Happy Festivus, Oregon! The time has come for the annual airing of grievances.
New Transportation Taxes
To the elites in Salem – it’s ok to say no to the lazy bureaucrats who bankroll your campaigns sometimes. What are they going to do, start donating to Republicans? When push comes to shove, they’ll stick with with a little accountability versus a lot of accountability. House Republicans presented a viable funding package in April that had no new taxes or fees and increased the Department of Transportation’s focus on transportation and eliminated extraneous spending. Salem elites telling their donors “no” would indeed be a Festivus miracle.
Reservoir Drawdowns
Now coming to Detroit Lake! This ecological catastrophe is the brainchild of bloodthirsty hippies who are proud of the massive fish die-offs that resulted from their vexatious litigation. Impacted communities, prepare for your water infrastructure to be damaged and your tap water to taste like a public pool. The litigants want this to hurt, and the Army Corps of Engineers is viciously ambivalent to Willamette Valley water consumers.
Wolves
Still a problem! The hippies in Portland protect this invasive species by manipulating data and bankrolling anyone willing to join in their righteous crusade against cows and rural economic vitality. Their best friends, the lazy bureaucrats running ODFW, ensure that nobody has an accurate picture of the full scale of wolf depredations in Oregon. If they are really so important, put all the wolves in Multnomah County. Special thanks to America’s best Congressman, Cliff Bentz, for getting the Protect Pets and Livestock Act passed by the House of Representatives. Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, please ignore the hippies this time and listen to the constituents of yours actually impacted by wolves – vote yes on this bill when it gets to the Senate!
The Government Shutdown
Congratulations to Oregon’s Democratic Congressional Delegation on supporting the longest federal government shutdown in US history! A October 29 letter from the Congressional Budget Office to the House Budget Committee projected the following detrimental impacts:
- 650,000 federal employees furloughed
- Economic activity at the end of 2025 will be lower as a result of the shutdown.
- If all furloughed workers in October were counted as unemployed on temporary layoff, the measured unemployment rate would be boosted by 0.4 percentage points that month.
- SNAP disruptions
- The agency estimates that the annualized quarterly growth rate of real GDP in the fourth quarter of 2025 would be lower by 1.0 percentage point in the four-week shutdown scenario, 1.5 percentage points in the six-week scenario, and 2.0 percentage points in the eight-week scenario
Great job, guys.
John Hoeven Killed My Street Sweeper
Street sweepers occupy an odd space in infrastructure funding in the American public finance sphere. Given their niche role in infrastructure maintenence, the only grant funds generally available outside of Congressionally-directed spending are distributed upon the condition that your community has experienced highway fatalities. These grants are written in blood, and one cannot hope to qualify for them in good conscience. When the City of Elgin requested Congressionally-directed spending for a street sweeper, Senator Jeff Merkley’s office leapt into action for the Jewel of the Blue Mountains. After a valiant effort, an email arrived in my inbox at Elgin City Hall in late July:
We are so sorry to share that your community initiated project (CIP) submission did not make it out of the Senate appropriations subcommittee and into the FY26 Senate mark (the appropriations budget draft for FY26).
This has been a dynamic, unprecedented year with multiple unexpected twists and turns, beginning with the Republican blockage of the FY25 budget. This resulted in nearly all of last year’s successfully-included CIPs being included in this year’s FY26 process, thereby leaving less resources available for your project and other important projects statewide.
What is great is that the Senate Subcommittee that killed Elgin’s request in particular is chaired by North Dakota Republican John Hoeven, the 6th-richest US Senator and Big Pharma darling who invested $250,000 in health sciences stocks in January 2020 shortly after attending a COVID-19 briefing. Did a wealthy elite need to block my street sweeper? No, but he had to funnel my tax dollars to his Big Pharma buddies through murky government subsidies somehow. Bye-bye, street sweeper.
Feats of Strength
Festivus isn’t just about the airing of grievances – let’s hear it for Rep. Ed Diehl and his team for leading the grassroots army that stopped Tina Kotek’s gas tax increases dead in their tracks! By November 2026, the rage about this wasteful spending will get enough of us “petulant children” to vote Republican in competitive races that Republicans actually could win the House of Representatives for the first time in 20 years! That is if legislative Democrats do not kill it first themselves, as Oregon Citizen reports. Ignoring the will of the people and losing the next election as a result? Talk about a Festivus miracle!
Editor’s Note
Alex McHaddad is the City Administrator of Elgin, Oregon. His views are personal and do not reflect an official stance of the City of Elgin or Right Now Oregon, LLC.
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