means they work for everybody but you.' People who do enter deflection in Medford are often taken by officers directly to the Addictions Recovery Center (ARC), one of two treatment providers partnering with police on the program. Staff address participants' basic needs, including food, clothes, medications; conduct an addiction assessment; and place them in temporary shelter. The clients are required to complete ten appointments, generally within 30 days, which can include meetings with counselors or peer support staff, at which point the threat of prosecution is erased. Ben Spence, ARC's community justice program manager, said roughly half of their participants have successfully completed deflection; some people fail when they become unreachable, though his staff works hard to track people down and keep them engaged. The ten appointments are just a start to their recovery journey, he added. Of the 69 referrals in the county, as of 27 March, 23 had successfully completed the program, 26 had failed and 17 remained in the process, said Vicky Armstrong, the county's deflection coordinator. She emphasized that the program was in its early days and that deflection was just one of many pathways into treatment: 'You can't legislate people into sobriety. You can legislate opportunity.' Green, the DA, said he felt deflection was a better path to treatment than the criminal system, which can be a slow process, and that the fact that only some people were succeeding was a good sign: 'We didn't [make it] too easy or too hard. We really found that sweet spot.' At Medford police headquarters, Lt Rebecca Pietila, in charge of community engagement, said law enforcement viewed recriminalization with deflection as a 'compromise – a happy medium'. She said deflection was working well due to close partnerships between police and providers, noting that Jackson county had a higher success rate than the state average. She said it would take time to build law enforcement buy-in as many officers were pleased to have an opportunity to restart arrests. 'They want to hold people accountable, because we know drug crime is not just about addiction, it leads to theft and disorderly behavior and victimization,' she added. Pietila said she would like to see drug laws become tougher, with stiffer penalties for certain possession quantities, and that she supported efforts to expand the county jail so more arrestees could be held longer. For unhoused people with severe addiction, 'sometimes jail is the only intervention'. For many in the region, it is still easier to get a jail cell than into treatment. OnTrack Rogue Valley, another drug treatment provider and deflection partner, has more than 300 people on its waitlist for residential programs. That includes 200 people waiting for a 16-bed program, said executive director Sommer Wolcott. 'Many of those 200 people are unhoused with severe substance use disorders who desperately want a treatment bed,' Wolcott said. 'They need 24-hour care and support. They can't just stop using.' Some people are stuck for more than a year on the waitlist, and at times, when staff try to track them down, they discover the client has died of an overdose. Wolcott personally knows of three people who died while on her treatment waiting list last year. But, she said, there could be many more. As Medford police escalate their crackdown on possession, and treatment facilities remain at capacity, some advocates are doing their best to keep drug users safe and alive through harm reduction. Max's Mission, a southern Oregon group founded by a couple whose son died of an overdose in 2013, does weekly outreach in Hawthorne Park, which involves syringe exchanges, connecting people to housing and treatment services and giving out tarps, socks, snacks, wound care kits and naloxone, the overdose-reversal drug. Crystal Bilyeu, who was helping lead Max's Mission outreach one recent afternoon, said she had reversed 48 overdoses with naloxone, including 17 in 2024. The 41-year-old was herself unhoused and struggling with addiction in the early years of the pandemic. While living outside, she would give out cards advertising a 'never use alone' hotline people can call while using so that EMS can be alerted if they overdose, and she became known as someone who always had naloxone in her backpack. The strict anti-camping laws worsened her substance use disorder, she said, as she often used drugs to stay awake since sleeping brought the risk of trouble with law enforcement. 'I used it for survival,' she said. She got clean after she became pregnant, she said, and Julia Pinsky, Max's Mission founder, got her a motel room until she could get into treatment. Having somewhere stable to sleep made the start of her recovery possible, she said. Bilyeu, who was eventually hired by the organization, now gives out harm reduction supplies to the same communities she used to live with. 'We meet people where they are at,' she said. 'I think empathy matters. I've been there before and I can help them with an open mind and no judgment.' The presence of someone like Bilyeu can be the difference between life and death. Later that day, Christy Sexton, 50, stopped in Hawthorne Park to greet another volunteer assisting the unhoused. Her 31-year-old son, Mike, had died of a fentanyl overdose two weeks earlier, she said, and she had just viewed his body. 'He looked very peaceful,' Sexton said. 'I couldn't stop kissing his head and telling him how much I loved him.' Sexton is unhoused, living in her car, and her son was also struggling with homelessness. She described him as 'everybody's friend' and a devoted son: 'He made sure every single day that I knew how much he loved me.' She didn't know the circumstances of his overdose, but wished more people were aware of the state's Good Samaritan law, dictating that people can't be prosecuted for drug possession if they seek aid for someone overdosing. While starting to process the shock of her son's death, she said she was plagued by the thought that someone might have been too scared of police to call 911 – and instead left her son to die. 'I'll never understand why my son's life had to be taken.'
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
PGE's project involving Forest Park tree removal moves forward after public hearings
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — After hearing arguments in January, Portland General Electric is moving forward with their plan to remove nearly 400 trees in Forest Park to help ensure stable electricity and mitigate wildfire risks in the area. The plan, known as the Harborton Reliability Project, has been met with pushback from local environmental activists who argued that the project would affect Forest Park's plant and animal communities, although others have shown support calling the project the 'least-impact solution' for meeting growing power needs. On Monday, PGE confirmed that the project would be moving forward with it's third phase, including the removal of 376 trees on five acres near the north end of Forest Park. $400M in Oregon Measure 110 funds set for addiction treatment In a statement, PGE Vice President of Policy and Resource Planning Kristen Sheeren said the work being done is essential for 'safe, reliable and increasingly clean energy' for Portland. 'The decision to approve PGE's permit request is an example of the process working as it should, and will allow PGE to proceed with work that is crucial for safe, reliable and increasingly clean energy for Portland homes and businesses. The decision to approve this permit request constitutes the most significant finding of facts about this project coming out of an extraordinarily detailed application process that included extensive public involvement. We appreciate that this decision weighed all evidence and found that the project is needed and meets the stringent requirements for work within an existing utility easement, including extensive plans to improve forest health and wildfire safety.' According to the timeline on PGE's website, the project will be underway through 2027 and will include site restoration. Prior to the initial hearing, PGE also promised to plant 398 Oregon white oaks and 418 short stature trees. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
