"If only WE were in charge..."

We don't trust practically anything government touches anymore. Left, right, center, we don't see ourselves represented in the decisions government makes or the process they use to make them.

What if some significant decisions were put in the hands of well-informed citizens--call them 'everyday,' 'average,' 'common'-- people with no axe to grind and no self-interest beyond what every one of us has in good government and good community. Could they come up with better decisions, or at least decisions we could trust more? The Citizen Initiative Review process is a way to find out, and here's why I think it matters.

Where's the beef?

In Portland last week I watched Al Gore endorse Bill Bradbury to be Oregon's next governor. (Disclosure: I count Bill as longtime friend, and served as his Chief of Staff when he presided over the Oregon Senate in 1993).

I went in part looking to hear about the transition to green jobs, because both of these guys have the brains and experience to drill deeper than pleasant platitudes, down to the bedrock of economic reality. I didn't hear depth, and with hindsight understand why: this was a launching event to rev up core supporters, not a policy summit on the new economy. And it served its purpose.

But it's time to put more meat on the bones of Green Jobs, and on the larger assertion that what's good for the environment is good for the economy. There's a critical mass of people who want to believe that, but the combination of the scariness of change and propaganda from the fossil-fuel establishment has too many of them stuck. In this week's column I'm suggesting that we're not doing much good as cheerleaders for abstract claims about economic conversion; let's push candidates to glean the best data from the Apollo Project and other sources, and turn on some voters not already in the choir.

You know that overused definition of "insanity"?

OK, with everything else going on, this one's not exactly on the front burner. But one thing I'd like to know from the Guv candidates is how many chips they're ready to spend to reverse the 1990s initiative measure that commits every dime of gas tax and auto registration money to highway construction, or closely-related expenditures.

If that weren't the law, we might not be on the verge of throwing another hundred million highway dollars at the Sisyphean task of unclogging Highway 62, the major road thrusting north out of Medford towards Crater Lake and Bend. This particular rathole has swallowed more ODOT cash over the years than I can remember. Yet as I write these words 62 resembles a long linear parking lot for more hours of the day than ever. I don't think a thoughtful argument can be made that this new slug of cash will make a difference for more than a very few years. Even local county commissioners are reluctant to accept this particular check, and in the world of cash-strapped local government, that's just weird. Weird enough to deserve its own column.

We're going to hear plenty from 2010 candidates about Oregon's great and glorious Green heritage, and how it's the key to a future worthy of our kids. Working to repealing the car-worshiping mandate on transportation spending would be a good way to show they mean it.

After the election

Last week voters in my town renewed Oregon's only tax on prepared meals and beverages, established 15 years ago to fund major sewage treatment upgrades and an open space program to establish neighborhood parks and trails. We fought over it back then and fought about it again this time.

On Tuesday we re-upped for the tax by a 59-41% margin. Does that end the conversation? It usually does. But what if instead the two sides came together and got creative about dealing with the concerns that divided them during the election? Would that make us a stronger, more resilient community? That's what I asked in this week's column.

Free speech doesn't mean much if you're scared to use it

There's a court battle going on in Washington State over whether your name should be public information if you sign a petition to put a measure on the ballot. The measure that brought this up would reverse a state law that expanded the rights of same-sex partners, and petitioners claimed that gay rights activists are so hostile that they might scare some people away from signing. A lower court judge agreed and said keeping the petition signatures private was a reasonable way to prevent this "chilling effect" on political expression.

You can get caught up in the surface-level arguments in this case. But set those aside and reflect for a moment. Are we really accepting the fact that intimidating people for expressing their opinion is part of our political culture? Why?

This week's column calls for something different. In these times it might sound naive. But where do we end up if we take political intimidation as a fact of modern life?